Readers may recall that the Campaign to Restore Jackson State Redwood Forest brought lawsuits, lobbied, and mobilized public support to change the mission of our 50,000-acre publicly owned redwood forest from industrial logging to restoration, research, education, and recreation. We began in 2000 and were able to bring a halt to logging in 2001 (still not restarted) and to obtain a vastly improved management plan that was approved in January 2008. As part of the agreement an independent advisory committee, the Jackson Advisory Group (JAG), was established and charged with recommending a long-term landscape plan and supporting changes in the management plan. The JAG has until January 2011 to complete its recommendations.
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Progress is now occurring, and in the most important area--the development of the long-term landscape plan. At issue in this plan are the potential conflicts between timber production and restoration, habitat, ecological health, and recreation.
The questions the Landscape Committee of the JAG has been addressing are:
1) How much of Jackson State will be devoted to different purposes or uses, ranging from preserves with no active management at one extreme to clearcuts at the other?
2) What types of harvesting practices (silvicultural methods) should be used to achieve the chosen desired future conditions for the various parts of the forest?
The existing management plan proposes to manage the forest for a wide range of purposes and with a wide range of harvest techniques, with the latter very much representative of the practices common in industrial and smaller commercial forests. Only a small portion of the forest is to be restored to old-growth conditions.
The Landscape Committee appears now to be moving toward agreement (but definitely not yet there) on a very different approach to determining how to manage the forest. Rather than thinking about the forest in terms of timber potential, the committee is proposing to manage the forest in ways that would reflect and emulate the natural processes that would take place in the forest in the absence of man.
"Natural Forestry" is an idea that may go far toward solving the conflict between restoration and timber production. The term was coined and defined by Mike Jani, the chief operating officer of Mendocino and Humboldt Redwood Companies, and a member of the JAG. "Natural Forestry is managing the forest to emulate natural forest processes," he says.
A key aspect of the natural processes of redwood forests is that the trees grow to 500 years and upwards. Once this is accepted as a goal of forest management, it requires that current operations occur within the context of moving the forest to old-growth conditions.
Key elements of Natural Forestry, as I envision it, are that harvest operations would be designed to continually grow stands to higher volumes and larger tree diameters; would allow some portion of trees to grow indefinitely larger; and timber harvesting would continue throughout the time. As the stands grow for hundreds of years, they will increasingly resemble natural old-growth stands.
Investigation of the economic and practical feasibility of Natural Forestry is just beginning, so it is premature to make any judgments. But the concept is instantly appealing to almost everyone who hears it. We get our old growth, healthy forests, and timber too. What could be better?
What has happened already is marvelous. Just raising the idea of Natural Forestry and putting it out into the broader forest community has ignited a wonderful conversation among forestry experts throughout the redwood region. Instead of decades, we are now thinking in terms of millennia--as we should when thinking about redwood forests.
I will be continually posting conversations and information on Natural Forestry, including this article, at Jackson Forum (http://jacksonforum.org), where you can read them easily and post your own ideas and comments. You can read all the email communications, including attachments, as soon as they are distributed at the online archive of JAG communications (http://groups.google.com/group/jackson-advisory-group/).
There is an enormous amount of interest and energy in the forestry community to contribute to planning the future of Jackson Forest. The involvement of the larger forestry community will help ensure that decisions made by the Jackson Advisory Group reflect the best available knowledge and thought. This is good news.
For more information: www.jacksonforest.org
Vince Taylor is a member of the Jackson Advisory Group, but all views expressed herein are solely his own.
© 2008 Vince Taylor. All rights reserved.