Page 18 RAIN May/June 1984 A Timely Prescription for Healthy Forests As we go to press, the big news in the Northwest is that a federal judge has banned all herbicide spraying on national forest lands in Oregon and Washington and told top officials of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service in no uncertain terms that they had better get serious about citizen concerns over herbicide safety or he will make them “spend their spring in jail." The order comes as a result ofa lawsuit filed by the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, the Oregon Environmental Council, and the Audubon Society of Portland. The ruling took the BLM, the Forest Service, and the timber industry by surprise. They're looking around desperately for something to tell the judge (about how they're going to manage the forests without those nasty chemicals) and for something to tell the wood-products industries (about how they're still going to be able to harvest trees without those precious chemicals). They're chanting out statements about reduced harvests, lost revenues, even wasted research—they're afraid that their new “genetically superior" conifer trees won't make it without herbicides to keep down competing species. They're also doing their best to scare the public into believing that herbicides are God's gift to the forest economy. Not long ago, these tactics might have worked. Not any more. Herbicide opponents and others concerned with sustainable forestry have been searching for years for a simple, logical, economical, and ecological approach to forest management. Now, when even the timber industry has been forced to ask the right questions, a book with answers on sustainable forestry has just been published. It's called The Forest Farmer's Handbook; A Guide to Natural Selection Forest Management (by Orville Camp, 1984, 72pp., $6.95 from: Sky River Press, 236 East Main, Ashland, OR 97520; 503l488r 0645). Camp's Forest Farm in Selma, Oregon, has become a model of successful “all-age, all-species" management. Working with former RAIN editor Mark Roseland, Camp has written a book oriented toward small woodland owners everi/where who want to make a livijig from their forest land, and so it addresses both the needs of the forest and the needs of the forest farmer. It's the kind of book you can enjoy reading by the woodstove in the evening, then pack along with your chainsaw in the morning. Filled with photographs and practical information, it covers everything from access roads and equipment to taxes and landuseplanning. The following excerpt describes natural selection harvesting and addresses the implications ofpracticing Natural Selection Forest Management on public lands. Let's hope it gets to the judge. —Mark Roseland by Orville Camp The key to Natural Selection Forest Management is natural selection harvesting. Natural selection harvesting is the continuous process of thinning and removing the Sitka Spruce Alpine Larch weaker members of a population—as selected by nature—to allow adequate territories for the roots and crowns of the stronger dominants. The dominant members are left to survive and reproduce. When the dominants reach the end of their natural life, they will then become the weaker members and so in turn will be replaced by a new generation of dominants. Sometimes the canopy can be opened some to produce a climate suitable for seedlings. And so the cycle is repeated. .. . If Natural Selection Forest Management were widely adopted it could change our society's concepts of forests and forest management. We could learn to "see the forest through the trees." The diversity of the forest ecosystem is the key to the stability of the forest and could be the key to the stability of the timber industry as well. The implications of natural selection harvesting and other ecological methods of forest farming go beyond one's private business. Our public forests are in need of better management practices than those that industrial and public foresters have used in the past. Many of those forestry methods still common with the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service are destructive to the forest environment and therefore to an economy centered around timber and the forests. Some of these practices along with their objections and remedies are listed below: (1) Monoculturally based operations treat the forest as a tree farm, following an agricultural model. At harvest, the trees may be cut down like a crop of hay. By the time the area is replanted, a year or more of growing time has been lost, and many more years will pass before it can produce its potential yield of fibre per acre. However, we know that there is less
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