Forest Service

  • “What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine the fleet limbs of the antelope?” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers encapsulated the idea that evolutionary processes shape all plants and animals.  Unfortunately, far too many in the Forest Service and the collaboratives that work with them fail to understand this basic idea—a “healthy” forest is…

  • Tree fire scars are used to reconstruct past fire occurrence. These historical reconstructions are often used to guide current forest management on federal lands. Trees charred but not killed by past fires often form scars where the cambium and inner layers were burnt by fires.  A researcher can count the growth rings between scars and…

  • One of the biggest impacts resulting from logging our forests that is largely ignored by public land management agencies is the contribution that timber harvest makes to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Increasingly it is clear that the greatest value of our public forests might be to end all thinning/logging and protect them as carbon…

  • We often hear that our forests are “unhealthy” and among the indicators of forest ill-health are large acreages burning in wildfires. However, if you look back a few centuries or more, you find that we have a fire deficit. Many paleoclimate studies document major wildfires long before there was “fire suppression”. Indeed, one study by…

  • I recently attended a presentation on invasive weeds by a representative of the Deschutes National Forest. The problem with the presentation was that it promoted and legitimized an industrial paradigm to weed threats. The Forest Service (FS) promotes an Industrial Forestry Paradigm that treats the symptoms, not the causes of ecological degradation. The biggest factors…

  • My title may seem excessively harsh by some groups who are doing what they believe is the best way to protect public lands from industrial development. However, when you consider that we have only 2.7% of the lower 48 states in designated wilderness, while at the same time there are calls from many ecologists to…

  • Senator Daines and Congressman Gianforte recently published an editorial in many Montana newspapers dealing with forest management that was full of misleading and often false statements. http://helenair.com/opinion/columnists/gianforte-and-daines-forest-plan-will-help-montana/article_4db0f8d7-7216-50f9-974a-d8dd86b6a351.html First, Daines and Gianforte repeat the flawed idea that management results in a “healthy forest.”  In fact, active management impoverishes forest ecosystems by removing carbon stored in trees,…

  • The proposed Horsefly Vegetation Project (Vegetation Project in the Little Belt Mountains north of White Sulphur Springs on the Helena/Lewis and Clark National Forest is based on numerous false assumptions. The proposal displays both the Forest Service’s lack of professionalism and an Industrial Forestry bias. First, the FS starts out with the assumption that the…

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