Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West. Nancy Langston (1995). Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 368 pages. $16.95 (paper).
Book review by Stan Rowe
Here is a well-written hundred-year history of the eastern Oregon "Blue Mountains," blue from the smoky haze of frequent fires in that summer-dry region of pines, firs, and larches. It is a backcasting story that, as the title suggests, traces the contemporary "nightmares" of declining ecosystem health back to the "dreams" of forest guardians and researchers imbued with the turn-of-the-century ideals of Fernow and Pinchot: to make the forest two or three times as productive as the wild unruly state in which they found it.
Early reports described magnificent open, park-like stands of old-growth ponderosa pine on well-drained warm sites, typically on lower and mid-mountain slopes facing south and west. Elsewhere, on the cooler and moister sites, inland Douglas fir was prominent, mixed with western larch, grand fir, and lodgepole pine. The latter four species, less commercially valuable than the Ponderosa pine, tended to replace it. Fire suppression seemed a good strategy to protect the thickets of ponderosa pine seedlings that sporadically appeared in forest gaps. Fernow had condemned forest burning; the whole fire question in the United States, he said, is one of "bad habits and loose morals." But the unfortunate effect of fire suppression was to increase the spread of the "inferior" trees whose proliferation was accompanied by devastating insect outbreaks and high-intensity crown fires. Too late it was realized that the health of the ponderosa pine savannas was related to frequent low-intensity ground fires.
Langston places the cause of failed dreams-especially the loss of open ponderosa pine forests-on misconceived management by the U.S. Forest Service. But philosophically perceptive, she is deeper than that. Beneath the firm belief that foresters could redesign the forests to serve the nation better, she identifies the contributing theories of science and political economy, undergirded by the arrogant ideology of human superiority over non-human nature. The fatal human flaw is a lack of humility and an unwillingness to learn the land's ecological expectations of us. She quotes Wallace Stegner, historian, teacher, and writer of the West, who argued that we need to let the land shape us and to stop trying to force the land to fit our ideals.
The author follows postmodern theory in accepting that people think, act, and live according to value-charged theories or narratives (e.g., history or herstory) about who we are, what nature is, and hence the proper human-nature interactions. She does not expound the theory that posits that cultural stories also serve to preserve and strengthen the prestige and power of particular societal groups. In a macho culture ruled by moneyed elites whose revered seers are Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, competition is a virtuous process, science discovers that natural selection favors the aggressive, dominance is the mark of success, and foresters expect thickets of seedlings to thin themselves in the struggle for existence and produce a scattering of ''manly'' trees. Against this cultural expectation, many western conifers simply stagnate when thickly seeded. If their growth potential is to be fully realized, young stands of such species have to be "opened up" by fire, rabbits, insects, or root pathogens. So scientific theories and hypotheses - the narrative to which researchers give their allegiance- are partial and fallible, as are the yarns to which economists and political theories pay obeisance and inflict upon the public.
Quoting Langston, "Foresters were not, as many environmentalists claim, greedy or stupid. Like everyone else they needed to hold onto a story that made their lives make sense. Their work was based on the faith that they were making the forests better. If they let themselves see the evidence in front of them - that the forests were dying, not getting better- they would have to give up the vision that made sense of their lives. Instead, they blinded themselves to the consequences of their actions, ignored the doubts that crept in, and condescended to people who challenged their version of the forest. Everyone does this, not just foresters (my emphasis)."
Toward the end of the book, Langston inadvertently strengthens her argument by accepting without question that "natural systems ... do not have an inherent balance or stability" and that "natural ecosystems are not inherently self-regulating." This recent scientific narrative, as dogmatic as the ones that preceded it, is derived at least in part from the specious equating of "ecosystem" with fluctuating aggregates of organisms. But if we examine planet Earth as the supreme model of a "natural system," do we not find signs of self-regulation, evidences of inherent balance and stability? And if we do, must not these characteristics in some way pertain to the balanced interrelationships of the major parts (geographic ecosystems) and to their parts (landforms, soils, topoclimates, organisms)? Denial of balance and stability in the world is a ploy by which managers justify their intrusions into every aspect of nature's processes.
The story of the "Blues" can be read as the continuing saga of "management" that perhaps began when the first forester, stone ax in hand, approached a grove of trees and announced, "I'm gonna make this baby better!" It should be read by all who are interested in natural resources, for in its surprises and misadventures the narrative provides a parable for other land-use fumblings that have gone on in wildlife and range management, agriculture fisheries, and mining. There too theories have been rife as to what constitutes the well-being of land-water ecosystems and how people can get the most out of them without destroying ecosystem health.
What is the meaning of "ecosystem health"? The author devotes several pages to this complex subject, concluding that the definition depends on human perceptions and wants. For example, a University of Idaho policy team opines that forests are healthy when their mortality is no more than 18.3 percent of gross annual growth, the definition offered by the Society of American Foresters. It follows that intensively managed industrial forests are healthy and old growth forests are sick. Not good enough, says Langston. Ecosystem health and integrity should hinge on neither production of extractable commodities nor refusal to extract commodities, neither maximization nor minimization of human disturbances. Beyond utility and efficiency, "ecosystem health" should include maintenance of the land's ecological processes, place by place.
The idea of judging health by non-market standards is good, but place by place? "Places" are not units unto themselves; they are ecological parts of regional landscapes. It seems to me that in her discussion of health, fragmentation, and restoration, Langston comes close to expressing the unifying spatial concept of regional health. Health pertains to wholes, as the etymology of both terms suggests. Where care of geographic spaces is concerned, regional health makes more sense than does site-specific health because, at the scale of the latter, nature seems "variable and uncertain" Whether a small clearcut within the regional forest mosaic is unhealthy can legitimately be questioned, but massive forest fragmentation by many clearcut patches is clearly unhealthy; it disrupts regional processes. The idea of regional health supports Langston's argument that goals for restoration should not be site-specific but rather should take their cue from such generalities as historical stand age distribution (70-90 percent of stands in the Blue Mountains were mature or older), the ratio of uneven-aged to even-aged stands (formerly very high) and original forest composition and structure (stands were complex, patchy and diverse).
Nevertheless, she is too clever to be tied down to easy formulas. She rejects the argument that because people, like other organisms, are parts of ecosystems, the latter should be managed for what people want. Equally, she rejects the idea that the best ecosystem management is complete hands off, although she recognizes the need for preservation of wilderness areas. She comes down hard on "intensive management" for commodity maximization, saying humans do not known enough and perhaps never will. She likes the idea of "adaptive management" because in it she sees (perhaps too optimistically) a bow in the direction of learning from the land's signs what it has to teach us. She wonders if it would be better to confine industrial forestry to some parts of the landscape and preserve the rest or whether sensitive and conserving kinds of management over all the forested landscape might not prove better in the long run. She notes that science is instrumental, a means of doing what we want but not a provider of visions and goals.
Finally, Langston puts her hopes for restoring landscape wildness, biodiversity, and complexity (while also producing some commodities) in an ethical stance that relinquishes the idea of complete control while rejecting the inevitability of human separation from nature. Furthering this praiseworthy ethic - implicit in the "new sciences" of conservation biology, restoration ecology, and ecosystem health - is likely more important than all of the "fix-it" forestry literature that in recent years has reached flood level in the continental West.
This book review by Stan Rowe of New Denver, British Columbia, first appeared in the June 1997 edition of Ecosystem Health, Volume 3, Number 2, pp 115-116. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Science Inc.