Foresters Need Complete Set of Tools to Trim Trees
Further limiting tools like clear-cutting endanger forests
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For years, activists used political and legal means to prevent the harvesting of trees throughout California, creating a tinderbox in our state's mountains that endanger our communities and incinerate our forests.
Last year, we saw over a million acres of overgrown forest and brush burn in California, including the largest single fire in the state's history. Sadly, these fires cost the lives of 22 people and destroyed 3,631 homes. Even more tragic, this destruction was predictable and preventable.
Thankfully, policymakers today understand that a healthy forest is not a forest that is left alone. Legislation and policy coming out of Washington, D.C. and Sacramento show an increasing willingness to address the crisis caused by overgrown forests. For example, my research shows that today there are about 460 trees per acre in the Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forest. In the late 1800s, when the forest was healthy, it supported 66 trees per acre, and only 22 of them were old.
The public is learning what professional foresters have known for some time: a healthy forest is one that is cared for. Just as a gardener would prune and weed, we must care for our forests through periodic harvesting to ensure that they don't become overgrown and unhealthy. Prescribed fire is still an important tool, but it is too dangerous to use on a large scale in modern forests.
As a result, projects to thin overgrown forests and return them to a more natural state are winning community support and even the limited support of activists who have opposed such efforts for decades.
Yet, despite this progress, some forms of responsible forest management continue to be shunned.
Today, if you own your own land in California and want to use a practice for regenerating trees accepted by professional foresters and the law - clear-cutting - you can do so on no more than 20-30 acres even after gaining approval from state regulatory agencies. However, several bills before the California legislature would further reduce management options including eliminating clear-cutting on some private forests.
Some people object to clear-cutting because they think it damages the soil. If this were true, then we would not have large areas of vigorously growing Douglas-fir in the Pacific Northwest or highly productive pine forests in the Southeast that have been repeatedly clear-cut.
Other people object to clear-cutting because they think it is unnatural. They should know that foresters in Europe and America have spent centuries observing and learning from nature to develop methods that regenerate certain kinds of trees.
Foresters learned that nature clears parts of a forest with fires, tornadoes, insects, and many other ways. This creates openings where pioneer trees such as pine can grow because they need bare soil and plenty of sunshine. Clear-cuts mimic this natural way to grow certain trees.
Clear-cutting also mimics nature by regenerating young trees on a small part of the whole forest at one time. Other parts of the forest contain trees of different ages that are harvested when they mature.
This mosaic of patches of different aged trees created by clear-cutting is similar in principle to the way a natural forest works. Historically, nature cleared trees in different parts of a forest at different times, which ensured that there were enough young, middle-aged, and old trees to sustain a healthy forest.
For example, patches of old trees covered only about 22 percent of the historic Sierra Nevada mixed-conifer forest. Smaller trees, brush, and meadows grew in other patches. As John Muir observed long ago, "The trees of all species stand more or less apart in groves, or in small irregular groups."
While we should be concerned about our environment, we should not base our policies on misperceptions about the natural history of our forests or practices such as clear-cutting.
The best hope for California's forests rests on learning from history, and ensuring that professional foresters retain a complete set of tools, including prescribed burning, thinning and clear-cutting, to responsibly manage privately owned forests in the future.
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Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Ph.D., is an historian of North American forests and the originator of "restoration forestry." He is professor emeritus of forest science at Texas A&M University, visiting scholar at The Forest Foundation,and author of "America's Ancient Forests" (John Wiley, 2000).