An Eleven Year Old's Perspective on Cutting Forests to Save Them.

An imagined dialog.

In my last post, I alerted us to the September deadline for comments on the United States Forest Service’s National Old Growth Amendment Draft Environmental Impact Statement. All tolled, across four commenting periods, over a million citizens wrote asking for greater protection of mature and old growth forests. It waits to be seen if the forest service will heed all those requests.

One thing I’ve noticed in both Biden’s old growth inventory and the old growth amendment that came after, is the frequency of language referring to “threats to mature and old growth forests,” and the need to “address” those threats. By “threats” you might think they mean chainsaws and feller bunchers, but they mean anything but, listing “fires, insects, disease, drought, invasive species and other 21st century stressors.” The chainsaws and feller bunchers are for addressing those threats, through what is variably called “proactive management,” “restoration,” or “prescriptive thinning,” the idea being that as forests age they become overburdened with potential fuels and prey to insects, and therefore need to be thinned. But what occurs is generally logging by any other name, with sparse remains of trees left behind, most or all of the big ones taken, the ground tore up and dried out, the microclimate altered. Noted fire ecologists Chad Hanson refers to this narrative as the “overgrown forest” myth, which he says has been scientifically discredited.

Image courtesy of the Seattle Times

The news does not seem to have reached the forests service. According to Sierra magazine, “between December 2023, when the Forest Service announced its proposal to amend management plans for each of the 122 national forests, and April of this year, the agency has pursued logging projects across more than 116,000 acres within old-growth forests.” And it appears that “mature” forests (forests on their way to old growth) have been dropped from consideration for protection altogether.

Meanwhile, pro-logging politicians have crafted a bill called the Fix our Forest Act, HR 8790, which recently passed in the House of Representatives. It would roll back logging restrictions on millions of acres of federal land, exclude public and scientific oversight and limit judicial review. Or, in their words, the bill “increases resiliency to catastrophic wildfires, and protects communities by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration projects.”

Not surprisingly, a mirror image of this narrative is playing out here at the local level in Washington State, where a race for Land’s Commissioner is well underway. The outcome of this race will determine the fate of up to 10,000 acres of mature, naturally regenerated “legacy forests.” Last week, during the candidates’ first debate, industry favorite Jaime Herrera Beutler made what was essentially a “fix our forests” pitch, saying the state’s forests had fallen into “disrepair” and needed more active management. One of her claims was that this is what the “new science” is telling us to do.

But what is the science really saying? And according to which scientists? And according to which source of funding for that science, which seems to matter a good bit. And since the concern is fire, why is there so little talk about water, or forest hydrology? Why so little recognition of' a forest’s ability to, as the late Mediterranean meteorologist Millan Millan would have put it, “beget water.” It’s not a mystery. As forests mature their soils deepen, becoming able to store more and more water from the wet season, longer and longer into the dry season. Deep rooted trees tap aquifers, bringing water to the surface and atmosphere. Leaves and needles waft not only moisture but “condensation nuclei” into the atmosphere, catalyzing cloud-formation and rain. By this transpiration, they also cool their climates, inhibiting dehydration. We haven’t even mentioned fungi yet, the undergrown neural networks by which older forests share resources and alert each other to potential bug infestations.

There are many questions to be asked about the scientific basis for this “fix our forests” narrative, at both the local and national levels, but here I want to focus on something else Beutler said. Near the end of the debate she called on Dave Upthegrove, running to protect legacy forests, to explain to the state’s students why he is threatening their school construction funding.

She was referring to the fact that Washington’s original “Enabling Act” stipulated that schools would be funded by the selling of state-owned timber. As the state grew, however, this proved insufficient and legislation was eventually passed allowing the state and localities to fund schools more directly, and eventually timber sales were earmarked for school construction only, not day-to-day operations. According to the state’s Superintendent for Public Instruction, Chris Reykdal, this arrangement now provides less than 2% of the state’s school construction budget. It’s complicated because for small, rural taxing districts, the monies have greater impact and sometimes the land is county-owned land being administered by the state, in which the case the amounts are more consequential and need to be addressed. Certainly, no one is arguing for underfunding schools, which is why Reykdal calls for the arrangement to be abandoned altogether, with other funding sources, on the simple grounds that it’s wrong to pit kids against forests.

Along these lines, I’ve been wondering about Ms. Beutler’s challenge to Mr. Upthegrove. Such an exchange could turn out differently than she imagines. The students might say, “no worries, just preserve the forests please.” More interesting to me, however, is how the inverse of that conversation might go, where Jaime Herrera Beutler must explain to the students why she is sacrificing naturally regenerated, mature forests for a school budgets rather than seeking alternative funding. Since speak to “the students” is hard to picture, this imagined dialog addresses a single student, an eleven-year-old fifth grader named Sophie.

Jaime Herrera Beutler:  Hi Sophie. You probably don't know me but I'm running to be Commissioner of Public Lands. There are some extreme people trying to keep a lot of old forests out of production, but I'm fighting hard to stop them so we can maintain that revenue for your school's budget.

Sophie:  What is a budget?

Beutler:  That's where we get the money to do things like build new buildings for you.

Sophie:  Will I still be able to keep the building I have. I really like it. By the stone steps the mowers don't reach and the grass grows really high. I've seen frogs in there, and once baby rabbits. How old are these forests?

Beutler:  Oh, about 90 to 120 years old.

Sophie:  That's doesn't sound very old to me. My teacher Mr. Adams says the trees are meant to live up to eight hundred years.

Beutler:  Well, it's old compared to the other trees, which we cut at around forty to sixty years.

Sophie:  Aren't they still like children then?

Beutler:  Uh, I don't think that's the proper way to think about it. These are special forests that we planted to provide timber revenue for the state. We call them "working forests."

Sophie:  Are the older forests also working forests?

Beutler:  Not yet!  But we plan on bringing them into production if the extreme people don't get in the way.

Sophie:  But if you just leave them do you think they will grow to be eight hundred?

Beutler:  Oh no, Sophie. They will just fall into disrepair.

Sophie:  You mean like a house or a bicycle?

Beutler:  Uh...

Sophie:  Is it the older forests or the working forests that are falling apart?

Beutler:  It's all of them. As they grow old they start falling into disarray.

Sophie:  Then how did they ever grow to be eight hundred in the first place?

Beutler:  Well aren't you an inquisitive one. Sophie, this is simply what the science tells us we must do.

Sophie:  Maybe the scientists should talk to Mrs. Fletcher.

Beutler:  Who's Mrs. Fletcher?

Sophie:  She's my friend Larry's mom. She once took us to one of these forests you are talking about. a forest named Bessie. We          had to walk up a long logging road to get there, but then we turned off the road and clambered through to Bessie, and it was like another world. It made me think of a giant living room, with really wide walls and a ceiling high up in the sky. There was even carpeting made of moss, which sank under our feet as we walked. Things certainly liked living there. There were holes in the trees and chips on the ground from woodpeckers. Mrs. Fletcher said they leave holes for other birds to make their homes in. Mrs. Fletcher called it a Legacy Forest. a forest named Bessie. Is this the kind of forest you want to keep in production?

Beutler:  Well, it's not that we want to, but we have to. If we don't they'll catch fire.

Sophie:  But what about the sponges? Mrs. Fletcher said that as a forest grows old it's soil becomes like a sponge, soaking up water during the rainy season so it's there in the dry season. Fallen logs, he said are like really long sponges. We turned a small one over and the wood was soaking wet.  And we saw a SALAMANDER! I can tell you, it felt much cooler in Bessie than on the road between the working forests. We were sweating to death out there. Mrs. Fletcher said animals come to these places during fires because they know it is safer. Maybe the animals know something the scientists don't.

Beutler:  Well, I doubt that. The thing is, Sophie, we need to cut these forests to raise money for your education. Don't you realize, silly, it's for you we cut the forests.

Sophies brow furrows and she tries to process the information. Then her eyes begin to water.

Sophie:   You mean you are cutting them... for me?

Beutler:    Yes. For your education and future. And ...oh dear, don't cry. Here's a Kleenex. You'll understand when you get older. But I have to go now. There's no time to waste in saving your budget! 

Sophie, quite worried, calls out after her: Please talk to Mrs. Fletcher. And my teacher Mr. Adams is pretty smart too. He'll explain. Maybe our class can do a raffle for them...

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