Tag Archives: forests
Governor Parnell Can’t See the Trees for the Rainforest
Containing about one-third of the world’s coastal old-growth rainforests, the Tongass is the “crown jewel” of the National Forest System. Its pristine rivers produce more salmon than any other place on earth. The regional economy is tied to the health of this fishery and wildlife, which in turn, depends on how the Tongass rainforest is managed.
Logging on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska threatens remaining intact rainforests
Most of the productive forests are verdant old growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock, with ideal conditions for abundant salmon, deer, and other subsistence wildlife. But most of the largest trees were logged decades ago. Industrial logging was slowed by landmark policy changes in the last quarter of the 20th century, including the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. But if Alaska Governor Sean Parnell has his way, the Tongass will return to the clearcut strategy of the past.
The Governor recently announced that the State would challenge the Roadless Rule as it applies to the Tongass as well as a federal judge’s recent decision overturning the Bush-era exemption to the rule in Southeast Alaska. In his announcement, Governor Parnell stated that, “this is the wrong time for the Forest Service to further restrict timber supply, new mining jobs and development, and impose higher energy costs on communities.” He also wants to dam and mine the region’s salmon bearing streams and announced a “timber task force” that could lead to a return to unsustainable and damaging logging.
The Governor’s myopic view of the life sustaining Tongass rainforest is at odds with the region’s sustainable economic drivers. Southeast Alaska employment is no longer dominated by natural resource extraction; rather, today’s jobs are in non-extraction services (44%, many in tourism), government (36%), leisure/hospitality (10%), commercial fishing and seafood processing (8%). The mining and wood products industries are dead last, each representing 1% of regional employment. The economic engines derived from old-growth rainforests, intact forest roadless areas, subsistence wildlife, and, especially salmon are what is driving the economy today and into the future.
In trying to prop up the few jobs in logging and mining on the Tongass, the Governor would seriously harm other job sectors— especially Alaska’s healthy salmon and trout populations that pump nearly $1 billion into the local economy every year.
Cruise ships, local guides, and bush pilots are busy not because tourists come to see clearcuts, but because they come for fishing, wildlife viewing, sight seeing, and other rainforest amenities. We know from other regions, like the Pacific Northwest, that logging, road building, mining, and dams have together nearly devastated commercial and recreational fisheries.
Fiscally the Governor’s proposals do not pencil out. According to the Forest Service, total revenues from all timber sales on the Tongass combined were $5.5 million from 2002-2008. During this time, the agency spent nearly $30 million of taxpayer dollars just on building timber sale roads. Far more was spent in planning and administering these sales. The road construction budget for one sale alone (e.g., Central Kupreanof) is $6 million. A University of Alaska study pegged the cost to the U.S. Treasury of each timber industry job in Southeast Alaska at over $170,000 annually.
The Forest Service needs to transition its timber program into restoration, taking out and repairing damaging logging roads and culverts, and thinning overstocked post-clearcut forests. This type of management is not measured in board feet but in restoration jobs and healthy fish and wildlife populations, which in turn create local jobs in sustainable industries. American taxpayers do not want to foot the bill for the timber industry, but are likely willing to invest in restoring damaged fisheries because it is good for the region’s ecology and economy.
The Roadless Rule protects 58.5 million acres of some of the most pristine areas in the nation, including the Tongass. Protecting intact rainforests is sound fiscal and environmental policy and an investment in the region’s future. The Governor’s tunnel vision would send the state down a too familiar dead end.
Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and president of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and president of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is the author of Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation. Randi Spivak is Vice President of Government Affairs, Geos Institute, Washington D.C, and is a national leader in efforts to protect National Forest roadless areas and old-growth forests. Both have worked on the Tongass and other rainforest regions for many years.
Read this blog post translated into Estonian.
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Logging Company Threatens Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest
Aggressive logging in one of the last remaining large blocks of temperate rainforests in the world – the Great Bear Rainforest – is jeopardizing an historic agreement designed to boost rainforest protections and shift logging from industrial clearcuts toward ecosystem-based management (a lesser form of logging).
"Spirit Bear" feeding on salmon, Great Bear Rainforest; photo credit Wayne McCrory, Valhalla Wilderness Society
The Great Bear and adjacent archipelago of Haida Gwaii are critically important rainforests (read more in Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World) because they represent over a quarter of the Pacific Coastal rainforest region, a vast area that stretches from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to the California coastal redwoods. Like its northerly neighbor, the Tongass, the Great Bear Rainforest and Haida Gwaii are among the last places on earth where it is still possible to experience untrammeled temperate rainforests. These verdant forests are home to coastal giants like Sitka spruce, a white phase of the black bear (Kermode or “Spirit Bear”), a unique subspecies of goshawk, abundant grizzly bears and wolves, and prodigious salmon runs.
On March 31, 2009, the Great Bear Rainforest agreements were reached (and endorsed by the government of British Columbia) with conservation groups, logging companies, and First Nations to protect half of the intact rainforests from all industrial development while allowing some forms of logging under the yet to be developed principles of ecosystem-based management. And while the agreement falls short of the 70 percent protection targets recommended by scientists, it brought all the major parties together toward agreeing on these science-based goals.
That is except for the TimberWest logging company. The company’s history of opposing forest protections got them fewer restrictions on logging during the transition to full implementation of the agreements. Recently they boosted logging levels in the southern portion of the region before more restrictive rules come into place. This rush-to-log has put the company at the forefront of controversy.
Forest Ethics, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club, BC got a birds-eye view of the companies’ logging practices by flying over the southern region on June 11 where TimberWest was chipping away at coastal rainforests. If this were a hockey game, the company would be sent to the penalty box for un-sportsman conduct. TimberWest can still get out of the penalty box as it just changed ownership and conservation groups are asking the owners to turn over a new leaf (http://forestethics.org/timberwest-logging-threatens-great-bear-rainforest-solution) by supporting full implementation of the agreements now.
TimberWest clearcutting of the Great Bear rainforest; photo credit Garth Lenz
The agreements offer a unique opportunity to halt large-scale logging and manage the region responsibly. Corporations have more than a bottom-line responsibility to shareholders. They also need to be good neighbors and stewards of the same life-support services that provide local communities with clean water, coastal fisheries, a stable climate, and subsistence wildlife. TimberWest is being asked to act as a responsible citizen of the rainforest community by doing its part to abide by the agreements while there is still time to save some of the last intact old-growth temperate rainforests on earth.
Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and president of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and president of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is the author of Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation.
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
TGIF – Thank God It’s Forested!
My 6 year old daughter, Ariela, standing alongside a "nurse log" - will her generation marvel in coastal rainforest giants?
There is no doubt that the Olympics of Washington State are ground zero for temperate rainforests–but are all the forests really “forests” in an ecological sense? As you know from my previous blogs, there are big differences between old-growth rainforests and the plantations replacing them. This is apparent on the Olympic Peninsula or in Alaska or most other rainforest regions that I have been writing about.
The windward slopes of the Olympics receive over 140 inches of rainfall a year. Abundant rain and productive soils allow Sitka spruce to tower over 300 feet and live for 700 years or more, world champions for their species in age and height.
A casual stroll through this Olympian rainforest reveals just how rich it is from the ground up. On the ground, “nurse logs” in different stages of decay are covered with tree seedlings with roots affixed to decaying bark. Many of the oldest trees have a tripod appearance to exposed roots, evidence of nurse logs that have since been erased by forest decomposers with the roots firmly fixed to where a nurse log once provided support. The ground cover, a verdant carpet of mosses, ferns, and lichens, is soft, spongy, and wet. Wood sorrel, skunk cabbage, candy stripe, and trillium are but a few of the bountiful wildflowers. Stout branches of big-leaf maple are covered with layers of moss that weigh over a ton when wet. The thick mosses also provide nesting platforms for a threatened coastal seabird, the marbled murrelet. It takes over a hundred years for moss mats to reach the right thickness for this old-growth dependent species to use as nesting platforms. Epiphytic licorice ferns penetrate the thick moss cover and are restricted to growing in the tree canopy.
Salamanders, tree voles, and flying squirrels sometimes live out their existence in a single-tree- top, which offers a microcosm of the rainforest ecosystem. The flying squirrel, in turn, is nature’s Johnny Apple-seed, coming down to the ground level and digging up the truffles (spore-producing structures) of mycorhizzal fungi. The spores pass harmlessly out the squirrels’ other end and propagate fungi throughout rainforest soils. The hyphae (threadlike filaments forming the mycelium of a fungus) then coat the roots of host plants and are responsible for an avatar-like network that allows the host to absorb nutrients and water. The squirrel, in turn, is on the main menu of the threatened northern spotted owl. Nothing in these rainforests is wasted!
The profusion of tree farms growing on these slopes is very different from their rainforest predecessors. The Olympic Peninsula is the home of one of the most heavily fragmented temperate rainforests on earth. I have flown over and driven by its clearcuts many times. Last week, while driving on Highway 101, I couldn’t help noticing the road sign: “State Trust Lands – Managed with Care.” In almost Orwellian fashion, just down the road from this sign was a large clearcut where rainforest vegetation was stripped to the bone, leaving just a few spindly trees. Managing state lands or any other rainforest land with care requires much more than leaving a few trees where a forest once grew. Webster’s definition of a trust is “interest held by one person for the benefit of another.” In this case the state would argue (as it has with road signs near cut-over and replanted forests) that the income from such practices is needed to pay for hospitals, roads, and schools. What’s missing from this trust is the calculation of true costs of managing the land this way in reduced water quality, declining salmon populations, threatened wildlife, and carbon dioxide pollution. The state’s antiquated notion ignores the full suite of values and services that intact, old-growth rainforests provide.
Clearcuts like this have nearly replaced the Olympian rainforests - is this what "managed with care" means?
The near destruction of the Olympic rainforest has been underway for decades. It has been slowed by the Northwest Forest Plan, but new logging proposals that would turn trees into biomass for fuel production as well as continued logging on state and private lands continue to chip away at the rainforest’s ecosystem benefits.
If the Olympic rainforest is going to survive as a functional living ecosystem, the last remaining old-growth rainforests need to be taken off the chopping block. Then perhaps we could have new state signs that read: Will today’s seedlings become tomorrow’s coastal giants? Will children marvel at the rich life these rainforests hold? How has an old-growth rainforest helped you today? And finally, maybe one day we will see a sign alongside an old-growth rainforest that simply says: TGIF! Thank God, indeed, It’s Forested.
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Rainforests From 36,000 Feet: Transformed by Humanity’s “Bigfoot”
Tongass from 36,000 feet
En route from Seattle to Anchorage on May 4, 2011 to give a talk on the importance of the United Nations International Year of Forests, I could not help noticing the stunning view from my window seat at 36,000 feet. I could see massive glaciers straddling the tallest peaks of the Coastal Range, and, at lower elevations, verdant rainforests of Vancouver Island (south BC coast), Great Bear Rainforest (mid BC coast), and Tongass (southeast Alaska).
Unfortunately that also meant that I had a clearcut view, literally, of how humanity’s ecological “Bigfoot” is rapidly stomping out some of the most important temperate rainforests on the planet. Replacing structurally complex rainforests were expansive areas of clearcuts distributed in a shotgun blast of snow-covered openings easy to pick out from remaining green rainforests.
Gazing at the landscape below, I mentally went over the forest facts. Just how important are forests in a global sense? Well, based on the latest global assessments published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 2010) and other research (summarized in Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation), forests cover 31 percent of the earth’s surface, sustain about 80 percent of its biodiversity, and absorb the equivalent of over 35 times our annual carbon dioxide pollution. Forests cleanse the air we breathe, purify our drinking water, provide us with medicines, many yet to be discovered, and are linked to our food supply, particularly salmon in the case of the Pacific Coastal rainforests. And while deforestation rates have slowed globally, 13 million hectares (32 million acres) each year have been logged in the past decade, roughly 25 hectares (~61 acres) every minute of every day for the past 10 years.
An important subset of these statistics is the decline of primary (previously unlogged) forests. These forests represent 36 percent of the total forest cover. Most occur in South America, followed by North and Central America, and they have declined by about 40 million hectares (100 million acres) over the same time period. Over 60 percent of the world’s largest forested blocks (large enough to sustain all native species including wide ranging ones and natural ecosystem processes) are also gone and the remaining areas are vanishing quickly. For instance, Europe has no large intact areas and the contiguous United States has very few intact areas due to road building and logging. Road building on the U.S. National Forest System alone has resulted in over 400,000 miles of forest roads, enough to circumnavigate the globe 17 times.
Taking another glance from my window seat, I pondered what all this might mean for the Pacific Coastal rainforests, which, aside from the occasional windstorm and rare fire events (more so southward), once ranged nearly unbroken from the California redwoods to Tongass rainforest. Today, only 4 percent of the redwoods are intact, only the last 15-20 percent of old-growth remains in the Pacific Northwest, and logging and road building are advancing into the northern coastal rainforests. From 36,000 feet our activities are clearly transformative in a “Bigfoot” sense: furthering the planetary scale of forest degradation.
For the greater good of this and future generations, rainforests need to be sustainably managed for their vast carbon stores, salmon resources, and clean water – benefits that reach their greatest capacity in old-growth and intact rainforests. From an ecosystems services standpoint, old-growth rainforests are the true working forests. The massive long-lived trees, dense foliage, and rich soils of the Tongass rainforest soak up and store the equivalent of over 200 times Alaska’s annual carbon dioxide pollution. The Great Bear rainforest absorbs the equivalent of about six times British Columbia’s annual emissions, and the Pacific Northwest rainforests absorb the equivalent of roughly 13 times the carbon dioxide emissions of the entire U.S. Both the Tongass and Great Bear are global resources for salmon production (the Pacific Northwest used to be), an economic engine for regional economies. Under “no-logging” scenarios, the Tongass rainforest alone could generate $4 – 7 million dollars annually in the sale of carbon credits should this exchange take off globally, and assuming carbon trades at about $20 per metric ton (based on 2006 estimates). And while we must reduce our greenhouse gas pollution to stabilize the global climate, rainforests in particular, and forests generally, play a pivotal role in these efforts.
A 21st century vision of sustainability must become more than talk at the United Nations when its members assemble again in September to assess progress on the International Year of Forests. This is especially important here in the United States, which is the world leader in greenhouse gas pollution and according to the FAO (2005) was ranked 7th globally for deforestation of its old-growth forests.
Salmon, carbon, and clean water should be the yardsticks by which we measure progress toward sustainable forest management for the Pacific Coastal rainforests. As we move forward, timber production will be an important byproduct of ecologically based restoration. At the same time, we need to reduce, reuse, and recycle wood products while increasing reliance on alternative fibers (e.g., hemp grown on agricultural lands) to pick up the slack. As I wrap up my facts for the upcoming talk, the sobering view from my window seat reminds me that the next time I travel to Alaska to be sure to grab the aisle seat or watch a movie!
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
Bird Survey Suggests If You Plant It, They Will Come
The results of last month’s annual Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge Bird Survey indicate that birds may colonize reforested areas much faster than experts had predicted. This year’s surveyors spotted all five of the common native forest birds and four endangered forest birds within sections of the refuge that two short decades ago had been treeless areas dominated by non-native plants and animals. “I never thought I’d live to see this,” said Jack Jeffrey, who coordinated this bird survey and was the refuge biologist from 1990-2008.
Hawaii’s Hakalau (Hawaiian for “place of many perches”) Forest Refuge was explicitly created in 1985 to preserve native forest birds and their habitat. Today the Hakalau NWR comprises almost 33,000 acres between 2,500 and 6,600 feet. By the time the refuge was established, however, more than 200 years’ worth of damage from cattle, feral pigs, logging, fires, and noxious weeds had converted much of what had been a magnificent high elevation native rain forest into a vast ecological wasteland.
Read the rest of Robert J. Cabin’s post at Huffington Post Green.
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Robert J. Cabin is an associate professor of ecology and environmental science at Brevard College. Before returning to academia, he worked as a restoration ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Tropical Botanical Garden. His new book Intelligent Tinkering: Bridging the Gap between Science and Practice will be published in August 2011 by Island Press.
About Robert J. Cabin
Robert J. Cabin is Associate Professor of Ecology and Environmental Science at Brevard College. Before returning to academia, he worked as a restoration ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Tropical Botanical Garden.
Brothers in Arms
In my travels through the mangroves of the Americas I was keen to learn how mangroves had influenced or been incorporated into local cultures. In Caravelas, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, I met three remarkable brothers who promote the indigenous culture of Bahia—a culture that is infused with images and myths relating to mangroves. Here is a blog post I wrote from Caravelas … Read more »
Teaching Afro-Indigenous culture to the children of Caravelas. Photo by Kennedy Warne.
About Kennedy Warne
Kennedy Warne co-founded New Zealand Geographic magazine in 1988, and served as the magazine’s editor until 2004, when he relinquished the editorship in order to pursue his own writing and photography. He has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Canadian Geographic, GEO and various travel publications, and continues to contribute regularly to New Zealand Geographic. He writes mostly about natural history subjects, and specializes in underwater assignments. His work for National Geographic has taken him from the sea ice of the Gulf of St Lawrence to the mangrove swamps of Bangladesh; from the rainforests of Fiordland to the kelp forests of Cape Town. His book Roads Less Travelled: Twenty Years of Exploration with New Zealand Geographic is published by Penguin (NZ) in September 2008. He lives in Auckland.
A Stone in the Shoe
Opposition to shrimp aquaculture in Ecuador has been growing as coastal mangrove dwellers find their voice and harden their resolve to fight for the preservation of the forests that sustain them. Some of the more outspoken opponents of shrimp farming have had their lives threatened. I met one such champion of the mangroves, who had been in hiding with his family for a month. Here is the blog post I wrote after talking to him. . . Read more »
Peter Segura—a marked man. Photo by Kennedy Warne.
About Kennedy Warne
Kennedy Warne co-founded New Zealand Geographic magazine in 1988, and served as the magazine’s editor until 2004, when he relinquished the editorship in order to pursue his own writing and photography. He has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Canadian Geographic, GEO and various travel publications, and continues to contribute regularly to New Zealand Geographic. He writes mostly about natural history subjects, and specializes in underwater assignments. His work for National Geographic has taken him from the sea ice of the Gulf of St Lawrence to the mangrove swamps of Bangladesh; from the rainforests of Fiordland to the kelp forests of Cape Town. His book Roads Less Travelled: Twenty Years of Exploration with New Zealand Geographic is published by Penguin (NZ) in September 2008. He lives in Auckland.
The Cockle Collectors
In the Esmeraldas region of northern Ecuador a large mangrove reserve has been created, within which several villages have custodianship of the forests. Here traditional ways of mangrove-dependent fishing continue, including picking cockles from the mud around the mangrove roots. Cockle collection is predominantly women’s work, and in the village of Tambillo I joined a group of these concheras as they set out for the mangrove collecting grounds. Here is the blog post I wrote about that experience . . . Read more »
Concheras at the cockle beds, about to climb the mangrove scaffold. Photo by Kennedy Warne.
About Kennedy Warne
Kennedy Warne co-founded New Zealand Geographic magazine in 1988, and served as the magazine’s editor until 2004, when he relinquished the editorship in order to pursue his own writing and photography. He has written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Canadian Geographic, GEO and various travel publications, and continues to contribute regularly to New Zealand Geographic. He writes mostly about natural history subjects, and specializes in underwater assignments. His work for National Geographic has taken him from the sea ice of the Gulf of St Lawrence to the mangrove swamps of Bangladesh; from the rainforests of Fiordland to the kelp forests of Cape Town. His book Roads Less Travelled: Twenty Years of Exploration with New Zealand Geographic is published by Penguin (NZ) in September 2008. He lives in Auckland.
World’s Most Unique and Endangered Forest Needs Our Help
No, it’s not in Brazil or Borneo. It’s actually in the good old USA, literally and figuratively clinging to a steep slope in a drainage called Mahanaloa Gulch on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. We need to stop twiddling our thumbs and SAVE THIS FOREST NOW.
I first visited this mystical forest shortly after I began a postdoctoral fellowship in restoration ecology at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in 1996. To my novice eyes, this gulch contained a beautiful but bewildering quilt of plants. Even more bewildering was the fact that several species I had recently seen elsewhere in the archipelago looked so different (what had been, say, a small shrub on another island had magically transformed into a vinelike tree here) that I never would have recognized them without my colleagues’ help.
What also struck me about this remnant forest was that every other plant seemed to be another federally endangered species found only on Kauai. We later realized that since 1) Hawaii has the world’s most unique and endangerment flora, 2) Kauai has the most unique and endangered flora of all the Hawaiian Islands, and 3) Mahanaloa Gulch has the most unique and endangered flora on Kauai, to the best of our knowledge, that particular forest contained the most unique and endangered flora on the planet!
New post from Robert Cabin, author of the forthcoming book Intelligent Tinkering writing on Huffington Post Green. Read the rest of his post here
Obama’s new forest rules: Read the fine print
This post was written by Dominick A. DellaSala, chief scientist and president, and Randi Spivak, vice president of Government Affairs at the Ashland-based Geos Institute. This post was excerpted from OregonLive.com.
Recognizing the need for a 21st-century vision, the Obama 
administration recently announced a sweeping planning rule for the 193 million acre national forest system. The rule will govern management of the national forests with the goal of maintaining and restoring forests and watersheds that Oregonians will increasingly depend on for climate change insurance.
National forests are among the last places to find old-growth trees and untrammeled places. They also serve as economic engines for local communities through dollars spent on outdoor recreation like hunting, fishing and camping. And they provide drinking water for more than 120 million people — in the West, more than half of our water comes from national forests. So a lot is riding on this proposed rule.
Read the full article on OregonLive.com
About Dominick A. DellaSala
Dominick A. DellaSala is Chief Scientist and President of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and President of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology.
