Santa Cruz Sentinel

November 23, 2003

Timber harvest good for forest, local economy

By BARBARA McCRARY

Am I prejudiced in favor of logging? Absolutely! It is my family's livelihood. It puts a roof over our heads, food on our table, clothes on our backs, and it allows us to live a lifestyle that we love, raising livestock in an area we treasure, namely the North Coast of Santa Cruz County.

But looking at the more practical side of logging vs. no logging, let us look at the options and alternatives. Everyone needs wood in some form or other: Our homes are built of wood, our decks and fences, and for those who have fireplaces or wood stoves, it is the fuel we need. It provides the mulch that enhances our gardens and the paper we all use. The alternative to harvesting timber from our country's forests is to import it from some other country. This practice sends U.S. currency out of the country, takes jobs away from Americans, destroys towns built upon the industry of harvesting timber, reduces income-tax sources, and finally, uses enormous amounts of fossil fuel to transport wood products into this country. And where do we get our fossil fuels? Not from this country, because this is another industry being shut down due to resistance to using our own country's resources.

The forebears of our family came to Santa Cruz County among the earlier pioneers in the 1860s. My husband's forebears used timber in one way or another, building a house or a barn, splitting fence posts and pickets, timbers for foundations, mines or railroad ties. My grandfather worked as a blacksmith in sawmills in the Santa Cruz mountains in the 1880s.

I have a treasured family photo, circa 1885, of my grandfather and his fellow workers standing in front of a sawmill near Loma Prieta. The background shows a stripped mountainside, with only a few snags standing and everything else burned to the ground. Now that was clear-cutting! A practice, I might add, that has not taken place in this county in over 55 years. Our business, Big Creek Lumber, was prominent in formulating the logging practice rules that this region of California now uses. Should anyone worry about clear-cutting in the Santa Cruz mountains, it simply does not take place anymore.

Another fallacy about logging is that once a redwood tree has been harvested, it is gone forever. Anyone who believes this hasn't seen a recently harvested forest where each stump sprouts numerous new trees within weeks of removal of the parent tree. That's why there are so many more trees now than there were 150 years ago when white man started harvesting them and why, without thinning, our local forests can become overcrowded, thus slowing tree growth.

Looking at another practical side of timber harvesting, one only has to wonder what will happen to timber land that is often owned in small parcels by people who bought it thinking the product of their land would help support them, pay their children's way into college or help pay their property taxes. If landowners are not allowed to realize some profit from their property, the only alternative may be to sell it. In this area, undeveloped land is frequently purchased at high prices by those who can also afford to build a trophy home upon it. The forests that everyone admires so much will then be removed more completely in order to build a huge house. Personally, I would rather see a forest freshly harvested once every 15 years than one with houses, paved driveways and power lines.

The property we logged in the spring of this year shows promise of being beautiful next spring. A logged area looks untidy for about two years. However, with current logging practices, the slash is lopped so it lies close to the ground and is aided in decomposition, bare earth is seeded with grass and covered with straw to minimize erosion. New or reopened old roads are carefully contoured for proper water runoff and closed to use until the earth settles in, and next year there will be lovely open glens with grass and forbs for the deer to graze. Contrary to another belief, most wildlife does not frequent deep, dark forests. The food upon which they depend does not flourish in darkness. Birds don't live there because the insects and seeds they eat do not live there. Streams that exist in dark forests do not have the necessary vegetation to support the insect population needed by fish. Excessive stands of trees also take up vast amounts of water that can leave streams depleted of adequate flow to support trout, steelhead and salmon. This has happened in Big Creek, which has gradually diminished in flow. In the Big Creek watershed there has been negligible timber removal since the last big fire in 1948.

I'm not a scientist by formal education, but anyone who has lived in this area as long as my husband, myself and various other family members, sees the dynamics of the forests on a daily basis and recognizes the natural trends over the decades. We, too, are environmentalists, if that is to be defined as someone who cares for the natural wonder of the world. I don't like seeing a dark, overcrowded, stagnant or dying forest. It is unattractive, wasteful and unproductive. It is also kinder to the wild creatures (and people) who do live in our forests to help manage the forest in a supportable tree population than to see it burn, either intentionally or accidentally. While neither logging nor non- logging will be the final answer in controlling wild fires, certainly a diminished fuel load and a few logging access roads go a long way toward helping control fires that do break out. The only way for our forests to be "natural" is for man never to have been put on the earth. But we are here, and it behooves people who do not understand forest dynamics to leave modern forest management to those who do, and to attempt to gain understanding of, and to support reasonable solutions to the complex issues that impact us all.

Barbara McCrary is a longtime resident of Swanton.