Opinion: Unnatural forests are depleting water supply
By Helen M. Poulos and James G. Workman
Ronald Reagan once justified logging with “a tree is a tree; how many more do you need to look at?” Besides, he warned, “trees cause more pollution than automobiles.” We cringed at his biases. Yet due to forces none foresaw, Reagan’s gaffes may now ring true.
Today, the hottest and thirstiest parts of the United States are best described as over-forested. Vigorous federal protection has stocked semiarid regions of public land with several billion trees too many. And day after day these excess trees deplete a natural resource that has become far more precious than toilet paper or 2-by-4’s: water.
Scientists and water managers report that 39 states face water scarcity. Much of the nation’s freshwater shortfall comes from our population growth, waste, hunger and contaminants. But we must also now implicate the escalating thirst of unnatural forests.
Water depletion from afforestation — the establishment of trees or tree stands where none previously were — is the unintended consequence of a wildly popular federal policy. For millenniums, fires set by lightning or Native Americans limited forest stocks to roughly a few dozen trees per acre. All that changed after the nationally terrifying Big Blowup wildfires of 1910, which led the United States to in effect declare war on wildfire. The government’s wartime-like tactics included security watchtowers, propaganda, aerial bombing and color-coded threat alerts. Uncle Sam trained elite Hotshot and Smokejumper crews to snuff out enemy flames. Congress annually funded the war effort with an emergency blank check, now $2.5 billion.
Helen M. Poulos is a fire ecologist and postdoctoral teaching fellow at Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment. James G. Workman, a former wildland forest firefighter, is a visiting professor at Wesleyan and the author of “Heart of Dryness”.
Could it be that Reagan’s so called gaffe was seeing the forest through the trees. Let’s beat him up anyway. Time for tree huggers to go on the offensive, as there can never be enough trees. Oh really?
Fortunately, there is a whole lot of thinning going on around here. The forest is too dense. This is an interesting new take on motivating reasons to thin. Hope it’s done with good planning, taking into all effects–erosion, pollution, etc., as a lot of overgrowth is along rivers and streams. I wonder how the companies are doing that create energy from safely burning bio-fuels (without polluting)?
P.S. The willows seem overgrown along the S. Upper Truckee.
The idea that lightning and Native Americans kept natural control to “roughly a few dozen trees to an acre” is in itself ridiculous, as if lightning targeted certain areas for thinning.
Besides, according to the Forest Service’ own studies, lightning hits mostly the top of hills versus “down below” – the reality is that most fires now are caused by urban interface issues (in short, they’re man-made).
“Escalating thirst of unnatural forests” – a case can be made for thinning by using cellulosic material for energy conversion – and much progress has been made in breaking the cellulosic bond (one of the strongest in nature)to allow that to happen – with economic benefit to former ‘lumber mill towns’ now bereft of logging. . .
As former Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck was known to say, “Forests are water factories”, in that they filter (purify)water in the natural gravity from top branches,to the understory, to the ground, eliminating soil erosion from a faster downfall from above, without trees.
Forest policies created the overgrowth now needing to be thinned, as there is only so much water to share with a given location. Thinning allows for healthier forests, so existing trees get a better share – forests are also our best defense against climate change, as they absorb CO2, using the carbon as building material, while exhaling fresh oxygen.
Here is a link to the Amador Calaveris Consensus Group’s website. This is a group of loggers, land managers and environmentalists that are trying to manage forests on a watershed basis. Most interestingly, they have enough money to actually effect forest health on a watershed scale.
http://acconsensus.wordpress.com/