by George Wuerthner, Eugene, Oregon
A national chainsaw epidemic exists in America’s woodlands. A recent article in the New York Times titled “Plans for an Ailing Forest Include Logging” exemplifies this trend.
In the article, foresters say that we must cut down forests—including green trees—to arrest the forest health crisis.
According to officials interviewed in the article, the problem is that trees are dying from natural causes—drought, beetles, wildfire, and disease. However, officials have a solution—kill the trees with chainsaws before any natural source of mortality can occur.
From the Forest Service perspective, natural mortality events like drought, disease, high temperatures, and other processes are unacceptable ways to thin the forest. They assert that we need chainsaw medicine to cure what “ails” the forest.
But here’s the issue. First, foresters define the problem. To most foresters, trees dying from anything other than a chainsaw is a forest ‘health” problem.
I do not dispute that more trees may be dying than in recent years—this is to be expected, given that we are experiencing some of the worst droughts and highest temperatures in over a thousand years.
Drought, wildfires, disease, higher temperatures, and insects are nature’s way of adjusting forest growth to match today’s climate regime.
In all these cases, natural thinning agents can reduce tree density more efficiently than logging for several reasons.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that dead trees are critical components of the forest used by everything from insects to fungi to fish, birds, mammals, and even geological processes—for example, dead trees falling into a river creates the aquatic habitat for salmon and trout.
Many species live in “mortal fear” of green trees for their very existence depends on a generous supply of snags, down wood, and the gradual physical decay of tree boles and litter that results from high severity blazes, drought, insects and disease.
The expansion of logging ignores the reality that individual trees have different genetic adaptations for tolerating drought, insects, disease, and wildfire.
When loggers use chainsaws to cut out half of the trees on a site to “reduce” the density, they may be removing the very trees with these kinds of adaptations and genetic traits that permit survival of high temperatures, wildfires, diseases, and so forth.
This is no different than how wolves and other predators affect elk or deer herds. Predators can sense which deer or elk are vulnerable. By removing the weaker animals, the overall health of the deer or elk herd is increased. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that hunters with guns tend to kill the healthier animals in a herd, so they have the exact opposite effect on herd health.
Chainsaw medicine decreases the forest’s natural resistance and degrades forest health. Rather than helping forests gain resistance, the ongoing chainsaw epidemic is the biggest threat to the ecosystem’s long-term stability and resilience.