Executive Voices: An Op-Ed Column
Healthy Forests
Museum management is the wrong
approach to growth
By Bob Slocum
As
the population of our state grows, we will have to address many
challenges to ensure that all North Carolinians continue to enjoy a
high quality of life and a healthy economy. One challenge will
be how we care for and manage our forests. The good news is that
thanks to the private landowners who own almost ninety percent of the
forest land in North Carolina, our forests are extensive, healthy,
productive and a significant contributor to our environment and
economy.
Yet some continue to paint a bleak picture of forests and forestry in
North Carolina. They point to the public lands — the national
forests — as the future we should seek for all lands and say that
only government and more regulations can preserve forests. Yet a close
look at national forests shows that government policies have all but
eliminated active forest management. As a result, over a third of the
forests – 65 million acres – are at high risk of catastrophic
wildfire and insect and disease infestations. Already, one out of
every three acres is dead or dying and more than six million acres
burned to the ground last year. This is what museum management —
look but don’t touch — will do to the forest. This is not
the future we need in North Carolina.
Trees, unlike fossil fuels, metals and other limited natural
resources, are renewable. They can be harvested, used to make
products and replanted in an endless cycle. To imply otherwise is to
ignore history. The forests of North Carolina and the South have been
harvested repeatedly and regrown. Are the forests of today
somehow inferior to some past forest? Of course not. This is like
saying that we have lost all of our “original rivers” based on the
shocking discovery that all the “original water” has run to sea
and been replaced by highly inferior “replacement water.”
The recently completed North Carolina chip mill study confirmed that
our forests are healthy and diverse. Our forests are better stocked
and growing more per acre than any time in recent history. The
study also showed that maintaining and expanding the economic value of
forests is critical to future sustainability. The forests we
enjoy today are there largely because they have economic value to the
people that own them. If they lose this value, then landowners may
convert them to some non-forest use that does have economic value. It
is the loss of forest land, not timber harvesting, that is the real
issue for forest sustainability. While the study did project a
time when annual removals might exceed annual growth, it showed this
was largely driven by assumptions on the loss of forest land and the
fact that our hardwood forests are generally old. Clearly, the key to
sustainability is maintaining land in forest cover.
Despite this, some now even criticize tree planting. It is difficult
to understand arguing against a landowner making an investment in the
future by planting trees. If it is a fear of the loss of
hardwoods, that worry is misplaced. North Carolina’s forests are and
will remain dominated by hardwoods. Regardless of tree species, trees
and forests are far better than parking lots.
The study also confirmed that our highest quality water comes from
forest land and that neither chip mills nor timber harvesting
represent a threat to water quality. Since 1990, all land disturbing
forestry activities, including timber harvesting, have had to comply
with mandatory standards to protect water quality. These
requirements include maintenance of streamside management areas —
buffers — to protect water quality. The Division of Forest Resources
inspected more than3,600 forestry operations in 1999-2000 and found
that compliance with these standards exceeded 94 percent – an
outstanding record for any program.
There is a clear need for improved forest inventory data. The North
Carolina Forestry Association has long advocated and pushed for
accelerated data collection on the condition of our forests. We hope
the preservation groups will join us in pushing the U.S. Forest
Service and the state to accelerate the Forest Inventory and Analysis
program in North Carolina.
North Carolina, with more than18 million acres of forest land, is the
fourth most forested state in the nation. These forests support the
state’s second largest manufacturing industry — forest products
— and provide a vast array of environmental benefits at the same
time. These forests will, with the right policies and programs,
remain productive. We need to address the current flood of subsidized
lumber imports from Canada and other nations that are displacing
American manufacturers and devaluing private forest land. We
need to recognize that forestry is a very long-term investment and
landowners need technical assistance, incentives, strong markets and
perhaps most importantly, a stable regulatory environment that
recognizes the benefits of forestry and does not put needless
roadblocks in front of landowners. If landowners are to make forest
investments for the next generation, they need to believe that the
next generation will be allowed to benefit.
Bob Slocum of Raleigh is executive vice president of the North
Carolina Forestry Association. The NCFA is the state’s oldest
conservation organization. Its membership consists of more than
2,500 forest managers, landowners, mill operators, loggers, furniture
manufacturers and educators.
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