community
april4
2019
9
UNWC Speaker on Oregon Forest Practices continued from front page
While the event was hosted by the UNWC,
Executive Director Maggie Peyton made clear that they
were not officially endorsing the Oregon Wild perspec-
tive on the Oregon Forest Practices Act. “The UNWC
provided the venue for learning and open dialogue to
occur. We are deeply concerned for the health of the
watershed and exploring ways to increase awareness
and build collaboration to effectively address factors
limiting the health, productivity, and resiliency of the
watershed/ecosystem we rely on for our livelihoods,”
said Peyton in a written statement prior to the event.
Gonzales specifically works with
coastal and coast range communities who are
organizing to protect their local forests and
watersheds from the impacts of industrial
clearcuts and aerial spray. He visits com-
munities when invited, to make presentations
and encourage civic engagement around log-
ging practices. He lives in the coast range
near Triangle Lake, west of Eugene, in a
rented cabin on 160 acres of private forest-
land, which he helps sustainably manage.
The property has a small saw mill business,
called Shady Creek Forest Products, which
produces a small supply of dimensional
lumber from their timber harvests which is
used by local consumers. “I live in a logging
community and I live on a logging property.
We do a lot of logging, so I don’t come at
this from the view that logging is bad and we
shouldn’t be cutting down trees. What I’m arguing for
is not that we should stop logging, but I think we can do
a lot better.”
Gonzales compared the effects of logging in a
mixed and diverse forest with multi layer canopies, to
industrial logging that tends to take place on a mono-
culture of replanted Douglas fir. He said diverse for-
ests support an abundance of other species including
low growing shrubs and ferns, and can support more
wildlife, while heavily managed and closely planted
Douglas fir plantations choke out any other growth.
He characterized industrial logging practices as “de-
forestation” which he said is the clearing of diverse
forests and replacing them with a single species, simi-
lar to what is happening in South American countries
where rainforests are being cleared and replanted with
palm trees for oil.
Gonzales made the following points during his
two and a half hour presentation, which included an
open discussion with the audience that was composed
of several employees of logging companies:
• Oregon has some of the most lax logging laws in
the Pacific Northwest and does not adequately protect
streams and rivers with buffers of trees in many areas.
He showed photographic evidence of clearcuts right
up to the banks of running streams in August. He
said the Suiuslaw Watershed Council, working in his
region, has done extensive stream restoration projects
including stream side planting of trees. After years of
restoration a local stream saw the return of wild salmon
for the first time in decades and now has a salmon run
every year.
Photo by Jason Gonzales
• The close replanting of trees, the loss of diversity
and lack of understory growth, along with an excess
of dead branches low to the ground and touching each
other, create overly dry conditions leading to increased
fire danger. He quoted a study that showed, while
more acreage burns on federally managed forests, more
severe burns with more explosive fires occur in more
heavily managed, private forest stands. This results in
higher rates of tree mortality, causing a more severe
impact on the ecology of the forest. He said there are
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continued on page 15
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concerns that more intense forest management practices
being utilized in the coast range in recent years will
lead to more serious and larger fires in the region.
• Industrial logging and clearcutting practices on
private lands are impacting communities’ drinking
water supplies through more sedimentation.
• Quoting the Perry and Jones study from 2016,
Gonzales said the rapid growth of new trees and
heavily managed and harvested stands contribute to
the reduction in volume of stream flow. In Douglas fir
forests studied in the Pacific Northwest where greater
than 50% of a watershed area was logged,
low flow deficits of 50% and greater are
occurring in all streams, and those low flow
deficits persist for at least 40 to 50 years
with no evidence of recovery to pre-logging
flows. He also noted that in the first 10 years
following a clearcut, run-off and flooding can
be intensified due to the lack of ground cover
and trees to help capture and hold rainfall.
• In some watersheds as much as 85% of
the surrounding forests have been clearcut
in the last 20 years. Gonzales showed over-
head photographs in three areas in the coast
range, including Vernonia, that showed the
annual amount of clearcutting taking place
from 2000 to 2016. He said policy has been
changed to reduce clearcutting on Federal
lands, and said Oregon Wild is proposing to
reduce logging on state lands by 50% to help
diversify use and encourage recreational opportunities.
• Industrial loggers often use helicopters to aerial spray
herbicides on fresh clearcuts; they also utilize workers
on the ground spraying from backpacks. Oregon’s aer-
ial spray regulations are less stringent than neighbor-
ing states and industrial foresters may spray anywhere
from once after trees have been replanted to as often
as twice every year for up to five years (the average is
three to four times on a site) to ensure only “crop trees”
503-429-7101
Tim Poppino
19025 Woods Road
Vernonia, OR 97064
usbank.com
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Vernonia
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LOGGING CO., INC
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503-429-6522
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503-429-1470
cell 503.789.1268
fax 503.429.0252