Cataloging a Disaster in Our Forests

Sometimes bits of information come at you from unrelated directions and conk you on the head with an unexpected pattern.

Mary Zabriskie of Putney, Vt., writes that a year ago she got fed up with the flood of junk mail coming at her. “I decided to keep all the catalogs that came from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 1997,” she says. A picture shows a smiling Zabriskie, one arm resting on a stack of catalogs that reaches to her elbow. There are 371 of them; they weigh 104 pounds.

If we assume that Zabriskie’s household is average, 100 pounds of catalogs times 100 million American families makes 10 billion pounds or 5 million tons of paper per year. The Postal Service figures it at 4.6 million tons per family--more than 1,000 pieces of “bulk business mail” for every man, woman and child of us.

I could complain about all that unbidden paper filling our dumps (less than half is recycled). I could give Zabriskie the standard advice about contacting the Direct Marketing Assn. (1120 Ave. of the Americas, New York NY 10036-6700) and asking to get off junk mail lists. (Why do we have to request not to get this stuff? Why don’t they have to get our permission to send it?)

But the piece of the picture that jumped out at me was the trees: 100 million a year are ground up to supply the paper for junk mail.

I wouldn’t have been so sensitive about trees if we in New England hadn’t just had an ice storm that left forests bent and broken, the hillsides covered with jagged stubs where whole trunks snapped. The papers are predicting a flood of downed wood coming to the mills, followed by a long scarcity.

And then the foresters came to my class.

Scot Zens has his forestry degree from the University of Washington and is now working on a PhD in ecology from Dartmouth. He’s measuring long-term growth patterns in the forests on Vancouver Island where he grew up. Kathy Fallon Lambert is a graduate of Yale Forestry School and now directs the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation. Her job is to compile ecological research on the forests of New England and make that information available to the public and policymakers. I invited them because my students were trying to sort out the arguments they were hearing about whether forestry in the United States is “sustainable.”

Lambert and Zens spoke of our many different kinds of forests, their various species and age structures and growth rates, and possible definitions of the word “sustainable.” They were giving us numbers and graphs, being careful and scientific.

I asked if they thought we can keep on cutting indefinitely at the rate we’re cutting now.

Zens drew a graph on the board. “Here’s something that scares me,” he said. He showed the actual cut in Washington and Oregon over many decades, with ups and downs as the market turns, but an overall downward direction. Then he showed the official estimates, made every 10 years, of the expected sustained yield from those forests. The studies that determine this theoretical yield are very thorough, involving forest censuses and computer models and land management plans.

His graph showed that every 10 years, for decades now, the calculated sustainable cut--the rate at which the forests can go on yielding wood over the long term--has gone down.

This is partly because of forest land being cleared for other uses, he said. But mainly because of cutting the standing stock faster than it is growing back.

“I’ve just seen a graph that scares me,” Lambert said. She drew a line that rose steadily and then leveled off. “This is the biomass of trees in the Hubbard Brook watershed (in New Hampshire) since the 1960s,” she said. The trees had been growing happily for decades, and then something slowed the rate of biomass buildup way down, nearly to zero.

No one knows what happened for sure, she said, but scientists think it’s air pollution and acid rain.

Clunk. The pieces fell together in my mind, and out popped a great big WHY? With the forest stock going down in one of our major forest areas and tree growth rates going down in another, with expected future cuts decreasing, why are we using 100 million trees a year to pelt people with advertising they mostly don’t ask for, don’t want and don’t even look at?