To the Climate Adapted Plants group (and anyone else that cares):
Changing climate translates to changing selective forces. The adaptation of our flora to these changing forces is going to involve novel modes of selection acting on genetic variation that is present or potentially present in our local plant populations. The amount of genetic variation, the ways in which variation is partitioned, and the processes that affect variation over time, therefore, matter to the outcome. The outcome will be the flora of the future.
It is unlikely that this group is going to effect much change in the evolutionary trajectory of the regional flora through planting and tinkering with the current style of restoration-type projects, situated on small parcels scattered across a matrix of intensively managed human enterprise zones. Compared to our small-scale restoration efforts, the real-world interactions between human enterprise and regional vegetation succession and evolution are playing out on millions of acres, involving gargantuan numbers of existing plants – both native and otherwise – and many orders of magnitude more seeds produced every year and lying dormant in seed banks. Considering the scale of these processes and the sizes of the populations involved, it will be difficult (but maybe not impossible) for restoration managers to tip the balance for a handful of the thousand or more native taxa in our local flora. This is potentially a valuable effort, and Scholls Valley is here to support it. But most of our native species are going to have to figure it out on their own. This is both inevitable and beneficial. The less hand-holding we do with our native flora, the more likely any of its constituent species will be able to stand on their own in this brave new world we have created.
Another front for this group involves conserving the remaining shreds of native plant diversity on millions of acres of state and private forest land in Washington and Oregon. These forests were cut in the early and mid-20th century and left almost entirely to regenerate naturally. What emerged was a diverse and complex pattern of forest cover not unlike the forest that was cut down – just a lot younger. Since 1990, the vast majority of this naturally regenerated, “second-growth” forest land has now been logged again, but what has emerged from the most recent round of logging does not in any way resemble natural Northwest forests. With a combination of high-powered herbicides and genetically improved Douglas-fir seedlings, something in the neighborhood of 6 million acres of what was diverse, complex forest have been converted to short-rotation biomass plantations of a single species of wind-pollinated tree, just in western Oregon, over the last 35 years.
We have failed to recognize what is undoubtedly the greatest human-caused loss of biodiversity in western Oregon since the first humans arrived here ~20,000 years ago. This has happened on our watch. A great way to visualize the scope of this erasure of local biodiversity is to look at Beyond Toxics’ interactive map (https://www.beyondtoxics.org/work/pesticides-and-communities/pesticide-map/). Kudos to BT for taking on the task of compiling and deciphering ODF’s intentionally abstruse forest spraying database (FERNS). In this interactive map, you can see both the scale of the assault on native plants that ODF and industrial landowners have waged, as well as the details of the applications themselves – who sprayed what and when. The visualization is shocking. How has this horrific reality escaped us? Why have we gone along and gotten along while this was playing out?
It is important to note that the Coast Range and the Cascade foothills where most ODF and industrial forest land is located, were almost entirely dominated by native plants and natural forest cover as recently as 1990. This was, by and large, an uninterrupted tapestry of diverse native plant species, functioning as part of the ecosystem of the Pacific maritime forest, despite the logging of the early 20th century. What the map shows is just the past ten years of herbicide application, blasting holes in this tapestry of plants between 2014 and 2024. The actual footprint of the spray campaign, now spanning 35 years, is more than three times greater than what is displayed. As a result, we now have vast blocks of state and private forest land that are covered either with barren soil and slash, exotic weeds like Canada thistle and velvet grass, or Douglas-fir stands with little other than sword fern and mosses in the understory, depending on the number of years since the last pass of the helicopters. This new plantation landscape is therefore about as impoverished of biodiversity as it can possibly be. Ironically, this blasted and blighted landscape comprises the majority of forest land in Portland’s back yard.
Industry is now embarking on a third round of logging and spraying in these artificial plantations. What little native diversity escaped the first round of helicopter spraying is being sprayed yet again with combinations of glyphosate, hexazinone, metsulfuron, sulfometuron, imazapyr, 2,4-d, clopyralid, and triclopyr. The current plan is to cut and spray almost 2 million acres of these sad plantations every decade in western Oregon from now onward. This is not good forest management, in fact it is not forestry at all. It is fiber production and nothing more than that. The loss of native diversity associated with these fiber plantations is staggering, and almost certainly a factor in well-documented regional and global declines in diversity of not just plants, but also insects, birds and everything else that depend on the primary production of diverse vegetation. And those are just the effects so far. The impact of vaporizing this much native plant cover, with disproportionate impacts to rare taxa, will have a long-lasting effect on the richness and function of vegetation in the broader landscape. And unquestionably, the vegetation that is left in these plantations is greatly reduced in diversity at every stage of stand growth, and therefore inherently more unstable and vulnerable to further degradation in a rapidly changing climate. Diversity, i.e. variation as described in the beginning paragraph, is critical to the flora of the future. Is that flora going to be dominated by plants like Ventenata, Holcus and Geranium lucidum, which are at this very moment racing up sprayed-out logging roads and spreading across sprayed-out clearcuts, completely unchallenged by our now-vaporized native flora? Or are some of our native taxa going to be represented? The latter outcome is far more likely if we stop spraying the roadsides, ridges and canyons of the Coast Range. That’s just a fact, and all you have to do is look at these industrial fiber farms to see it.
So if you hope to have a positive impact on native plant evolution in the face of changing climate, please contact ODF and the Board of Forestry now and register your concerns. This does not need to be, and shouldn’t be, a passionate philosophical argument at this point. Society has already decided that native plants, pollinators, birds and biodiversity in general are important. Even at ODF, these resources figure prominently in vision statements and management plans, while, through a series of profound oversights, they nevertheless plan to spray exceedingly potent cocktails of herbicides across yet another 25,000 acres of the Tillamook State Forest over the next decade.
For those of you at Metro, Clean Water Services, the SWCD’s and other agencies and organizations dedicated to native plant restoration, you need look no further than your own programs as evidence of society’s mandate to conserve nature. You have been granted hundreds of millions of dollars to restore and manage native vegetation, just in the metro region over the past 35 years, which also ironically coincides with the period of the far larger-scale liquidation of these same native plants by ODF and private industrial foresters. I would ask that you consider who is “winning” this game. How many acres have you all acquired and restored thanks to the largesse of local taxpayers? How many acres have ODF and industry foresters liquidated? Please do the math for yourselves, but I’m just going to say it. We are not winning.
The opportunities before us are compelling. We know so much more about what it takes to try to piece these ecosystems back together after they have been destroyed. We better understand our limitations and the challenges that restoration presents. We know that, try as we might, we can’t ever put Humpty together again, but with some glue and duct tape we can at least present something reasonable as a result of our efforts (I’ll point to Quamash Prairie as an example). So there is real, tangible hope for humans and our environment. But for these efforts to have any meaning, and for broader ecosystems to have a better chance to function for our benefit in the future, we need to pick up our sights and challenge ourselves and other organizations like ODF and the Board of Forestry. This is an obvious policy disconnect. Here we are, spending hundreds of millions of tapayer and ratepayer dollars to restore small swatches of native plants. Meanwhile ODF is spending state dollars to vaporize them with herbicides on state land using Vietnam-era technology, and promoting this approach to vast areas of private forests. How do we respect and uphold our fiduciary responsibility to the generous donors and taxpayers who fund our native plant restoration? How do we reconcile these diametrically opposed actions? Pursuing answers to these questions is the simple next step, and I ask you all to take it.
Please write to ODF and the Board of Forestry today. They have not heard from people like you, and perhaps may not have considered that their actions conflict with yours, so this engagement really matters right now. Contacts below.
Thanks,
-George
Oregon Board of Forestry
2600 State Street
Salem, OR 97310
Eric Perkins, District Forester
Oregon Department of Forestry, Forest Grove District
801 Gales Creek Rd
Forest Grove, OR 97116
Oregon Department of Forestry, Tillamook District
5005 3rd Street
Tillamook, OR 97141