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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

False Forests: Plantations Replacing Native Forests

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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org

http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Archives

http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation

07/01/00

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY

Tree plantations are not forests. The rampant practice of logging

old growth and regenerating natural forests to replace with

plantations must come to an end. Vast monocrops planted in straight

rows are NOT forests, they are crops, false forests indeed. Do not

believe industry propaganda that calls the process "reforestation," it

is really factory farming. Pine farming, "like other large-scale,

industrial agriculture, harms the environment and the economy."

Plantations damage streams and water with fertilizers and herbicides,

impoverish soil, destroy habitat including wetlands, and stop the

benefits of managed natural forests such as clean water, recreation

and valuable sawtimber. One example is the Southern states in the US,

which are being hammered by logging companies shut out of the Pacific

Northwest. "Today there are 156 chip mills in the South -- 110 of

them less than 10 years old. Some can grind up to 3,000 acres of woods

per year... ... Between 1989 and 1995, exports of Southern hardwood

chips grew 500 percent." Plantations may be appropriate in certain

circumstances such as on previously degraded lands, yet the

"deadwood, decadence, and disorder" of natural old-growth and

secondary forests are the only true forests. Following is an

excellent article on the matter.

g.b.

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Title: False Forests

Source: Copyright 2000, Mother Jones magazine,

http://www.motherjones.com

Date: June 1, 2000

Byline: Ted Williams

What's green, full of trees, and worse than a clearcut? Vast pine

farms, which are rapidly replacing the woods with a new kind of

Southern plantation.

Under a low winter sun muted by the leading edge of an ice storm

sailing in from Oklahoma, I trudge up Moore Hill above the old

Shottsville, Alabama, cemetery and gaze out over the new plantations

of the South. The crop: loblolly pine, native to the moist piedmont

between highlands and sea and pretty much a stranger to these hills.

But these aren't just any loblollies. They are cloned "supertrees,"

selected for swiftness of growth, straightness of trunk, and

resistance to drought, disease, and insects.

The overseer of all the plantations in view: Champion International,

one of dozens of forest-products outfits frantically buying or leasing

woodlands across the South. Before planting their superseedlings, the

companies clearcut and bulldoze the site to get rid of all native

trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, mosses, fungi, grasses, sedges, and

wildflowers. Woody debris is burned off. Then they plant loblolly. As

the pines mature, they are thinned and pruned. Native trees that

return from roots or seeds are cut or killed with herbicides.

Frequently the plantation is bombed with fertilizer pellets. Then, 15

to 20 years after they were planted, the pines are clearcut, and the

process begins anew.

Since mechanized forest removal became de rigueur in the 1960s, the

industry has been excusing itself with ads that begin: "Clearcuts may

seem ugly at first...." As I gain the brow of the hill, I have to

agree. But here, on this frozen, snag-littered mud flow salted with

land snails roasted white, there is something even uglier -- a

greener, more insidious threat to the environment apparent in the

freshly planted pine seedlings that barely make it to my boot tops.

Directly to my left, a rectangular plantation almost ready for harvest

stretches to the next hollow like a roll of teased Astroturf. The

plantation to my right is maybe two years old and just greening up.

For miles in all directions, the earth is clad in genetically

identical, genetically "superior" specimens of loblolly jammed into

the dirt in straight rows -- trees the timber industry calls

"vigorous" and "thrifty," all goose-stepping their way to harvestable

diameter.

There is no genuine forest in sight, save a relict scrap to the north

that contains hardwoods: oak, beech, dogwood, ash, sweet gum,

magnolia, yellow poplar, hickory, cherry, and maple. It is a reservoir

for wildlife, but also for what companies like Champion seek to

correct -- "deadwood, decadence, and disorder." With a pine

plantation, the forest has not only been removed, it has been

prevented. Countless species of insects, arachnids, mollusks,

amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals -- each as much a part of a

forest as a tree -- are gone because the diverse vegetation on which

they depend is gone. E.O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist and Pulitzer

Prize winner, estimates that a pine plantation contains 90 to 95

percent fewer species than the forest that preceded it. He compares

the effects of tree farms on biological diversity to "building a line

of Wal-Marts."

Over the past decade, tree farms have certainly proliferated like

discount chains. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that plantations

now make up 36 percent of all pine stands in the South and within 20

years will make up 70 percent. Like other industries, pine farming has

migrated to the region for its mild climate, cheap labor, and low

taxes. Trees grow more quickly here, and they cost less to plant,

tend, and harvest. What's more, most of the pine conversion is taking

place on private land, where regulation is virtually nonexistent. More

than half of evergreens harvested in the U.S. come from the South,

making it the world's largest pulpwood producer.

Before visiting Moore Hill, I spent an afternoon flying over northern

Alabama in a light plane, inspecting endless pine plantations. Some

cover more than 1,000 acres, almost merging with others of the same

size -- squares, strips, and rectangles of sickly green draped across

the dark forest. By the year 2030, according to government

projections, more than two-thirds of all forests in the state will be

replaced by loblolly pine planted in orderly rows. People who don't

work for the forest-products industry call the process "conversion."

The industry calls it "reforestation." What it really is is factory

farming.

One of the reasons there are no meaningful controls on pine conversion

is that forest-products companies have pretty well convinced the media

and the public that "replanting" a forest once it has been removed is

not only possible but admirable. Weyerhaeuser, which according to

Business Week does "better than Mother Nature," boasts that it

"promptly replants" its clearcuts with "vigorous, young seedlings."

The company reports that in 1998 it planted more than 51 million

seedlings in its U.S. "forests." Georgia-Pacific, which manages 4

million acres in the South, plants 125 million seedlings each year and

proudly proclaims that its "forest is a factory."

What the companies neglect to mention is that pine farming, like other

large-scale, industrial agriculture, harms the environment and the

economy. Pine plantations require enormous amounts of fertilizer and

herbicide, much of which winds up in streams and drinking water. They

impoverish soil and destroy habitat, including wetlands. And they rob

communities of valuable sawtimber for lumber and of real forests that

produce clean water and provide recreation. Few of the profits end up

in local communities, and many of the companies are multinational.

Champion, for example, is owned by a firm based in Helsinki.

This is the second time the forest-products industry has marched like

Sherman through the South. Having grazed off the timber supply in the

early 1900s, the industry migrated to the Midwest, consumed that

supply, then moved to the Pacific Northwest. By the mid-1980s -- with

that region's old-growth rainforests fast dwindling -- the industry

returned to the South, where native forests had recovered from its

previous visit. With much of the second-growth hardwood of poor

quality, forest removal and site preparation for pine planting had

been prohibitively expensive. But the Army Corps of Engineers' newly

completed Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, connecting the rivers of the

same names, offered a cheap way to transport wood fiber. Now even the

stunted, twisted, genetically inferior stuff left by generations of

loggers could be run through mills that grind them into chips, loaded

on barges, whisked to the Gulf of Mexico, and shipped to Japan to be

turned into fax and copy paper!

Today there are 156 chip mills in the South -- 110 of them less than

10 years old. Some can grind up to 3,000 acres of woods per year,

clearing the way for vast tree farms. Between 1989 and 1995, exports

of Southern hardwood chips grew 500 percent.

Tom Bourland, a forestry-wildlife consultant who once worked for

International Paper, defends pine conversion. "If you just want that

go-back-to-nature bullshit and you don't really know what you're

talking about, you can get a wide audience," he says. "But it doesn't

make any sense. If you don't want industrial forestry on the

landscape, what do you want? Forestry is our No. 1 agricultural crop

in Louisiana. There are all the jobs and the taxes that come from

that, and you get all the environmental amenities. So what is your

argument?"

The argument is that pine conversion squanders real wealth. Ed

Whitelaw, the University of Oregon economics professor who provided

key testimony in the spotted-owl hearings and had to be assigned

bodyguards as a result, puts it this way: "Let's say you're the CEO of

one of these forest-products firms. Well, for you the long run is 8 or

10 years. No big deal. The long run for a politician is next November.

Is pine conversion economically wise in the long run -- the real long

run? I think the answer is unequivocally no. The companies have to

cover the externalities -- that is, the costs they impose on others --

and all the subsidies. If they do, then fine. But they aren't even

coming close."

One of the subsidies that Whitelaw is talking about is the Tennessee-

Tombigbee Waterway, which is now used primarily to transport wood

chips. It cost taxpayers $2 billion to build, and costs another $2

million annually to dredge. In addition, the pulp and paper mills that

facilitate pine conversion receive tax-free construction loans and

millions of dollars' worth of tax credits.

Alabama is particularly generous to pine converters. Among the

benefits bestowed by the state is a tax exemption on almost $4 billion

worth of timberland -- an arrangement that, together with other tax

breaks, deprives public schools of an estimated $50 million per year.

So pine conversion is being underwritten in part by the future

enlightenment and earning potential of Alabama's children. An Auburn

University study reveals that rural counties most dependent on the

forest-products industry have the highest levels of unemployment,

poverty, and infant mortality. They also spend $200 less per student

for public education than rural counties less reliant on timber. Tax

revenue that would have gone to schools and other social services goes

instead for such industry accommodations as road maintenance for

fleets of logging trucks.

Another hidden cost of pine conversion is that young hardwood trees

are ground into chips before they have a chance to mature into

valuable sawtimber. Unlike Western logging, which is often conducted

on public land, pine conversion happens mostly on private property

where regulations are lax or nonexistent. Foresters for companies like

Champion routinely pass out free seedlings and free advice to

landowners, encouraging them to sell their timber before it matures

and to "reforest" with loblolly. The landowner gets quick cash, the

company gets wood for chips, and workers at local sawmills get laid

off. Lamar Marshall, director of Wild Alabama, one of the state's

largest and most active environmental groups, showed me the results of

this system as we toured the countryside in his truck. "Look there,"

he exclaimed as we passed someone's back 40, a once-diverse woodlot

replaced by a monotonous expanse of young pine. "If the forester isn't

real ethical, he'll cut every stick of hardwood for chips. He'll pay

$5 for a red oak, which might have been worth $50 or $75 in five

years." All trees look the same by the time a Japanese fax machine

spits them into the holding tray.

In a forest, though, each species of tree has a unique function,

contributing different nutrients to soil and water and providing food,

shade, and shelter for different wildlife. Jonathan Evans, who teaches

biology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, says the

industry needs to quit pushing the fantasy that replacing all these

trees with loblolly is "reforestation." "Corn is a species of grass,"

he remarks. "Yet Midwestern farmers don't go around pretending they're

restoring the tallgrass prairie."

Farmers know what happens to soil used to grow successive crops of

grain or vegetables. What happens to soil used to grow successive

crops of pine? I put the question to David Van Lear, a forestry

professor at Clemson University. Industrial foresters, he explains,

don't know, because they haven't been doing it long enough. But he

thinks someone should find out. "Most of the nutrients are in the

topsoil that is sometimes bulldozed away with the debris," he says.

"There have been studies documenting the detrimental effects of that.

If your cutting rotations get shorter and shorter and you're taking

more and more off the land, then you're likely to run into nutrient

deficiencies. That is something we cannot tolerate as managers because

then the resource isn't renewable; you're mining it." Van Lear

questions whether chemical fertilizers can cure the soil depletion

caused by pine plantations.

As with other forms of factory farming, fertilizers incur costs of

their own -- to the companies that use them and to the fish, wildlife,

and people whose habitat they pollute. Last fall residents of

Sequatchie County on the Cumberland Plateau in southeastern Tennessee

complained that they'd been bombed by urea pellets intended for a

Bowater pine plantation. "You could hear them hit our roof and splash

in our pond," says Beverly Hicks. "They hit us and our animals. My

husband and I got terrible headaches and sore throats. My sister had

blisters inside her nose."

Hicks is among 27 residents who convinced a judge to issue a temporary

restraining order and who joined in a lawsuit against Bowater and the

applicator, Aerotek. According to the Chattanooga Times & Free Press,

citizens and county officials "ran into a stone wall." Bowater refused

to comment on the spraying, and the state said that there are "no

regulations regarding application of fertilizer."

While there are regulations for application of the herbicides used by

pine converters to prevent the return of native plants, there is scant

information on the long-term effects on fish, wildlife, and humans.

One of the most commonly used of these poisons is Garlon, which can

remain in the soil for two years and easily washes into streams,

lakes, and ponds. Although it kills unwanted plants, Garlon is highly

toxic to the microbes that help pine trees grow, and in laboratory

tests on rats, it increased rates of cancer and birth defects.

Wetlands -- which help purify groundwater from fertilizers,

herbicides, and other contaminants -- are also being destroyed by pine

plantations. Because they are heavily forested, wetlands pay for their

own destruction: The industry finances their draining and site

preparation by selling their timber to chip mills. A Duke University

study found that pine conversion was responsible for more than half of

all wetland losses in the coastal plain of North Carolina. Statewide,

nearly two million acres of wetlands have been converted to pine.

According to the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center, 91

percent of all destruction and damage to freshwater forested wetlands

has occurred in the 13 Southern states.

The pace at which wet and dry forests are being converted to loblolly

plantations has recently been documented by Jonathan Evans of the

University of the South, who calls conversion "a vast experiment with

no control." When he and his colleagues studied aerial photographs of

a single county in the deciduous forest cloaking Tennessee's

Cumberland Plateau, they found that 13,144 acres had been cleared for

pine plantations between 1981 and 1998. Net loss in the county's

hardwood habitat: 12 percent.

"No one knows what's going to come back on these vast acreages," says

Evans. "There is no place in the United States where anyone has

successfully restored a hardwood forest in upland conditions like

this. The coal industry came and went; that's why we have a lot of the

problems we do. Well, here's another industry coming and going. It's

not in this for the long haul, but the people who live here are.

What's going to be left for them when these companies go to Malaysia

or wherever?"

Not all pine conversion takes place on private land. The Forest

Service has gotten into the business, albeit in a more casual way.

"The service is doing better," Lamar Marshall tells me as we orbit in

Chip Vercelli's Piper Arrow over the Bankhead National Forest in

northern Alabama. There has been no clearcutting or pine conversion on

this forest for the last three years. Vercelli is an attorney for

WildLaw, a nonprofit law firm that does pro bono work for more than 80

environmental groups; one reason the Forest Service is doing better on

the Bank- head is that WildLaw, on behalf of Marshall's Wild Alabama,

sued it every time it got ready to remove a tract of woods and cluster

bomb the earth with loblolly.

Similar rehabilitation of national forests -- and the people who

manage them -- is under way all across the South. In the last two

years, a coalition led by Georgia Forest Watch has shut down

clearcutting and pine conversion on the Chattahoochee and Oconee

National Forests. Thanks to citizen activists and an agency wide tilt

toward resource stewardship initiated by Forest Service chief Michael

Dombeck, new plans for these and other Southern national forests

recognize past mistakes and call for the conversion of loblolly

plantations back to native stands.

The pine plantations in the Bankhead forest differ from the private

ones I'd inspected in that they have been less intensively managed.

Timber companies might even call them "slovenly." Clearly, "deadwood,

decadence, and disorder" are creeping in. The tops of some of the

pines have turned brown because they've been invaded by Southern pine

beetles, the boll weevil of the new plantations. Presented with a

vast, unbroken smorgasbord of cotton, the real boll weevil had helped

ruin most of the South's traditional plantations by the 1920s, thereby

encouraging the return of native forests. Will the pine beetle -- part

of those native forests -- do the same?

No one can say, but the beetle is currently undergoing an

unprecedented population explosion. Because these insects look for

stressed trees, the timber industry insists that they pose little

threat to pine plantations. But Tom Bourland, the forestry-wildlife

consultant, inadvertently acknowledges that tree farms have been hard

hit. He blames the "back-to-nature types" that run the National Park

Service for failing to control beetles 17 years ago in the Big Thicket

National Preserve in Texas, allowing them to overwhelm their

predators. "They moved on the prevailing winds northeast through prime

forestlands in Louisiana and Mississippi," Bourland says. "It was an

incredible outbreak. You can't get over a pine plantation in an

aircraft today and not see evidence of that epidemic."

Because pine beetles can't be controlled by pesticides, they are

providing plenty of employment for independent loggers like Donnie

Williams. Among his fellow professionals, Williams is downright

aberrant in that he thinks in terms of ecosystems; Marshall calls him

"an environmental logger." Because of his reputation, the Forest

Service has hired Williams to selectively excise the moribund, beetle-

infested loblollies it planted 35 years earlier.

I meet Williams at his salvage operation deep in the Bankhead. His

quarter-million-dollar harvester-processor cuts the dying pines

without even nicking the hardwood saplings interspersed among them,

lays them horizontal, strips their branches, and slices them into

identical lengths. As the logs hit the earth scraps of bark fall off,

each perforated with tiny holes made by the emerging adult beetles and

inscribed on the inside with tangled trails left by the larvae as they

devoured the living cambium.

I ask Williams why he isn't cutting down the dead trees that have no

bark. "That's where the checkered beetle lives," Williams explains.

"He goes over to the live tree, waits on the bark, and eats the pine

beetle when he comes out." So the "deadwood, decadence, and disorder"

that timber companies cut, scrape, and poison from the earth have a

function after all.

Checkered beetles aren't the only forest creatures that feast on pine

beetles. Many species of woodpeckers do, too, but because the birds

need dead and moribund trees in which to forage and excavate their

nests, they can't live in the carefully tended trees of a pine farm.

Another natural control of pine beetles -- parasitic wasps that lay

their eggs on them -- need the nectar of wildflowers for nourishment,

but pine converters eliminate wildflowers, along with all the other

seemingly useless flora. Nor can pine farms sustain the fox squirrels

that bury puffballs which, in turn, inoculate the roots of native

longleaf pines with nitrogen-fixing nodules, thereby facilitating

better growth and better production of the cones the squirrels eat.

Shottsville is named for the Shotts family. Dozens of gravestones in

the cemetery bear the name. Some of the Shottses buried here fought

for the Confederacy with the Bull Mountain Volunteers. Others gave

land for the adjacent single-room church. Lee Shotts, 68, his five

children, and the older of his 14 grandchildren drive all the way from

Roseville, Michigan, to fish for bass in the family pond. Once he

caught a six- pounder.

The pond nestles in a wooded hollow at the base of Moore Hill, a four-

minute walk up Bull Mountain Creek from County Road 13. It is here

that I encounter some of the "externalities" Ed Whitelaw has been

telling me about. With the first big rain of the year, a torrent of

mud, silt, and debris had swept down the feeder stream from Champion's

100-acre clear- cut. The pond had always been transparent. Now it is

Mississippi brown and crusted over with a scum of dirt, ashes, and

sawdust.

Nutrients that have accumulated for centuries in forest soil are lost

not just to planted pines; they flow with mud into ponds and streams

each time pine converters remove all the soil-anchoring vegetation.

Then, when the site has recovered from that erosion, the fast-growing

pines are clearcut and erosion begins anew.

Stepping over and through deltas of silt and mud, I follow the feeder

stream up Moore Hill for several hundred yards until it goes dry.

After Lee Shotts had complained to Champion, it hired a contractor to

set up rows of hay bales, backed on the upstream side with black

plastic. The mud that has flowed and hardened above some of these

barriers is 18 inches higher than the mud below. In its upper reaches

the stream and its banks are bare as the baseline from home plate to

first base. Champion has burned and bulldozed everything, and it is

all perfectly legal because forestry regulations on private land in

Alabama, as in most of the South, are voluntary.

"You wouldn't want to eat a fish out of that pond now; they've ruined

it," declares Lee Shotts, who is suing Champion for damages. His

attorney, WildLaw director Ray Vaughan, says the firm hopes to

accomplish three things with the lawsuit: compensate the Shotts

family, punish Champion, and deter timber companies from clearcutting

in ways that damage their neighbors. "They are logging without regard

to their responsibilities to the people around them," Vaughan says as

we hike around the pond. "It can be done better. No government agency

will hold them accountable, so we're going to try."

Where the cart path to Shotts' pond joins the county road, a flock of

perhaps half a dozen eastern bluebirds flashes over our heads.

Bluebirds, which nest in holes excavated by woodpeckers in dead and

diseased trees, can't exist in pine plantations. How many bluebirds,

woodpeckers, and bass, I wonder, does a 100-acre pine plantation cost?

And would the public authorize such purchases if it knew about them?

At least the Shotts family is going to have something to say about it.

Now the sky is beech-bark gray, and fingers of the approaching storm

are reaching into bare hardwoods along the unconverted creek banks.

From the dark valley all around us, branches of Alabama's old, native

woodlands rattle like the drums of the Bull Mountain Volunteers.

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