SCI NC

ECHN • LO Y•ME ICINE

Just recently scientists have begunto recognize that Washington andOregon are wrestling with the fateof a unique ecosystem: the ancient

by Bill DietrichTimes staff reporter

t has been suggested that familiaritybreeds contempt. So perhaps it wasthe once-endless, dark blanket ofNorthwest old-growth forest that ledsome residents to take such trees forgranted and some foresters to dispar-age the dank, choked stands as "deca-dent."

Certainly the old-growth timber is-sue can baffle the public. Woods are woods, aren'tthey? Clear-cuts are regrown. What's so specialabout "ancient forests?"

Only recently have scientists begun to recognizethat Washington and Oregon are now wrestlingwith the future of a unique ecosystem.

"This is the richest coniferous forest in theworld," said Chris Maser, an Oregon forestryconsultant and outspoken critic of present-dayforestry practices. "The trees live longer here andgrow larger than in anyplace else on the planet."

In his new book, "Fragile Majesty," authorKeith Ervin estimates that the biomass of North-west old-growth forests — the total volume ofstanding and downed wood — is greater than anyother place on Earth, triple that of tropical rainforests.

Elliott Norse of the Wilderness Society hascalled such conifers "the whales of the forests."

A single Douglas fir, for example, can grow ashigh as a 30-story building, fatten to 10 feet in

diameter, and bear somany needles that theirsurface area equals anacre. The tree can stand750 years — some inMount Rainier NationalPark are more than 1,000years old — and evenafter falling persist as adecaying log for 300years more, serving as ahome to different species

ENVIR0NMENT•

DISCOVERY

old-growth forests. Modern treefarms are far different fromnature's original design; whetherthis matters is a divisive issue.

...The biomassof Northwestold-growthforests ... isgreater thanany other place

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SceneSECTION CMonday, October 2, 1989The Seattle Times

Classified ads c 9.10Television C 4Comics C 6, 7

Musicalworks arechallengeto the ears■ Works by Bolcom, Bernstein, Chihara andCopland in the American Music Series, theSeattle Symphony conducted by GerardSchwarz, Saturday night at the Moore Theater.

by Karen MathiesonSpecial to The Times

he term "theatrical" covers many stagesin the expression of human self-aware-ness — from the ancient forms of dance

and acting before a live audience to ourcentury's fascination with flickering shadowson a screen.

Just about every context of the theatricalcould apply to the music Gerard Schwarzprogrammed on the Seattle Symphony's firstAmerican Music concert of the season. Yet,despite the trappings of such titles as "Comme-dia for (almost) 18th-Century Orchestra" and"Music for the Theatre," the composers hadplanned the action entirely for the ears.

The program began with a concertoverture revealing the sly wit of WilliamBolcom, a Seattle native long resident inMichigan. Antiphonally placed horns were aclue to the music's nature even before Schwarzgave the downbeat: Bolcom's "Commedia" is astudy in contrasts.

Offstage strings interject a soothing melodyinto a scurry of motifs among the body of thesmall orchestra. Wails from an oboe reed andshort upward runs reminiscent of Papageno'sflute take turns with the slow alternatingappearance of the widely separated horns. Theorchestra handled these and other juxtaposi-tions with the aplomb of quick-change artists.

The mood was more sustained, andfull of expressiveness, in the "Serenade" (afterPlato's "Symposium") by Leonard Bernstein.The five-movement work features a solo violinthroughout, a part taken on Saturday night byJun Liang Du, who is among the youngest ofthe symphony's players.

Following the discourses of Phaedrus, Aris-tophanes and others, the "Serenade" exploresaspects of love from the purely physical to thespiritual. Du provided a sensitive narrativevoice from the beginning, and picked upstrength in his delivery as the piece expanded.A duet passage with cellist Susan Williams inthe fourth movement, an Adagio, had depthand warmth.

Bernstein's 1954 score for strings withpercussion — everything from glockenspiel to

- years more, serving as ahome to different species

iin all phases of its exis-tence.

The timber industryhas cut this millennial lifespan to a rotation of 50years. Trees are clear-cut,then cut, burned, replant-

ed with seedlings of the same age, sprayed,fertilized, thinned, pruned and harvested.

The result is an efficient producer of wood, but aforest far different biologically than the originalecosystem.

Whether this matters is an issue splittingyounger foresters from older traditionalists, andpublic-lands foresters from their private-industrycounterparts.

At a recent scientific conference in Newport,Ore., there seemed almost to be a generationaldivide. Baby-boomers with wildlife degrees, manyof them women, have flooded a profession oncedominated by male engineers and logging special-ists.

When Jerry Franklin of the University ofWashington told the crowd, "Thank God wehaven't been able to do all that we thought wewanted to do with managed forests" by wiping outmore species with the creation of tree farms, amajority applauded.

But others defiantly clapped when Keith Mun-son of International Paper Co. derided the newresearch. He called it "popular science, a lot ofspeculation based on very little fact."

I .Clear-cuts tend to be small, 60-80 acres, but frequent.

Wood waste is burned, either by yarding logs andbranches into piles or burning entire clear-cut.

Roads extend through most of the forest to allowclear-cuts to be spaced out

4. With new trees planted at the same time, each stand is asingle species of the same age.

5.The remaining forest is divided into small clumps,fragmenting the ecosystem.

&Industrial forestry uses air-sprayed herbicides andfertilizers to encourage growth.

Timber traditionalists with the Bureau of LandManagement referred to the spotted owl threatenedby logging as "the S-word.'

And Jim Rochelle, wildlife manager for theWeyerhaeuser Co., argued that it is too early in theresearch to embrace Franklin's call for a newforestry that preserves old-growth characteristics tosave plants and wildlife. "Let's make sure we haveconclusive information," he argued.

To many professional foresters, old-growthtrees are decadent. Their growth rate falls offsharply after the first two or three centuries, and

eventually they rot from within faster than theygrow without.

For decades now, these foresters have believedwe can improve on nature with younger, morevigorous trees.

"I regard the Northwest forest as one that canproduce all objectives and still be harvested," said

Please see FOREST on C 2■ Discovery Digest, C 3

any other placeon Earth, triplethat of tropicalrain forests.

44,F5/

1 Clear-cuts are clustered, some trees are left at therate of 6-12 to the acre, and dead snags remain ashabitat.

2. Woody debris is left to rot into the ground and serveas habitat.With logging concentrated in certain drainages, othervalleys remain roadless.

As the forest regrows, it is a mix of different age trees andincludes hardwoods.

Large blocks of uncut forest remain, providing habitat forspecies needing a lot of room.

Some hardwoods remain to naturally add nitrogenfertilizer to the ground.

Ed Walker / Seattle Times

by Hill WilliamsTimes science reporter

Denny Hill, one ofSeattle's original sevenhills, has been gone formore than half a century,

DISCOVERY leveled to make way forexpansion of the down-town business district.

But the old hill, a partof Seattle's history, appar-

ently lives on. Geologists studying thebottom of Puget Sound have found amassive shoal off the central waterfrontthat they believe is what's left of DennyHill.

Discovery of the shoal was an offshootof a U.S. Geological Survey study of thepossibility of underwater slides that couldendanger structures along the shoreline.

Denny Hill, which once loomed northof Pine Street, was sluiced and dug awayin a series of projects ending in 1931,leaving the area known as the DennyRegrade, which includes today's SeattleCenter.

Much of the material was loaded onbarges, dumped in Elliott Bay and forgot-ten. But Mark Holmes, a member of theGeological Survey stationed at the Univer-sity of Washington, is convinced thesurvey has turned up the final restingplace of the legendary Denny Hill.

Holmes said the underwater ridge liesabout 500 feet off Piers 65 through 69, isabout 4,000 feet long and 1,500 feet wideand rises 120 feet from the bottom to

1J,1,4001■J•11

Please see MUSIC on C 5

PNB `Firebird'is beautifulbut empty inchoreographyby Alexandra TomalonisThe Washington Post

W

ASHINGTON — Once upon a timethere was a wonderful ballet called"The Firebird." It was choreographed

by Michel Fokine and was one of the hits of theDiaghilev Ballets Russes' second Paris seasonin 1910. Its story is an ersatz Russian fairy tale— a blend of the highlights, as it were, of realRussian fairy tales — and it exemplified thecolor and exoticism that were a revelation toaudiences of the day. It was also a near-perfectexample of how to tell a story in ballet.

Fokine's version to the beautiful Stravinskyscore was very, very popular and still existsbut, for reasons best understood by contempo-rary choreographers, is hardly ever staged.Instead, the great, near-great and not-so-greathave had a go at the "Firebird," with verysmall success. Even Balanchine's three at-tempts have been stored away. But every balletcompany seems to need a "Firebird," and KentStowell, co-artistic director of the PacificNorthwest Ballet, has choreographed a ver-sion, which received its world premiere lastnight at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

It's a very pretty "Firebird." Ming Cho Lee'sdelicate, pastel sets, with a spare, silver treeand a tiny white castle with blue onion domes,have a picture-book quality, as do the prettypastel costumes of Theoni Aldredge. The stageis always aswirl with pink and baby blue andwhite, even when the monsters dance, and thewedding clothes in the finale are gloriouslyrich — white upon white, layers of dresses andpetticoats and embroidered detail. It's a safestorybook, the kind that wouldn't scare theyoungest child for a minute.

But even the prettiest sets and costumes,and the best efforts of a splendid cast, can'tdeflect attention from the fact that there'snothing much going on choreographically.More importantly, the sets and costumesremain illustrations for a story that neverunfolds. It's not clear that Prince Ivan hascaptured the Firebird (he keeps jumping overher leg during their duet). The Firebird'sfeather is stolen, snatched from her turban byIvan, not given by her in exchange for herfreedom. Instead of the Firebird's lulling themonsters to sleep, she wakes up the dreaming

Please see PNB on C 5

INSIDE

Auctions turn to river cruising and Pon-cho kicks off its season with a glitzyparty, in Seattle Scene.

Scientists find old Denny Hill at bottom of Puget Sound

Seattle Times fileIn 1931, dirt sluiced off Denny Hill to form the Regrade is loaded onto barges for dumping into Puget Sound.Please see DENNY on C 2

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FORESTcontinued from C 1

Mike Newton, a forestry professorat Oregon State. "Almost anyhabitat can be improved."

Besides, "We can't afford togrow 450-year-old trees," pointedout Tom Terry, manager of West-ern forestry research for Weyer-haeuser. "We can't make a returnon our investment."

Franklin agrees more researchneeds to be done, but says if thereis to be a delay to complete it, itshould be a delay in cutting downthe centuries-old trees, not a delayin modifying logging. "Public for-ests are becoming the court of lastresort to solve all the (log supply)problems caused by private landsbeing overcut," he complained.

Maser, the consultant, chargesthat current forestry is gamblingwith the Northwest's future eco-logical health, running the risk ofsoil exhaustion and genetic vulner-ability.

"Forests run on rotting wood,"said Maser. Tree farms, he argued,don't leave much. "If we're goingto reinvest, we have to leave someof the dead wood out there."

Experience in Europe and Chi-na, he contended, shows that in-tensive forestry can't be sustained.

"The magic number of repeatedrotations around the world forsome reason seems to be three.You won't see the result of a forestthat has deteriorated for a century,and then when it collapses it willbe too late to do anything aboutit."

Other old-growth champions,such as Franklin, don't believeNorthwest forest soil will be ex-hausted after just three crops, butthey do agree the potential of soildepletion deserves more studythan it has gotten.

And they take issue with theassumption that all Northwest for-ests should be converted to man-

* aged stands to maximize timberproduction.

"There's no question theamount of old growth is getting toa critical minimum," said MartyRaphael, director of the ForestService research lab near Tum-water.

"As a biologist, I have a senseof crisis," said Franklin.

Greg Gilbert / Seattle TimesMotorists traveling along 1-90 through Snoqualmie Pass have this view of a squared-off clear-cut

New pattern ofclear-cuttingto be explored

A 12,000-acre test sitein Oregon's WillametteNational Forest WILLAMETTE

NATIONAL FORESTTEST AREA

^ Areas of clear-cutAreas of forest

At presentExisting clear-cut harvest

in a 12,000-acre area ofthe Willamette National

Forest, as of 1988.

C 2 The Seattle Times Monday, October 2, 1989

Ow-GROWill MOSAICCurrent forestry methods under review

ONLY A REMNANTf !ci growth on private and state

makes us think we have to back offour philosophy."

Researchers have found othervalues in old-growth forests asopposed to tree farms. Severalspecies of woodpecker, for exam-ple, depend on the standing deadtrees, called snags, that are re-moved during a clear-cut.

Woodpeckers nest in cavitiesthey peck into trees. They can'tuse young healthy trees, Raphaelexplained, because the lack of rotmakes the excavation too hard.Sap on a young tree will gumwoodpecker feathers, and carpen-ter ants and similar food can't befound in them.

Most plantation trees are alsotoo small in diameter. And the lackof woodpecker habitat spells prob-lems for other birds that nest inabandoned woodpecker cavities,species ranging from house wrensto bluebirds.

Snags provide hunting lookoutsfor predators such as hawks andowls. The canopy itself shelters thesquirrels, which are the owl's mainfood. Similarly, two weasel-likepredators — martens and fishers

just a choice between logs andtrees. He believes existing loggingpatterns can be modified to satisfyboth concerns.

Simply setting aside more oldgrowth as a de facto wildernessarea is not enough, Franklin ar-gued. "It's not something we cando simply by drawing lines on amap and leaving areas alone," hesaid. "It is a hell of a lot morecomplicated."

CHANGING THE PATTERN

proposed at the Newport con-ference was preservation of

some old growth. But with it cameproposals to change the pattern ofclear-cuts in the rest to reducefragmenting, and modifying North-west logging methods to give sec-ond-growth forests old-growthcharacteristics.

This "new forestry" wouldchange the look of the nationalforests. At present, clear-cuts arescattered like a shotgun blastthrough a wide swath of forest,supposedly to lessen their cumula-tive impact by separating themwith standing blocks of trees. Theresult is the patchwork pattern sovisible from an airplane.

Now the Forest Service is con-sidering clustering clear-cuts inone drainage and leaving an adja-cent drainage alone. The agencywould connect larger blocks ofsurviving old growth with corri-dors of uncut trees, like hallwaysbetween rooms. This would enableanimals to move and give themenough contiguous acreage tothrive.

Other advantages, scientiststheorize, is that there would bemore usable forest available forrecreation. And concentratingclear-cuts in one part of the forestwould reduce the need for loggingroads, saving money. The mileageof logging roads in the nationalforests of Washington and Oregonalone, scientists were told in New-port, is double that of the interstatehighway system.

The new forestry would alsoreduce the amount of old growthexposed on its edges to wind,drought, heat and cold. In oneexperimental 12,000-acre block inOregon, estimated Miles Hem-strom of Willamette National For-est, simply clustering clear-cutscould reduce the amount of edgefrom 135 miles to 95 miles.

Clear-cuts themselves wouldchange under the new forestry.Douglas fir, the preferred timberspecies, grows best in full sunlightand, accordingly, the forest is

Scientistsuncover oldDenny Hillin soundDENNYcontinued from C 1

within 50 feet of the water'ssurface.

In the last phase of the regrad-ing, conveyor belts took materialalong Battery Street to the water-front, where it was loaded ontobarges. But records are unclear asto where in the bay the materialwas dumped.

"The material was piled so highthat ships started running agroundin 1931 and they had to dredge thetop off the ridge," Holmes report-ed at the recent Oceans '89 confer-ence here.

Bottom profiles show the sum-mit of the ridge is flat, indicatingwhere the dredging scooped offthe top, he said.

Holmes and other investigatorscalculated the ridge contains about6 million cubic yards of material,only about two-thirds of the totalremoved in the Denny regrading.They speculated that some of themissing material may have slidinto deeper water.

"The slopes of the ridge are sosteep they verge on instability,"Holmes said. "They apparently arethe scene of earthquake-triggeredslumps" into deeper water.

In fact, the researchers foundplaces where mud flows from theshoal had eroded canyons 20 to 40feet deep in the bottom of ElliottBay.

The discovery of Denny Hill's

111111111111111111■1111M1111■1

' That's anincredible ditch

out there. 'Mark Holmes

final resting place was part of aGeological Survey study of thesediment accumulations in PugetSound since the last ice age. Thestudy is showing that nature'swork can make the earth-movingefforts of humans seem puny.

"People think of Puget Sound(a little deeper than 600 feet offSeattle) as a glacial scour feature,"Holmes said. "But the actual scourcontours (of the most recent iceadvance) are as much as 1,700 feetbelow the hnttnm of the cnnnti

By the year 2018What the forest wouldlook like in 30 yearsusing the currentclear-cut pattern.

Minimumfragmentation

The proposed new approachconcentrates clear-cuts,leaving larger areas with

standing forest for habitat.

(Shaded areas in A and B equal in volume.)

(7,000 acres will be harvested by the year 2018.)

Ed Walker / Seattle Times

Denny Regrade revisited

advance) are as much as 1,700 feetbelow the bottom of the sound.

"That's an incredible ditch outthere."

The researchers used low-fre-quency sound signals to probebeneath the sound's bottom toreconstruct events since the retreatabout 13,000 years ago of the lobeof ice that scooped out PugetSound.

The bottom layer, about 450feet thick, is composed of boulder-studded debris that accumulated atthe foot of the ice sheet. On top ofthat is a 600-foot-thick layer of finesediment, deposited by a huge lakethat formed in front of the retreat-ing glacier.

The upper deposit, a 600-foot-thick layer that forms today's floorof the sound, represents sedimentthat has been dropped since the iceretreated far enough to the northto permit ocean water to reoccupyPuget Sound after an absence ofmany thousands of years.

And that's not the wholePuget Sound story. Beneath theditch scooped out by the last icelobe lies another 1,350 feet ofsediment left by a previous glacialadvance.

That means Puget Sound, the"incredible ditch," measures morethan 3,600 feet from water surfaceto bedrock.

The last glacial advance leftsteep slopes beneath Puget Sound,just as it did on some of Seattle'shills. The possible hazard posed byhuge slides down those underwat-er slopes, perhaps triggered byearthquakes, is one focus of theGeological Survey study.

"One of the mechanisms we'vediscovered for transporting largevolumes of material from shallowto deeper water are these largeslumps which have occurred fre-quently in the past and apparentlycan still occur today," Holmessaid.

A big one could cause damag-ing waves or, if it began nearshore, undercut structures alongthe shoreline.

Working with Holmes on thestudy of the Denny Regrade mate-rial were Richard Sylwester, aSeattle engineer, and Robert ,Loeffler of Santa Ana, Calif.

Lisa Remillard / Seattle Times

Id growth on private and stateland is for all practical pur-

poses gone, except for a remnantof 50,000 acres of state land on theOlympic Peninsula.

Weyerhaeuser, for example,has cut at least 95 percent of theold-growth timber on its lands.Two-thirds of its tree harvest lastyear were trees less than 60 yearsold. Plum Creek Timber, a latestarter that is harvesting formerBurlington Northern railroadlands, has cut more than half itsold growth since the early 1980sand hopes to remove the restwithin a decade.

Of the six big national forests inwestern Washington and westernOregon, the Forest Service initiallyestimated there were 2.5 millionacres of old growth left. But amore detailed analysis by the Wil-derness Society, an environmentalgroup, showed only 1.1 millionacres.

Worse, the organization's studyshowed the forest has been sofragmented by existing clear-cutsthat 439,000 acres of that were inpatches fewer than 80 acres ornear roads. And even that over-states the survival of the "greencathedrals." The Wilderness Soci-ety found only 340,000 acres inWashington and Oregon that hadthe classic big trees more than 300years old.

Forest Service biologists nowbelieve the Wilderness Society fig-ures are the most reliable avail-able, but the agency has launcheda crash satellite-mapping programof its own to try to get even betternumbers by next spring.

THE ROLE OF VOLES

So? What good is old growth?

Consider mouse droppings.Research into old-growth for-

ests has turned up a never suspect-ed plant-animal cycle in which treevoles — mice that spend most oftheir lives in the tree canopy —play a key part.

It seems that tree roots hererely on a fungus called mycorrhi-zae, which live on the root hairs, tohelp extract nutrients from thesoil. Mycorrhizal fungus colonieseventually form truffles. The volesdescend to dig and eat the truffles.As the mice scurry on they excrete,and their scattering of depositscontain undigested mycorrhizalspores.

Thus the mice distribute a fun-gus essential to conifer growth.

Now the kicker: Many of thevoles, scientists have learned,seem to thrive only in old-growthforests. "It may be the eliminationof old growth and the removal ofsmall animals will affect the dis-persal of mycorrhizal fungi," saidthe Forest Service's Raphael, "andif you don't have fungi, the treeswon't grow."

Nonsense, said Weyerhaeuser'sTerry. Tree nurseries using fumi-gated, sterilized soil are swiftlyrecolonized with mycorrhizae withno help from endangered mice, hesaid. "Most spores are spread bythe wind. Nothing we've seen

predators — martens and fishers— bound from tree to tree in

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In fact, much of thelit of an old-growthforest plays out farover the heads ofhuman hikers, littleseen or suspected.

search of prey in an old-growtharea equal to or greater than thatrequired by owls.

In fact, much of the life of anold-growth forest plays out farover the heads of human hikers,little seen or suspected.

The very rot that drives indus-trial foresters crazy is heaven notonly to cavity-nesting birds andbats, but to dozens of other spe-cies. Insects thrive in the decay,and the wet downed logs are hometo secretive salamanders. The liz-ard-shaped amphibians are far lessfamous than spotted owls, butsome people get quite excitedabout them: Amherst, Mass., hasconstructed salamander tunnelsunder a road to help them migratefrom hibernation burrows toponds.

Jeff Peterson, a forester atOregon State, has concluded thatleaving snags in a tree stand willincrease bird numbers by 30 per-cent. He said 70 percent of North-west amphibians and 85 percent ofNorthwest reptiles need downedlogs — largely absent from treefarms — to survive.

A COMPLEX SYSTEM

Alot of what drives old-growth

ecosystems is only dimly un-derstood. "The NASA space pro-gram is simpler than a single acreof old-growth forest," asserted Ma-ser. "We've got to maintainenough of its blueprint to learn. Ifwe don't have a few healthypatients (groves of natural trees)how can we diagnose diseasedones?" such as tree plantations.

Nalini Nadkarni, a UW gra-duate student, used mountain-climbing gear to get up into thecanopy of the Olympic rain forest.What she found was a unique you-scratch-my-back ecological sys-tem: Deciduous trees in old-growthforests support huge mats ofmosses far off the forest floor thathave the ability to take nitrogenfrom the atmosphere and store it.The maples, in turn, sink roots intothe moss for this natural fertilizer.

Franklin has found that oldgrowth creates a beneficial micro-climate important to scores ofspecies that tree plantations can'tmatch. The dense forest covertends to be cooler in summer andwarmer in winter. Critters rangingfrom elk to insects take advantageof the differential.

VALUABLE GENE POOL

With deforestation in the trop-ics wiping out an estimated

100 species per day, scientists areconcerned about similar possibili-ties here.

"It is now becoming increasing-ly clear that loss of biologicaldiversity will undermine society'sability to achieve full technologicalability," argued Larry Irwin. amember of the pulp and paperindustry's National Council for Airand Stream Improvements.

As examples of the benefits ofspecies preservation, Irwin cited aCentral American corn strain thatsaved U.S. agriculture $1 billion byproving effective against a corndisease. And the trailing feathersof owl wings have been studied byengineers for tips on how to abateaircraft noise.

A classic case cited by environ-mentalists is that of Jay Hair,director of the National WildlifeFederation. Hair said that in thefall of 1984 his 5-year-old daugh-ter, Whitney, was diagnosed withhaving a rare and fatal case ofcancer called T-cell lymphoma.She was treated with an experi-mental drug taken from the rosyperiwinkle, a flower in Madagas-car. Today, Whitney is cured. Andthe plant that led to the drug isnow extinct, lost in logging thathas consumed 80 percent of Mada-gascar's tropical forests.

Closer to home, the bark of theNorthwest's Pacific yew tree,which thrives in the shade of old-growth forests, is being studied bythe National Institutes of Health asa treatment for slow-growing can-cerous tumors.

Hair said 40 percent of thedrugs we use originally came fromnative plants. "Just at the time weare learning so much about geneticdiversity," he said. "we are de-stroying entire gene pools."

Franklin adds that the old

growth preserved in high-elevationparks and wilderness areas is aninsufficient substitute for the low-er-elevation, more species-produc-tive forests being cut. "Our wilder-ness system has done an abomina-ble job of protecting old-growthforests," he said.

Industry remains skeptical ofscientists' tentative conclusions.Weyerhaeuser's Terry cites thecase of logs in streams. Initially,

' timber companies were told toclear debris out of streams becausebiologists feared that fish passageswould be blocked. Now they aretold to leave organic debris, be-cause it creates pools, shade, andbreaks up the current and erosivepower of steep creeks.

He also disagrees with the needto leave a lot of rotting wood."Look at a clear-cut," he said."There's a tremendous amount ofdebris out there, tons and tons.Pre-commercial thinning (in whichsome trees in a stand are felled togive their companions more roomto grow) leaves even more. It's anargument used by people whowant to protect old growth andaren't looking at managed stands."

Research into all these ques-tions is still underfunded, saidGeorge Brown, associate dean forforestry research at Oregon State."There are lots of interesting bitsand pieces of information abouthow systems perform," he said,"but we haven't been able to putthem together. We're under-invest-ed in the research we're called onto do, far, far less well fundedthan, for example, the agricultureindustry."

One 1985 study by the NationalScience Foundation showed thatwhile American industry as awhole invested 3.8 percent of itsnet sales in research, forestrydevoted only 0.7 percent.

Franklin said the political splitbetween the timber industry andenvironmentalists is unfortunatebecause the old-growth issue is not

4-1 ill a44" J1./11116111.

iand, accordingly, the forest istypically cut bare. Clear-cuts areoften subsequently burned to re-duce litter and make it easier toplant new trees. Herbicides areused to keep weedy species downuntil the young Douglas firs gainthe necessary height to compete,and fertilizers speed growth.

The reformers would changethat. Instead of cutting every tree,they would leave six to a dozenlive trees per acre to give wildlifedifferent-aged trees to chooseamong as the forest regrows. Theywould leave some standing deadtrees to provide homes for insectsand birds. They might leave somedeciduous trees to help infuse thesoil with nitrogen. They wouldleave all the woody debris, burningnone of it. They would reduce oreliminate the use of herbicides andfertilizers.

There are doubts. Can Douglasfir be regrown successfully onsuch a half-shaded cut? Won't theuncut trees, left unprotected, beblown down anyway? And aresuch drastic steps needed to en-sure forest diversity? So manycompeting species invade treeplantations anyway, contendedTerry, that, "We (Weyerhaeuser)couldn't get a pure Douglas firstand if we tried."

Leaving snags is another dumbidea, he said. "People get killedthat way. The classic way to getkilled in the woods is by a fallingsnag."

Other ideas have surfaced. Oneis to devote part of the nationalforests to high-yield, intensive for-estry such as practiced on industri-al tree farms in order to leaveother parts alone. Another is toadd to the national forests privatelands, now poorly managed, whichcould be devoted to wood produc-tion. Still another is to seed andclose some logging roads.

PUSHING THE DEBATE

Some change is already underway. A Timber, Fish, Wildlife

agreement between environmen-talists and timber companies isencouraging the leaving of stripsof trees along streams or patcheson the crowns of hills around treefarms. Under way are a series ofstudies to see if these methods areworking.

But scientists are pushing thedebate beyond that, to the value ofan ecosystem with global politicalsignificance.

William Reilly, the administra-tor of the Environmental Protec-tion Agency, remarked recentlythat a Brazilian foreign ministersaid Americans had no right tocriticize Brazil's deforestation ofthe Amazon given the old-growthlogging they were allowing in thePacific Northwest.

"It is a magnificent ecosystem,"said Dr. Charles Meslow of OregonState University. "It is somewhatpresumptuous of us as humans tolay waste to something that washere 200 years before we were anation."

"We are practicing the politicsof extinction," said Maser.