Competing Research Visions

The proposal by the OSU Forestry School to create a broad spectrum of research surrounding multiple uses scattered throughout the Elliott Forest is naïve. Subsequent laws and regulations placed upon forest lands by both federal and state laws will continue to be used by the courts to block the ability to conduct a wide range of intensive forestry research practices (harvesting, herbicides, stream buffers, etc.). The University would have no legal shield that is any different from that of the State of Oregon or private companies. The land would become no more than a research facility to study the natural state of forest ecosystems while remaining open to a small percentage of the public for recreational purposes.
-- Bill Lansing, President and CEO, retired, Menasha Forest Products Corporation

Competing research visions: OSU vs Giesy

"When you mix science and politics, you get politics" (John M. Barry)

This page discusses the vastly different research that would come from the DSL/OSU Elliott State Research Forest Proposal versus the ORWW/Giesy Plan for an Elliott State Educational Forest. It's worth reviewing how the two plans were prepared.

This partial list shows some of the many habitat consultants, professors, lawyers, regulators and environmentalists involved in creating the OSU research proposal plan. The full list is available at the OSU Elliott State Forest page.

The OSU Plan's political history

2009 to 2014: Activist environmental groups stage numerous protests to illegally block logging, and they and other environmental groups file lawsuits, so the State Land Board agrees to shut down all harvest activities on the Elliott State Forest ... even commercial harvesting of mushrooms and huckleberries has been stopped.
2016: The State Land Board tries to sell the Elliott State Forest for $220.8 million in 2016, and that attempted sale was first reversed by the State Land Board and also subsequently ruled illegal by the courts.
2017: The Oregon Department of Forestry was fired from managing the Elliott and the Department of State Lands (DSL) assumed direct responsibility. The DSL's only forester for the Elliott State Forest also oversees many other DSL properties. He works out of the Bend DSL office, a four-and-a-half hour drive away from the Elliott, but that works well enough because he's been instructed to not prepare plans for harvesting.
2017: The State Land Board decides to try selling the Elliott State Forest to OSU. All planning documents (such as the OSU Elliott State Forest page as of December 7, 2020) suggest the transfer will take place for $220.8 million dollars, roughly one-fourth its actual value in 2020.

Even with the hugely discounted value, OSU says it won't pay anything at all for the Elliott State Forest. Undeterred, the DSL signs an intergovernmental agreement with OSU worth $1,000,000 for a "research forest" plan. That works out to be $8,000 per page for the eventual plan.

2017-2020: In a multi-year process, OSU professors write a research forest plan along with input from habitat consultants, wildlife biologists, government regulators, environmental lawyers and outdoor and conservation interest groups. You can see a partial list of these people nearby. All these people are well paid and well insulated from the effects of completely shutting down the Elliott State Forest: they won't be affected if it stays largely shut down forever. The advisory councils largely exclude actual forest managers or experienced timberland owners.
December 2020: In a State Land Board meeting, a timeline is announced for two more years of planning. The timeline includes hiring more expertise for the "forest management plan" and "carbon plan."

Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project, Inc. (ORWW) co-founder, Wayne Giesy, displays his Oregon Society of American Foresters (SAF) Honorary Membership certificate for lifetime achievement in forestry, April 25, 2013. On October 24 of the same year, Wayne attended the annual SAF convention in Charleston, South Carolina, where he received a second -- national -- SAF award for his lifetime of contributions to forestry and forest policy.

Wayne Giesy died in August, 2019 at age 99 ... he continued lobbying for active forest management right up to his death.

The Giesy plan's political history

Sometime in 1983, after Wayne Giesy first began work as an employee of Ralph Hull, of Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. in Dawson, Oregon, Wayne approached Ralph with his concerns on increasing environmental actions to restrict logging activities on federal lands. Wayne thought, in order to secure a stable supply of logs from BLM Lands -- where Hull-Oakes then obtained most of its raw materials -- a deal should be made between the forest industry and environmental organizations to divide the disputed lands into two portions: half for environmental purposes and half for public product needs (see: Giesy 2008a). After nearly a year considering this idea, Ralph gave Wayne the authorization, funding, and encouragement needed to present the idea to other forest industry leaders, with full backing of Hull-Oakes Lumber Co.

When Wayne first presented his idea to a number of forest industry leaders he was openly laughed at, and accused of "giving away the farm" by other members of these groups who couldn't conceive of environmental organizations having enough power or credibility to obtain such a major commitment of public resources. At that time local loggers and sawmill owners had access to perhaps 85% of the standing federal timber in Oregon; today that number is much closer to 15%, as the remainder has been dedicated to "critical habitat" for Threatened and Endangered Species, riparian "reserves," Wilderness, roadless areas, and other designated "set asides."

Wayne's idea first became publicly known through an editorial written and published by long-time and well-respected Albany Democrat-Herald editor, Hasso Herring, in May 2003. His editorial used the name "Giesy Plan" to label Wayne's thoughts:

"The Giesy plan sounds visionary because it is based on common sense and assumes that obstacles can be overcome. That's the way most Americans used to think. Would that more of us did so now."

In 1996, Bob Zybach and Wayne Giesy co-founded the Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project, Inc. (ORWW), one of the educational 501 c(3) non-profit organization's responsible for this website. You can learn more about ORWW in the About Us page.

In 2017, Zybach and Giesy adapted a version of the Giesy Plan for the Elliott State Forest. You can read the adapted version at this website's Giesy Plan page.

This bar graph with acronyms shows the three research treatments to be used in the OSU Research Plan. Reading and understanding this plan is difficult: It was written by committees of academics. We have done our best to summarize it fairly and clearly in this page.

If you don't trust our summary, feel free to read the original. For example, here is the plan's description of "Extensive" forest treatments:

"While intensive and reserve treatments provide opportunities to study management extremes, a third research treatment, extensive research treatments, will strive to increase forest complexity to help achieve multiple values across the landscape. The purpose of these widespread dynamically managed forests will be to explore the implementation of a new set of alternatives in a continuum between intensive plantation management and unlogged reserves. The research design on this continuum of extensive options will enhance diverse forest characteristics and better integrate them with riparian areas to meet a broad set of objectives and values in any stand. We can accomplish this goal by retaining (or creating) structural complexity while ensuring conditions exist to obtain regeneration and sustain the complex forest structure through time. Extensive alternatives represent the most significant opportunity for learning and expanding timber management’s frontiers by aiming to simultaneously achieve biodiversity objectives and timber demand at the stand scale. The extensive treatments are where we will test a vision for a genuinely sustainable approach to land management - reflecting social values, needs, and ecosystem function. The Oregon Department of Forestry and Bureau of Land Management are implementing similar alternative approaches making the scientific findings from the ESRF on how species and ecological processes, such as carbon sequestration, respond to extensive treatments especially relevant." (From page 19.)

Plan Comparison: OSU versus Giesy

The OSU Plan's research treatments

The OSU Plan would break the Elliott Forest into the three basic research treatments, as can be seen in the nearby bar graph.

Roughly two-thirds of the forest would be permanently placed in "reserve." It describes these untouchable areas as:

"These unlogged forests are ideal for monitoring ecosystem attributes such as biodiversity, recreation, carbon cycling, and water in the absence of any timber harvest. Thus, they serve as benchmarks for research treatments and managed habitat."

Less than 20 percent of the forest would be in "intensive" forest management. Average rotation ages would be 60 years.
Less than 20 percent would be in "extensive" forest management. "Extensive" forest management appears to be a brand new concept, and you can read its description in the sidebar, perhaps it will make more sense to you than it does to us. Average rotation ages would be 100 years.
Total harvest would be 17 million board feet per year, roughly one-fourth of the annual growth on the forest, and not nearly enough to pay for proposed maintenance, management, and research expenses.

A Giesy Plan research treatment map. The areas available for harvesting are equal in overall size to the areas reserved for endangered species, although a number of these subbasins would not be harvested in the 20-year life of the Plan.

The Giesy Plan's research treatments

Riparian Lands. Under the Giesy Plan, riparian areas could be managed by local Tribes and businesses with a specific focus on coho recovery -- particularly Tenmile Lakes coho -- water quality, public access, research, education, and potential development of commercial recreational uses.
School Fund Lands. Similarly, the economic-based management of select forested subbasins and ridgeline roads could be transparently and profitably managed for purposes of public access, recreation, research, education, and generating revenues for Oregon schools. Methods of reforestation and discrete uses of prescribed maintenance fires would be tested on clearcuts and thinnings. Local businesses and agencies could be responsible for these activities.
Old-Growth Lands. Subbasins dedicated to old-growth habitat could be collaboratively managed by a coalition of organizations who have filed suits during the past regarding management of the Elliott State Forest for listed species, including marbled murrelets, coho, and spotted owls. The opportunity to clearly and openly demonstrate – and compare -- their desired management approaches and outcomes would be in exchange for agreeing not to file additional legal suits regarding the Elliott during the first 20-year public management experiment.

The photo shows David Katz, who recently posted it on Facebook with the following comments:

Today, I stopped at a very memorable location. The trees you see & those I’m standing beside were just 1 foot tall saplings when myself & some other awesome hippie tree planter friends planted them way back in 1977.

This is Cerine Creek, just past Logsden, OR on the way to Moonshine Park in Lincoln County. From Oct ‘75 through Sept ‘78 I personally planted 400,000+ trees along the OR coast & parts of WA. Our boss, Bob Zybach ran a tree planting, thinning & falling company called Phoenix Reforestation.

The coastal land in this photo has nearly identical productivity and climate to the Elliott State Forest, and at age 43, these trees are ready for a final harvest.

Rotation Ages

If you view a working forest as a crop, then your goal will naturally be to grow trees as fast as possible. Each extra year in a crop rotation adds to the holding cost, so practicing foresters have a huge incentive to find seedlings that shoot out of the ground and grow quickly. This viewpoint is similar to the Green Revolution in traditional agriculture that saw farmland production explode on a per acre basis in the 1900s. Food shortages were abolished with this philosophy, and forestry has been following a similar path toward ever more productivity from ever shorter rotation cycles.

Essentially all industrial timberland in Oregon is managed with short rotations to produce lots of timber volume quickly in this way, and nearly all logging equipment and sawmills have been optimized for small logs: computerized equipment cuts these logs rapidly and efficiently.

The Elliott State Forest has productive soils and plenty of rainfall, so it grows trees quickly. This means 25- to 50-year-old Doug fir stands are potentially ready for final harvest. If we look to the future, rotation ages are likely to decrease further as better genetics and management methods allow ever shorter growing cycles.

OSU Plan: ultra-long rotations

Growing trees with long rotation cycles has several potential benefits. For example, it can grow trees with clear lumber and tight growth rings that are especially prized for visual appearance. This, of course, grows a specialty product and wouldn't be a suitable strategy for the entire Elliott State Forest. Also, long rotations lower logging and reforestation costs because harvesting happens less frequently. But this mild cost reduction doesn't come anywhere near compensating for the loss of frequent harvest revenue. Few industrial or private landowners want to wait longer than necessary to grow commercial-size trees.

The OSU Plan suggests its "intensive" areas will average 60 years. This use of the word "intensive" would be confusing to most practicing foresters; more accurate terms might be "leisurely" or "lethargic" forest management. Or possibly "agenda-based" management.

The "extensive" areas would have even longer average rotations: 100 years!

Even a 60-year rotation cycle seems unnecessarily long to industrial foresters in high-site lands in the Douglas Fir Region. If seedlings have superior genetics, and the forest is actively managed to receive frequent thinning to remove the weaker trees, then the few remaining trees at age sixty will be huge -- too big for most sawmills. Fifty years ago sawmills paid a substantial premium for large logs: today, few mill are capable of processing them at all.

Of interest is the fact that the Elliott was used for many years as a premium and pioneering location to develop progeny test sites and experimental commercial thinning projects. Can OSU or DSL representatives even locate these areas? Should they not be an important focus of applied science research? Why are they not even mentioned or located on the DSL/OSU management proposal?

Forest stands are subject to lots of catastrophic disturbances, so waiting extra decades exposes the landowner to large, uninsurable and unnecessary risks that are often completely outside the landowner's control. For example, on October 12, 1962 the Columbus Day windstorm knocked down 15 billion board feet in one afternoon. Instantly the price of logs plummeted because so many landowners needed to harvest fallen trees at once. Similar problems can be caused by insects, root rot, disease, and landslides. The largest and most expensive disasters come from fire. A really hot fire can char the remaining trees so badly that mills won't want to take them -- but fires are explored in more detail below.

The biggest argument against long rotation cycles comes from how it destroys any incentive for the landowner to actively manage the forest. Humans don't live long, and collectively we are impatient. This means a potential payoff 60 to 120 years from now is viewed as nearly worthless by most people -- it's just too far away to justify significant investments today. If we want working forests to be productive, we need landowners to actively manage them by aggressively replanting, thinning, and otherwise carefully tending their forests. That won't happen with ultra-long rotation cycles.

Conclusion: The OSU Plan would "actively manage" only a small part of the Elliott State Forest; the bulk of it would be locked up in a de facto wilderness area. The “actively managed” areas would use ultra-long rotation cycles that are risky and don't make economic sense. Academic professors like to research unusual and quirky things; they live in a publish-or-perish world that rewards promoting new ideas regardless of their practicality. But the rest of us live in the real world, and we cannot afford to wait 60 to 100 years to see whether the latest unconventional academic theory will work. This explains why the Home page of this site says the OSU Plan proposes to "conduct academic research of little interest to foresters who manage Oregon's working forests."

This book describes how Indian burning has shaped coastal forests for thousands of years. It carefully documents how catastrophic fires repeatedly swept through the Elliott forest area in the 1800s. The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

The 1879 Coos Bay Fire

This hand-annotated map comes from Jerry Phillips' book, Caulked Boots and Cheese Sandwiches. It shows how a fire that started near Scottsburg spread across an estimated 300,000 acres to the southwest, covering the vast majority of the Elliott Forest. Although the map and its caption suggest this fire happened in 1868, more recent oral histories show the 1868 "Coos Fire" was smaller, and the catastrophic "Big Burn" actually occurred in 1879.

Timber volumes on the Elliott State Forest in 2020 are six times what they were in 1930, despite more than 50 years of intensive management for timber crops. Whether the volume will double again or will return to the 1930 level will largely depend on when -- not if -- the next catastrophic fire happens.

Fire

If you take a long-term view of the OSU Research Plan, it would transform the Elliott State Forest by devoting over 80 percent of the land to reserves or near-reserve status (100-plus year rotation ages). So if we fast-forward mentally 80 years to the year 2100, the average age of these trees could theoretically be 150 years.

The OSU Plan suggests these dense, old and unmanaged stands will help endangered species and sequester carbon in the forest. These goals are admirable, but the OSU Plan rests entirely on two untested assumptions:

Assumption #1: We can grow dense forests with 150-year-old trees.
Assumption #2: Endangered species will benefit from a dense forest with 150-year-old trees.

These assumptions are worth discussing based on what we know about Oregon Coast range fires. They are also the key focus of scientific research proposed by the ORWW Giesy Plan.

The history of catastrophic Oregon Coast range fires

The history of catastrophic Oregon Coast range fires is one of incredible, nearly instantaneous changes to vast areas of the physical and biological environment.

Nearly all these fires were caused by humans. This isn't a single record of a large-scale wildfire (10,000s of acres) ever being caused by lightning in the region during the last 200 years of written history. When lightning does occur, it typically is accompanied by drenching fire-suppressing rains.

More importantly, the northern, western, and southern perimeters of present-day Elliott Forest were peopled by communities of Kelawatset, Hanis, and Miluk families. Yoncalla Kalapuyans -- renowned for their ability to use fire to shape and manage their vast homeland camas prairies and oak savannahs -- lived upstream to the east and northeast.

All catastrophic-scale (100,000s of acres) Coast Range wildfires on record took place during late summer/early fall with winds from the east and northeast, a time of year when Kalapuyans did most of their landscape-scale burning. These people, on all sides of the forest and like people everywhere, used fire on a daily basis to cook, heat, and provide light. They also used it seasonally to hunt, clear fields and trails, and rejuvenate favored plants. Woody fuels were gathered and stored constantly, whenever and wherever they were available. "Large, woody debris" did not exist over a large portion of the environment; it quickly became fuel or was used for tools, construction materials, carvings, or other purposes. The same with accessible dead trees.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s some of the largest and most destructive forest fires in US history took place on the western slopes of the Coast Range, including the Elliott Forest area. These fires gained international attention and were known collectively as the "Great Fires."

The earliest known "Great Fire" was the circa 1770 Millicoma Fire that burned to the eastern and southern boundaries of the Elliott, apparently buffered by ridgelines of mature, even-aged, second-growth Douglas fir. It is significant as being the earliest documented catastrophic-scale wildfire in Oregon history, as well as being the only one on record that occurred before white discovery and exploration.

The 1879 Coos Fire burned 90 percent of the remainder of the Elliott, by which time many of the trees that survived the Millicoma Fire became young old-growth; with some older trees "estimated to have been about 300 years old."

The 1962 Columbus Day Storm blew down 100 million board feet of timber on the western slope of the Elliott, resulting in a major extension of the existing road system and the removal of an additional 200 million feet of trees during salvage operations. Today this area of logged, reforested, and remaining mature second growth contains most of the "critical habitat" for marbled murrelets on the Elliott. There is no scientific justification for this determination, which has never been tested. The Elliott offers a unique opportunity to do just that -- and this information is critically needed over much of the Douglas Fir Region.

This history likely reflects most of the "natural pattern" of the western slope of the Oregon Coast Range during the past several thousand years: large extents of second-growth even-aged Douglas fir representing past wildfire and windstorm events, interspersed with patches of old-growth, alder, and of newer burns, landslides, windthrow that had yet to develop a stand of mature trees. This remains a characteristic pattern for much of the western Coast Range, and one to which people and our native animal populations have adapted over the past several thousand years.

The "shaping" of the Elliott State Forest by fire can be technically characterized as the result of a long-term series of botanical responses to constant and cumulative human disturbances caused by daily, seasonal, and episodic fires of varying size and intensity.

In light of this history of Coast Range fire, let's consider both assumptions behind OSU Research Plan.

Assumption #1: We can grow dense forests with 150-year-old trees

Perhaps the best answer to this assumption came with this summer's Labor Day fires: a strong east wind fanned flames to burn more than a million acres, and firefighters were helpless to stop the destruction until the winds died down. So with all our modern technology, we have no clue how to stop catastrophic fires without nature's help.

Conclusion: Attempting to store huge quantities of carbon in the Elliott State Forest is a poor, dangerous, and expensive idea. Eventually most of the trees will burn, and they will burn hotter and faster when they get older and larger. After burning, or if mortality is by other means, they will rot. These processes will make the Elliott "carbon neutral" over time and have absolutely no effect on global climate -- whether they are storing or releasing carbon.

Assumption #2: Endangered species will benefit from a dense forest with 150-year-old trees.

The best evidence suggests catastrophic fires have repeatedly burned the Elliot for at least the last several thousand of years. This means Coast Range forests have never been blanketed with large dense stands of old-growth trees as many environmentalists and even some forest scientists have claimed. Over this time span, native species have adapted to the major disturbances caused by catastrophic fires.

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