| First/Last Timber Sales | Pictures |
| First/Last Timber Sales | Pictures |
In the Umpqua National Forest, there are two timber sales with the ominous names First and Last. Withdrawn years ago because of the environmental destruction they would cause, these sales have now been released by the Salvage Logging Rider. Forest activists have discovered by taking tree cores that some of the trees marked for cutting are 1000 years old. One thousand years old. I've been struggling to put the cutting of 1000-year old trees into context. Perhaps the only way is to follow the saw as it moves into the heart of the tree, into the depths of time.
The first cut slices through the bark, the thick hide that has protected the tree for centuries from fires, floods, the claws of bears and the jaws of beetles. Then the living wood is reached. In a second or two, the saw rips through the lifetime of my daughter, 5 years, and of my son, 9 years. Soon, it pierces the ring that marks my age, 42 years, and enters time before my experience. In a few minutes more, it passes the ring marking 152 years, which is the oldest age ever recorded for any animal, a giant tortoise. From then on, the saw moves deeper into a world of time that animals have never experienced. Our only living links to this world are trees, who preserve the scars of ancient fires and the breath of vanished atmospheres in the subtle script of their rings.
By now, the saw has reached 500 years into the past. The year was 1496. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was working on The Last Supper. Shakespeare's grandfather was a young man. And this tree was 500 years old.
When the saw reaches deeply enough, the tree's heart will crack, and it will fall. Its oldest rings, its beginnings, will be lost in a maze of splinters.
One thousand years ago. In Europe, it was the depths of the Dark Ages. And our tree first appeared as a tender green shoot on a protected flat above the Umpqua River.
Most people understand the finality of extinction. Once every individual of a species is gone, that unique organism can never be recovered. What of 1000-year old trees? How can we recover the biological wisdom that such a lifetime represents? The answer is not complex. Plant a seed. Then, protect that tree and its habitat for the next 1000 years.
As an individual, I try to be hopeful. As an ecologist, I find it impossible to imagine that humanity will be able to protect any individual organism over the coming thousand years. We are blessed that a handful of these great survivors still exist. We must protect them, learn from them, and honor them. The earth will never see their kind again.
Pepper Trail
No one knows for sure, but we can do a good estimation. The method used to obtain the calculation of 1044 years was a Forest Service Current Vegetation Survey (CVS) extrapolation method.
Trees are aged with a tool called an increment bore, which takes a sliver, or core, of wood out of the trunk at 4.5' off the ground on the uphill side of the tree. Tree rings can be seen and counted on this increment core.
4.5' off the ground measurements are called measurements at breast height. A diameter of the tree was taken here. The tree pictured measured 66.6" diameter at breast height (or DBH). Increment bores of the size needed for these large trees are not in common use. In order to tell exactly how old a tree is without cutting it down, the core would have to reach to the very center of the tree.
Instead, the mean number of rings on the last two inches of the extracted core are used to extrapolate the number of rings that would be on the missing core. Depending on if the tree was suppressed at a young age, or if it grew faster at a young age, it would make the extrapolated age be an overestimate or underestimate of the true age at breast height. Since this tree is on a very steep slope, another question that has to be asked is: how many years did it take this tree to reach 4.5' in height on the up hill side (over 10' on the down hill side). Taking all these factors into consideration, a PSU biologist, and a forestry technician of many years, estimate the tree to be likely over 900 years old. The extracted core is being preserved for further examinations.
Forest Service timber sale administrator for the 'First' sale, Jerry Rainville, confirmed that the trees in this Umpqua National Forest planned clearcut are indeed very ancient. Rainville went with Silverculturalist, Mat Dolegreen, on 3/25/96 and bored a tree in the same unit. Jerry Rainville told me on 3/27 they calculated the age of a 67.0" diameter tree in the 'First' sale to be 830 years old. Previously, they had reported the age of the stand to be between 300 and 500 years old.
Unfortunately, the only way to accurately measure the age of these large trees is to count the rings on the stumps after the units are clearcut. Even then, these large ancient trees often have a soft or missing center where rings are difficult or impossible to count.
Some reports say these trees were calculated at 980 years, and some say 1044 years. The reason for this difference is that in the field, first rough count, brought us to 980 years, and this was the first report out. When we examined the core later, we reach a calculation of 1044 years age at breast height. Trees similar to the measured specimen appear to be distributed through out the cutting area. Unfortunately, environmentalists were denied access to the area when we returned on 3/22 to gather more age data.
How old are these trees is an important question because it is essential that we know what part of our public heritage, history, and gene pool is being extracted as an industrial resource, when less sensitive materials could so easily be used instead. Few of these old trees are left. It could take over 1,000 years to replace them. We are not cutting at a renewable, sustainable rate. Do we have a right to kill these trees now, in our generation, when they have been preserved through so many previous generations? The Salvage Rider is forcing us to clearcut these few remaining historical, ancient trees and we are cheating our children.
Another issue concerning the First/Last timber sales has been that these sales fragment a previously unfragmented, significantly large area of old growth forests. This is also vitally important to our children. Most of our public forest now is in a patchwork of old trees - fragmented into a quilt like pattern. Isolated islands of old growth cannot support the full range of old-growth dependent species, like salmon. Edge effects permeate so far into these little islands that we are facing a species extinction crisis. A reporter asked me recently if the salvage rider was taking the last stick of old growth. No, it's not. What it is taking in the Tiller Ranger District, with the five sales that First/Last is a part of, is the last fully functioning, healthy, intact old growth ecosystem. It is taking the last stick of meaningful old growth.
| First/Last Timber Sales | Pictures |