The Forest Service fiddles while the forest burns…
by Matt Peters
(printed: Athens Messenger, 3/24/09)
Matt Peters, Millfield Oh.
Only the Feds could see the sense in burning public forests while simultaneously raising the risk of escaped fire to “very high.” Despite this alarming safety level, it is of the utmost importance to keep in mind that our Appalachian forests simply do not burn on their own, like prairie grasslands and dry Western forests do. They need help from us.
Televisions all over the Central Hardwoods Forest region show the devastating effects of development as it interacts with what in Nevada and the oak-savannah forests of southern California, is as natural as the rain. Here in Ohio though, our forests just don’t burn that way. Even after a century and more of clearcutting, invasive species, stripmining, abandoned farmland conversion and other human impacts, forests fires in Ohio are rare, small, and entirely caused by humans. Fears of massive wildfires following a winter’s ice storms are largely unfounded.
Using fire in a management tool in an ecosystem adapted to that influence, such as true prairie grassland, can be an appropriate management tool if intentions are “pure” and free of commercial interests. To use fire to maintain the failed reclamation of a stripmine site, as the USFS has done in Hocking County, is madness equal to the lead-poisoned emperors of Rome. The point of stripmine reclamation, in addition to “restoring the approximate original contour” of the land, is also with the implicit hope that someday native flora will return to the ravaged site. While some are impressed that grass is able to grow there at all, we need to recognize that these and other former forestlands need healing, not further disturbance represented by these controlled burns. Those locust trees are a valuable legume that rebuilds the soil, if you can call it soil on a reclaimed stripmine site. The autumn-olive might better have been removed by a more shovel-ready approach, labor intensive perhaps but that’s why they call them “jobs.”
Which raises the issue of the spending of public monies by management agencies. In response to the catastrophic fires out west, Congress has made abundant money available for fighting fires, and well they should. Here in Ohio that money is being used as a subsidy for commercial timber interests, using fire to promote oaks which will later be harvested through clearcutting. This is a thinly veiled attempt to greenwash the continued exploitation of public land, tack a leaf to it and call it “ecological management.” Ecological management is being aware of natural processes and working within that framework. If life gives you maples, make syrup. Shrewd foresters will recognize that there is more money to be made growing ginseng under a maple canopy, than weeding out multiflora rose let in by repeated logging so that the oaks might grow back. While agencies recognize half the problem, that oaks are in fact not regenerating, there is a fundamental failure to admit that our forests are being pushed beyond their ability to sustain us.
The importance of intact mature forestland is as subtle as it is profound. No-one has ever conducted the experiment where an entire continent is clearcut in the space of a century, and the results seem to be coming in fast. The effects of the disappearance of the chestnut tree a century ago, and how the oaks and maples might jostle for canopy space in its wake, is an ongoing process that is beyond the control of forest management. In these changing times it becomes ever more important to set aside large intact forest reserves, closely monitored but basically inviolate, that allow these natural processes to work themselves out. Ending commercial logging on public forests is a good place to start, that would free up all that valuable labor to embark on projects designed to truly restore the scars of our industrial past.