In support of the slow logging zone in WA forests

When I quit logging and moved to Seattle in 1984 to go back to college, the spotted owl issue had heated up. The debate over preserving old growth set the environmentalists against the loggers, and I got into lots of arguments.

In an attempt to find a more balanced point of view, I went into the forestry section of the library at the University of Washington where I was studying engineering and found an article by Mark Wigg and Anne Boulton, “Quality Wood, Sustainable Forests,” in the January 1989 issue of Forest Watch. Their logic made a lot of sense and blew oxygen on my desire to write. On July 2, 1991, Seattle Weekly published the result, “Growing Old Growth,” built around Wigg and Boulton’s piece. In it I reported on the economic and environmental benefits of harvesting our Pacific Northwest forests at a much slower rate.

But the political territory for protecting the spotted owl had been staked out by then. There was no more time or energy to add another idea into the mix. What happened, happened.

Now, more than 30 years later, the idea of growing publicly owned timber on slower, more natural and sustainable cycles has re-emerged, this time as a means to sequester carbon and fight climate change. It doesn’t surprise me. I’m glad the idea isn’t dead. Neither are the forests.

A decade or two after the big cut of old growth was put to rest, the saplings planted on the clearcuts grew taller than the stumps. The brown wasteland turned green. The checkered pattern disappeared. Old logging roads unraveled here and there, were washed away in some other places, but from the point of view of this retired civil engineer — often from the seat of a mountain bike — the soils eventually reached a new equilibrium with the ground cover, hydrology and streams. We may have overharvested these forests, but we didn’t ruin them as many people professed.

Remember the photo taken from an airplane of a logged-off ridge and drainage thumbtacked to the bulletin board of the old REI? I swear it looked like the view east of Spoon Creek Pass into the Canyon River drainage. Canyon River, straddling the border between Grays Harbor and Mason counties, is an arm of the Satsop River’s middle fork, and I worked on several clearcuts above the tributary. I’d love to see that area from the air now.

At ground level, the shape of the terrain can barely be seen anymore. However, I still feel it in my muscles and joints as I grind up and down the hills in my truck through the Wynoochee, Satsop and Skokomish valleys. While ascending Spoon Creek toward the pass, sunlight filters through maple and alder growing next to the water and dapples the stream’s pools and rapids, if it’s not raining. Occasionally I pass small waterfalls gushing down the steep slope on the other side of the rig. Mostly though, I look at the new evergreens and the big stumps under them. The embedded rootwads are monuments of the original forest that set the standard for what the second growth can become.

Even where the switchback turns, I am unable to see very far up the ridge or down into the deepening valley due to the thick stand of young fir. They are tall enough and their limbs long enough to arch over the entire road in places. The beginning of a second canopy has sprouted under the industrial forest, poles have died and become snags, windfalls rest on the ground, all features of an infant old-growth forest. At the top of the pass, the view is no more expansive. A private owner would be salivating over the lumber already locked inside the healthy young tree trunks. I probably would be too if I were fortunate enough to own timberland. But this is public land and I say let them grow another 100 years.

Does being a logger at heart and someone who hugs trees make me a hypocrite? I don’t know or care. Hiking through vast stands of ancient trees in the Olympic National Park several times as a teenager impressed upon me why they should be preserved. Trees had souls that were good for mine. In my 20s, learning the trade of wrapping cables around big logs and laying out the wire rope that would pull them up and down mountainsides also taught me lots of things about nature, and myself.

Expanding the area where old growth can regenerate and exist is a good idea. We would be leaving behind a growing forest of big trees in which people could hike with their dogs, ride horses or mountain bikes, even use wheelchairs, and suck in big lungfuls of fresh air while listening to the birds.

The way I imagine it, in a slow logging zone, we would preserve the islands of original forest. We also would be wise to protect sections of second growth in between the survivors and other areas of ecological importance. We would then sell the rest of the timber in one of these zones on a cycle greater than a normal human lifetime. I like at least twice as long, say 150 years minimum.

Considering the current administration in the White House, I doubt if the idea of growing old growth could take hold on federal land right now. However, Washington’s Department of Natural Resources is working on something similar, which is great. I just wish they would go big. The math for a conceptual plan is simple. According to the DNR’s website, the department manages 2.1 million acres of trees in the state. If the state sold 25% of it, roughly 525,000 acres, on a 150-year cycle, that would amount to 2,100 acres of large-diameter trees being logged, sawed and glued into top quality products annually. Some of the forest products would sequester carbon dioxide for another 100 years. In the meantime, people could travel, hunt and camp freely in it, on fewer roads and a lot more trails.

Driving through the hills and drainages where I logged reaffirms what every logger knew, then and now, that the woods in which we toiled every day were stronger than our detractors thought. We couldn’t destroy them, and now the second growth is proving at least one part of our ethos was valid. If you are old enough, try to recall the unattractive scenery of clearcuts when driving over Snoqualmie Pass in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Look at it now. Pretty nice, isn’t it?

Old growth can be a renewable resource, too. My spirit sinks when I see young trees cut down at the rate we harvested the old ones the first time around. These new forests on the mountain sides of the Olympics and Cascades have much more to give us, perhaps as much as what we have already taken. We need to conserve their tangible and intangible qualities.