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About Capital press. (Salem, OR) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 29, 2017)
6 CapitalPress.com Editorials are written by or approved by members of the Capital Press Editorial Board. September 29, 2017 All other commentary pieces are the opinions of the authors but not necessarily this newspaper. Opinion O UR V IEW Editorial Board Editor & Publisher Managing Editor Joe Beach Carl Sampson opinions@capitalpress.com Online: www.capitalpress.com/opinion The curse of the Yellow Dragon T he hunt has all the makings of a Sherlock Holmes detective story, complete with an exotic villain and a victim desperately in need of rescue. At risk is U.S. citrus fruit production, worth $3.4 billion a year. Florida’s citrus production alone is worth $1 billion, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. As a whole, Florida’s entire citrus industry, including growers, processors and packers, generates $9 billion a year. But something has been killing citrus trees in Florida. The number of orange trees has dropped 25 percent, from 80 million to 60 million, in the past nine years. The number of grapefruit trees has dropped 64 percent, from 14 million to 5 million, according to USDA. Only a few years ago, Florida had nearly 1 million acres of citrus groves. Today, it has less than half that, 410,700 acres. The villain is huanglongbing — Chinese for “yellow dragon disease.” Discovered nearly 100 years ago in China, the disease has been decimating the citrus industry around the globe. Since its discovery, the bacterial disease has killed more than 100 million citrus trees in 40 countries. Yellow dragon disease is also known as citrus greening and by the initials HLB. There exists no cure for yellow dragon disease. It is spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny insect that sucks the sap of an infected tree and infects the next tree it visits. Yellow dragon disease fi rst causes the leaves to turn yellow. Then the fruit turns greenish yellow and becomes unmarketable. Finally, within a few years, the tree dies. Scientifi c detectives are using high-tech tools to gain an understanding of the yellow dragon and the psyllids that have spread it to 15 states or U.S. territories, File Photo including Florida and California, the nation’s largest An orange infected with citrus fruit producers. huanglongbing — yellow At the University of Florida, Clemson dragon disease. University, Texas A&M University and the USDA Agricultural Research Service, scientists are undertaking a computerized search for varieties of citrus trees most resistant to the disease. They hope to use the information to breed varieties of trees resistant to yellow dragon disease. This narrative will sound familiar to hazelnut growers in Oregon. Eastern fi lbert blight took hold in the hazelnut trees of Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the mid-1980s. The fungal disease spread through the valley despite farmers’ efforts to control it using fungicides and by pruning and removing infected trees. Shawn Mehlenbacher, a Oregon State University hazelnut breeder, led the successful effort to study hazelnut trees from around the world and develop new varieties that are resistant to EFB. His is one of the great success stories of OSU agricultural research. “Without the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station the hazelnut industry would disappear,” he said in a 2014 university video. “But because we have new resistant varieties it is expanding, not disappearing.” Oregon’s hazelnut industry, which produces 99 percent of the nation’s crop, continues to expand. Today, Oregon farmers grow hazelnuts on 37,000 acres — and plant more EFB-resistant trees each year. This success — the ability of scientifi c research to overcome a seemingly insurmountable problem — should be encouraging to citrus growers in Florida, California and elsewhere. With adequate resources — hundreds of millions of dollars have already been funneled into research from the industry and the state and federal governments — scientists will be able to breed citrus trees resistant to huanglongbing. They will slay the yellow dragon forever. The villain is huanglongbing — Chinese for “yellow dragon disease.” Discovered nearly 100 years ago in China, the disease has been decimating the citrus industry around the globe. Readers’ views Purpose of forest management changes Growing up in Cascade Locks, Ore., in the 1940s I would listen with awe to the many stories about wildfi res told by my family and older friends. Stories of fi re jump- ing the Columbia, people covering their shingle roofs with burlap soaked with water to protect their homes from cinders, people riding logging trains out of the mountains while trestles were on fi re, etc. Scary stuff. But, they made me believe that fi re preven- tion was very important. In the 1950s and 1960s I spent summers working for the Forest Service. Fire pre- vention was the No. 1 prior- ity for the Columbia Gorge Ranger District and every- thing we did was done with the understanding we were doing this to better protect our forests. We opened trails that had not been worked since the CCC boys left at the begin- ning of World War II. We opened and built roads to provide quicker access for fi re suppression and for po- tential fi re breaks. In the Bull Run watershed small pockets of old dying trees were clear cut to reduce the potential for lightning-caused fi res. These small managed clear cuts were done to mimic the ideal forest environment one would hope for in the event of a fi re. The roads to these clear cuts were planned to provide for fi re protection with their construction being done by the logging companies. Funds from the sale of the logs would go into the federal cof- fers to be distributed back to the counties, schools, roads, etc. Everything was done to prevent mega fi res. This appeared to me to be a win-win deal. Fire hazard trees were being removed, roads were being constructed for quick access and funding was being provided for neces- sary services. Then the emphasis began to shift. Trails were for rec- reation, clear cuts were ugly, fi re could be beautiful if you would just wait a hundred years, companies were be- lieved to be making money off our trees, lawsuits were fi led, roads needed to be destroyed to limit access. We needed to bring the forest back to its prehistoric state. All of this was happening with the pop- ulation increasing and our cli- mate changing. Now we are paying the price for this shortsightedness and lack of common sense. We have to decide for whom we are managing these for- ests. The native population at one time may have burned the forests periodically. Their management objectives were different from what our ob- jective should be. We need to be thinking about 100 years or more from now as well as today. Carlisle Harrison Hermiston, Ore. Letters policy Write to us: Capital Press welcomes letters to the editor on issues of interest to farmers, ranchers and the agribusiness community. Letters policy: Please limit letters to 300 words and include your home address and a daytime telephone number with your submission. Longer pieces, 500-750 words, may be con- sidered as guest commentary pieces for use on the opinion pages. Guest commentary submissions should also include a photograph of the author. Send letters via email to opinions@capitalpress.com. Emailed letters are preferred and require less time to process, which could result in quicker publication. Letters also may be sent to P.O. Box 2048, Salem, OR 97308; or by fax to 503-370-4383. Plan reduced NW forest management Regarding your opinion on managing forests, which was excellent, a correction needs to be made that it was President Clinton and Vice President Gore that led and created the “NW Plan” that reduced forest management by 85 percent in California, Oregon and Washington. Subsequent presidents did nothing to alter that fact while every single year throughout only the North- west, approximately 4 bil- lion to 5 billion board-feet of growth continued to add fuels for eventual fires — fires that we are now expe- riencing. Yes, national parks and monuments are burning, too, but that is expected where “preservation poli- cies are followed by law.” That is not the case on our national forests and lands managed by the Bu- reau of Land Management, yet the NW Plan so restrict- ed management under the premise “it was to protect the spotted owl” that fires are now burning those hab- itats by the thousands of acres. We need to manage our federal forests on a land- scape or watershed scale by treatments that alter contin- uous fuel patterns and pro- vide improved wildlife hab- itat! It can easily be done with congressional action. By the way, I am a for- mer forest supervisor, in- cluding two decades of fire- fighting plus National Fire Team experience. Ted Stubblefi eld Ridgefi eld, Wash. Obama not to blame for forest management A recent editorial about federal land management and fi res covers a topic that is close to my heart — the use of active forest manage- ment to better set up our na- tional wildlands for the inev- itable wildfi res. I was happy to see that you got much of it right, especially with respect to the need to place thinning treatments in strategic plac- es in order to better manage fi res. However (and this is critically important) the ed- itorial took an irresponsible turn when you chose to lay the blame on the Obama ad- ministration. Your statement, (“(A)t some point the Obama administration decided near- ly all federal forests were off-limits to logging, the best and only way to manage for- ests”) is fl at out wrong and unnecessarily divisive. Does every issue have to be viewed through the lens of partisan politics? Here are the facts: Ac- cording to the Oregon De- partment of Forestry, federal annual timber harvest levels in our state were actually higher during the Obama ad- ministration than during the G.W. Bush administration (503.75 billion board feet harvested per year 2009-2016 vs. 324 billion board feet per year 2001-2008). Interesting- ly, the harvest level per year during the Clinton adminis- tration was even higher (665 billion board feet/year 1993- 2000). I see absolutely no evidence that any particular administration “decided that federal forests were off-lim- its to logging” as you have so boldly stated — let alone the Obama administration. In my beloved Blue Mountains National Forests, harvest levels have also risen over the past 8 years, due in part to the collaborative ap- proaches to forest manage- ment that were encouraged (and funded) by the past ad- ministration. If you want to blame fed- eral laws for our current sit- uation, it is popular to blame the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Be aware that these laws were passed (by Congress) and signed (by the president) in the 1960’s and 1970’s — under the Johnson and Nixon administrations. There is enough partisan politics being played in our country right now, and to fur- ther polarize the public in the west by falsely laying blame for the 2017 fi re season on the Obama administration only makes it worse. I would expect the opinions of the editorial board to be based on real facts, not “alternative facts” or partisan hyperbole. I can get enough of that by reading letters to the editor and social media. W.C. (Bill) Aney Pendleton Ore.