For the Good of the All!

 The last few days I have been reading the last chapters of Suzanne Simard's book Finding the Mother Tree, and also attending a League of Women's Voters webinar on Forestry.   Both account the history of forestry - not very different in the US than Canada.  A clear cutting of old growth when around the turn of the 20's century when white Settlers first hit the west coast of both countries and then the seedlings that were left behind - some were cut again leading up to WWII.   After WWII the chain saw came in and it became easier to clear cut every tree in an acre - not just the biggest. So the oldest trees we find in the state of WA were in hard to cut places or where somehow skipped.   We have 100 to 120 year old trees that are 2nd growth - but precious little of it.  In the whole US there is only 5% virgin forest left.   A picture of what it looked like when White people came to the US shows from the East coast to the Mississippi was almost all forest.   Settlers "cleared it" as they went, and now there is little of in from coast to Mississippi.

WA state Department of Natural Resources has been responsible for "managing" these forest lands - our constitution says "for the Good of the All" which DNR has generally interpreted to mean auctioning off the cutting rights and making money for the citizen's of WA.  In fact this past week a decision was made by the WA Supreme Court after they were sued by several non-profits who claimed that "for the good of the all" especially in climate times meant not cutting the carbon sinks.   The WA Supreme Court ruled that they could only have found for the suing parties if DNR was operating unconstitutionally and since they were given a trust responsibility they were indeed carrying that out.  But the WA Supreme Court clarified, that cutting trees is not the only way that they can meet that responsibility.   And the WA Supreme Court nodded to the legislature saying that they took seriously the environmental issues raised but that it was not their role to comment on those - that the Legislature could give DNR updated marching orders.  (Thus I pray for that in the next session.)  A coalition of groups, including my own Restoring Earth Connection, have put out a Call to Action calling for less cutting and a reconstituting of the board so it is not made up of people who receive money from the sales, thus locking in bias.

In fact part of how DNR came to have its lands is that often the robber barons that cut the original old growth would buy a tract of land, cut it and abandon it, paying no taxes.   Those abandon lands became the property of the State of WA.   (Never mind that all of this was Native land that the US government claimed the right to "sell" in the first place.)  The first settlers to come out and log the west coast were cutting down 800 and 1,000 year old trees.   See photo below of a tree from 120 years ago being cut down.   No one living has seen a tree that size and of course if we continue at the rate we are going our descendants will never be able to see the 120 year old size trees we can see.   I am astonished by the greed and arrogance to feel we could come and find a being that had lived for a century and feel no hesitation in killing it, in extinguishing what the Creator made over a century and turning a forest into a field of stumps.

Simard's book and the webinar report a history of forestry practice - both on private and public lands that has seen replacing old growth with plantation trees as the best thing to do.   Certainly when logging it is much easier to have the trees all in a row, and also when replanting it is easier.  Various theories were developed that believed that a mixture of deciduous and conifer trees just made the faster growing Birch block out light for the Firs' and thus make them smaller and less profitable.  This was based upon the patriarchal and domination paradigm thinking that plants "compete" with each other.  Therefore, standard logging practice if not already in plantation area is to cut down everything then bull doze the stumps and undergrowth plants making big ugly slash piles and then burn them.   After that herbicide (poison is applied to the ground) killing the bacteria as well as the other plant life so that the dirt will be "ready" for the planting of only the Firs in neat rows.  

Decades of ground breaking scientific study by Suzanne Simard and her graduate students now reveal that quite the opposite of competing with each other that the mix of trees that grown naturally in the NW share energy under the ground through their mycelium.  They trade energy back and forth at different times of the year and have a complex system of balancing out needs for the good of the all! The mycorrhizal networks of different trees fend of different root diseases and so when in relationship with each other they survive better.   Those grown in plantations are much more susceptible to these diseases.  When the disease is not in the roots but a bug infection or other "virus" the trees that first get it send out a warning (underground) to the other trees and then are sealed off  from the mycorrhizal network so the infection cannot spread, but with information that allows the surviving trees to adapt and protect themselves. When these trees are quickly cut it can disrupt this communication process.  Other plants in the understory are also adding and taking nutrients to this undergrown highway of communication and trade.  

The traditional Forestry industry communicates much incorrect information also about fire.   In Oregon after fire ripped through various big old forests the industry used this as an excuse to log areas they had never been allowed to log, saying the trees were "dead".   In historic reality these trees had burned before and they are big enough and  their core insulated enough by outer layers and bark - that most in fact survive.  Some species like Lodgepole do not even release their pine cones (seeds) until fire bursts them open like popcorn.   This is how Nature designed them - to expect fire.  But even a dying Mother tree will send out life giving energy to what ever young trees have not been burned - ensuring the recovery of the forest.  In the webinar we were shown aerial shots of acres right next to each other, one that was logged right after the fire and the other that was left "as is".   10 years later the "as is" forest is making a decent comeback.  The other one is barren and fairly lifeless.

Not only that the "Mother Trees" or biggest hub trees specifically act to nurture and protect their offspring - even as they die sending their last energy to them.  (one might reasonably ask, even as we are killing off the planet, what are we doing for our offspring?  I think the trees are doing a better job of caring for future generations then we are!)  Thus the Mother trees are playing a critical role in the health of the forest.  These elders are many decades older than us, and with far superior ways of "managing" the forest.  Yet these bigger trees are more profitable, so DNR particularly targets them right now with a plan that would take out most of the Legacy forests (those at least 80 years old) so that all most all will be gone in 3 years.  So here as we head into climate change are forests that have the complexity to fend of disease, to carefully husband water and be drought resistant, and even to survive fire .....and this is what we are cutting for mere money?!?  This same crazy policy has been playing out on Federally "managed" lands and on lands "managed" in Canada by their government.  (I say quote/unquote managed because this very language is such a clue to the old paradigm of domination and colonization - the very opposite of being in relationship with Earth.)

The hubris of the human idea that are little forebrains are capable of better "managing" ecosystems and improving upon the design of Nature/God has always tremendously bothered me.   Especially since over and over again we have discovered unintended consequences of our interventions and basically discovered over and over again that we did not really under stand the complexity of how nature operates.  There is a perfection there that we will never match, as we are only a cell within the larger system of this Living Earth.  It is this very hubris that got us into climate change.  Also over and over again we see how nature is designed to heal....when we get out of Her way!  We have precious little time to get out of her way.

Washington Tree 1880.

A slash pile