Plan to Thin Diseased Forests Stirs Vigorous Debate in the Northwest

Up on Davis Mountain, the green forests that cloak the hills are freckled with spots of red.

Those dots, foresters say, are a sign of encroaching disease as much as red bumps on your face are a sign of measles. And like a spreading disease, the spots are showing up in forests across the West as years of fire suppression, high-grade logging and drought infect the forest ecosystem.

The problem is painfully evident in places like the Santiam Pass, where thousands of cars whiz past a skeleton forest every day. But it goes on almost unseen in less-traveled parts of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, in the Blue Mountains and the Rockies and Sierra--in all the places where years of management mistakes were magnified by environmental collapse.

Phil Cruz noticed the spots on Davis Mountain several years ago, about the same time that insects and drought were turning trees along the Santiam Pass into matchsticks. He had a brief vision of the same thing happening here, and the image chilled him.

“All of a sudden, it just slapped me in the face,” said Cruz, district ranger on this southernmost patch of the Deschutes National Forest. “For me, it was really kind of like waking up from a bad dream and finding that it’s not a dream.”

The nightmare was seeing the Crescent District turn into another war zone where armies of insects and disease kill trees by the thousands, as they did in forests around Santiam Pass. It hasn’t happened yet, but Cruz fears the patches of dying trees are a sign that the web of life could be coming undone.

“We’re seeing on the Crescent District the beginning of this unraveling,” Cruz said. “That’s exactly what I want to prevent.”

Environmentalists don’t want to see the Santiam plague wipe out another forest either. But they’re worried that the Forest Service’s prescription may do the patient as much harm as good.

The regimen foresters have proposed can be described in one word: thin.

“Most of this project is a massive commercial thinning and understory thinning job,” Cruz said. The agency’s Seven Buttes Project would cull live, small- and medium-diameter trees from 25,000 acres out of a 155,000-acre planning region that lies east of Odell and Crescent lakes and south of Wickiup Reservoir.

Choosing the slow and cautious route, the Forest Service plans to spend the first five years of what could be a 20-year project dealing with the most critical areas. Those are the most damaged stands, trees that pose the greatest threat in a wildfire.

Thinning in these areas is expected to create forests with an open, park-like understory. Other stands will get less thinning in hopes of producing the multistory canopies where many birds and animals thrive.

The Forest Service believes that the root of the problem in Seven Buttes lies with the trees. There’s too many of them, the agency said, all competing for light and water and soil. The bigger trees, which need more of all those things, are the ones losing out.

That’s what’s making the red spots. Trees stressed by the competition start to die, turning their needles reddish brown and leaving them vulnerable to mistletoe or spruce budworm or root rot.

Cruz is an enthusiastic preacher of the thinning gospel. Reduce the competition, open up the stands, and those red spots once again will turn green, he said.

The situation in the Seven Buttes area hasn’t yet gone the way of forests farther north, where vast swaths of trees already lie dead. That means there’s time, perhaps as many as 20 years, to get a handle on the problem.

“We have time to react. We just don’t have time to stand by and do nothing,” Cruz said. “If we do nothing, then we’ll see more and more of this occurring.”

Forest Service scientists believe forests in the Seven Buttes area have two to three times as many trees as a healthy ecosystem can support. Like the Santiam area, that’s largely because of decades of fighting fires and logging off the biggest pines and Douglas fir, allowing smaller firs to thrive.

The project would spare the region’s shrinking, fragmented old growth. Wilderness areas, recreation areas, and wild and scenic river corridors also are off the table, although thinning would take place in wildlife habitat, including that of the threatened Northern spotted owl.

And unlike the salvage projects on the Sisters Ranger District to the north, most of the trees coming out of Seven Buttes are green. Call it preventive logging; sometimes it’s necessary to cut some trees to save the forest.

“What this project has really brought home is it really is necessary to cut green trees,” Cruz said.

But that’s an idea that makes many conservationists uncomfortable.

Even accepting the Forest Service claim that there are too many trees, they said it doesn’t necessarily follow that logging will make things better. Logging presents its own set of problems that could make the cure worse than the disease, environmentalists said.

Susan Prince of the Central Oregon Forest Issues Committee noted that logging means using trucks and tractors that compact the soil, hampering regrowth. It also can increase erosion, clouding streams and damaging fish habitat, and can disturb wildlife and wreck the huge root systems of older trees that are left behind.

Coupled with past logging and overuse, the thinning project could do more harm than good, she said.

“These forests are in trouble already,” Prince said. “We’re looking at an area that’s already been used and abused, and we’re talking about taking it down even further.”

Prince said she is just as concerned as the Forest Service over the sight of big trees turning red. But she wonders if the government should risk the whole forest on what some worry is an unproven theory that thinning is the answer.

“It’s just a judgment call, in my opinion,” she said. “No one has really studied these forests that long.”

Cruz and the Forest Service scientists who study trees are much more confident. They say the logging plan is a modest one and there’s plenty of evidence that reducing competition can restore the forest and allow red trees to turn green again.

Environmentalists, though, want to see the data. The Forest Service’s history of acquiescing to loggers has left conservationists with a show-me attitude.

Prince is concerned that the agency is allowing too many medium-sized trees to be cut. Those trees are the old growth of the future, she said, creating wildlife habitat both now and in the decades to come.

Even so, Prince said, it looks like the Crescent District is moving closer to putting the environment ahead of extraction. “I don’t see this as a timber grab,” she said of the Seven Buttes project.