Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (9 page)

The resulting debate became known as the Clearcut Controversy. Out
raged Montana ranchers, landowners, and the general public protested. U.S.
Forest Service managers made the mistake of insisting that they were the
professionals who knew all about logging, and that the public was ignorant and should keep quiet. The 1970 Bolle Report, prepared by forestry profes
sionals outside the Forest Service, criticized Forest Service policies and,
fanned by similar disputes over clear-cutting of West Virginia national
forests, led to national changes, including restrictions on clear-cutting and a
return to emphasis on managing forests for multiple purposes other than
timber production (as already envisioned when the Forest Service was es
tablished in 1905).

In the decades since the Clearcut Controversy, Forest Service annual
timber sales have decreased by more than 80%
—in part because of environmental regulations mandated in the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Wa
ter Act, and requirements for national forests to maintain habitats for all
species, and in part because of the decline in easily accessible big trees due
to logging itself. When the Forest Service now proposes a timber sale, envi
ronmental organizations file protests and appeals that take up to 10 years to
resolve and that make logging less economic even if the appeals are ultimately denied. Virtually all my Montana friends, even those who consider
themselves dedicated environmentalists, told me that they consider the pen
dulum to have swung too far in the direction away from logging. They feel
frustrated that logging proposals appearing well justified to them (such as
for the purpose of reducing the forest fire fuel loads discussed below) en
counter long delays in the courts. But the environmental organizations fil
ing the protests have concluded that they should suspect the usual disguised
pro-logging agenda behind any seemingly reasonable government proposal
involving logging. All of the Bitterroot Valley's former timber mills have
now closed, because so little timber is available from Montana publicly
owned timberland, and because the valley's privately owned timberland has
already been logged twice. The mills' closing has meant the loss of many
high-paying unionized jobs, as well as of traditional Montanan self-image.

Elsewhere in Montana, outside the Bitterroot Valley, much private tim
berland remains, most of it originating from government land grants made
in the 1860s to the Great Northern Railroad as an inducement for building
a transcontinental railroad. In 1989 that land was spun off from the rail
roads to a Seattle-based entity called Plum Creek Timber Company, organized for tax purposes as a real estate investment trust (so that its earnings
will be taxed at lower rates as capital gains), and now the largest owner of
private timberland in Montana and the second-largest one in the U.S. I've read Plum Creek's publications and talked with their director of corporate
affairs, Bob Jirsa, who defends Plum Creek's environmental policies and
sustainable forestry practices. I've also heard numerous Montana friends
vent unfavorable opinions about Plum Creek. Typical of their complaints
are the following: "Plum Creek cares only about the bottom line"; "they are
not interested in sustainable forestry"; "they have a corporate culture,
and their goal is 'Get out more logs!' "; "Plum Creek earns money in what
ever way it can from the land"; "they do weed control only if someone
complains."

Should these polarized views remind you of the views that I already
quoted about mining companies, you're right. Plum Creek is organized as a
profit-making business, not as a charity. If Montana citizens want Plum
Creek to do things that would diminish its profits, it's their responsibility to get their politicians to pass and enforce laws demanding those things, or to
buy out the lands and manage them differently. Looming over this dispute is a basic hard fact: Montana's cold dry climate and high elevation place
most of its land at a relative disadvantage for forestry. Trees grow several
times faster in the U.S. Southeast and Northeast than in Montana. While Plum Creek's largest land holdings are in Montana, four other states (Ar
kansas, Georgia, Maine, and Mississippi) each produce more timber for
Plum Creek on only 60 to 64% of its Montana acreage. Plum Creek cannot
get a high rate of return from its Montana logging operations: it has to pay
taxes and fire protection on the land while sitting on it for 60 to 80 years be
fore harvesting trees, whereas trees reach a harvestable size in 30 years on its
southeastern U.S. lands. When Plum Creek faces economic realities and sees
more value in developing its Montana lands, especially those along rivers and lakes, for real estate than for timber, that's because prospective buyers
who seek beautiful waterfront property hold the same opinion. Those buy
ers are often representatives of conservation interests, including the govern
ment. For all these reasons, the future of logging in Montana even more
than elsewhere in the U.S. is uncertain, as is that of mining.

Related to these issues of forest logging are issues of forest fires, which have recently increased in intensity and extent in some forest types in Mon
tana and throughout the western U.S., with the summers of 1988, 1996,
2000, 2002, and 2003 being especially severe fire years. In the summer of 
2000, one-fifth of the Bitterroot Valley's remaining area of forest burned.
Whenever I fly back to the Bitterroot nowadays, my first thought on looking
out my airplane's window is to count the number of fires or to gauge the
amount of smoke on this particular day. (On August 19, 2003, as I was flying to Missoula airport, I counted a dozen fires whose smoke reduced visi
bility to a few miles.) Each time that John Cook took my sons out fly-fishing
in 2000, his choice of which stream to fish depended partly on where the
fires were burning that day. Some of my friends in the Bitterroot have had
to be evacuated repeatedly from their homes because of approaching fires.

This recent increase in fires has resulted partly from climate change (the
recent trend towards hot dry summers) and partly from human activities,
for complicated reasons that foresters came increasingly to understand
about 30 years ago but whose relative importance is still debated. One factor is the direct effects of logging, which often turns a forest into something ap
proximating a huge pile of kindling: the ground in a logged forest may remain covered with lopped-off branches and treetops, left behind when the
valuable trunks are carted away; a dense growth of new vegetation springs
up, further increasing the forest's fuel loads; and the trees logged and re
moved are of course the biggest and most fire-resistant individuals, leaving
behind smaller and more flammable trees. Another factor is that the U.S.
Forest Service in the first decade of the 1900s adopted a policy of fire sup
pression (attempting to put out forest fires) for the obvious reasons that it
didn't want valuable timber to go up in smoke, nor people's homes and lives
to be threatened. The Forest Service's announced goal became, "Put out
every forest fire by 10:00
a.m.
on the morning after the day when it is first
reported." Firefighters became much more successful at achieving that goal
after World War II, thanks to the availability of firefighting planes, an expanded road system for sending in fire trucks, and improved firefighting
technology. For a few decades after World War II, the annual acreage burnt
decreased by 80%.

That happy situation began to change in the 1980s, due to the increasing frequency of large forest fires that were essentially impossible to extinguish
unless rain and low winds combined to help. People began to realize that
the U.S. federal government's fire suppression policy was contributing to
those big fires, and that natural fires caused by lightning had previously played an important role in maintaining forest structure. That natural role
of fire varies with altitude, tree species, and forest type. To take the Bitter-
root's low-altitude Ponderosa Pine forest as an example, historical records,
plus counts of annual tree rings and datable fire scars on tree stumps,

demonstrated that a Ponderosa Pine forest experiences a lightning-lit fire about once a decade under natural conditions (i.e., before fire suppression
began around 1910 and became effective after 1945). The mature Ponderosa trees have bark two inches thick and are relatively resistant to fire, which in
stead burns out the understory of fire-sensitive Douglas Fir seedlings that
have grown up since the last fire. But after only a decade's growth until the next fire, those seedlings are still too low for fire to spread from them into
the crowns. Hence the fire remains confined to the ground and understory.
As a result, many natural Ponderosa Pine forests have a park-like appear
ance, with low fuel loads, big trees well spaced apart, and a relatively clear
understory.

Of course, though, loggers concentrated on removing those big, old,
valuable, fire-resistant Ponderosa Pines, while fire suppression for decades
let the understory fill up with Douglas Fir saplings that would in turn become valuable when full-grown. Tree densities increased from 30 to 200
trees per acre, the forest's fuel load increased by a factor of 6, and Congress
repeatedly failed to appropriate money to thin out the saplings. Another
human-related factor, sheep grazing in national forests, may also have
played a major role by reducing understory grasses that would otherwise
have fueled frequent low-intensity fires. When a fire finally does start in a
sapling-choked forest, whether due to lightning or human carelessness or
(regrettably often) intentional arson, the dense tall saplings may become a ladder that allows the fire to jump into the crowns. The outcome is some
times an unstoppable inferno in which flames shoot 400 feet into the air,
leap from crown to crown across wide gaps, reach temperatures of 2,000 de
grees Fahrenheit, kill the tree seed bank in the soil, and may be followed by
mudslides and mass erosion.

Foresters now identify the biggest problem in managing western forests as what to do with those increased fuel loads that built up during the previ
ous half-century of effective fire suppression. In the wetter eastern U.S.,
dead trees rot away more quickly than in the drier West, where more dead
trees persist like giant matchsticks. In an ideal world, the Forest Service
would manage and restore the forests, thin them out, and remove the dense
understory by cutting or by controlled small fires. But that would cost over
a thousand dollars per acre for the one hundred million acres of western U.S. forests, or a total of about $100 billion. No politician or voter wants to spend
that kind of money. Even if the cost were lower, much of the public would be suspicious of such a proposal as just an excuse for resuming logging of
their beautiful forest. Instead of a regular program of expenditures for main
taining our western forests in a less fire-susceptible condition, the federal
government tolerates flammable forests and is forced to spend money un
predictably whenever a firefighting emergency arises: e.g., about $1.6 billion
to fight the summer 2000 forest fires that burned 10,000 square miles.

Montanans themselves hold diverse and often self-contradictory views
about forest management and forest fires. On the one hand, the public fears and instinctively dislikes the "let it burn" response that the Forest Service is forced to take towards huge fires that would be dangerous or impossible to
try to extinguish. When the 1988 fires in much of Yellowstone National Park
were allowed to burn, the public was especially loud in its protests, not understanding that in fact there was nothing that could be done except to pray
for rain or snow. On the other hand, the public also dislikes proposals for forest thinning programs that could make the forests less flammable, be
cause people prefer beautiful views of dense forests, they object to "unnatu
ral" interference with nature, they want to leave the forest in a "natural"
condition, and they certainly don't want to pay for thinning by increased
taxes. They (like most foresters until recently) fail to understand that west
ern forests are already in a highly unnatural condition, as the result of a cen
tury of fire suppression, logging, and sheep grazing.

Within the Bitterroot, people build trophy homes next to or surrounded
by flammable forests at the urban/wildland interface and then expect the government to protect those homes against fires. In July 2001, when my
wife and I went for a hike west of the town of Hamilton through what had
been the Blodgett forest, we found ourselves in a landscape of fire-charred
dead trees killed in one of the big forest fires whose smoke had filled the val
ley during our summer 2000 visit. Blodgett-area residents who had previ
ously blocked Forest Service proposals to thin the forest demanded then
that the Service hire 12 big firefighting helicopters at a cost of $2,000 per
hour to save their homes by dropping water on them, while the Forest Service, obeying a government-imposed mandate to protect lives, people's
property, and then the forest in that order, was simultaneously allowing ex
panses of public timberlands far more valuable than those homes to burn.
The Forest Service subsequently announced that it will no longer spend so much money and endanger firefighters' lives just to protect private prop
erty. Many homeowners sue the Forest Service if their house burns in a forest fire, or if it burns in a backfire lit by the Forest Service to control a much
bigger fire, or if it doesn't burn but if a forest providing a pretty view from the deck of their house does burn. Yet some Montana homeowners are afflicted with such a rabidly anti-government attitude that they don't want to 
pay taxes towards the costs of firefighting, nor to allow government employ
ees onto their land to carry out fire prevention measures.