About this area...

First, let me describe what I knew about the pacific NW forests before I moved here:

• logging was getting restricted
• spotted owls had large territorial requirements
• some of the coastal forest qualifies as temperate rainforest
• lots of Oregon's forests are public lands, much of which has timber sold off of it by questionable federal bureaucracies

That's a pretty good sketch of what you hear on NPR about Oregon's forestlands when you live in North Carolina, and haven't really spent much energy on it.

And that means that the Sierra Club et al are not really doing their proper jobs telling folks what's going on here.

A few notes about geography. Oregon borders on the Pacific, and has a rugged and rocky coastline with few really good port cities. Rising up from the Pacific is the Coastal Range, which sweeps the first moisture from the clouds that have blown from the SW, and drops as much as a record 194 inches of yearly moisture on some areas of the coast. The Coastal Range is wreathed in cloud and mist, particularly to the west, much of the year. Then the clouds slide down into the Willamette (pronounced will-lam'-met, not will-ah-met or willa-mettie -- it's not French, it's a francorruption of an Indian name) Valley. Before the last ice age, the Willamette was an inland estuarial sea, with the coastal range like the Baha Peninsula sheltering it from the Pacific. When the glaciers retreated, they scoured out the valley, filled it with silt, and relieved such a load on the land that it raised up and became a river valley instead of an inland sea.

Topsoil along side the Willamette is 60-90' deep, and of a better quality than any remaining in the US (because of the erosion of the great plains) except that the glaciers and the action of the sea-bottom ecology leached certain minerals from it, so to grow most crops, it needs serious fertilization with phosphates or rock phosphorus. This part of Oregon gets about 45 inches of rainfall a year -- about the same as where I was living in NC -- but it almost all falls between October and May, during which time it is almost always cloudy and drizzling at best, and at times seems like the floodgates are open, and we should be building the ark.

Then the clouds, having rained on the grass- and croplands of the valley, climb up the western slopes of the Cascades, which are some beautiful mountains, young and rough and full of slag, lava fields, hot springs, and young black basalt that feels like iron in the hand, and almost smells burnt. From the west slopes come some of the finest rivers in the country. From the east, little.

East of the Cascades, pushed high into the sky, the remaining clouds sail over the deserts of eastern Oregon with hardly a yearly downpour. Some areas here get no more than six inches of rainfall a year -- high desert, full of sage and juniper, broad winged raptors, and small lizards -- and cattlemen.

Due to the balance of the soils, many hardwood trees that grow anywhere else with a vaguely similar climate won't grow here. So the dominant trees are Douglas Fir, Incense Cedar, and a number of large timber species -- as you go south into California, it shades into redwoods, gradually.

So, here in the Willamette Valley, which is where Eugene is located, the land has been managed as grasslands by the local people for hundreds and maybe thousands of years. The bottomland has been managed by human-lit grassfires to keep a range of land free for game grazing and crops (many wild-fostered rather than gardened or cultivated) long before Europeans set foot in Oregon. So right around here, the forests haven't been a major force, right next to the rivers, running north to Portland. Grass (of either variety, come to think of it) is one of the major cash crops for this part of Oregon -- and lawn grass bought anywhere in the world might well be grown here. We're also draped with orchards, including thousands and thousands of filbert trees (hazelnuts, popularly but improperly), which we grow here more than anywhere in the world. All kinds of stone fruits, with the exception of the real warmth-lovers like almonds -- grow here.

But up in the mountains to the east, and the coastal range (more like hills) to the west, the forests have stood for thousands of years. Douglas firs five feet across were the rule here before Europeans came here. Most of the coastal range forests -- much of which comprises the DENSEST RAINFORESTS IN THE WORLD -- are administered by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management, Dept of the Interior). It seems that the BLM exists to do to the rainforests here as the BIA has been doing to the native americans for the past 150 years -- destroying the ecology/culture, to reduce it's workload, and increase someone's profits.

Among other folks profiting from the timber sales on the BLM lands, are the 14 counties in western Oregon that have these lands on them -- including Lane County, and most of the valley and coastal range, and the Siskiyou Mountain counties that form the natural border with California. The counties here would have to probably triple their taxes if they were not being paid by the federal government, a share of the mostly unsound harvesting of the old growth forest.

OLD GROWTH is not a synonym for virgin forest. It refers to the old forest ecological system here which consists of a complex ecology running from the hugest douglas fir down to the lowliest soil-born microbes. This ecology is only barely better documented, and probably no better understood, than that of the Brazilian rainforests. Yet how many folks who feel such outwardly-directed sympathy for the Save the Rainforest movement really know that we are losing one of the most diverse, rich, and *the* greatest in biodensity per acre, here in our backyard in the US?

The forests here are draped in lichen, unearthly, majestic, and yet remarkably human-friendly. We don't have the huge population of tropical pests and pestilence that the archtypical jungle-tropical-rainforest throws at a human. So, these forests have been pretty badly damaged since the Europeans came here.

Typical of the limited understanding of these forests is the "salvage lumber" legislation, which -- among other rapine -- allows people to harvest "waste" timber -- meaning downed trees. These downed trees are the bottom of the food chain of the local ecology. They take hundreds of years to rot, providing food to thousands of varieties of microbes, plants, and animals, and returning the nutrients concentrated by hundreds of years of deep taprooted growth back to the forest. By removing downed trees, we are stripmining the resources of the forest, the basis of its continued growth -- while leaving the current trees standing, we doom the prospect of their replacement in the natural course of a fragile complex ecology.

A good example of the cluelessness of "forest management" here is that down trees in streams provide shelter and pools (there are very few natural lakes here) for the salmon-family fingerlings. It may be that the past 150 years of timber harvest have done more to eliminate native salmon in Oregon than dams ever did.

But since letting valuable timber rot on the ground is "waste" to a human, and this seems obvious to any person not grounded in ecology, it's hard to educate folks in Washington DC who've never seen these forests about how they are raping the old growth forests.

Land Use in Oregon is set to protect the continued use of any of the parcels of land in Oregon for agricultural, timber, or whatever human-oriented "best use" that land may have. So while it is the best and most stringent in the country, it's full of holes and insufficiently enlightened. Forest with harvestable timber is taxed according to "highest and best use," which means according to the value of the standing timber in a wood-hungry international market. So it's difficult to buy forest -- the value of the land being so high for old timber -- and very very hard to keep it, given the tax structure. I'm not sure we know enough about the ecology to have a very good chance of "sustainable" harvest of these forestlands.

I suspect this is not a recoverable ecology. But I'd like to see what folks could do.

More and more is being discovered that might help humans and the old forests live together. Part of the problem is education, and information dissemination. Here, I think a goodly investment of information technology, with some backing of folks grounded in environmental law and related issues, could make a serious difference.

It's an interesting dream to wrap yourself up in, and I donUt know if it could make a difference, but IUd like to try.