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FOREST CONSERVATION NEWS TODAY
Plantations Are Not Forests, Era of Restoration Ecology
Beckons
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.
http://forests.org/
-- Forest Conservation Portal
http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest Conservation
May 25, 2002
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Forests.org
Plantations are not forests. They are tree farms. As the World
Rainforest Movement notes at
http://www.wrm.org.uy/plantations/material/problem.html,
"A forest is a
complex, self-regenerating system, encompassing soil,
water, microclimate,
energy, and a wide variety of plants and animals in
mutual relation. A
commercial plantation, on the other hand, is a cultivated
area whose
species and structure have been simplified dramatically
to produce only a
few goods."
As with any agricultural system that is resource intensive
and based upon monoculture, most commercial tree
plantations are
environmentally damaging and not ecologically
sustainable. Current
plantation practices frequently incur substantial
environmental costs
including mining of soil nutrients, soil erosion, loss of
native
biodiversity, reduced water quality and disruption of
local livelihoods.
There remains tremendous potential to increase the
planting and natural
reestablishment of forests on degraded and fallow lands;
and to manage
such planted and regenerating forests under rigorous
certified management
practices to produce both forest products and
environmental benefits.
This will require more emphasis upon planting a variety
of native tree
species, emphasizing a range of activities from
restoration ecology to
more production orientated natural forests, accounting
for environmental
benefits and costs, and ensuring local communities
meaningfully
participate and benefit from long-term natural forest
cover.
The World's remaining primary forests will provide the
necessary seed
stocks and the blueprints for the coming age of forest
ecological
restoration.
Global forest and ecological sustainability depends not only
upon strictly preserving as much primary forests as
possible; but also
requires reestablishment of widespread restored historically
based natural
ecosystem reserves, and a massive expansion of benignly
managed natural,
native forest cover.
Never, ever forget - forests are more than timber
and fiber.
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Mistaking
Trees for a Forest?
Source: Copyright
2002 Los Angeles Times
Date: May 23, 2002
By DEBORAH SCHOCH, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Southern timber harvest replaces native hardwoods with
rows of pines.
Critics decry loss of habitat but industry says the
practice spares wild
areas.
SPENCER MOUNTAIN, Tenn. -- SPENCER MOUNTAIN, Tenn. --If
many trees are cut
down in a forest, but others are planted to take their
place, is it still
a forest?
Or is a forest something more elusive: a repository of
varied life forms,
a cradle for clear-running streams, a historical
continuum where children
and their fathers and grandfathers can sit atop old
stumps, watch for
squirrels and talk?
That's the question posed here in central Tennessee,
where giant
timber-cutting machines shear native trees off Spencer
Mountain like skin
off a black bear. Mathematically, clear-cutting tens of
thousands of trees
is not a problem. The South is growing more trees than it
is cutting down.
By mid-century, trees may well cover more ground than
they do today.
The issue is that as the timber industry cuts the
region's slow-growing
oaks, hickories and other hardwoods to feed the nation's
ravenous appetite
for computer paper, chipboard and other consumer
products, it is sowing a
sterile substitute: vast pine tree plantations.
Many biologists dismiss these new forests as nothing more
than
agricultural fields planted with nonnative trees. A real
forest, they
argue, is something more messy, primal and elusive--a
place to learn not
just about nature and hunting but about the world of your
ancestors.
Tennessee is emblematic of the transformation sweeping
the South, which
today produces more wood products than any single country
on Earth.
The 13 Southern states account for nearly 60% of the
nation's wood output,
almost four times the current volume of the once-mighty
Pacific Northwest.
The escalating timber market is altering landscapes from
Georgia to
Arkansas, turning oak forests, farm fields and marshes
into man-made seas
of planted pine.
The question of whether these pine stands are forests or
farms is a new
turn in a centuries-old quarrel over the role forests
play in America.
Consider the 1890s feud between two pioneering giants in
their
fields--environmentalist John Muir and forester Gifford
Pinchot--about the
purpose of the first forest preserves. Muir envisioned
them as preserves
for wildness, containing "thousands of God's wild
blessings." Pinchot saw
them as more utilitarian, where trees would not only grow
but provide
valuable building materials.
The new forests are not the forests that Tennesseans
recall from
childhood.
The trees are mostly loblolly pine, grown in rows, mostly
the same age,
the same height and cut at the same time by giant
machines. The loblolly
stands are fertilized and managed and devoid of many
native plants and
animals.
Government and industry foresters say the plantations are
highly
productive and emulate many of the roles of natural tree
stands. More
efficient forests, they say, mean that more wilderness
can remain
unscathed. Timber companies contend that years of
"high-grading" in old
groves--harvesting the best and strongest trees--have
weakened forests,
leaving behind spindly stands.
"You end up with what a professor I had in school
called 'green junk,'"
said Sharon Haines, International Paper manager of
sustainable forestry.
Ecologists counter that given time and sunlight, a small
oak will grow
larger, and that even a crooked tree can hold a
songbird's nest.
Most tree farms produce a single species, the
fast-sprouting loblolly, in
place of a slower growing mixture of native Tennessee
oaks, hickories and
sycamores. The loblollies can be harvested by machine and
replaced with
seedlings in as little as 25 years, two to five times
faster than the
regrowth of a traditional forest.
The amount of Southern land devoted to pine plantations
will increase 67%
to 54 million acres--an area the size of Utah--by 2040,
predicts a U.S.
Forest Service report. Natural forests of all types will
decline 17%,
meanwhile, with the most dramatic conversion occurring in
Tennessee, the
report says.
Barry Graden, forestry development manager for Bowater
Inc., one of
Tennessee's largest timber companies, is proud of his new
forests.
He shows off a stand of young, green loblollies, saying
they provide
nesting habitat for quail, shelter for deer, wild turkeys
and rabbits,
easy foraging for hawks and eagles.
But Graden and other forest experts concede that when
planted loblollies
grow taller, the sunlight dims and creatures disperse.
"As the canopy closes on a planted pine stand, that
diversity will drop
off rather substantially," said David Wear, coauthor
of the recent Forest
Service report.
The Forest Service report regards the growth of
plantations as an
important hedge against suburban sprawl, which the
authors say is the
single greatest threat to Southern forests.
Paul E. Davis, director of water pollution control at the
Tennessee
Department of Environment and Conservation, said pine
plantations treat
the land and water more gently than, say, a 100-store
mall surrounded by
acres of asphalt. "It's good for clean water in
Tennessee to see a viable
forestry industry, because that keeps the land use from
changing," he
said.
The conversion to plantations has been going on for half
a century. But
the process accelerated in the last two decades as Fortune
500 timber
companies moved away from the Northwest to the friendlier
regulatory
atmosphere of the South. Most Southern forests are
privately owned and
immune from the environmental restrictions imposed on the
federal forests
of the West.
Unlike California, most Southern states do not require
timber companies
that cut trees on private land to draw up plans to
protect wildlife and
water quality. Tennessee requires no notification before
land is logged.
Nor is there a lone imperiled species, like the Northern
spotted owl,
which became the icon of the Northwest timber wars. No
single forest
creature has emerged to trigger federal
endangered-species laws across the
South. Nor can even a small number of Southern forests be
called
"primeval," as in the West, since generations
of Southern settlers cleared
trees for farmland that in time were overgrown by new
forests.
Today's pine plantations flourish on abandoned farms in
southern
Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley, in Florida grasslands,
Alabama
river valleys and in the coastal lowlands of the
Carolinas.
Around Spencer Mountain and elsewhere in rural Van Buren
County, neon
green swaths of nonnative loblollies intermingle with the
brown bark of
hardwoods. Thin bands of trees called beauty strips still
line the roads,
masking the clear-cuts beyond.
"They hurt this mountain out here. It ain't nothing
but a pile of brush,"
said William Bouldin, 84, whose father taught him to cut
trees one at a
time.
Van Buren County has lost more native forest than all six
neighboring
counties on the Cumberland Plateau, according to a new
study commissioned
by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife
Service.
Hardwood clear-cuts in the county were immense--averaging
186 acres, 50%
beyond the timber industry's own recommended limit for
clear-cuts, said
the director of the study, Jonathan P. Evans, associate
biology professor
at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. The
study focused on the
plateau because it is part of a region valued for its
biological
diversity.
The best example of the area's natural treasures is Fall
Creek Falls State
Park, which features deep forested gorges, ancient
bonsai-sized cedars and
a 256-foot-high waterfall, the highest east of the
Rockies.
Ecologists fear that soil runoff from clear-cutting is
sullying the
crystalline creeks that flow through the park and support
fish, mussels
and other aquatic creatures. After recent flooding, muddy
runoff from
treeless hillsides turned Fall Creek Lake the color of
chocolate milk.
For botanists, a walk through a heavily cut hardwood
forest becomes a hunt
for clues that it still functions as a biological haven.
Chris Bullington,
a botanist with the Nature Conservancy of Tennessee who
grew up on the
plateau, says he sometimes can't find a single rare
flower or skittering
salamander, and he wonders then if the forest has been
cut too many times
to be repaired. Then he spots a sign--an unusual white
fringeless orchid,
perhaps, sheltered by ferns--and he is reassured.
"Everybody's been operating on the notion there's
plenty of trees. No
one's been keeping score," Bullington said.
"Now people are bumping into
each other--'Oh, you've been cutting trees on the other
side of the hill,
and I've been cutting on this side.'"
Tennessee forester Ronald Measles grew up in the woods
around Spencer
Mountain, where his father took him hunting and taught
him to tell red
oaks and white oaks apart by the shape of their leaves.
He did the same
for his own son.
Only two years ago, oak forests surrounded the small
office on Spencer
Mountain where Measles works as a technician for the
state Division of
Forestry. Today that office overlooks a clear-cut field.
Not only have the old forests vanished, but so have the
small family-owned
sawmills, and the freedom of children to hike and hunt
right down the
road.
The tiny county, population 5,200, is so impoverished
that it is only now
building its first sewage treatment plant. It still has
not enjoyed an
economic boom from the recent logging. Machines called
"feller-bunchers"
scoop up piles of logs, much like the bright orange
"Super-Axe-Hacker"
that harvested Truffula Trees in Dr. Seuss' "The
Lorax." As the timber
companies stripped the hardwoods, few local residents
were hired to help.
"They weren't employing anyone in the community.
They weren't buying
anything in the community," said Van Buren County
Executive Kelly Dishman.
Much of the clear-cut hardwood goes, not to small,
traditional industries,
but to chip mills such as International Paper's Royal
Blue mill in
Caryville, Tenn. It produces around 200,000 tons of
hardwood chips each
year with a staff of seven. Most of those chips are used
to make paper.
As chip mills proliferate, small manufacturers wonder
where they will get
their hardwoods. The Burroughs-Ross-Colville Co. in
McMinnville has been
crafting handles for axes and hammers since the 19th century.
On an office
shelf, one manager displays a hammer that appears to be
Tennessee-made,
but in fact has a handle made of foreign wood. That is
perhaps the deepest
fear: that not only are local hardwoods disappearing, but
the replacement
wood will come from overseas.
"It's really changed, it sure has," Ronald
Measles said. "The kids worked
in the woods, and cut timber. Now the timber's gone. It
probably won't be
back in our lifetime."
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