Perhaps it was an act of intentional
deception when the U.S. Forest Service used old photos of a Montana
timber lease to make the case for logging in California to reduce
fire danger. It’s just as likely, however, that laziness and
bureaucratic ineptitude are to blame.
Either way, the
incident raises doubts about the agency’s intent and competence as
it tries to develop a management strategy for 11.5 million acres of
forest land in the Sierra Nevada. When a federal agency decides it
must hire a private public-relations firm to market policies that
ought to be based on science rather than popularity — and
then condones the use of powerful but clearly misleading visual
imagery to make the sale — it’s reasonable to ask why.
As disclosed recently in an Associated Press story, the
misleading photos appear in a brochure published in January by the
Forest Service as part of its campaign to sell the public on a new
management plan for the Sierra Nevada. The plan, a revised version
of one developed during the Clinton administration, substantially
increases the amount of logging permitted in the state’s federal
forests and reduces protections for old-growth areas that serve as
critical habitat for such rare species as the California spotted
owl.
The agency contends that more logging is needed to
reduce the fire danger posed by dense stands of trees and
undergrowth, the result of more than a century of fire suppression,
and that it will return the forests to the state they enjoyed
before white settlers began meddling with them. The agency spent
$90,000 to hire a San Francisco marketing firm to develop a
publicity campaign for the plan.
As an example of the
conditions the Forest Service seeks to create in the Sierra Nevada,
the brochure reproduces a 1909 photograph showing an open, parklike
stand of trees, following it with a sequence of photos taken in
subsequent years that show the forest filling in. What the brochure
neglects to mention is that the photographs were taken in Montana’s
Bitterroot mountains and depict the site’s recovery after logging.
Photos of the same site appeared in a 1983 Forest Service
report on fire conditions in the Rocky Mountains, and in a 1995
Forest Service research paper. According to environmental
activists, the agency also used the photos in 1998 to argue for
more logging in Oregon and Washington.
In other words,
the agency is simply recycling the same set of images over and
over, probably because it’s easier than obtaining new ones. A
Forest Service spokesman reinforced that suspicion when he told the
AP that “it is difficult to find a good series of repeat
photographs of the same place over almost 100 years.”
Well, no, it isn’t. Three years ago, Mountain Press Publishing Co.
of Missoula, Mont., published a book that does exactly that:
Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic
Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849.
Writer-photographer George Gruell features 80 sets of meticulously
matched photographs of the same sites throughout the mountain
range, one photo in each pair taken in the 1800s and the other more
than a century later from the same vantage point.
The
book is fascinating purely from a historical standpoint. The
locations in the photographs range from mining camps in the Mother
Lode to Yosemite Valley and Lake Tahoe, and are distributed along
the length and breadth of the mountain range. As a catalog of
landscape change from the gold rush to the present, it shows how
white settlement reshaped California.
The book also is
ecologically instructive. Gruell, a retired wildlife biologist,
proves that tree density has increased markedly over the past
century in nearly every ecological zone from the foothills to the
Sierra summit. The pictures alone offer no guidance on what to do
about that; they merely confirm what many ecologists,
environmentalists and fire experts have been saying for more than a
decade.
In a postscript to the book, Gruell argues that
the Forest Service must employ a range of techniques if it is to
undo the damage created by a century of fire suppression and
restore the woodlands to a healthier, less combustible state. These
include both prescribed fire and logging, but logging of a kind
seldom practiced: removing trees and brush, marketable and not, to
mimic the varied and complex conditions produced by natural fire.
If the Forest Service can’t make the case for that
commonsense approach without lying, it is as desperately in need of
rehabilitation as the woodlands it manages.
John Krist is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a senior senior
reporter and columnist for the Ventura County
Star in California.
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