Article: Enough is Enough! Obfuscation and Our Forests by Heather Cantino

Enough is Enough! Obfuscation and Our Forests by Heather Cantino
Copy/pasted from Martha's Journal with some minor editing by Rouzie

Over the last decade, we’ve heard many terms that cloak damaging practices in pretty-sounding language, such as Bush’s Healthy Forests and Clear Skies initiatives and the currently touted “advanced energy” (which includes nuclear power) and oxymoronic “clean coal.”

There are, though, a number of forest-related terms that we may not even think about being similarly deceptive. Here are a few:

Division of Forestry (DOF) is in the Department of Natural Resources. Both suggest a simplistic, anthropocentric perspective that reduces forests to “resources” as well as simply to trees to be logged.

“Logging” itself does not suggest the harm it almost invariably causes. Like “timber harvesting,” “logging treatment,” “silviculture,” “clearcut” and its new replacement, “even-age regeneration plot,” logging implies that one can somehow remove trees and leave the forest intact. The terms’ agricultural or medical allusions erroneously evoke healing, growth, and care.

Similarly, logging is not acknowledged as serving the timber industry but is now called “vegetation or “ecosystem management,” as if the ecosystem needs to be managed or might benefit from logging. DOF’s and USFS’s notion of “healthy forest” is oddly in line with forest industry goals and drastically at odds with what constitutes a healthy natural forest, with all its complexity, variation in tree age and species, and wealth of flora and fauna. (See An Economic Analysis of the 2006 Wayne National Forest Plan, at heartwood.org, for an extensive discussion of USFS “goals” for “healthy forests” in relation to timber industry needs.)

And then there’s the Mohican State “Demonstration Forest,” which, under the guise of “education” permits logging in spite of a ban on commercial logging. A stately spreading oak in an area of “selective cuts” has even been girdled (and thus killed) and is now a “wildlife tree.” With its spreading canopy (having started life in the open, probably in the 19th century), the tree is not ideal for timber, so perhaps its fall may be welcomed and is thus being hastened? It is alarming that DOF calls “educational” the killing of a grand tree to create habitat for wildlife that would have plenty of such habitat if the trees were left to live out their natural lives.

And then there are DOF and USFS efforts at oak-hickory “restoration” or “regeneration,” in spite of growing evidence that the recent prevalence of these species may not have been natural but was the result of frequent human-induced fire in pre-European and early European settlement periods.

“Controlled burn,” one technique being used in these efforts, suggests limited action under human control, though it actually affects many non-target organisms and often burns hotter and well beyond planned boundaries. Another term for these forest burns, the medical-sounding “prescribed burn,” sounds beneficial, obscuring that the practice may exist because the federal government funds DOF and USFS based on its use. (See “Follow the Money” in An Economic Analysis, cited above) In certain cases, such as logging followed by burning (a practice used in Shawnee State Forest) and burning in moist coves, in which fire is clearly unnatural and not “historic,” “habitat sterilization” would be an equally appropriate term. Although fire is purportedly to “restore a natural fire regimen,” experts increasingly surmise that frequent fire was perhaps never a natural part of Ohio’s forests.

Another common government forest term, “salvage sale” (in which dead but also living trees are removed after a storm), implies rescue and reuse. However, the Economic Analysis of the Wayne report cited above documents extensive abuse by the timber industry and economic shenanigans by USFS hidden behind this innocent-sounding program.

Finally, there are (mis)uses of environmental power words: DOF claims its “timber harvests” are “sustainable” based on the amount “harvested,” with no consideration of the impact of cutting on the land cut. And DOF claims to promote “biodiversity” and “wildlife habitat” when it claims to log to create “early-successional habitat,” as if logging were simply the means to appropriate ends. This practice is doubly misguided because scrubland and young woods are much more abundant than older forest in Ohio. DOF and USFS both use this justification to cloak their steady supply of trees to the timber industry. They also refer to trees over 80 years old as “over-mature,” clearly a timber industry point of view. Some Ohio species have life spans of several hundred years and of course offer wealth to the forest even after they have died.