Credit: Mark Ahn
Last December, Oregon State University forest scientist Dan Donato prepared an article for publication in Science indicating that the practice of forest recovery was not really a help to nature, and immediately found himself at the center of a heated debate.
Before Donato's findings made it to press, a group of his OSU colleagues launched an aggressive campaign to stop the article's publication.
"The best way to start a bar fight in the Northwest is to mention forest recovery," said Donato.
It sounds like common sense: After a blaze razes a stretch of wooded area, why not clear out any remaining trees and replant new ones? This way, the timber industry picks up a tidy profit from everything left standing, and the forest seemingly gets to start with a green bill of health.
Apparently, Congress agrees with that logic: Last month, the House voted 243-to-182 for a bill that would subsidize as well as ease restrictions on the practice of forest recovery on public lands. If the bill follows a similar track in the Senate, the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act could be on the books this year, even before the leaves start to fall.
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The bill's supporters claim its relatively broad support follows naturally from hundreds of studies validating the practice. But Donato and other ecologists claim that the science is skewed by the influence of the timber industry.
According to Donato's research, clumps of healthy trees left after forest fires are 70% more effective at reseeding surrounding areas than humans are. Further, harvesting burnt trees leaves lots of scrap twigs and broken branches behind—an ideal kindling for yet another fire.
These findings met with vehement disagreement from other scientists at OSU. The most outspoken of these critics was forest engineer John Sessions. Part of his objection, Sessions said, was that Donato's research focused on a limited area from a 2002, 500,000-acre blaze in northern California and southern Oregon, so the results might not be widely applicable.
Sessions went as far as going on a popular Oregon conservative radio talk show, where he demeaned Donato's research and announced the campaign to halt its publication. He and his fellow antagonists wrote letters to the editors of Science demanding that they not print the paper.
"This is really irresponsible science," Sessions said. "We have dozens of other studies from many other conditions that show that [human] seeding works as well if not better [than natural reseeding]. And if the recovery is performed properly, the workers clean any waste that could be a fire hazard."
According to Sessions, Donato's research also ignores economic factors. If forest recovery had taken place for the whole burn area immediately after the 2002 blaze, two billion board feet of timber could have been recovered, delivering eight to 10 jobs per million board feet by Sessions' calculations.
"You don't want to send the wrong kind of message when it can rob communities of that kind of economic benefit," he said.
The aggressiveness of the attempts to preempt the paper prompted a sharp counterresponse from environmentalists, who object to human-led forest recovery because burnt forestland provides a unique ecosystem upon which certain plants and animals depend.
"Wildfires are an important part of life for the plants and animals involved," said Richard Hutto, director of the Avian Science Center at the University of Montana. "They've got the routine perfected, and there's not much we can do but stay out of their way."
Six species of woodpecker live exclusively on burnt forest, eating the grubs of beetles that seek out the still-smoldering embers of burnt woods as a warm place to lay their eggs. Species ranging from bats that burrow under burnt bark to arboreal frogs that are drawn by the rich soil similarly thrive in the scorched earth.