These are the pre-Forest Forever warm-up days. Already, CDF is repositioning itself. What can account for the 180 degree change in its "new directions"? CDF is back-peddling away from the loser in a contest that runs past November. Why? Why has the timber industry been granted most-favored nation status for years? The Forest Practice Act was not written to recognize such favoritism.
What are these new directions of CDF?
CDF insists that "adequate rules already exist," and have been in effect all along, and that this change is but a reinterpretation of the intent of the Act. If that is the case, what accounts for the crisis of overcutting? Why the rush to reinterpret these rules? Why are Forest Practice officers and industry RPF's standing on quicksand, arguing over the cutting of individual trees? This keen argument and debate could represent the healthy resurgence of textbook forestry. But "industry" has other plans.
Currently, CDF, under intense public scrutiny of the THP process, has been attempting to tighten up on logging method loopholes, even touching on "uncompensated taking" by restricting the cut on one or two of the more blatant plans, and not accepting deficient plans for filing. This is heartening and commendable, and leaves us free to go after the big picture: cumulative impact of the ransacked second and third growth forests and watersheds of Mendocino County, (plus continued clear-cutting of old growth in Humboldt County).
Unfortunately, final decisions are not made locally, but at Regional Headquarters in Santa Rosa, where the same level of past confusion combined with contempt for public imput continues.
How will the timber industry, through Madison Avenue, attempt to gain the high moral ground in the months ahead? Their slogan, "Every Day Is Earth Day," will no doubt backfire this summer! Regardless of the rhetoric, industry's machinery is moving along right on schedule: deplete the second and third growth forest (and residual old growth), close down the big tree mills, force us by default into accepting a full-scale fiber industry and toxic composite wood. When cornered by "market forces," only one faction will prevail: that of the timber industry.
The stakes are high...to reduce the finest, most long-lived forests on the face of the earth to 20-30 year chip and brush rotations is biological suicide. Will we let these "market forces" slide us into fullscale forest decline and environmental degradation?
"Industry" must first redefine the intent of the Forest Practice Act from "maximum production of high-quality sawlogs" to maximum production of stick lumber and "quality chips." (The rationale: the rest of the world has succumbed to chip and pulp "foresty," so why not the North Coast?)
Will industry be able to stop CDF's "illegal" new directions, or will their political clout falter?
Now THP work is even more important. Watershed by watershed, "industry" should be realistically challenged. There seems to be a crack in the door, with CDF distancing itself from industry, which finds itself naked as a clearcut with its intentions blatant of gutting the remaining lands. The steepest canyons, the rocky outcroppings, the creekbed protection zones, every crack and crevice will be mined.
"Market forces" have created a corporate forestry that is against growing tress to the culmination of mean annual increment. When challenged on this, industry falls back upon private property rights. To quote an L.P. representative, "no one can tell us how or when to cut our trees." This will be the argument after November and in the courts.
Perhaps the misuse of Shelterwood III will contine under the semantic redefining of Alternative Prescription. Perhaps large acreage clear-cuts will be defended to the end. However, soon the timber industry will realize that the cost of doing business in California will be the cost of practicing real forestry: growing real timber, on realistic, sustainable rotations, bound by strict guidelines of growth to harvest ratios. Then, who cares about "market forces," if the forest still stands?
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited