FORESTS: A case for management

Bonnie Bogart-Brown’s July 28 My Turn [When Human Management Isn’t Such a Good Thing], reveals a troubling lack of understanding for Idaho’s beautiful forests. She laments “management,” by which she means “excessive clearcutting,” which, she suggests are warming our forests, I guess in the same way she thinks Earth’s climate is warming.

I’ve been involved in forestry, logging and lumber manufacturing businesses in Idaho for more than 64 years, and for many of those years, I too railed against clearcutting before realizing that most of our tree species — western white pine, larch, ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir and lodgepole pine — regenerate best in full sunlight.

What does this means? It means that if we aren’t clearcutting and replanting, nature does it for us. Witness the 1910 Fire which leveled 3 million acres of virgin timberland in North Idaho and western Montana in just 48 hours. God only knows how many millions of birds and mammals were incinerated. Likewise, the more recent 1988 Yellowstone Fire, which burned some 800,000 acres of unmanaged forestland. Killing countless thousands of animals.

I certainly understand Ms. Bogart-Brown’s concern for animals and the habitats they occupy, but her worries are misdirected. “Management” isn’t the problem. The problem is a lack of management on hundreds of thousands of national forest acres that hold too many trees. Stressed by insects, diseases and prolonged drought, these stands are falling apart. Restoration — thinning and the use of prescribed burning when it is safe to burn — are the only sensible answers. There is no other way for us to protect or create more habitat for wildlife.

The “management” work that Ms. Bogart-Brown decries is best completed by professionals, and fortunately we have armies of them in Idaho’s forests: botanists, biologists, silviculturists, ecologists, engineers, soils scientists, foresters and hydrologists. My concern is for the fact that they aren’t moving fast enough in our diseased and dying forests. Insect, disease and drought-related mortality exceeds net growth by a factor of seven and harvest by a factor of 25.

We must speed our thinning and forest restoration work on public lands in Idaho. Otherwise, you will soon hear Ms. Bogart-Brown and Mr. Bennett singing from the sheet music!

DICK BENNETT

Hayden Lake