Art Downing and Paula Ajay were San Francisco hippies who, with some friends, decided to form a commune and move back to the land. They bought some cutover timber land in southern Oregon, only to discover that being bordered by the BLM meant that they could expect clearcutting and herbicide spraying in their proverbial backyard.
Downing and Ajay contacted OSPIRG for help and OSPIRG sent them to me. By the time I met them, they and a man named Harold Washington were the only members left of the commune, and Washington soon went back to California as well.
Downing and Ajay introduced me to the clearcutting issue. Deciding whether to use clearcutting or some other cutting method was another subject that wasn’t taught to undergraduates at the Oregon State University School of Forestry, but I knew clearcutting was controversial. I was skeptical of the controversy, which I felt was based mainly on aesthetic grounds, and I believed that whether a particular forest should be cut at all was a more important question than how it should be cut.
When I suggested to Art and Paula that clearcutting wasn’t that bad, however, they immediately contradicted me. Forests in southwest Oregon, they said, were hotter and dryer than the northwest Oregon forests I was used to. As a result, the biggest timber companies in southwest Oregon didn’t practice clearcutting on their own lands.
Clearcutting consisted of drawing a line around a group of trees that might cover anywhere from 2 to thousands of acres and then cutting everything within that boundary. Trees that were too small to be worth taking to a sawmill were cut anyway and burned with other debris following the cut.
The other main methods of cutting were called shelterwood and selection cutting. Shelterwood cutting consisted of taking about two-thirds of the trees and leaving the rest to provide shade for the seedlings that would grow back. On hot summer days, the surface temperature of soils open to direct sunlight could increase to above 130 degrees, which would be lethal to seedlings. The trees left behind would keep soils cool enough to protect seedlings. After seedlings were well established, perhaps ten years, the left-behind trees would be removed.
One variation that was probably used in the hottest areas was a three-stage shelterwood, in which about a third of the trees would be removed in the first stage, another third a few years later, and the final third a few years after that. The disadvantage of shelterwood cutting is that it cost more than clearcutting, especially since loggers removing the second and (if there was one) third stages risked damaging the seedlings.
Selection cutting involved choosing and cutting individual trees that were considered “ripe” for harvest while leaving the rest to grow a little more before cutting. While all the trees in a clearcut and (after the final harvest) shelterwood cut forest would be about the same age, trees in a selection-cut forest would be of mixed ages.
Carefully done, selection cutting would take trees that were about to die, trees that for some reason were growing particularly slowly, and trees of less valuable species so that the trees left behind would grow the fastest in both volume and value after the cut. Carelessly done, selection cutting would take the best, most valuable trees, leaving behind the less valuable species to regenerate, which reduced the long-run value of the forest.
Up to about 1950 or so, selection cutting was the Forest Service’s preferred method of harvesting. I have national forest maps from the late 1940s bragging that they agency only used selection cutting on most forests. From 1950 through 1970, clearcutting gradually took over on the national forests until the skills and techniques required to do selection cutting had been entirely forgotten within the agency.
Selection cutting remained dominant on many private lands in California through the 1970s. At least one company that owns about 100,000 acres in northern California, Collins Pine, still practices selection cutting today. This was the result of the influence of the University of California, Berkeley forestry school. A professor there wrote the original timber management plan for Collins Pine and since then all or nearly all of the foresters hired by Collins Pine came from that school.
In southwest Oregon, however, the dominant form of timber harvesting on private lands was, according to Art & Paula, shelterwood cutting. They invited me to come to southern Oregon to see for myself. I don’t remember how I got there, but I must have hitchhiked as I didn’t own a car at the time. In any case, they introduced me to the chief foresters of the Medford Corporation and Boise-Cascade’s southern Oregon division, who confirmed that they exclusively used shelterwood cutting on their own land.
Medford Corporation foresters were friendly but cool to our inquiries, but Boise-Cascade’s forester, Sam Taylor, eagerly took us on a guided tour of the company’s lands. He told us that he sometimes used two-stage shelterwood cuts but often did three-stage cuts. This was a sharp contrast to the BLM’s Medford District, which was the agency’s largest district in western Oregon, and which relied almost exclusively on clearcutting.
While I had to admit that clearcutting vs. shelterwood cutting was an important question, I was still concerned about whether trees should be cut at all on some BLM lands in southern Oregon. The BLM and Forest Service both had a policy that forests should only be considered “commercial” if they were capable of growing more than 20 cubic feet of wood per acre per year. This number was fairly arbitrary; the best lands could produce more than 200 cubic feet per acre per year and I suspect private investors might be willing to cut trees from land that produced only 20 cubic feet, but they wouldn’t invest in growing new trees on such land.
The usual method for measuring forest productivity is known as site index, and it is based on the height of trees at a given age. If the index age was 100, and trees could grow to be 200 feet tall in 100 years, the land was considered to be site index 200. Foresters at the experiment stations and in various universities had put together yield tables that included the height of trees at various ages, and the table for Douglas-fir showed that land that could produce trees that were 50 feet tall at age 20 and 140 feet tall at age 50 were also site index 200. Site index 80, the lowest site index in the tables, could produce more than 50 cubic feet of wood per acre per year.
Douglas-fir is the dominant tree species in northwest Oregon and along the Oregon coast, but interior valleys of southwest Oregon were hotter and dryer, leading to a mixed forest of Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, Jeffrey pine, and other species. Because it grows where there is less moisture, the ponderosa pine yield tables project slower growth than the Douglas-fir tables, but the lowest rated site index for ponderosa still produced more than 30 cubic feet of wood per acre per year. In other words, no matter what the species, 20 cubic feet was so low that Forest Service researchers didn’t even bother measuring stands that produced that little.
In my visits to the Pacific Northwest Experiment Station, I had come across some documents that warned that site index was not the sole measure of forest productivity. All of the standard yield tables were based on measurements of “fully stocked stands,” but in some dry areas stands would never become fully stocked. Trees make most of their height growth in the spring and then make their diameter growth in the summer. But in areas with late summer droughts — such as southwest Oregon — their diameter growth would not match the growth of trees of the same height that were measured in the yield tables. (This was another bit of information not taught to forestry undergraduates.)
A second index called stand density index measured how close to “fully stocked” a forest was. A forest undisturbed by fire or logging for many years that was still stocked well below the full stocking levels as given in the standard yield tables was probably incapable of producing the volumes projected by those yield tables.
The experiment station had actually written a document for the BLM describing how to use stand density index to correct for the site index productivity estimates during the agency’s forest inventory. The Forest Service and BLM didn’t try to inventory every acre of their lands, but selected one sample plot for every 1,850 acres on their forests. They then multiplied the per-acre volumes on those plots by 1,850 to estimate the data for the entire forest or district. The stand density index data were to be combined with site index measurements of each plot to estimate total forest productivity. The inventory told the BLM that it had some acres that couldn’t produce 20 cubic feet of wood per acre per year, but it couldn’t tell the agency where those acres were located.
The formula for calculating stand density index was more complex than simply measuring the height and age of trees. The diameter of all of the trees within a given area had to be measured, those diameters converted to what foresters called basal area — essentially the surface area of the stumps after the trees were cut down — and compared with the fully stocked basal areas in the standard yield tables. Fortunately, I could easily program all of these calculations into my trusty HP-65 calculator.
Art and Paula were concerned about BLM sales because the agency had proposed a clearcut right next to their land south of Grants Pass. Using standard forestry instruments, I walked the proposed sale area measuring stand density index and concluded that the land was incapable of growing 20 cubic feet of wood per acre per year. Like the Forest Service, the BLM had an appeals process, and Art and Paula appealed the sale. They lost that appeal, but we went on to appeal a lot more sales and eventually the BLM’s timber management plan for the entire Medford District.
The BLM responded by circling the wagons. They appointed a new state director, Murl Storms, who immediately shuffled around all of the district managers in western Oregon. Don Scofield, the manager of the Medford District, was transferred to a staff job in the Portland office. Given equal rates of pay, staff jobs are considered more lowly than line jobs (which in the BLM were national director, state director, district manager while in the Forest Service they were chief, regional forester, forest supervisor, and district ranger) because the line jobs had the decision-making authority. Scofield decided to retire instead.
Scofield had never been particularly friendly to us, but he had never been particularly hostile either. In contrast, the chain-smoking Storms exuded hostility whenever I met with him. He turned BLM offices into little fortresses, with members of the public rarely allowed to pass beyond the reception room. It was somehow gratifying to know we were having an effect even if it wasn’t the one we wanted.
