Forest Plan Hits a Snag

In the early 1800’s, the forests of the upper Great Lakes were dominated by enormous white pines. By the close of the century, most of these white pine forests had been cleared by aggressive loggers with little or no experience in forest management. Other species of trees like aspen began to flourish in the spaces where the white pines once grew, and the forests of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota were changed forever. Now, some environmental groups would like to see the forests returned to their natural state, and one group is taking the issue to court. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has this report:

Transcript

In the early 1800’s, the forests of the upper Great Lakes were dominated by enormous white pines. By the close of the century, most of these white pine forests had been cleared by aggressive loggers with little or no experience in forest management. Other species of trees like aspen began to flourish in the spaces where the white pines once grew, and the forests of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota were changed forever. Now, some environmental groups would like to see the forests returned to their natural state… and one group is taking the issue to court. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has this report:

(Natural sound: walking through snow)

This patch
of land in Michigan’s Huron-Manistee National Forest was clear-cut last year. That means all the aspen trees were cut down, fed into a chipper, and hauled away to make particleboard and paper. All that was left was a wide-open field. A dense stubble of new growth is already emerging from the snow, though — a forest recreating itself. But here’s what bothers Marv Roberson, a forest policy specialist for the Sierra Club:
Nearly all of the new trees are aspens…

“You can see coming up, aspen that’s most of it less than a year old, some of it’s three feet tall already, and since it comes from root suckers, what it’s done is it’s gotten a head start on all the competition, so next summer when all these little trees have their leaves out, the floor of what used to be a forest and will be again, will have shade on it and so a lot of the smaller trees that want to come up from seeds that didn’t get a chance this summer won’t be able to.”

Aspens are known as
a “pioneer species.” Whenever there’s a major disturbance — a fire, a tornado, or clear-cut — aspens recover quickly. And they take over, squeezing out any other species that might try to grow there. Roberson says he doesn’t believe that would happen nearly as often if the forests weren’t clear-cut. He says the aspens would eventually grow old, die and fall down. And then, in the absence of a major disturbance, the white pines would thrive again.

It’s enough of an issue that the Sierra Club has filed a lawsuit against the United States Forest Service. The group is asking that the Forest Service do a study to analyze the long-term effects of clear-cutting aspen on federal land. In the meantime, they’re asking for a moratorium on aspen logging in certain parts of the national forests…

“The reason for our lawsuit is not to stop the harvesting of aspen. The reason for the lawsuit is to get the forest service to do an analysis of what the effects are. We’re right now going through the biggest forest experiment in North American history. We’re altering the kinds of forests that we have and we don’t know what the long term results are.”

The lawsuit has suddenly raised the stakes in what has been an on going discussion about the future of the national forests. Every ten to fifteen years, the Forest Service creates a new management plan for each National Forest in the Great Lakes region. The discussion often involves representatives from environmental organizations, wildlife preservation groups and timber companies. But it rarely ends up in court. Forest
Service officials are not allowed to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit. But Regional Planner Sam Emmons says any decisions on forest planning involve a lot of thought, foresight and input from the public…

“The Forest Service is looking for a diversity of timber species and diversity of wildlife habitats and understands that whatever transitions that are made have some effect on the local sawmills and pulp mills and the folks who live up in the North Woods.”

The forests are an important part of life in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. The federal government estimates that logging and forest-related activities annually contribute nearly 30 billion dollars to the economies of just those three states. For many of those who live in the region, logging is what pays the bills. Jim Schmierer of Michigan Technological University’s Forestry Program says residents in the Upper Great Lakes forests approach issues about the forests with a blend of intelligence, experience and passion…

“Maybe grandpa was a logger or they’ve been managing a family woodlot for fifty years and so there’s a real strong connection to the land in a lot of cases up here with people who that are very familiar with forest practices, so it’s kinda unique, a much different situation than some in the west, so definitely an interesting dynamic here.”

For that reason, the Sierra Club lawsuit has created some resentment among those who make their living from logging aspen. John Lamy is President of the Timber Producers Association of Michigan and Wisconsin. He says the Forest Service’s management plans involve a lot of public input and compromise. He says he doesn’t understand why the Sierra Club had to get the courts involved…

“I just feel that since everybody had a chance to participate in the plan and develop the plan and that plan has been approved that we should allow that process to go forward and the Sierra Club is choosing to go through the courts to change a major part of that plan.”

Marv Roberson of the Sierra Club says his group has been trying to work within the system. But he says the Forest Service isn’t getting the message. So the lawsuit is simply a last resort. In the end, the Sierra Club may be getting its way even without the lawsuit. Since the 1960’s the aspen population in the upper Great Lakes has actually declined. Roberson acknowledges this and offers this analogy: If a patient’s temperature goes from one hundred five degrees to one hundred three degrees, he might be getting better. But he’s still sick.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

Marketing “Character Wood”

In an effort that could be replicated across the region, one county in Minnesota is trying to encourage growth of hardwood forests. They think sawmills and related enterprises that use hardwoods will create good long-term jobs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill has more:

Transcript

In an effort that could be replicated across the region, one county in Minnesota is trying to encourage growth of hardwood forests. They think sawmills and related enterprises that use hardwoods will create good long-term jobs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Forests throughout the Great Lakes are economic powerhouses. In Minnesota alone, the timber industry contributes nearly 8 billion dollars to the economy. Pulp and paper mills dominate the industry in Minnesota. They cut a lot of aspen to produce paper and chipboard. Three fourths of the wood cut in the state goes to these mills. Most of them are owned by big, multi-national companies. Sawmills are much smaller, and they’re usually locally owned. They use a variety of wood, including pine and spruce, maple and oak, to produce paneling, flooring, and trim.

(Car doors slam)

Aitkin County foresters are visiting a logging
site about 50 miles west of Duluth. Most of these trees are about 80 years
old. There’s sugar maple, basswood, and red oak. Such forests provide
prime habitat for a broad range of species. Forester Mark Jacobs says it’s
time to cut some of the trees down, to give others a chance to grow
faster. He wants to do it as much like nature as possible.

“The type of disturbance that would happen in here, since it’s kind of protected from fire, would be individual trees falling. Through mortality or if a windstorm would go through, a small group of trees may fall down in the natural cycle.”

Foresters imitate nature by choosing mainly smaller, diseased or mis-shapen trees to be cut. Joe Jewett has the logging contract to thin the woods. He examines each log to figure out how it can best be marketed.

“The higher grade lumber is around the outside of the log and then here this is the heart, this is the sapwood, and the higher grade is out here.”

The small trees have lots of branches, so the wood will have a lot of knots. So it’s hard to sell, because most people want clear-grained wood.

“Howdy, how’s it going?”

Dan Haugen is visiting Jewett to see if he can help sell the wood Jewett has cut. Haugen is a middleman. He buys wood from loggers and sells it to lumber yards. He’s trying to create a demand for wood with knots and color variations. Haugen calls it “character wood.”

“If you go into most homes, the millwork, the cabinets and the flooring, most of it’s clear. And you can look around in the forest and see all these limbs, and that’s just not how God makes these trees. And so we really need to find some markets for character grades of forest products.”

(Saw, sfx from processor)

Aitkin Hardwoods buys some of Haugen’s wood. The small factory is filled with the smell of freshly cut boards. Stacks of lumber reach to the ceiling. The oak, maple, ash, and aspen boards will become paneling, flooring, and trim. Manager Rich Peterson says he’s found a market for character grade lumber. He says people building lake cabins in the area want informal-looking wood to build their casual second homes. They find clear wood too boring.

“They haven’t seen any mineral streak, there are
no knots, and all of those things today are considered beautiful.”

Peterson employs four workers and sells about 40 semi-loads of lumber each year. He’s expecting his business to grow. He says Aitkin County’s long-term approach to forest management will eventually produce more, and better quality lumber. Some day, he hopes furniture could be produced here. That would bring more jobs, and better profits than paneling and flooring.

Hardwood manufacturing in Aitkin County is growing slowly. The raw materials are growing slowly in the woods, and entrepreneurs like Rich Peterson are slowly building markets. It’s a different scale from the pulp mills that employ hundreds of people and cut down thousands of acres of trees every year. And that’s fine with Aitkin County’s land department. Forester Mark Jacobs says the local economy will still benefit from a growing hardwood industry –slowly but surely.

“Some smaller sawmills expanding, maybe a kiln-drying facility, maybe some secondary manufacturing, and in total it could be several hundred employees.”

And Jacobs says in the meantime, people who live in the county, and people who have cabins here, enjoy the hardwood forests.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Voters Love the Lakes

The Michigan Legislature voted recently to ban new oil and gas drilling under the Great Lakes. Until the ban was enacted, Michigan had been the only state considering to allow such drilling. As the nation heads into a new round of federal, state, and local elections, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Cameron Davis says that the region’s drilling debate provides some invaluable lessons for candidates:

Transcript

The Michigan legislature voted recently to ban new oil and gas drilling under the Great Lakes. Until now, it had been the major holdout on such a ban. As the nation heads into a new round of federal, state, and local elections, Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Cameron Davis says that the region’s drilling debate provides some invaluable lessons for candidates.

The first lesson to our future leaders is to beware of one element of news “spin”- that if you repeat something long enough it will become true. In pressing their case, oil and gas interests said that drilling would not result in oil bubbling up to pollute Great Lakes water. As a result, they repeated, drilling was quote -“safe.” They failed to listen, however, to citizens troubled by something different: oil and toxic hydrogen sulfide leaks on land that could put human health and fragile coasts at risk. Given the small amount of oil and gas below the lakes, citizens said drilling wasn’t worth it. So, we get to lesson number one: Our future leaders should define public safety and environmental health broadly, not so narrowly that they gloss over legitimate concerns.

Lesson number 2: the debate was as much about the need for states to be credible leaders in natural resource protection as it was about drilling itself. The Lake Michigan Federation looked at 30 active wells in Michigan and found that eight of them had in fact contaminated water supplies. According to the same research, state oversight continues to fail in the clean up of any of those sites. In the drilling debate, citizens believed that without responsive agency action, the only way to prevent similar damage from shoreline drilling was to prohibit the practice in the first place. Congress responded to citizens’ concerns over the summer by suspending new drilling for two years. Candidates can take away from this that if states don’t want Congress stepping on their toes, they need to do a credible job themselves of protecting the Great Lakes.

Last, pro-drilling interests argued during the debate that other serious challenges besides drilling deserved more attention. While concerned citizens believed that a drilling ban was the best way to prevent new shoreline damage, advocates also agree that a number of other important threats need to be addressed. The third moral of the story is that people’s interest in protecting the Great Lakes environment from drilling is the beginning, not the end.

It’s time to move onto other pressing threats such as harmful water diversions in an increasingly thirsty world. We need to prevent future invasions of foreign pest species like the zebra mussel that throw the multi-billion dollar Great Lakes fishery out of whack. With women of childbearing age and other sensitive populations unable to eat certain fish because of contamination, it’s time to eliminate cancer-causing and other pollution once and for all. And, it’s time to restore fish and wildlife habitat, including the region’s precious wetlands, forests, and sand dunes.

Voters love the Great Lakes. Because of that, whoever commits first in upcoming elections to protect them, wins.

Fighting Beech Bark Disease

Forestry experts throughout the Midwest have been experimenting with new ways to fight beech bark disease. The disease has already killed millions of beech trees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Ontario and Michigan. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has more:

Transcript

Forestry experts throughout the Great Lakes have been experimenting with new ways to fight beech bark disease. The disease has already killed millions of beech trees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Ontario and Michigan. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Matt Shafer Powell has more…


Beech bark disease is actually a deadly tag-team combination of an insect that invades a tree and a fungus that finishes it off. Michigan State University entomologist Deb McCullough is one of several scientists trying to stop the spread of the disease in Michigan…


“What we’re going to see in the forest is gonna be something like Dutch Elm disease, the biggest, oldest beech trees are most vulnerable to this insect and to the disease, and as beech bark disease moves through the state, those are the ones that are going to die out first.”


McCullough says researchers have had some limited success with injecting pesticides into infected trees. And scrubbing the trees with soapy water seems to work too. But she says such methods simply aren’t practical when you’re dealing with the millions of beech trees that inhabit the region’s forests. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

Repelling Christmas Tree Thieves

  • Landscape Manager Jeff Culbertson sprays a Scots pine with thief repellant containing fox urine. The smell isn't too noticeable outdoors... but when a thief drags a conifer indoors, the repellant heats up and makes for a memorable Christmas. Photo by Nanci Ann McIntosh, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Evergreen trees grace forests, campuses, and lawns around the region. Much to the dismay of landscapers and gardeners, some of those trees disappear this time of year, stolen by someone who may not quite get the idea of Christmas cheer. But some universities have found a way to fight tree rustlers. It involves a foul-smelling concoction that makes thieves regret taking a tree. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams has the recipe for this nasty, yet effective repellant:

Transcript

Evergreen trees grace forests, campuses, and lawns around the region. And much to the dismay of landscapers and gardeners, some of those trees disappear this time of year, stolen by someone who may not quite get the idea of Christmas cheer. But some universities have found a way to fight tree-rustlers. It involves a foul-smelling concoction that makes thieves regret taking a tree. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams has the recipe for this nasty, yet effective repellant:


About fifteen years ago, landscape managers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln had a big problem. Tree thieves were cutting down the best conifers on campus. And the landscapers were getting calls from local residents, whose trees were also disappearing. Dennis Adams is a forester at the University of Nebraska.


“It’d be, you know, trees that have good Christmas tree form, so blue spruce, concolor fir, some of the pines – white pine, scotch pine.”


Some thieves were easy to track. Jeff Culbertson is a landscape manager at the university. He says students were stealing trees during Thanksgiving break… and they weren’t always perfect criminals…


“We’ve had instances where the students, I guess didn’t do a good job or didn’t think anybody cared, but you could find the dragged marks of the tree through the snow to their fraternity or dormitory or something like that so in those cases I think it was pretty easy for them to figure out where the tree went.”


Campus trees are worth hundreds of dollars, so the university was eager to find a solution. Dennis Adams discovered a solution… literally. He found the recipe in an old magazine… 1 part glycerine, 10 parts water, and 2 parts… fox urine.


Jeff Culbertson says the fox urine makes Christmas tree thieves think twice…


“It doesn’t really smell like skunk. Maybe like an extremely strong cat urine sort of smell. Or dog, something that’s very concentrated. But you know normally you’re not going to smell that. So it’s pretty pungent.”


Culbertson says since the University of Nebraska began spraying conifers in the 80s, they haven’t lost many trees. He sprays 50 to 100 Christmas-tree size evergreens each year. He used to wear a plastic spray suit, but now he just keeps the wind at his back.


“When I do the fox urine, I don’t have many volunteers that want to help me with that. So I take on upon myself to do it. They mostly stand away from me, and they probably don’t talk to me too much that day either.”


Culbertson says there is one problem with this technique… when it’s cold out, you don’t notice the smell. So he started adding a dye… he sprays blue or red stripes on the trees where he sprays the fox urine. He says it makes the trees that much less attractive, and serves as a warning. And each year, the university lets the local papers know they’re spraying fox urine again.


But if a thief still chops down a tree and drags it into his house … Culbertson says he won’t likely do it again.


“It would be a smell that you’d have a hard time getting rid of.”


Culbertson recommends the method to anyone with a lot of trees to protect. He says the repellant is pretty affordable, and normally wears off after the Christmas season. Most of the supplies, sometimes even fox urine, can be bought at a garden store.


“I use a small, 3 gallon bottle sprayer, typical sort of garden sprayer people would purchase at the hardware store, garden center… And I try to use hot water. The glycerin is very syrupy kind of like corn syrup. So it helps to loosen it up, heat it up and make it less thick. I mix it up, take it out, and just spray the trees by hand.”


Both Jeff Culbertson and Dennis Adams think thieves are just looking for a cheap tree. But Adams still finds the thefts a little unbelievable.


“I think people have to be pretty desperate to steal a tree for Christmas. That seems like it’s kind of in the anti-Christmas spirit to steal.” (Laughs)


Other campus managers, meanwhile…have cooked up their own people repellant. The University of Idaho adds a few ounces of skunk scent. It makes their mix even more memorable.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Wilderness Area to Be Torched

Last summer a violent storm struck down nearly half a million acres of
trees in and around the boundary waters canoe area. The boundary waters
is a pristine wilderness area in northeastern Minnesota. No motorized
vehicles are allowed and the U-S Forest Service does minimal management,
leaving it in its natural state. But now officials are worried about
the fire danger, and they’re planning some measures that normally aren’t
allowed. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill has
more:

High Grading Fails the Test

The recent announcement by the National Forest Service canceling a
cutting plan in New Hampshire’s White Mountains has Great Lakes Radio
Consortium commentator Don Ogden thinking about forestry issues we often
don’t hear about:

Rediscovering the Alvar

Imagine you’re wandering through the woods on a trail shaded by trees.You turn a corner, and suddenly, you’re standing at the edge of a rockygrassland plopped down in the middle of a Northeastern forest. Theseseemingly misplaced grasslands are known as alvars and theGreat Lakes is one of only two regions in the world where they occur.The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly visited one of theseunique sites and met two local volunteers who’ve become the unofficialcaretakers:

Restoration Practices Generating Controversy

Years ago, forest preserves were established in many American cities toprotect valuable natural areas from urban development. But over theyears, the health of those preserves has declined. Conservationists arenow trying to repair the damage by actively restoring those naturalareas. But now, some of their techniques are being questioned. TheGreat Lakes Radio Consortium’s Steve Frenkel reports:

Traveling Activists Build Support for Forests

Two environmentalists are crisscrossing the country to spread their message of stopping deforestation in America. While saving the forests is a national issue, their approach for building support has a local emphasis. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports: