State representatives Cynthia Wooten (D) and Floyd Prozanski (D) have introduced legislation to amend the State Forest Practices Act to protect lives and private property from devastating landslides.
"This is a responsible and overdue bill," said Andy Stahl, Executive Director for Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. "This bill tells the Board of Forestry and the State Forester that Oregon's citizens want their lives and property safe from clearcut-caused landslides."
The bill responds to last year's devastating storms which saw thousands of landslides pour out of recently cut-over lands, destroying homes, property, and killing at least 6 people. The State Department of Forestry has claimed that it has no authority to protect people and their property from the slides. The legislation would give the Forestry Department the needed authority.
The bill:
- Directs the Department of Forestry to identify areas that are "marginal for safety" where slides threaten lives or property;
- Require that written plans for forest practices in marginal for safety areas describe how the forest practice will prevent threats to lives and property;
- Changes to composition of regional forest practice committees to gain a broader public representation while still maintaining professional resource management experience; and,
- Directs the State Forester to deny a forest practice with a written plan where the forest practice threatens lives or property or may damage water, fish or wildlife resources owned by the state in trust for all Oregonians.
"This bill is not radical surgery," Stahl continued. "It maintains the authority of the Board of Forestry and State Forester to regulate forest practices on private and state lands, but to do so sensitive to private property rights and people's lives."
The common sense observation that high levels of clearcutting can accelerate flooding and erosion has historical roots in earlier human cultures. In 16th century Venice, a forest owner named Paulini performed a careful study relating flooding to deforestry. He noted that "in earlier times, because of forest cover, the rain was absorbed by fallen leaves and the forest canopy shaded the snow, allowing it to melt slowly". Paulini concluded that "where there is now no vegetation to retain rain water and the snow lies exposed to the sun, in an instant, water will precipitously swoop down from the mountains to the rivers mouth and will carry such enormous quantities of debris as to devastate the country-side".
For those who require modern science to confirm common sense, there is a great deal of research, including new studies by both the Forest Service, and Oregon State University, that document increased runoff and erosion from heavily roaded and logged areas. There is a volume of scientific support for the observation that high levels of upstream logging clearly encourage downstream flooding. Nevertheless, many Northwestern politicians and "bureademics" will predictably deny the obvious, dodging much needed forest practice reforms by calling instead for further studies. Many of the Western Oregon drainages most dramatically impacted by 1996's floods were downstream from high levels of recent corporate logging. For example, the upper drainage of the Mohawk River in Lane County lays inside a vast industrial forest acquired by a new corporate owner during the last decade. When corporate forestlands trade hands, they are often quickly cut to repay capital outlay. As an air photo inspection or flyover reveals, this is exactly what happened in the uplands of this watershed. The effect of increased flooding in the Mohawk, a tributary of the Willamette, has been observed far downstream, particularly in the bottom lands around Corvallis and Salem.
In 1996, several million acres of corporate timberland changed hands in Oregon. There are also millions of acres of corporate land cut over during the post war building boom that will soon be ready to fall again to an industry that utilizes increasingly smaller logs. How quickly will these lands be cut and what will be the downstream effects? Although Oregon's Forest Practice Rules recently limited the size of individual clearcuts to 120 acres by maintaining thin buffers between cuts, a forest owner can still "legally" cut 85% of every section (one square mile). When a watershed is quickly stripped in this fashion, only a fool would deny higher levels of flooding and erosion during increasingly common rain-on-snow events.
Between no clearcutting and cutting it all, there are reasonable solutions to minimizing flood damage caused by logging within the context of a warmer, wetter climate and a burgeoning population. Watersheds already critically impacted by too many roads and recent clearcuts should be identified and harvested lightly, if at all, for the next few decades. Watersheds not yet critically impacted should be conserved by the careful timing and planning of new roads and cuts. Steep or unstable sites should be subjected to much smaller clearcuts, retention of evenly distributed, well rooted trees throughout every acre, and aerial yarding systems that minimize soil disturbance.
In the Northwest, immense corporately owned forests and tree farms dominate public waters, fisheries, highways and, indirectly, downstream communities and properties. Society gives these timber corporations the benefits of huge property tax breaks, and further subsidizes them with cheap federal timber, public access, fire and insect protection, and forest research. Would we be unreasonable to require major forest owners to conduct equally benevolent logging practices on their upstream lands? Perhaps the last round of property tax reductions freely bestowed on timber corporations should have been traded for reductions in logging rates, quid pro quo.
Logging exacerbated levels of runoff, debris and sedimentation from this years floods have damaged salmon spawning grounds; oyster beds; grain fields; dairy farms; public roads, sewage and water systems; private homes; and even taken lives. Why wait for our congressmen to bravely ignore corporate campaign contributors and initiate substantial forest practice reforms? Reducing flood damage by requiring major landholders to maintain a reasonable amount of forest cover should be instigated by those who presently pay the price of overcutting. If our downstream quality of life and environment are to be maintained, Oregon's voters will need to begin holding timber corporations, like tobacco corporations, responsible for the public costs of their private actions.
Roy Keene is a forestry consultant and the ex-director of the Public Forestry Foundation, a group of public interest foresters and scientists.
Oregon State Forester James E. Brown's recent editorial opinion is evidence of the extreme nature of the timber industry's near total ownership of our politicians and forestry schools. In addition to billions of advertising dollars, Weyerhaeuser, Georgia Pacific, Boise Cascade, Willamette Industries, Champion International, Roseburg Forest Products, International Paper, Sun Studs & others have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars in buying our nation's forestry schools, Governors, Senators and Representatives, even our President. This highly lucrative investment has paid off in broken laws, devastated gs, trashed watersheds, and $billions for timber barons.
James Brown should be fired. His doleful attempt to placate the public with "vigorous geotechnical investigations" in the wake of the tragic logging-caused deaths of at least five Oregonians is both hollow and shameful. His concerns come a little late. How can we afford or tolerate Big Timber lackeys on our public payrolls actively working to prevent responsible forestry and public protection.
For as long as trees have been cut in this state one would think there would be a glut of studies on the relationship of logging to landslides and flooding. And one would be right. Anyone with a sixth grade education can go to the library and find them. The Forest Service did a study after the 1964 storms. R.L. Fredrickson, in a USFS Pacific Northwest research paper, reported that the greatest soil loss was from mudflows and landslides, and these occurred more frequently at roads and clearcuts.
An OSU Masters thesis shows that "Landslides occur 24 and 253 times more frequently (relative to forest rate) in clearcuts and road areas, respectively."
Why even the Oregon Department of Forestry itself knew the truth about the source of landslides. In 1995 it published, Cumulative Effects of Forest Practices in Oregon. The document states: "Timber harvest in sensitive areas has also been associated with increased incidence of mass movement. Clearcut harvest and/or slash burning on steep slopes may increase failure rates from two to forty times over rates on undisturbed sites."
How did all this information escape Forester Brown's attention?
Instead of paying five or six separate agencies and an "independent" consultant to study this issue (yet again), perhaps I can save the taxpayers a great deal of money by making a modest proposal. Mr. Brown should go to the library,. He should take the Governor and other friends of Big Timber with him. Read his own studies. Read the other studies he'll find there. If he's still not convinced, he can read Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh (first published in 1864), and A Forest Journey, by John Perlin. In these volumes he will find irrefutable proof, documented links between deforestation, flooding and landslides dating back as far as 1,000 years before Christ.
No, the problem is not "landslide-producing storms," but landslide- producing logging and Mr. Brown and the rest of corporate timber's many establishment defenders know perfectly well.
The public should understand that the facts are not in dispute here. ODF and the governor simply don't like the facts because they point to a critically necessary reduction in logging, so they intend to keep on stalling, commissioning studies until they find one they like.
The sad truth is that even if we stopped all logging today, our watersheds will continue to be degraded for decades by thousands of clearcuts that will inevitably erode into our rivers and streams. It doesn't take a forester to see that. City officials in Portland and Salem have asked that their watersheds not be logged anymore due to economically devastating sedimentation from logging operations. Tellingly, even when such requests come from municipal governments responsible for the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people, their concerns are met first with denials.
The log-at-all-costs mentality is so ingrained in state and federal land management agencies, forestry schools & the political establishment, that otherwise rational people can look at this winter's flooding, the mudslides, and the tragic deaths, and pretend there is really no proven connection between them and decades of excessive logging.
It is revealing that nowhere in Mr. Brown's editorial is there a hint that stopping all dangerous or irresponsible logging is an option. That is because ODF rarely met a timber sale it couldn't like. In the words of Mr. Royce, area director of the ODF. "The Oregon Department of Forestry is not in the business of protecting houses."
Nor, apparently, the lives within.
If, after doing his homework, Mr. Brown still insists he does not know what caused all those deadly slides, I suggest he move his family beneath a decade-old 60-degree clearcut. That's right, Mr. Brown should settle in and wait for the rain. Then, perhaps, he'll begin to understand. If not, then he should go and honestly work for Weyerhaeuser instead.
Tim Hermach
Executive Director
NATIVE FOREST COUNCIL
PO Box 2190; Eugene, OR 97402
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Nature was the main culprit in the devastation of the West and Northwest. But commentator Alan Sipporin says some of the responsibility for the damage lies with us.
ALAN SIPPORIN, COMMENTATOR: Yes, mud slides happen. After all, the Pacific Northwest is a rainy climate. And here in Oregon, we have steep mountain slopes, too. So, some erosion is inevitable. Many of the mud slides would have happened no matter what we did. But not all of them.
Forested hillsides suck up huge amounts of water. The giant trees act as virtual water storage tanks and the roots of the trees hold the earth in place. Cut these trees and eventually the hillsides will give way. This common sense has been affirmed by scientific data.
A Forest Service study conducted after last February's mud slides showed a much higher incidence of landslides in clear cuts, than in areas that had not been logged. A study conducted by environmentalists over a much larger area indicates that mud slides are more prevalent and of greater magnitude on hillsides where logging has occurred in the past 20 years.
But the most frightening and damning information comes from two separate tragedies. In one instance, an Oregon State forester warned that logging a particular hillside would leave it vulnerable to mud slides. But the government can only make a recommendation on private land. There is no enforcement authority. So a private timber company ignored the report and logged the hillside anyway. That was ten years ago.
This past November, the hill came crashing down, burying four people in their home. All were killed.
In another case, state highway officials warned against clear cutting on the steep hillsides along Oregon highway 38. A motorist was killed in one of the more than 100 slides that occurred on this highway alone. Mud slides on logged hillsides have buried dozens of other homes in the past two months of intense rains.
For years, the logging debate in the Northwest has pitted the extinction of plant and animal species against the loss of jobs of timber industry workers. The logging lobby asked policymakers if they want to choose owls over people.
But mother nature may have changed the debate this winter. It's people versus people now: People losing their jobs versus people being buried under avalanches of mud and rock.
SIEGEL: Writer and commentator Alan Sipporin comes to us with help from member station KLCC in Eugene, Oregon.
Writers in the last century would not be surprised by the fact that eight people died in Oregon in November in landslide-related accidents; or that five of those deaths involved landslides starting in logged areas (clearcuts). Many books, including Man and Nature (George Perkins Marsh, 1862), detail the relationship between logging and both floods and landslides.
In the Coast Range alone, there are hundreds and hundreds of recent landslides, most of which originate at logging roads or in logged areas. There is an enormous amount of property damage, thousands of tons of sediment in streams, families left without homes, and major damage to fisheries. No rational witness of the destruction can debate the relationship between logging and landslides.
But what the Oregon Department of Forestry says following these tragedies is: 1) that "the jury is still out" regarding logging and landslides, and 2) that whether it is out or in, public safety is not their responsibility.
Huh?
The simple truth is that there is abundant and overwhelming evidence that clearcutting and logging roads cause huge increases in landslides and flooding. The jury is not out. The jury is in, and the verdict is: guilty.
Look at the science:
Landslides:
1971. R.L. Fredrickson, in a USDA Forest Service PNW Research Paper reported that the greatest soil loss in the 1964 storm was from mudflows and landslides, and these were more frequent at roads and at clearcuts. 1977, R. R. Ziemer and D. N. Swanston, in a USDA FS Research Note, said: "A crucial factor in the stability of steep forested slopes is the role of plant roots in maintaining the shear strength of soil mantles... Once the covering vegetation is removed, these roots deteriorate and much of the soil strength is lost." (Emphasis added.) 1981. M.S. thesis (OSU, geology) Daniel A. Marion said: "Clearcutting and road construction appears to strongly affect landslide frequency and location. Landslides occur 24 and 253 times more frequently (relative to forest rate) in clearcuts and road areas, respectively." 1986 M.S. thesis (OSU, geology) Margaret McHugh said: "...harvested areas showed an increase in failure rate of 7 times and roaded areas an increase of 48 times that of forested terrain."
Floods:
1979 in a USDA Forest Service Research Paper, R. Harr, R Dennis and R. L. Fredrickson report : "In ... western Oregon, two such studies have shown that clearcut logging of entire small watersheds in ... the Coast and western Cascades Ranges can cause absolute increases in annual [water runoff] yield that are among the largest in the world." Over a 5 year period, they found that annual runoff increased 43% in clearcuts, 14% in small clearcuts, and 8% in shelterwood cuts; and that peak flow increased 48% in clearcuts, 35% in small clearcuts, and 11% in shelterwood cuts.
And research like that is why the Oregon Department of Forestry itself, in its 1995 publication Cumulative Effects of Forest Practices in Oregon, states that "Timber harvest in sensitive areas has also been associated with increased incidence of mass movement. Clearcut harvest and/or slash burning on steep slopes may increase failure rates two to forty times over rates on undisturbed sites."
But that is not what they are saying in 1996. In 1996 they are saying that "the jury is out" on the relationship between logging and landslides. Hogwash. They should be ashamed. The ODF, incredibly enough, refuses to tell us the truth, even when they are the author of that truth!
The Oregon State Forest Practices Act doesn't require ODF personnel to warn folks whose homes are likely to be trashed because of logging, and doesn't authorize them to stop the logging. But simple decency would dictate that they should have. Landslides can kill. They say that public safety is not their job. It should be.
The law must be changed, strengthened, and enforced by folks who are not industry apologists. We all must insure that those changes take place.
It is clear that the Oregon Department of Forestry has a policy of concealing all risks - to people, property, fish, wildlife, and other resources - which result from logging. That's intolerable. Those who have misled us must be fired, and State Forester James Brown must go. We don't need cheerleaders for industrial logging. Instead we need the opposite - protectors of the products and contents of watersheds - pure clear water, fish, wildlife, public roads and bridges, families' homes and human lives.
We must start over with a new agency - one devoted to forestry, not deforestry.
Tom Giesen
Submitted on behalf of:
The New Alliance for the Forest , 541-485-1382, and
The Native Forest Council , 541-688-2600