Opinion: Nantahala-Pisgah Forest Service plan final, but old growth trees need protection

A Forest Service spokesman, Jason Hayes, wrote a letter (March 22) defending the final Nantahala and Pisgah Forest Plan, while rebutting criticisms of the plan from the public, whom he called “a group of environmental special interests.”

These “special interests” are those who speak on behalf of living nature, plant and animal species going extinct at breathtaking speed and needing protected habitat to survive. In this case, those “special interests” included the city of Asheville, Buncombe County, every major environmental group in Western North Carolina, and hundreds of individual residents. The writer defends the plan as a “positive example for what active and collaborative forest management should look like,” but it fails to provide what the present moment calls for.

The unpopular issue that evoked so much public protest was logging of old growth trees. His letter reminds us the forests are to be “managed” for a variety of interests, including “wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, water management, traditional and tribal uses ... and harvesting.” This mandate was established under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, in a world with fewer than 2 billion people, in which 66% of wilderness remained (48% in the U.S.), and carbon in the atmosphere was 270 parts per million.

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Today, however, we live in a world whose population has blown through 8 billion, with only 33% of wilderness remaining, and atmospheric carbon of 420 parts per million. The two greatest problems we face now, not mentioned by the letter writer, are loss of species that support the web of life and climate change. Sadly, when this forest plan expires in 2033, the world will be warmer and conditions in our forests much hotter, stormier, scarier.  Demand for oil and timber will be even greater. We will have lost a decade and many irreplaceable old growth trees.

But trees could have been protected. A review of the last 100 years shows the amount of harvesting has varied with different political administrations. For example, from the end of WW II until the 1980s, timber harvest in the national forests increased until 12-13 billion board feet of timber were harvested annually. Under President Clinton the U.S. Forest Service emphasized the conservation portion of its mandate, logging slowed, and “extensive restoration efforts were begun to enhance remaining stands of old-growth trees and their dependent species.”

Under President George W. Bush, oil and gas leasing increased, and logging leveled off at 1-2 billion board feet a year. Then last April on Earth Day, President Biden signed an Executive Order supporting “climate-smart forest stewardship,” which looked 100 years forward, instead of back. It said, in part, that “America’s forests are a key climate solution, absorbing carbon dioxide equivalent to more than 10% of U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions and serving as critical carbon sinks. The Executive Order will:

• Safeguard mature and old-growth forests on federal lands, as part of a science-based approach to reduce wildfire risk;

• Strengthen reforestation partnerships across the country to support local economies and ensure we retain sustainable supplies of forest products for years to come.” These provisions were not followed in the forest plan.

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As for science, Karl-Heinz Erb and Simone Gingrich of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, offer reasons for safeguarding old growth forests: “Harvesting wood causes emissions from soil and withdraws the carbon of trees from the forests. At the global scale, wood products are estimated to be responsible for land-use emissions of 2.4 GtCO2eq per year, and the carbon stocks of managed forests are considerably lower than those of pristine forests would be. ... When we harvest wood we must consider the carbon that would otherwise be sequestered if we left a forest untouched.”

It seems the timber companies have the loudest voice at the table even in the midst of a climate emergency.  Unfortunately, in our society, economic interests tend to prevail until supply is used up ― the opposite of sustainable use ― as when these mountains were logged 100 years ago. Now the timber and oil industries are resisting the transition to new products that would help in this emergency.

At the very least, the Forest Service might have heeded the input of local people who love their mountains because, as Peter Wohlleben and Tim Flannery write in "The Hidden Life of Trees," “Laypeople often intuitively grasp the need for a change in forest management practices better than forest professionals do.”

Jean Bettis Franklin is a retired English teacher and 10-year member of the Earth Care Team at Black Mountain Presbyterian Church.  

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Old growth trees in Pisgah and Nantahala forests need protection