Oregon Forest Showcases ‘New Perspectives’ Approach

Driven by the environmental battle over the northern spotted owl, the U.S. Forest Service is developing a new approach to logging that demands looking at the forest, not just the trees.

Through the New Perspectives program, the Forest Service is taking a harder look at what cutting down a tree means: to wildlife, plant life, biological diversity, erosion, sedimentation of steelhead and salmon spawning beds and hiking and driving through the forest.

New Perspectives is being showcased along Shasta Costa Creek in the Siskiyou National Forest in southwestern Oregon.

By careful management, foresters hope to produce in 80 to 120 years the kind of old growth forest that took nature more than 200 years to create.

“We’re looking beyond the trees,” said Kurt Wiedenmann, program director for the project. “We’re looking at it from an ecological standpoint. Not just timber production.”

Shasta Costa Creek is a tributary of the Rogue River in the area where the Klamath Mountains join with the Coast Range. The watershed runs from an elevation of 200 feet at the creek’s mouth to 5,300 feet at Brandy Peak.

The watershed provides spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead, and nesting and hunting grounds for the spotted owl, which was listed as a threatened species this year. It also is home to pine martens, which have been proposed for federal protection; pileated woodpeckers; elk, and deer.

Only 2,000 of the watershed’s 23,419 acres have been logged, making it a potential battleground for environmentalists who want to preserve old growth forests and the timber industry, which wants to keep mills rolling.

As a result, the Forest Service has undertaken an environmental impact statement, rather than the less demanding environmental assessment, to plan how it will log the Shasta Costa. It is to be finished this spring.

“No two ways about it, the spotted owl issue was the big driver in the New Perspectives movement,” said John Henshaw, the program coordinator for the Northwest. “New Perspectives concepts offer a hope, not a promise, of an ability to continue both amenity- and commodity-based production on the national forests.”

In the last decade, scientists such as Jerry Franklin, professor of ecosystem analysis at the University of Washington and chief plant ecologist for the Forest Service, began questioning traditional forestry. They decided nature had some valuable lessons to teach when it came to harvesting and replanting forests. The concepts became known as New Forestry.

“What we see happening everywhere is an appreciation of the fact that a more structurally diverse managed forest probably can do a better job of providing other ecological values, like wildlife habitat,” Franklin said.

The concepts were embraced first at the grass-roots level of the Forest Service and ran up to the top. Chief Dale Robertson thought they had merit, but thought the term New Forestry implied that the old ways had been bad. So New Perspectives was born.

On the Shasta Costa, New Perspectives can be described as logging the forest the way a forest fire would, in a mosaic of intensities that will grow back with the complex structure of old growth.

It includes debris left on the ground to decompose, standing dead trees where birds can nest and find food, and big green trees that will become the top of a multistoried canopy that shelters spotted owls from predators.

Henshaw said the program is spreading quickly throughout the Forest Service. But environmental groups and the timber industry aren’t sold on the concept.

“I think New Perspectives has its roots in the notion that we ought to be able to manage everything,” said Andy Stahl, forester for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. “I would submit that there are some lands, some things, that nature does the best at, and one of those is old growth forests. I don’t think the old growth they will grow in 80 years is going to compare with the old growth Mother Nature took 300 years to grow.”

Dennis Hayward, vice president of the North West Timber Assn., said New Perspectives provides a way to manage lands that have been set aside from logging.

But where he had hoped to see 17.5 million board feet of timber come out of Shasta Costa in the next three years, the Forest Service has proposed cutting 11.2 million board feet.

“Compared with what they started out with, their preferred alternative is a sleight of hand,” Hayward said. “They are using it politically to try to avoid a controversy for three years, and that is wrong.”