About Forests & People -- Forest Reserves Come About

Meanwhile back in Washington D.C., the Congress had been fussing about abusive forest practices since 1876, but never was able to do anything about it, until 1891.   It was the closing days of the Congressional session, members were in a hurry to pass the necessary bills so they could get out of town for a break.  Conference committees between the House and Senate were hastily bridging their differences on necessary bills to get them back on the floor for a vote.  In those hurried meetings and votes, someone, historians don’t seem to know who, inserted “Section 24” in the middle of a large bill.  Section 24 is one sentence (although lengthly with several phrases) allowing the President to set aside land from the Public Domain as Forest Reserves.  

Here’s what it said, “Section 24, That the President of the United States may, from time to time set apart and reserve, in any State or Territory having public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations and the President shall, by public proclamation, declare the establishment of such reserves and the limits thereof.”  (Dana and Fairfax, Forest and range Policy, pg 56-57). 

Nobody noticed, or they didn’t read it.  The bill was voted on and passed, President Harrison signed it.  The Congressmen likely had a very good break, they felt they’d earned it - and they had, they just didn’t know the correct reason why.  They had created an avenue for establishing Forest Reserves that became the basis for America’s National Forests and many National Parks and Monuments.  And they saved the American West from desertification which is how it was headed while being managed as Public Domain lands. 

Some of the Public Domain lands that nobody wanted for private development were just right for Forest Reserves that could provide healthy watersheds with continuous flowing streams and a reserve of wood.  It was one of those times when opportunity and the need come together to make a good thing.

Less than a month after signing the act that included the sentence that allowed the President to set aside Forest Reserves, President Harrison established the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve in Wyoming (not Yellowstone National Park, that was established in 1872).  Before leaving office in 1893, President Harrison created fifteen forest reserves containing more than thirteen million acres.  President Cleveland, following Harrison’s lead, created thirteen reserves including twenty-one million acres in one fell swoop, he hadn’t  bothered consulting representatives of the states affected.  Westerners exploded in protest, some because the reserves had been created, some because there was no protection or management direction for the reserves, some because of the President’s tactic and some just didn’t want the feds in the neighborhood.  Local people and businesses had been grazing sheep and cattle, cutting timber, homesteading and mining the Public Domain without government interference, suddenly there were these Forest Reserves and, worse yet, forest guards to look after them.  Early on it had not been decided what the Reserves would be managed to do, but most Westerners didn’t like the whole idea.  It was often viewed as government taking individuals’ rights.  But the Forest Reserves became established, the direction for their management could come later, and it did.

The Organic Act of 1897

The Forest Management Act, or Organic Act, passed in June 1897, laid out the purpose for  the Forest Reserves and how they would be managed.  They would be managed to protect watersheds and provide the basis for sustained-yield management of forest products and services.  Land suitable for agricultural was excluded from the Reserves, mining was allowed within their boundaries.  The law required the Secretary of Interior to make rules and regulations to protect the Reserves “against destruction by fire and depredations.”  The law directed that timber could be marked and designated for sale to promote growing new crops of trees.  Timber was viewed as a crop.  That was a new and different thing to have in a law.   (James G. Lewis, The Forest Service and the Greatest Good, 2005, Forest History Society)

After President Cleveland, President McKinley continued establishing Forest Reserves.  When he was assassinated, September 1901 there were 41 reserves containing 47 million acres and the Organic Act gave purpose and direction for managing the Reserves.  Good things. 

About Forests & People -- EARTH DAY ! ~Intermission ~ Newborn Bighorn

Newborn Bighorn
My Top Ten Wildlife Experiences, # 14

May 11, 1972

Fryingpan Ranger District, Whiteriver National Forest

Taylor Creek is a sprout off the Fryingpan River above Basalt, Colorado where the Fryingpan joins the the Roaring Fork River.  The Colorado Game and Fish has enclosed about 2000 acres of Taylor Creek within an eight foot high fence.  The purpose is to have a sanctuary for bighorn sheep where they can be free from lungworm disease.  Deer, elk and livestock are kept out.  The exclosure has been working for several years and there is a nice size heard of bighorns healthy and free from lungworm.

It is a great place to go to see bighorn social systems at work:  Fights between rams in breeding season, rams grouping-up away from ewes and lambs in winter; spring lambing season, and the ewe’s baby sitting system in summer.

The baby sitting system is fascinating to watch.  A group of 30 or more ewes put the lambs on steep rock cliff areas where the lambs are safe from predators.  The athletic lambs hop and skip all over those steep rocks and cliffs with no fear, having a fun time.  A few of the ewes stay with the lambs while others graze nearby areas where there are grasses and forbs.  Every once-in-a-while a ewe drifts over to one of the baby sitters and take over watch duty so that ewe can go browse.

On this day Wildlife Conservation Officer Chris Whitaker and I were hiking the area checking to see that the fence was in tact, looking for winter kill and seeing how the spring browse, forbs and grasses, were doing.  Snow was about gone, but it was definitely a day to be wearing a coat.  Chris had his black lab, a well disciplined dog.

The three of us had been hiking around the area for a few hours, it was late morning, we were coming down a small ridge with sage and bitterbrush on its top, Douglas fir and pine trees began just off the shoulders of the ridge and went down into the draws on either side.

The dog was about 20 feet ahead of us when he stopped to sniff.  He had found a baby bighorn sheep.  Chris instantly called the lab to his side.  The lamb stayed lying down warmly curled up.  We  stopped in our tracks and began backing away to avoid disturbing the ewe, but we couldn’t see her anywhere.   We knew we hadn’t  spooked her because the ridge was open and we would have seen her leave.  We finally decided the ewe must have gone for water.

So the three of us cautiously approached the lamb, we got close enough to see the umbilical cord was still pink and moist.  This lamb was really newborn!

The lab, always well behaved and not aggressive, approached the lamb to sniff it.  To this perceived threat the lamb wobbled up onto all four of its too long legs, then, as the lab backed up a step, the lamb reared on its back legs, front legs tucked under its chest, head cocked, eyes focused on the dogs head, it came down striking with its future horns at the black enemy!

WOW!!  We immediately backed away, the lamb curled up to wait the return of mom and we left the area.

With us we took a new definition of courage and better understanding of wild instinct.     Jerry Covault 

About Forests & People -- George Perkins Marsh

He pointed the way, others followed.

George Perkins Marsh wrote, Man and Nature in 1864, the book that raised concern about America’s forest practices and saved the American West from becoming a desert like north Africa or the Middle-East.  Marsh, born in 1801 in Vermont, was a man with huge intellect, huge curiosity and huge energy.  He became a lawyer, was elected to the House of Representatives four times, was fluent in twenty languages and was U.S. ambassador to Turkey, 1849 to 1854.  Marsh wrote the Vermont Fisheries Report in 1857, over a century later it was judged one of the most influential, prophetic, and thoughtful studies ever written on the subject.  From 1861 until his death in 1882 he served as ambassador to Italy.  It was during his Italian ambassadorship Marsh wrote,  Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.  Marsh must have been one of those people who can look at what everyone looks at and see what no one else sees, plus he had the ability and energy to write about what he saw.  

People’s common understanding about nature had always been that mankind was meant to dominate nature, other than that, there was no relationship or obligation between people and the natural world.  Marsh put forth the radical thinking that man and nature are interrelated, interdependent and humankind cannot survive without a healthy nature.  Traveling the Mediterranean basin Marsh saw land that a few thousand years before had supported wonderful forests, productive agriculture, cities, empires and art, but, through the centuries, had become poor, poor land, poor people, dusty cities, a semiarid land and desert. 

During Roman Empire times the Atlas Mountains of northern Africa had forests that the Roman woodsmen cut.  The Atlas forests included the sandarac tree, a pine who’s wood was valued for its durability and color.  A table made from sandarac wood is said to have cost as much as seventeen pounds of gold.  All the sandarac trees were gone by the year 50 AD, every one had been cut.  Most forests in the North African mountains had similar fate and serious erosion set in, the forests never grew back.  The forests of Spain and Portugal were ravaged for fuel to smelter the silver that finance Rome’s growth.  It was an old story from previous empires being repeated.      (John Perlin, A Forest Journey, 1989, Harvard University Press)

Marsh recognized that over time mankind made the earth’s surface what it is.  He wrote about what he saw in Man and Nature.  He wrote about the damage done to mountains and waterways by over-cutting forests, overgrazing and the effects of soil erosion from these abuses.  When forests are cut the tree canopy that breaks the fall of rain and snow is gone so the raindrops hit the ground surface with an impact, that can be ok if there are still leaves, needles and other plant material covering the mineral soil.  The water gets absorbed slow and steady much of it is held in the dead and decaying vegetation, that’s called duff.  It  is the kind of “cultivation” that will allow trees for a new forest to grow back.  But, if sheep, goats and cattle graze and overgraze where the trees were cut, really bad things start to happen.  The duff that is such an important sponge is trampled into small bits, the grass and shrubs and small trees are grazed and browsed again and again until they are killed.  The soil is exposed to the elements, rain and hot sun, it crusts and won’t absorb water when the storms come.  The rain and snowmelt rush down the slopes tearing it apart, first the small particles are washed down slope, then the larger particles and rocks.  The exposed soil and rock can’t hold the moisture, the slopes are barren of any protective plants.  The result is torrential flooding where dirty streams become raging dirty rivers in the valleys.   

Through 7000 years of agriculture and civilization this chain of events has evolved time after time.  The results are a string of failed civilizations.  Most history books concentrate on wars and conquest and politics as reasons this empire rose and another failed, we need to look deeper than wars and ask “Why.”  Why wars all the time?  Is it the need for more  crop land, more resources (wood)?  Why, are theirs gone?  Used up?  Why?  Does short term planning have anything to do with these failures?  Are we repeating their mistakes?

Let’s digress here for a moment to John Perlin’s book, A Forest Journey, page 79.  In the fifth century BC the Greek cities Priene and Myus and Ephesus  were seaports.  The Greek cut the nearby forests and grazed the cutover land.  With no vegetation to cushion and absorb the rain the floods came, the torrents and erosion, followed by efforts to dredge and keep the harbors open.  The dredging couldn’t keep up with eroding soil.  Less than 500 years later, second century AD, these cities were more than five miles from the sea, five miles of land eroded from what had been productive forested hills and mountains.  Point made.

But, we need to get back to Marsh, what is important is, Marsh wrote about it, in 1864.  He warned against these effects and advocated stewardship of land globally.  Marsh wanted to see large scale planning to manage forests for wood products and care for the soil and water quality.  He advocated scientific forest management before there was forest science.

Influential Americans read Man and Nature , it started to change attitudes toward forests and land.  It took time, but America began to respect nature.  We established Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the Government’s Division of Forestry was established in 1886, the nation’s first Forest Reserves in 1891 and in 1905 Congress made the Reserves into National Forests with the Forest Service as their manager.  Universities across the nation developed curricula in natural sciences and forestry to supply scientific information and trained people to manage forests.

Marsh’s book, Man and Nature, is still in print by the University of Washington Press.  It is worth having for the Forward and Introduction, even if you don’t read the whole thing, although you probably will. 

During the last half of the 1800’s Americans were pushing west across the 100th Meridian into semiarid land where rainfall was less than that 20 inches per year.  Americans were getting ready to enter a land like the Middle-East was thousands of years before civilizations destroyed the forests and land productivity.  Word was getting around about Marsh’s observations and the implications it had for the semiarid American West. 

About Forests & People -- America On The Move

“There’s More Trees West of Here.”

American trade, farming, commerce, shipbuilding and industry increased.  American forests decreased.  But that was OK, there were plenty more just to the west and that’s the way they were headed anyway.  “Cut the forest, farm the clearings hard and move further west when the soil plays out” was the model from 1620 to 1891.  (It was 1891 when the census showed there was no more frontier in America.)  The “move west” model hit the northern forests of the lake states hard.  Lots of heavy, hard logging (think Paul Bunyon and Babe the blue ox) and very little regard for what was left behind, which was a lot of slash, limbs, tops, and logs on the ground.  This slash became fuel for small fires.  Then, on the night of October 8, 1871 a large cyclonic storm hit the area with winds that whipped the many small fires into the Peshtigo Fire, a huge conflagration in northern Wisconsin and Michigan that burned millions of dollars worth of property and timberland and killed between 1200 and 2400 people.  The fire burned over 2400 square miles.  You may never have heard of the Pesthigo Fire because it happened on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire, started by some woman’s cow kicking over a lantern.  The Chicago fire got all the headlines.

The Peshtigo Fire was one of a series of events that were beginning to stir the American conscious about how we were treating our forests, but not too much.  America’s western forests were next in line for cutting, after all, that was what we’d always done.

Settling the Plains and West

Before the homesteaders and settlers could move onto the plains five things had to be invented and usable:  #1. The steel bottom plow to turn over the thick prairie grass (A fellow named John Deere invented that in 1837, we’re still following around his machinery).  #2. The windmill to bring water up from underground. #3.  Barbed wire because trees and rocks were not available to make rail and rock fences as has been used in the East.  #4.  The repeating rifle because homesteads were isolated and firepower was necessary for protection.  #5.  Railroads to haul the products of farms (cows, corn, wheat, etc.) to Eastern populations and bring manufactured products (kitchen stoves, farm machines, cloth —-) to the farms.  When these technological advances were in place, Americans moved onto the plains in huge numbers.  Wood was needed for houses and barns, the northern forests around the Great Lakes were cut, the logs floated down the Mississippi to sawmills in Iowa (of all places).  Logs were cut into boards, loaded on trains and trees became houses, barns, towns, fence posts, tools, toys, kitchen tables, railroad ties and all the hundreds of other things people need.  

As settlement, farming and town building were crossing the plains, an awareness was beginning that some forests and watersheds should be conserved.  The impact of logging on the land, the people and forests of northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota was awful.  But, the dominant thinking was still that there is a lot of forest on the Public Domain and it’s available to go into private ownership, and it did.  Much of the land west of the Mississippi became private by the old established ways, the 1862 Homestead Act, timber tracts were purchased, and mining claims taken from the Public Domain.

At this point we need to discuss Public Domain lands.  These are lands owned by the government, some acquired by purchase (Louisiana Purchase, Gadstone Purchase, Alaskan Purchase), some by wars (England, Mexico, Native Peoples, Spain), some by treaties with Native Peoples, The Oregon Compromise with England and a few other ways.  When the Government acquired land it was administered by the General Land Office (GLO), an agency in the Department of the Interior.  The GLO’s job was to sell the land to those who would develop it, adding to the nation’s growth.  Homesteaders, subdividers, town planners, miners, ranchers, logging companies, railroads all did their part in building the nation from Public Domain land.  But, some Public Domain land was too rocky, too steep, too far, too dry or too wet for anyone to want to own and pay the taxes on it.  

  

As settlers moved west of the Mississippi they faced two big changes; obviously, no forests, the other difference was more subtile, the further west they went the less the annual rainfall, until, west of the 100th Meridian (the north/south line that runs through North Platt, Nebraska south into Texas) there was not enough rain to grow crops.  Where there is less than 20 inches of precipitation per year (all of the West), agriculture crops require irrigation, special farming practices and more land to make money farming.

West from the 100th, the plains get dryer so semi-arid west requires a lot more acres to support a cow, a grain crop and a family than east of the 100th meridian  The result of the dryness is, the further west people went the more distance between the homesteads, further west, they became ranches and, of course, the towns were further apart.  These distances were spanned by railroads. Railroads require  big capitol provided by big companies so there had to be big possibilities for future businesses.  The thing out there that could provide that big future was big expanses of land -- Public Domain land.

The Railroad companies  made a deal with Congress.  The government would give the railroad company every other section (640 acres, one mile square) ten to twenty miles wide along every mile of railroad the company built through the Public Domain.  (Paul W. Gate, History of Public Land Law Development, p364 - 365). That created a checker board  pattern of land ownership on the maps all along the railroad through prairie and forest.  

What a deal!  The railroad made the land valuable because people and all the things they needed could move to and from the land.  Railroad companies sold their land to settlers, town builders and the forests to logging companies.  The government’s General Land Office was doing the same thing with their every-other section of Public Domain.  Prairie and forests were transferred from Public Domain to private ownership.  The combination of natural resources and people working them created an economy of extraction and the railroads took these basic raw materials (wood, beef, wool, minerals) east for manufacture.  Trains heading west carried machinery for sawmills, mines and farms, sewing machines, cook stoves, material and everything else people needed.

The railroads were subsidized and Congress made a way to expand America.

Intermission -- Wildflower Alert !

The trilliums are now blooming in the western Montana woods!  Although they do this every year, it's always good news.  I'm not the only one that considers the trillium the prettiest wildflower in the forest, lots of people do, Ontario even has it as their official Provincial flower.

If you decide to go looking for yourself, look in shaded places, along small creeks, or even shaded road banks, they like it cool and moist.  Be careful with them, as you would be with anything delicate and beautiful.  You can pick a flower if you need to, but try not to disturb the leaves or the fibrous roots, that may kill the plant.  Botanists say it takes seven years for a plant to go from seed to blooming in greenhouse conditions, and probably longer in the wild.  

Speaking of seeds, the trillium relies on ants to spread its seeds around.  It attracts an ant by coating each seed with elaiosomes  - we'll call it "chocolate" -  ants love "chocolate" so they haul the seeds away and stash them in a hole in the ground to enjoy later - and then they forget where they put it.  Seven or more years later - a new trillium blooms.

Do yourself a favor, go out in the woods on a trillium hunt, when you find a patch, you'll remember the day a long time.  The blooming will be going on until around Mothers Day.  

If trilliums are not your thing, the shooting stars, glacier lilies, buttercups, springbeauties, bluebells, yellow bells and more every day are doing their "blooming best."  It's a feast for the eyes out there.

About Forests & People -- European Energy Crisis

Wind energy was one of the driving forces that made civilizing possible from its beginnings up until mid-to-late 1800’s.  It is wind that filled the sails of all those merchant ships trading back-and-forth, things as varied as pepper, ice and slaves.  It is wind that propelled every navy in the world so they could carry on wars.  The other energy sources were human and animal muscle and water wheels in streams.  Men provided the muscle to fight the wars, mine the mines, dig the ditches, and all that other man-and-woman-killing labor.  A good percentage of those doing this work were slaves taken in all those wars throughout history.  Animals pulled the plows and wagons and everything else that could be done cheaper by animals than a human-person slave.  Not really good times for most people and animals.  

Half way through the 1600’s an energy crisis began to develop.  There was a scarcity of trees suitable to make ship masts.  It took about two thousand mature oak trees, that would be roughly 50 acres of good oak woods, to make a ship.  Europe had been building ships for a lot of centuries and the oak forests were hurting, but the more serious problem was getting trees big enough for ships’ masts.

The masts of a big ship needed to be three feet in diameter at the base and over 100 feet tall.  Ships’ masts had to have some bend and give in them and lighter weight than oak.  The conifers (evergreens) were the best bet and the best place for them were the northern countries around the Baltic Sea, the Scandinavian countries had spruce trees, and a little further south there was Scotch pine, the best European woods for masts.  England’s masts came from those countries, the problem was the number of trees was running low and England was always fussing (wars) with Denmark and others about shipping routes between the forests and England.  To complicate matters, England wanted to have a war with France (again!) and needed to get a bunch more war ships built.  

About that time, some shipbuilders began to realize that American White pine was far superior for masts than anything in Europe.  White pine was bigger, lighter, stronger and more shock resistant, and there they were, directly west of England with no one to fight with over shipping routes.  The Energy Crisis was solved - at least the wind part.

In 1691, King William III decided American white pines were so valuable he would issue a royal charter stating that it was illegal to cut any white pine greater than 24 inched diameter at breast height, no matter who’s land the tree was growing on, colonist’s or Native People’s.  To back this up he established the “King’s Broad Arrow” policy.  Agents were sent from England to mark the best trees with an arrow blazed in the bark.  This was a big job, White pine grew from Connecticut all the way north into Maine.  Not to worry, the head “agent” was a corrupt fellow and a long ways from the boss and not many trees got marked with a broad arrow, so, at first, this was no big deal.  American loggers had been sending a few masts to England for almost 90 years by the time William III got around to making his royal charter.  What was different was the King claimed these trees as his own, no mention of buying them from current land owners or the Native People who had been managing the forest for millennia.  The locals pretty much ignored the King’s charter, White pines of all sizes were cut, bucked into eight foot logs for whatever purpose and if a mast size tree could be fell so it was close to a river and easily transported to English shipbuilders, they did it.  But, over the years things tightened up - more inspectors - more rules - hard feelings grew until 1776, and we all know what happened then.  Yip, the “King’s Broad Arrow” policy came to an end.  (Eric Rutkow, American Canopy , p 13-33)

(John Perlin,  A Forest Journey, p278 - 291)

About Forests & People -- America

The farming, manufacturing and trade economies in Europe, the Middle East and Far East were pushing civilization along.  There were starts and stops and jerks along the way, but century after century, farming, manufacturing and trade allowed cities to develop where commerce, industry, arts, science and innovation grew.  About that time Columbus stumbled into the continents between Europe and India - he didn’t know what he was doing or what he’d found, or he wouldn’t have called the people ‘Indians’.  They had their own names for who they were.  More than a hundred years later the English landed on an American shore far north of where the Spanish had been running rough shod over the people and land looting for gold.  

Those English had to deal with a landscape unlike any they had ever seen before, solid forest.  People are like the other walk-around critters, we don’t usually like the deep dark forest.  We have long standing mythology about deep, dark, scary forests and the evils there, like Hansel and Gretel found.  We like the openings and the edges of the forest where the sunlight reaches the ground and plants we can eat grow.  We like to see around us in case something may be coming to eat us.  Forest near-by is ok, but on the edge and in the openings is where we want to be, not deep within.  

Unlike other critters, beavers and people can cut trees to make forest openings where food crops can grow and we can use the wood for fuel and housebuilding.  That’s what we did. 

It didn’t take too long for the New Englanders to realize the forests they were clearing to plant corn and pumpkins had some great wood that Europeans would pay to get, especially the white pine trees.  White pine trees didn’t grow in Europe, it began to dawn on American forest cutters that this wood was far superior to European wood for many uses.  These Americans-to-be could trade this superior wood for things they wanted from the “mother land,” and other “mothers-lands”. 

About Forests & People -- The Alps - Forests - Avalanches

In northern mountains there is another factor at play when forests are cut - avalanches!  In Europe, by the Middle Ages, numerous settlements existed in the beautiful valleys of the Alps.  People needed wood for constructing houses, fences, tools and fuel.  No problem, the forests were right there, further up the slope from the village, it even made it easy to skid the logs downhill to where they could be sawn and used.  And, early on, there was no end in sight to the forest.  After the trees were cleared, it was a great place to graze the sheep, goats and cows.  Sound familiar?  The trees couldn’t grow back, even on the moist mountain soils, the animals liked to eat them.  So, the forest receded up the slopes.  Wood for fires, tools and houses had to be hauled further and further, but the people probably thought a lot like we do today about oil, coal and electricity, “There’ll be enough for us, turn up the heat, honey”.

One of the things the forests did was hold winter snows on the steep mountain slopes, but nobody noticed.  As the forests were cut and the slopes grazed, the deep winter snows had no anchor to the ground. The mountains had become steep slippery slides for snow and at the bottom of many of those slides were villages.  In the 1400’s these villagers began dying in violent snow avalanches roaring down the slick slopes of the high peaks (Colin Fraser, Avalanche Enigma, pg 11).  Avalanche events that destroy villages and kill people continued through the centuries because the mountain forests had been cut and not allowed to grow back.  It is estimated that from 1915 to 1918, during World War I, forty to eighty-thousand Austrian and Italian soldiers died in avalanches that overtook their armies (Colin Fraser, Avalanche Enigma, pg 20).

                                                                         Sawtooth Mountains

Since WW I people of the Alps have put engineering to work to divert avalanches around buildings and villages.  Large, fence like structures have been constructed high on mountainsides in avalanche paths and in snow accumulation zones to hold the snow in place.  Trees have been planted between the structures to reestablish the forest and allow nature to hold the snow on the mountain slopes.  More foresight would have been good, but it is one of those “Tragedy of the Commons” deals.

Heinrich Cotta 

What’s a forest worth?  How could people allow their forests to be so reduced to cause these huge environmental problems that destroy property, societies, economies, nations?  Heinrich Cotta may have hit on the answer in 1816.  Cotta, born in 1763 in Germany, was a person of the forest.  When Heinrich was 53 he wrote his thoughts about forests in what he called “Cotta’s Preface.”  His conclusions are worth thinking about, “Three principal causes exist why forestry is still so backward; first, the long time which wood needs for its development; second, the great variety of sites on which it grows; thirdly, the fact that the forester who practices much writes but little, and he who writes much practices but little.”

“The long development period causes that something is considered good and prescribed as such which is good only for a time, and later becomes detrimental to the forest management.  The second fact causes that what many declare good or bad, proves, good or bad only in certain places.  The third fact brings it about that the best experiences die with the man who made them, and that many entirely one-sided experiences are copied by the merely literary forester so often that they finally stand as articles of faith which nobody dares to gainsay, no matter how one-sided or in error they may be.”    Heinrich Cotta, Dec. 21, 1816. (“Forestry Quarterly,” Volume I, 1902-1903)

Since Cotta wrote his Preface, there has been another wrinkle, capitalism, it demands short planning periods, quarterly reports need to show profits or investors lose “interest.”  But, more on that later.

About Forests & People -- Intermission

My Top Ten Wildlife Experiences, # 4

Ducks and Fox

A spring Saturday morning about 1966

The four-thousand acre lake was only a couple miles from our house at the ranger station.  My Grumman canoe was rather new.  On Saturday mornings I would get up before any light, prepare a bottle for Chad, put in his crib where he could find it so Lois could sleep a little longer and drive our 1963 Volvo, 122S (Brownie), with canoe on top, to Heaton Bay on Lake Dillon.  If my timing was good, I would be slipping the canoe into the water when there was just enough light to see.

The idea was to be on the lake, in this little bay, just as first light comes streaming between 14,000 foot Grays and Tory peaks on the Continental Divide, skips across the open water and slams into the Tenmile Range standing tall and thinking it could hold back the sun.   Peaks One and Two turn red in the first moments of their effort against those sun rays.

My excuse to the world for being there was to fly fish (in my entire life I have only had ten minutes of good fishing), but the truth is, I just wanted to see and feel the wild early morning.

On this morning, after the sun had put on its show, I was paddling slow and quiet in the shallows, rounding a small spit, when I noticed a mother duck with six or eight babies.  She paid no attention to me, she was alarmed about something else.  The mother was working very hard verbally and physically to get her ducklings in a line and move them further from shore.  She was having a frustrating time of it.  I was seeing all of this without her apparently noticing me.  

After a few minutes watching, I saw the fox!  It was in tall grass no more than six feet from the ducks.  The mother duck was, at once, swimming between the fox and her brood and herding the ducklings further from shore into open water,  I could only imagine the alarm in her small brain as I watched this drama playing out.

The fox would come out of the tall grass, take a step or two into the water ~ mother duck screaming ~ fox backs out of the water and shakes its front paws and disappears; then reappears from another patch of tall grass at a different angle.  

All the time the mother duck is working to convince her threatened brood that there is great danger and they must follow her.

Finally, after four or five minutes the mother duck’s life and death efforts worked and the little brood moved away from shore in a disciplined line.  

The fox disappeared back into the tall grass, probably to settle for a mouse breakfast.

I guess the mother duck taught me that discipline is the best defense when faced with danger.

I paddled on ~~ what a way to start a day!

Jerry Covault

About Forests & People -- Civilization Fueled by Forests

Throughout seventy or more centuries civilizations were growing across the world, more people, bigger cities, more metal, bigger ships and wars.  This created an always-growing need for more wood, food and fiber.  Wood is so important to growing civilizations that it was a war strategy to burn an enemy’s forests — that went on right down to World War II, the Japanese floated big air balloons across the Pacific with incendiary devices to land in the Pacific Northwest forests and start fires.  But I digress, back to early civilization.

Large areas of forest are cut as every civilization in history has grown and expanded, people needed wood.  This could have been ok, kind of, if that was all that happened.  Generally speaking, trees want to grow back where they were.  But, after the forests were cut, people brought in sheep, goats and cattle to browse and graze the on the land that had been forested and was too steep for crops.  People needed the meat and fiber, they thought it made sense.  Big mistake!  Sheep, goats and cows eat small trees as well as brush, forbs and grass - the trees never had a chance to grow back.  The forests that held the sparse moisture that fell and slowly released it so the streams could feed irrigation systems were gone.  Overgrazing destroyed the possibility of trees growing back as well as other plants that protected the soil from erosion.  Rains eroded the steep soils into streams, the dirty streams fed into the irrigation systems that watered wheat fields, cotton fields and cities.  The irrigation systems filled with silt to the point they could not carry water.  Agricultural soils became salty because of the erosion from where forests had been.  Crops failed, cities failed.

It took several hundred years, but the empire that produced the agriculture to support the great cities and The Hanging Gardens of Babylon became a desert.  A few thousand years later the Romans did the same thing to the land they fought over and controlled.

 *NOTICE*  Our climate in the American West is dry like the Middle East, eastern Europe and north Africa.

How did all this destruction happen?  Basically it happened because the people removed the forests, and they didn’t limit the method or number of domestic animals grazing - a bad combination.  Where there is grazing land and no one is responsible for it so anyone and everyone can graze it without restrictions, it makes sense for each livestock owner to own and graze as many animals as possible, and that has happened thousands upon thousands of times throughout the world over the past 7000 years.  When all livestock owners do that, eventually, every clump of grass, shrub and tree is grazed and re-grazed until the land is barren of plants.  Erosion washes away the fine particles of soil - the ones that hold moisture - what is left is a coarse, gravely soil.  Grasses, forbs and trees can’t reestablish themselves, the soil has lost its moisture holding capacity, the result is desertification.  That series of events played out time and again through history in the Middle-East, North Africa, and a big chunk of Europe and Asia.

These days there is a name for this scenario, it is called “The Tragedy of the Commons.”   This social, economic, political, environmental phenomenon was first described and named by the scientist Garrett Hardin and was published in “Science “ magazine in 1968.   In a nut shell, it describes a situation where many livestock owners are grazing some land held in common.  The result is, it is to each livestock owner advantage to maximize his heard when the grazing land is owned by everyone - or no one - until every blade of grass is grazed to the point that the resource is dead-and-gone.  Everyone’s cattle then die and what do you suppose happens to the livestock owners?  The overgrazing caused depletion of land productivity, famine, wars for resources and eventually the fall of the civilization. 

Of course “The Tragedy of the Commons” does not mean that grazing domesticated livestock, horses, cows, sheep, goats and hogs is the problem.  On well managed land, the prudent livestock owner will graze only the number of animals that the land will support year-after-year and that’s good.  The problem comes when nobody owns the land and grass, or it is managed only for short term profits, in those situations the livestock owner will REQUIRE the animals to overgraze the land for their own survival, which, in the end, fails.  Given a choice, the animals wouldn’t overgraze their survival grass, sixty million bison used America’s Great Plains for millennia and did just fine, they had choices, they grazed and moved, constantly.  Domesticated livestock aren’t given choices about moving.

America, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began recognizing this chain of events and interrupted The Tragedy of the Commons.  The “commons” were there, in the form of unregulated, uncontrolled public domain lands, the cows and sheep were certainly there and starting to use the public domain as “commons.”  Then we Americans did something very smart, or just fortuitous, in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s our government began setting aside unregulated public domain as National Forests and Natural Resource Lands and said, “Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, manage these lands so the watersheds are protected and the soils are not destroyed by overgrazing and the erosion that follows”.  Smart or lucky, that saved the American West.  And it is still working, to do otherwise with these now regulated public lands would begin the process of desertification of the American West.

The grazing resource example Garrett Hardin used in his  “The Tragedy of Commons” can be thought of as a metaphor for any-and-all natural resources (like our air that we all pump waste into and our aquifers we all drill wells into) that sustain human civilization.  That’s a scary and serious thing to think about.  We need to do just that (think about it) because this chain of events has played out in civilizations throughout world history, including North America.  The ancient Pueblo People in the American Southwest built communities of sophisticated houses and granaries long before European settlement. Their civilization worked for centuries, then the people apparently abandon many of their cities.  One explanation, some Archeologists speculate, is that the people cut the near forests and, even though they didn’t have grazing animals, the forests were not reestablished.  Their wood source for cooking, tools and structures became too far for them to transport, their communities died.