Letter: Heavy-handed approach to forest management about money

ByLetter to the Editor Reading Time: 6 minutes

A letter to this newspaper dated April 5, and signed by an anonymous entity called the Four Rivers Forestry Committee, advocates for widespread logging and repeated wholesale burning of our small publicly owned forests in southern Indiana. The author(s) chose not to include their names for obvious reasons – the letter is mostly speculation, hyperbole, and conjecture. They are promoting a heavy-handed management approach to our publicly owned forests while neglecting to mention that they and the agencies and organizations they represent are the primary beneficiaries of the cutting and selling of the publicly owned trees and the repeated burning of our forests.

Consider the following:

  • As recently as 2015, revenues from logging the State Forests was the Forestry Division’s main dedicated funding source, accounting for more than the budget provided by the Indiana General Assembly and all other sources combined. https://www.indystar.com/…/state-exploiting…/26299803/. Though appropriated revenues have increased since then, logging still contributes a major proportion of operating funds.
  • The 2006 Land & Resource Management Plan for the Hoosier National Forest says on page 1-2, that when the Forest Service uses the term, “The Forest,” or, “the Hoosier National Forest,” they might be referring to, “the NFS land base in Indiana,” OR to, “the Forest Service administrative structure.” In other words, when the Forest Service says that all the logging and burning they propose will be good for “the Forest,” it is entirely possible that what they really mean is it will benefit the agency and its budget.
  • The Forest Service is permitted to retain virtually all of the receipts from National Forest timber sales in a variety of special funds, including in the Timber Sale Pipeline Restoration Fund, to be used to prepare additional timber sales. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45688.pdf
  • And as Upton Sinclair famously noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The sad fact is that managers of the very small publicly owned forests in the State of Indiana consistently deny and obscure the extent to which financial and budgetary considerations drive the decision-making process. That process leads to logging and burning being their primary management tools; logging because they get to keep the money when they cut down our trees; and burning because a quirk in the budgeting process means that money appropriated by Congress to put out wildfires in the West can actually be used to set fire to our publicly owned hardwood forests here in Indiana, even if there is no clear historical precedent or logical justification for repeatedly burning a wet, fire-resistant forest in a time of rapidly accelerating climate change – they literally have money to burn.

With respect to forests and forest management, there are two kinds of science: one seeks to increase understanding; the other seeks to increase yields. In the case of the publicly owned forest, forest managers seem to rely almost exclusively on highly selective, often self-funded and largely self-serving, yield-driven science that promotes the benefits of logging for a small handful of species that favor abused and degraded landscapes, while ignoring the global scientific consensus on the importance of leaving as much existing forest standing as possible, especially on publicly owned land.

The first responsibility of any paid forest manager is to ascertain the wishes of the landowner in order to craft a management plan responsive to those wishes. This is what consulting foresters do for private woodland owners, but sadly something the decision-makers in the Division of Forestry and the Forest Service consistently fail to do, in pursuit of their own administrative and budgetary priorities. They believe they know better than the global scientific consensus on the importance of leaving mature and old-growth forests standing; better than the American people who consistently favor public forest protection in poll after poll; and better than the recovering forest itself what should be growing on the land we entrust to their care.

Every time our publicly owned forests are logged and the trees removed, the soil is compacted, the forest is further fragmented and impoverished and a new flush of invasive species will be introduced deep into the forest. Sure trees will continue to grow, but they will be weaker and smaller and growing in a diminished, drier, and distressed system whose web of life is further tattered until it looks more like a tree farm with little resemblance to the healthy, diverse, intricate and complex system that once inhabited these lands. A true forest is so much more than the trees.

If the members of the Four Rivers Forestry Committee are so concerned about the decline of oaks in the forest, they can easily address the primary source of that decline and STOP CUTTING THEM DOWN, at least on our publicly owned forests. In a time of rapidly accelerating climate change and unprecedented and extremely destructive weather events, what we do know is dwarfed by what we don’t know, not just about the forest as it now is or as it once was, but what the future forest might yet be. We are just asking the agencies with responsibility for managing our publicly owned forests to exercise humility and follow the precautionary principle; and to do far more knowledge-based research before subjecting our scarce public forestland to further degradation, fragmentation and abuse in the name of “restoration.” Public forests provide so many public benefits that are in high demand, that are not readily available from our state’s abundant privately owned forests, and that do not require costly and intensive manipulation and perpetual resource extraction.

Our public forests are far more valuable, especially in a public land poor state like Indiana, for 

  • recreation and tourism; 
  • protecting historic and cultural resources; 
  • ensuring water quality, including protecting Patoka Lake, the cleanest municipal water supply in the State, providing water to 100,000 people; 
  • wildlife habitat and biodiversity, including rare, threatened, and endangered species; 
  • education and scientific research; 
  • climate moderation and carbon sequestration; 
  • scenic beauty, solitude and spiritual renewal; and 
  • giant majestic oaks and other hardwoods that can live upwards of 400 years and that provide both a link to our past and a bridge to our future if we would just let them grow 

Public forests provide so much more when left standing than when they are cut down for short term gain from resource extraction.

Among those in favor of greater protection for our publicly owned forests are the Commissioners of Orange, Crawford, Monroe and Brown Counties, The Paoli Town Board, the Orange County Farm Bureau, the Orange County Economic Development Partnership, the Crawford County Economic Development Corporation, the Milltown Economic Development Committee, Saving Historic Orange County, the Orange County Recycling Cooperative, the Paoli Chamber of Commerce, and the list keeps growing. To that list we add our names

For Protect Our Woods
Andy Mahler
Mary Beth Gibbons
Rick Hockett
Robbie Heinrich
Larry Gillen
Shane Murphy
Richard Owens

Jeanne Melchior
Kathy Klawitter

Sam Klawitter
Brian Blankenship
Wyatt Blankenship
Jeanette Haworth
Phyllis Haworth

For Indiana Forest Alliance
Jeff Stant
Steven Stewart
Michael Bean

Martha Crouch

David Haberman

for Save Hoosier National Forest
Michael Stewart
Sally Stewart
Frankie Stewart

Nathan Pate
Richard Martin
Jack Boswell

Robert Fener

Sherry Schmidt

For Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter
Amanda Shepherd
Julia Lowe
Marilyn Bauchat

Mark Nowotarski

Jean Webb

Richard Hill

Cecil Rich

Greg Grant

Bill Hayden

For Trail Riders of the Hoosier National Forest

Jesse Laws

Mary Jo Beckman

For Friends of the Ferdinand State Forest
Rock Emmert
Kris Lasher

Adrienne Highhouse

For Owen-Putnam Friends of the Forest
Lora Kemp

For Indiana United for our Future

Jennifer Christie

For Valley Watch
John Blair

For Heartwood
David Nickell
Corina Lang
Matt Peters

For Friends of Bell Smith Springs
Sam Stearns

For Shawnee Forest Defense
John Wallace

For Regional Association of Concerned Environmentalists

Mark Donham

Craig Rhodes

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