There is nothing wrong with cutting down trees. Wood is truly a renewable resource. It is clean, safe, good material for your home. It is healthy to be around and pretty to look at if used right. Producing good-quality wood employs people in the making of something that is truly good. I hate that Weyerhaeuser and the rest of the corporate types have commandeered the words “renewable” and “sustainable” to greenwash their egregious forest butchery though. There is nothing sustainable or renewable about what those scurrilous wood-maggots are doing. Like all global corporate leadership, the people at the top of industrial wood fiber corporations are as crooked and wicked as they come.
There are two major problems with forest management in this state, and several secondary problems. The first problem is we are cutting trees when they are way too small. The wood from these puny plantation firs is trash. Truly terrible quality. Ask any builder that’s been around for a while – they’ll tell you. The Pacific Northwest is supposed to grow huge, majestic trees some of which we can turn into enormous logs and high-quality softwood lumber, the best structural wood in the world. Instead, we have allowed the wood-maggots at Weyerhaeuser to corner the log market and force everyone to stoop to their lowest common denominator. Pathetic. Why are these awful people in charge?
Second, we are following the logging operations with a spray campaign that wipes out everything that isn’t a Douglas-fir. I knew this was a problem when I first encountered a sprayed Weyerhaeuser unit about 1996. It had 2-3-year-old seedlings, but hardly a stick or a shoot of anything else alive over the better part of an 80-acre unit. I don’t know what I was thinking not to start this fight 30 years ago. Here is a picture of a local, Washington County plantation that was logged 25 years ago. A small stream that provides water for my neighbor’s house runs through it, and the helicopters skipped a small swatch of the logging unit that lies between this stream and another neighbor’s house. This is what the forest looks like 25 years after logging in this area that wasn’t sprayed:
The list of herbs and shrubs in this stand is long: meadow rue, trillium, bleeding heart, waterleaf, two species of violet, ginger, inside-out flower, Dewey sedge, Henderson’s sedge, Columbia brome, western fescue and many many others. It’s a beautiful, diverse understory despite being logged off 25 years ago.
The rest of this clearcut was sprayed with some combination of hexazinone, glyphosate, triclopyr, imazapyr, metsulfuron methyl and sulfometuron methyl. Here’s what the sprayed-out area looks like 25 years later, photographed just 30 feet away from the first picture:
Where sprayed, the diversity of herbaceous and shrub species are nearly or completely absent 25 years after the spray. There are now over 150,000 acres of sprayed out forest land just in Washington County. Industry and ODF claim that the effects of these treatments are minor and transitory, but this is clearly not true. The effects are profound and very long lasting, and this same pattern has been evident everywhere I have looked.
I am kicking myself for not having put the pieces together and for trusting ODF, OSU’s Peavy Hall and OFRI on this issue. In the meantime, something on the order of 6 million acres of western Oregon has been sprayed like this with the expectation that native stuff will “come back.” It ain’t coming back. And depressingly, Peavy Hall is again at the bottom of this with misleading and poorly designed research.
To date there is still not even a single floristic study demonstrating the effects of this biological sterilization, for the obvious reason that the findings of such a study would be apocalyptic from a plant diversity standpoint. That is about to change. One way or another, I am going to pull together a team to actually look at the reality in terms of plant diversity effects over time. Then we will see what the data says.
Call and write to ODF and tell them this needs to stop. It needs to stop now on ODF land. Unbelievable.
More soon,
-George