Ending Waste Avoids Huge Costs : Forest Reclamation: Last Resort After Conservation

As the sun beats down and the wind whips by, three federal reforestation experts proudly show off a 28-acre stand of loblolly pine trees hugging a hillside near this town on the Georgia border.

The eight-foot trees seem unremarkable enough. After all, these are the foothills of the thickly forested Southern Appalachian Mountains, where 100-foot oaks and hickories abound. These 28 acres used to be thickly forested, too. But that was before copper mining, smelter fumes and firewood cutting combined to denude 50 square miles of once verdant landscape, allowing wind and rain to carry away all the topsoil and several feet of subsoil as well, leaving deep gullies, a rocky cover of slate fragments and no vegetation at all.

Getting even grass to grow in the sterile, stony earth is considered an accomplishment. That 86% of the pine seedlings planted four years ago are still alive and thriving demonstrates that with ingenuity (such as inserting a marshmallow-sized pellet of fertilizer alongside each seedling), patience and luck, severely abused deforestation sites can be recloaked, reclaimed and returned to productivity.

“The lesson of the Tennessee Copper Basin is that even with extreme insult, nature has an amazing capacity to regenerate itself, particularly with man’s help,” says Gary Tyre, a U.S. Soil Conservation Service forester who helped plan the reforestation project.

Encouraging Example

Considered a classic of forest and soil destruction unusual even in the thick annals of land abuse, the Tennessee Copper Basin provides an encouraging case study of an attempt to remedy the ravages of deforestation that has relevance to other ruined landscapes the world over. If the Copper Basin can be reclaimed, so too can many other severely degraded former forests both temperate and tropical.

Reclamation, of course, is a costly, time-consuming last resort that often is only partially successful and sometimes has undesirable side effects. In land usage, as elsewhere, an ounce of prevention renders a pound of cure unnecessary. Ending destructive and wasteful habits not only spares forests, but spares societies the massive investments needed to rehabilitate them.

Unfortunately, far from preventing forest destruction, the world is making demands on forests for lumber, firewood, wood pulp, livestock forage and other products that far exceed their carrying capacity. Temperate forests in industrial countries are shriveling from the chemical stress of air pollution. Tropical forests in developing countries are retreating before the chain saw, the plow and the firewood gatherer.

Of all the countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, only China and South Korea appear to be planting more trees than they are harvesting, according to Worldwatch Institute, a Washington research organization that analyzes global problems. What’s more, Worldwatch estimates that worldwide reforestation programs would have to be expanded fivefold--in Africa, fifteenfold--to prevent forest cover from shrinking further.

“Forest resources for the future should be a mosaic of single-use plantations, multiple-use natural forests and intact undisturbed stands,” Worldwatch senior researchers Lester R. Brown and Edward C. Wolf conclude.

Small Patches Also Needed

With trees natural to about half the Earth’s land surface, experts say the world would be wise to maintain trees not only in solid blocks in forests but also in smaller patches in woodlots, windbreaks, shelterbelts, orchards, parks, and wherever thin, erodible soils, steep slopes and other damage-prone environments need the protection of tree cover.

The massive tree plantings required to protect environments and achieve self-sufficiency in forest resources are far from the only steps needed, however. Other measures include conserving wood, and thereby sparing forests, by fully utilizing timber in the forest and logs at the sawmill, economizing on the use of lumber in construction, recycling paper and reducing needless waste all along the line.

Another remedy is to manage forests to maximize sustainable yields, minimize losses to insects, disease and fire and avoid such shortsighted practices as taking the biggest and best trees, while leaving smaller trees and less desirable species to regenerate.

In the Third World, remedies include curbing rampant illegal logging and poaching of fuel wood, helping rural communities establish local woodlots and getting a grip on the economic and social problems that underlie much deforestation. Economic and social reforms that would relieve pressure on forests include redistributing land, increasing farm productivity, relieving poverty, improving the quality of life in and around threatened forests and reducing population growth.

Hope for New Land Ethic

Fully realizing such reforms would probably require a political revolution. But that isn’t the only revolution environmentalists say is needed. What they have in mind is an equally profound ethical revolution that would instill in people the world over a sense of environmental responsibility, a land ethic, an appreciation that forests are a world heritage held in trust for future generations and a realization that forest conservation serves societies’ long-run self-interest.

While it may be too much to expect billions of poverty-stricken Third World residents to see beyond their immediate survival needs, the industrialized, affluent First World has finally gotten around to cultivating, managing and developing forests--at least some forests--to provide for the future.

Although ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated plantations of trees, modern forestry dates to Germany in the 1780s. Until then, European foresters were mainly game wardens who patrolled hunting reserves for feudal landlords. Trees were cut without much regard for their replacement, as they still are in the tropics.

In the United States, there were no forestry schools and little forestry was practiced on either public or private lands until 100 years ago. Forestry was begun as a remedy for the devastation caused by reckless logging and the fires that often followed.

Stanley L. Krugman, director of timber management research for the U.S. Forest Service, says the federal government “didn’t really practice forestry until the 1930s and 1940s,” when the Civilian Conservation Corps undertook extensive reforestation projects. As for the commercial lumber industry, it “didn’t discover forestry, and practice tending forests and regrowing them, until after World War II. Companies only harvested prior to that.”

Something Left to Save

Thanks to the country’s vast forests, rich soils, generally adequate rainfall and impressive biological healing capacity, forestry’s belated arrival hasn’t been ruinous.

“We’ve made most of the mistakes,” Krugman says. “But the United States is large enough and has such a variety of forests and relatively low population pressures, that when we screwed up the East, the Great Lakes states and the South, we had the West to move to. With exceptions, such as the Tennessee Valley, we didn’t denude cutover lands. We didn’t eliminate the natural cover and degrade the soil. We harvested our interest, but we didn’t bankrupt our principal.”

With cut-and-run logging now the exception rather than the rule, a less dramatic, but no less insidious, threat to forests has taken center stage. This is the air pollution that is slowly sickening, stunting and even killing forests, both here and in most other industrialized nations.

When it comes to air pollution, no area of the United States better illustrates both the damage it can cause and the benefits of curbing it than the Tennessee Copper Basin.

From 1850, when the first mine opened, until early in this century, the basin’s mine operators piled the ore they brought up from deep underground in the open, then roasted it with firewood from trees cut from surrounding hillsides. Roasting rid the ore of its main impurity, sulfur, but the great clouds of sulfur dioxide that rolled off the heaps killed the remaining vegetation and, combined with the loss of soil, prevented it from coming back.

Smokestacks Extend Damage

Moving the smelting indoors to blast furnaces equipped with smokestacks reduced the concentration of deadly sulfur fumes. But it spread the fumes over a wider area, extending the damage and providing an early demonstration that the solution to severe pollution is not dilution.

Later, the sulfur fumes were captured and converted to sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is now the only remaining mine’s chief product, demonstrating that costly controls on emissions can repay the polluters who foot the bill.

Easing air pollution, however, did not stop the denuded basin’s soil erosion or provide a seed source to regrow the forest. Human help was needed. It arrived in the 1930s, when experiments to stabilize and rebuild the soil and reforest the hillsides began.

Since then, Tennessee Chemical Co., which operates the only remaining mine, and four federal agencies--the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Soil Conservation Service, the Forest Service and the Tennessee Valley Authority--have planted 14 million trees, perhaps half of which have survived. The denuded area has shrunk each year. But as the plantings have come closer to the heart of the basin, the lack of vegetation and topsoil, along with torrential rains and temperature extremes, have made reforestation increasingly difficult.

50% of Seedlings Lost

The 1986 drought that struck the entire Southeast has made survival particularly difficult for newly planted trees. Despite the 86% survival rate of the loblolly pines planted by the Soil Conservation Service in 1982, only about 50% of seedlings planted a year and a half ago on an adjoining plot remain alive.

Reforestation is not only uncertain but expensive. The TVA estimates that reforesting the 18 square miles of the Copper Basin that are still barren would cost $6.4 million. And even then it would take at least 250 years to rebuild the topsoil lost through erosion.

But not reforesting is costing even more. For one thing, soil washed from the basin into the Ocoee River has settled in three TVA reservoirs, nearly silting up one of them after only 43 years. The silt has clogged intakes, increased wear to hydroelectric turbines, reduced electric power generation and killed off nearly all fish and aquatic life in the river.

At the current rate of reforestation, another 40 years will pass before the Copper Basin is fully recloaked. Stepped-up public and corporate spending not only would shorten the process but pay dividends. Already, Tennessee Chemical is selling timber from areas replanted in the 1930s, indicating that reforestation can generate income as well as protect the environment and serve the public interest.

Man-Made Forests

Man-made forests are spreading throughout the world as an alternative to fast-shrinking natural forests.

Called commercial forest plantations by some and tree farms by others, man-made forests that are intensively cultivated to produce preferred species of trees have the potential of relieving pressure on natural forests and woodlands. But their drawbacks, including adverse effects on soil and wildlife and increased vulnerability to insects, disease and fire, are prompting serious questioning of their appropriateness as a remedy for deforestation and as a supplier of wood.

Modern man-made forests date back 200 years to Germany. There, as throughout much of Europe, unregulated selective cutting had taken the biggest and best trees, leaving the poorer specimens to regenerate the forest. Many forests were overgrazed by domestic livestock, while forests used for hunting by the nobility were over-browsed by game. The resulting deterioration called for remedial action.

Foresters proposed that the only way to rehabilitate the forests was by clear-cutting and then making a fresh start by planting trees. Although proposed only as a remedial measure, clear-cutting, planting and harvesting on relatively short rotations became standard practice in Saxony and many other regions, and has continued since.

The dominant motive was, and remains, profit. Barons and other forest owners discovered they could make more money replacing natural but slow-growing oak and beech trees with faster growing spruce and fir.

Relatively Recent Practice

In the United States, 19th-Century railroads established plantations alongside newly laid tracks to provide replacement crossties and fuel for steam locomotives. But man-made forests became widespread only after World War II. Since 1950, timber companies and other private forest owners have converted more than 35 million acres from natural growth to artificially generated stands of commercially valuable trees, and the Forest Service has converted nearly 8 million acres in national forests.

Tree farming has also spread to Canada, the Soviet Union and China. Pine plantations have been established in such temperate Southern Hemisphere countries as Australia, New Zealand, Chile and South Africa. Worldwide, man-made forests make up roughly 3% of the world’s forests, but produce a much higher, if undetermined, share of construction lumber and pulpwood.

The chief advantage of man-made forests is increased productivity. Trees grow faster than in natural forests. Species planted can be chosen for particular uses--eucalyptus for firewood, pine for pulpwood, Douglas fir for construction lumber, teak for furniture. Regularly spacing trees in rows reduces maintenance and harvesting costs. And nearly every tree can be utilized, whereas commercially useful trees are few and far between in many natural forests.

In the tropics, trees typically grow five to 10 times faster in plantations than in natural forests. But tropical forest plantations are costly to establish, and returns on investment not only are delayed but uncertain because of timber price fluctuations and the ever-present possibility of nationalization. As a consequence, less than 10% of the world’s man-made forests are in tropical regions.

Poor Don’t Always Benefit

Tree plantations in the Third World don’t always benefit the local population and sometimes actually widen the already huge gap between rich and poor. In India, tribal people in the state of Bihar have protested the replacement of the natural forest on which they depend for firewood and other essentials with teak plantations. At last count, hundreds of arrests and at least two dozen deaths had resulted from this eight-year-old conflict.

Tree farming has environmental drawbacks as well. For one thing, short rotations reduce the recycling of nutrients from trees back to the soil. “Maybe there are only so many rotations,” says Krugman of the Forest Service. “Some soils hold up, whereas others lose nutrients.”

Nutrient loss tends to be greatest in plantations of pine, spruce, fir and other conifers. Conifers, which bear their seeds in cones, generally make better construction lumber and pulpwood than deciduous trees such as oak and cherry, which produce their seeds in nuts and fruits. But whereas deciduous trees have nutrient-rich broad leaves that fall to the forest floor each year and decompose into rich humus, conifers’ needle-like leaves have a lower nutrient content and are shed only every five to seven years.

What’s more, conifer needles are acidic. This causes problems in cool, humid areas such as northern Europe. Water filtering down through the soil of conifer plantations becomes acidic and dissolves iron and aluminum salts in the soil. The salts are redeposited in a hard pan below the surface that impedes drainage and causes waterlogging.

Not as Helpful to Watersheds

Conifer plantations also protect watersheds less adequately than the mixed deciduous-conifer forests they replace. “Broadleaf species respire more water, have larger root systems that draw moisture from a larger area and do a better job of sopping up excess water, stabilizing slopes and reducing soil erosion,” says Andrew A. Leven, director of watershed management in California for the Forest Service.

Coniferous forests support less plant and animal life. According to conservationist A. Starker Leopold, even-aged stands of Douglas fir in Northern California offer so little food for wildlife that “a bluejay would have to pack a lunch to get across” one.

Coniferous forests have still other disadvantages. They suffer more from air pollution than deciduous forests because their needle-like leaves are exposed year-round. They are more vulnerable to insect and disease attacks than mixed, uneven-aged natural forests. And they are more susceptible to fire because conifers contain more flammable chemical compounds, maintain their foliage year-round and when even-aged, have crowns of uniform height that wind-whipped fire can race across.

To be sure, conifers aren’t the only fire-prone trees. Flammable deciduous trees include the blue gum eucalyptus, a fast-growing, drought-resistant native of Australia that was planted all over California early in this century. Foresters thought blue gum plantations would make their owners rich, but the species’ tendency to warp, shrink and crack when cut into lumber made it useful only for firewood and windbreaks.

Worse, blue gums proved fire hazards. Their oily leaves and peeling bark make ideal tinder, most dramatically demonstrated on a dry, windy September day in 1923 in Berkeley. A grass fire that started on the crest of the Berkeley Hills northeast of the University of California campus spread to a grove of blue gum eucalyptus trees. Flaming pieces of bark were blown by the wind, like firebrands, and set spot fires that destroyed 584 houses and other structures.

Third World Forests

In the Himalayan foothills of northern India, village women who spend long hours gathering firewood for home cooking and heating had their lives disrupted by unbridled commercial logging that wasted local firewood and caused soil erosion and landslides.

One day when commercial loggers arrived to cut down still another stand, the women adopted the Gandhian technique of nonviolent resistance by throwing their arms around the trees marked for cutting. The loggers, nonplussed, withdrew.

Out of this demonstration, in 1973, grew the Chipko Andolan, or “Hug the Trees,” movement. Begun as a grass-roots revolt among a handful of village women, it has since expanded to include environmentalists, students and politicians. The movement has called public attention to rampant deforestation and it has pressured the government to call a moratorium on commercial logging in an area of 450 square miles, as well as to step up reforestation programs benefitting local villagers rather than outside commercial interests.

Going beyond protest, the Chipko activists have planted trees and reforested several thousand acres, establishing what American observers call one of India’s most successful reforestation programs. Although lumbering and firewood cutting are still outstripping reforestation efforts in the Himalayan foothills, the movement’s success in halting and even reversing some of the devastation demonstrates what poor, ill-educated peasants working together can accomplish.

Self-reliance is a necessity in most of the underdeveloped and developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Government policies typically favor the urban elite rather than the rural majority. Investments in forest rehabilitation are few and far between and usually are for large-scale projects run from the capital and of little benefit to villagers in the hinterland.

Community Forestry

Poor villagers planting and tending their own trees for their own benefit constitutes forestry by the people, for the people. It’s called community forestry, and it provides many of the subsistence needs of rural dwellers: firewood, building poles, roof thatch, livestock fodder, fruits and nuts. Community forestry increases work opportunities and supplements farm income. Its environmental benefits include controlling soil erosion, preventing floods and landslides and increasing crop yields.

Multipurpose trees provide several benefits simultaneously. In China, trees planted around houses and villages and along roads and waterways--the so-called “four-around” plantings--reduce wind velocity and evaporation and raise crop yields. They provide leaves that are fed to hogs, sheep and rabbits. And they yield fruits, nuts and such marketable oils as tung and olive.

Community involvement and tree tenure rights are considered vital to the success of community forestry projects. “People have to identify with the trees they plant as their property, or the products of these trees have to be of direct benefit to the people, for programs to be successful,” says Ken Newcombe, a World Bank senior energy specialist.

Where villagers have not participated in selecting, planting, weeding, watering and protecting reforestation sites, as in many African countries, seedlings have had a low survival rate and saplings have been destroyed by wood poachers, cattle and goats.

China’s massive reforestation campaigns have produced mixed results. On the one hand, its windbreak and shelterbelt plantings are “legends, unmatched in magnitude anywhere in the world,” according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. FAO researchers report that shelterbelts have more than doubled grain yields in some areas, reclaimed farmland covered by windblown desert sands and converted wasteland into fruit gardens.

Posts Dismal Record

On the other hand, the government reported in 1981 that of 250 million acres reforested since the 1949 revolution, only 67 million acres had successfully yielded new trees. It attributed this dismal record to poor-quality seedlings, planting inappropriate species, inadequate follow-up care, shoddy forestry management and widespread illegal poaching.

The post-Mao government has moved to improve the survival rate by extending the concept of private farming to forestry. As in farming, the state or collective retains ownership of the land, but individual households contract to plant and cultivate small woodlots under leases running up to 50 years. The trees they grow can be passed on to their heirs.

However, price controls, taxes, surcharges and government regulations restrict the free marketing of the output of woodlots, according to Lester Ross, a Purdue University political scientist who has studied Chinese forestry practices firsthand.

Although protection against poaching has improved in the last several years, illegal cutting remains endemic. And if poaching is a problem in strongly governed China, it is even more rampant in countries whose governments maintain weak control over remote forests. In Africa, weak control allows peasants to supplement their incomes by chopping trees in remnant forests into firewood or reducing them to charcoal, and then selling them to syndicates that transport them by camel, cart and truck into cities for sale.

The grossly unequal distribution of land, income and social services marking most Third World countries must be ameliorated if deforestation is to be arrested, development experts agree. According to the World Resources Institute, a policy research organization based in Washington, “the real causes of deforestation (are) poverty, skewed land distribution and low agricultural productivity.”

Landowners Affected

Discouraging colonization of forests that are unsuitable for intensive farming, for instance, depends on finding land for surplus farmers on already developed, productive land. And in most countries, that depends on giving them land now owned by others.

“Strong political commitment by national governments to pursue policies of land reform that would lead to more equitable land ownership would, in the short term, do more to relieve pressure on forest lands than any other single policy intervention or any conceivable level of investment in forest resources development,” World Bank senior forestry adviser John Spears and Edward S. Ayensu, a former Smithsonian Institution botanist, have stated.

One idea awaiting a full tryout is to develop such tropical forest resources as wild game, rubber and nuts as an alternative to clearing the forests for timber, farming and cattle grazing. For instance, Brazilians who tap rubber trees and gather nuts in the Amazon have proposed the creation of “extractive reserves,” protected areas of forest managed by those living in them.

Another approach is to preserve tropical forests in parks. Costa Rica, which has more species for its size than any other land mass on Earth, has set aside 10% of its land area in national parks and biological reserves. They attract researchers in tropical biology from around the world and provide a more stable source of income than such quick-and-dirty rain forest activities as cattle grazing.

International aid agencies and multinational development banks are also showing more concern for forest preservation in the Third World. The World Bank, for one, is scaling back funding for some hydroelectric, road-building and colonization projects in tropical forests, as well as schemes to replace natural forests with commercial tree plantations. “If the World Bank has been part of the problem in the past, it can and will be a strong force in finding solutions in the future,” bank President Barber B. Conable Jr. said last month.

Conserving Wood

Coconut palms have long been valued for their beauty and their tasty fruit, but they have been shunned as a source of lumber because their wood is too wet.

That’s changing now, at least in Sri Lanka. Having depleted its own timber resources, the tropical island nation has been forced to spend scarce foreign exchange on lumber imports. But a new process that reduces the moisture content of coconut wood permitted the domestic introduction of coconut lumber last year. The government hopes coconut lumber will reduce costly imports by utilizing trees that are uprooted when Sri Lanka’s coconut plantations are replanted every 60 to 70 years.

As the advent of coconut lumber suggests, utilizing trees that now go to waste has the potential of stretching timber resources and sparing forests in both tropical and temperate regions. The main obstacle is that secondary species have unfamiliar drying, gluing, veneering and other manufacturing characteristics, and more research is required before they can make a significant impact on the world lumber market.

In the United States, timbermen generally prefer to grow, harvest and mill Douglas fir, spruce, pine and other needle-leaved, seed cone-bearing conifer trees. This is because conifers grow faster and generally have taller, straighter trunks with fewer limbs and knots than broad-leaved deciduous trees such as oak and cherry that produce their seeds in nuts or fruits.

The construction industry also prefers “softwood” lumber from conifer trees because it is generally easier to saw and nail and provides more strength for the same weight than “hardwood” lumber from deciduous trees.

New Materials Used

However, as softwood supplies shrink and prices rise, techniques are being developed to produce construction lumber from such previously shunned hardwoods as poplar and aspen. These and other less valuable hardwoods are also finding increased use in the interior layers of plywood, in particle board, in lower-grade furniture and in pulp and paper manufacture.

Wood needs are also being addressed by stepped-up efforts to reduce waste in the woods and at the mill. Thinner, sharper saw blades cut more accurately and leave less sawdust. Whereas sawdust, chips and shavings used to be burned in cone-shaped “tepee” burners just to get rid of them, these residues now go into boilers to generate electricity, to pulp mills to make paper and into particle board, fiber board and other panel products.

Conserving wood in construction is also helping to conserve forests. Some timber-short countries in Europe now use more particle board than either lumber or plywood. U.S. home builders are saving lumber by reducing floor space, lowering ceilings, using hollow-core doors and substituting tile or carpeting for hardwood floors.

Recycling Expands

Many industrialized countries are conserving wood fiber by expanding the recycling of paper and paperboard. Japan and the Netherlands both reuse nearly half of their paper and paper board. In contrast, U.S. recycling has dropped to about 21% from 36% at the end of World War II as the cost of collecting, sorting and transporting waste paper has risen. Other drawbacks include contaminants such as ink and glue, loss of strength during reprocessing and inconsistent quality.

Waste in burning firewood is being reduced with newly designed stoves that produce a slower-burning, longer-lasting fire that releases more of a log’s thermal energy. Unfortunately, many of the new stoves also produce smokier fires that pour more pollutants into the air.

In wood-short West Africa, inexpensive metal stoves have been found to achieve a 30% to 35% savings in fuel over traditional open-fire cooking. Substituting aluminum cooking pots for traditional clay pots further reduces fuel needs. But many Africans object to the taste that aluminum imparts to food, and many prefer an open fire because it provides light, and its smoke keeps away unwanted insects.

U.S. Forests

Most U.S. forest land producing or capable of producing timber in commercial quantities is privately owned. And not by corporations producing lumber, plywood, paper and other forest products. Farmers own about 24% of commercial forest land, and individuals and companies outside the forest products industry another 34%.

Thus, the tasks of remedying deforestation, protecting soil and water, and assuring adequate timber supplies are largely in private hands. Unfortunately, this means they are largely in inexpert, often indifferent hands.

According to Forest Service estimates, only 15% to 20% of the nation’s 7.8 million non-industry owners of forest land are managing their holdings reasonably well. Many forests in New England and Appalachia are not harvested at all, while many others are logged indiscriminately.

What’s needed, foresters and environmentalists say, is stepped-up technical assistance and increased financial incentives to encourage private owners to improve timber stands, replant cut-over forests and conserve soil and water, along with more stringent controls on forest owners’ rights to use and abuse their land as they see fit.

“People still have a right to do with their land what they wish,” says Al Schacht, associate deputy chief of state and private forestry for the Forest Service. “Most states don’t prohibit indiscriminate logging.”

Schacht estimates that 10 states, including California, have strong forest-practices acts regulating logging; 15 states have weak acts, and 25 states have no regulations to speak of.

States Require Reforestation

Taking a cue from Switzerland and Sweden, which have made reforestation compulsory since the turn of the century, some states now require landowners to restock their cutover lands. Oregon not only requires successful re-establishment of trees within three to six years, depending on area, but also specifies that only Douglas fir and other fast-growing species suitable for commercial lumber and pulpwood be planted.

“Until the last few years, there were virtually no state-funded programs to help private landowners apply soil and water conservation practices or plant trees,” according to the conservationist American Forestry Assn. “Today, more than half of the states have active soil conservation programs and over a half-dozen support reforestation on private lands with substantial funding. Those numbers will grow, we feel, as more states realize that sensible natural resource programs are in their own self-interest.”

Production-minded foresters emphasize the need to harvest neglected private forests and to maximize sustainable yields of marketable timber. They estimate that the timber yield from non-industry private forests could be doubled and even tripled with proper management.

But most owners sell off their trees when they need the money and let nature do the regenerating. “A lot of these people think that if they leave the land alone, trees will grow back,” says Forest Service economist Dwight Hair. “But they won’t get the kind of tree that has the highest market value. If they cut pine, they have to do something to get pine back. Otherwise they’ll get a mixed pine-hardwood stand” of, say, sweet gum and maple, for which there is no market in many areas.

Some Wait for Strip Mining

Many owners don’t think of their forests as potential income producers, valuing them instead as woods to walk, hunt and gather firewood in. Those who have leased mineral rights to coal companies see no sense in improving forest land that will be strip mined sooner or later. Many owners lack the capital to invest in reforestation, while others think the long payoff period not worth the risks.

The federal government has started to make it easier for farmers to invest in reforestation. Its new “Conservation Reserve” program provides payments to farmers to take marginal, erosion-prone cropland out of production and put it in trees. The farmer pays half the tree-planting costs, the government the other half, and the farmer agrees to keep the land in trees for at least 10 years.

Similar to the “Soil Bank” program of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the new program is expected to cost the government less than the crop subsidies it now pays on the land to be forested. What’s more, experts say that much of the cropland expected to revert to forest should never have been plowed in the first place and would yield higher rates of return growing pines.

The 1985 farm law that authorized the Conservation Reserve program also includes a “swampbuster” program to deny price-support loans, subsidized crop insurance and other federal benefits to farmers who drain wetlands to grow crops. The program won’t bring back the 19 million acres of forested wetlands in the lower Mississippi River Valley that already have been drained and cleared of trees, but environmentalists and wildlife advocates hope it will slow down conversion of the 5 million acres that remain there, as well as help preserve seasonally flooded forests elsewhere.

Windbreaks Repay Investment

Soil conservationists would like to see the federal government help farmers replace the windbreaks around their fields that many ripped out in the 1970s to maximize crop production. Re-establishment of windbreaks would repay many farmers’ investment, inasmuch as studies show that half a dozen rows of trees slow down the wind for a distance of 40 to 50 times the height of the trees, protect crops from burial by windblown sand and fine soil, help retain moisture in the soil and increase crop yields. Windbreaks also encourage birds and other wildlife, and some provide fruits and nuts.

Many of the bald patches that pockmark the 156 forests in the national forest system are the legacy of the prevailing practice of cutting every tree in a given area, and then replanting the area with an even-aged stand of commercially valuable trees.

Clear-Cutting Has Advantages

The main advantage of such clear-cutting is that it allows tree species that make the best construction lumber, such as Douglas fir, but that don’t grow well in the shade of taller trees, to flourish without competition from other species. Clear-cutting also reduces logging costs, minimizes the length of logging roads, makes it easier to dispose of logging debris and removes diseased trees that could escape harvest and spread infection.

The disadvantages are also considerable. Clear-cutting fosters soil erosion, removes small trees that could form the basis of the next stand, encourages brush, shrubs and “nuisance” tree species to invade and compete with the planted preferred species, increases the hazard of destructive crown fires that race across the forest canopy at uniform tree-top level and leaves clear-cut sections of land looking like heavily shelled battlefields.

Under public pressure, Congress and the courts have restricted the Forest Service’s discretion in clear-cutting. The size of clear-cut sections has dropped--to a maximum of 100 acres in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, 80 acres in southern pine forests, 60 acres in Pacific Northwest Douglas fir country and 40 acres elsewhere.

In California, the average clear-cut section is 20 acres, and Zane G. Smith Jr., regional forester with the Forest Service, says “the pattern in the future will be cuts of from one-third to two or three acres,” laid out in a mosaic pattern so that each clear-cut section is bordered by uncut forest.

The Forest Service has also been getting more restrictive about how much wood from national forests it will let lumber, plywood and pulp producers cut. The service has been selling timber from about 80 million acres in the 191 million-acre system, and this is expected to drop to 60 million acres as environmentally sensitive areas and those uneconomical to sell timber from are withdrawn from timber sales.

About 600,000 to 700,000 acres are actually cut each year. Timber companies would love to get their saws on still more trees, but as long as the Forest Service carries out its legal obligations to cut no more than can be sustained indefinitely and to replant harvested areas, deforestation should remain a localized rather than a system-wide problem.

Environmental Ethics

Perverse as it may seem, many people who live in the ravaged Tennessee Copper Basin aren’t pleased that it is being reforested.

The local weekly newspaper reported recently that some residents regard the moon-like landscape as “a beloved scar they have lived with all their lives and, thus, have come to love.”

Merchants fear tourists would stop driving out of their way to see the raw, red hills if they reverted to green like most others. Jannie Edwards, who works at the basin’s mining museum, worries that “it wouldn’t be a tourist attraction anymore.”

Call it local pride in the area’s reputation as the Tennessee Badlands--the ugliest place in the South--ignorance, arrogance or avarice, the resulting insensitivity to environmental concerns is all too familiar to students of deforestation. It’s reminiscent, for instance, of the attitude of the Spanish who conquered Mexico four centuries ago and destroyed upland forests not only for timber and to graze their cattle, but also because they craved a landscape resembling their own treeless homeland of Castile.

Lest ancient and costly errors continue to be repeated, ecologists see the need for a worldwide ethical revolution that would replace the prevailing attitude that humankind owns all environmental wealth and has the right to dominate and exploit it at will with an awareness that humans are themselves inseparable from, and an interdependent component of, that environment.

“The problem is that we set economic tasks and then go about accomplishing them at any price. As a result, we’re incurring a mounting debt to nature--a debt that will eventually have to be repaid, whether we like it or not. Man is a part of nature, and in struggling against nature we’re fighting ourselves.”

The ‘Psychological Connection’

That statement sounds as though it could have come from an Earth First! zealot. But it was made instead by the Soviet writer S. P. Zalygin during a roundtable discussion among Russian writers and scientists on the Soviet economy, ecology and ethics. Zalygin went on:

“In ancient times, people sensed not just their attitude toward, say, a forest or a herd of animals, but also the attitude of that forest or herd toward them. Now all we know is what we need from nature. We’ve lost the psychological connection that would let us know the natural world’s attitude toward us. Maybe we’re not as smart as we think we are when we laugh at the pagans who drew no distinction between animate and inanimate objects.”

American Indians regarded trees, like animals, “as having immortal spirits and the power to help or hurt,” J. Donald Hughes, an historian at the University of Denver, says in “American Indian Ecology.” “Accordingly, when the forest Indians gathered bark, they stripped it off only one side of the tree, so that the tree would not be girdled and killed.”

In Europe, Druids and other pagans revered natural groves of trees as the dwelling places of gods who brought sunshine and rain, and they maintained the groves as sacred temples.

The pantheistic Ancient Greeks first protected groves of trees as sacred sanctuaries, punishing poachers with ritual curses and a 50-drachma fine for a free man and 50 lashes for a slave. But as wood shortages worsened, the groves were cut down one by one to build fortifications, siege engines and sailing ships.

A Lower Order of Creation

As the need for timber came to override reverence for trees, forests--and the natural world in general--came to be relegated to a lower order of creation. This was clearly expressed in the Book of Genesis’ injunction to humans to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Early Christian fanatics abhorred the worship and bloody sacrifices that took place in sacred groves and chopped them down. They have been at it ever since. And they’re not the only ones. During China’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, communist fanatics took revenge on “decadent” Buddhist temples and monasteries by destroying groves of trees around them.

It has been said that the best way to get people to care for the earth is for them to look at, smell and taste it sensuously. If so, raising city-bound Americans’ environmental consciousness depends partly on encouraging them to use forests to rest, relax, enjoy beauty, get back to nature and regain physical and spiritual strength.

To environmental responsibility and human self-interest, conservationists could add generational justice as reason for preserving forests. As Larry D. Harris, a professor of forest wildlife ecology at the University of Florida, argued recently in opposing further clearing of forests in the lower Mississippi River Valley, “Stewardship of land should be based on the principle that resources are not given to us by our parents, but are loaned to us by our children.”

No one more clearly saw deforestation’s role in robbing succeeding generations than the late Walter C. Lowdermilk. In the 1920s and 1930s, this American soil conservationist studied environmental devastation and economic deterioration that deforestation had caused in China, the Near East and elsewhere in the world. Seeing what had become of the Promised Land, Lowdermilk concluded that if God had foreseen the consequences of misuse of the land, he might have been inspired to give Moses another Commandment, the 11th:

“Thou shalt inherit the Holy Earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy fields from soil erosion, thy living waters from drying up, thy forests from desolation, and protect thy hills from overgrazing by thy herds, that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail in this stewardship of the land, thy fruitful fields shall become sterile stony ground and wasting gullies, and thy descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or perish from off the face of the earth.”