Researchers began a program to reintroduce whooping cranes in the eastern U.S. in 2000. This winter, some young cranes are learning how to migrate south from older birds. The biologists tracking the birds say so far, the new recruits are catching on. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Christina Shockley reports:
Transcript
Researchers began a program to reintroduce whooping cranes in the
eastern U.S. in 2000. This winter, some young cranes are learning how
to migrate south from older birds. The biologists tracking the birds say
so far, the new recruits are catching on. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Christina Shockley reports:
At first, humans led the new flock of whooping cranes from Wisconsin
to Florida by flying ultra light planes. Now, some of those birds are
teaching a few younger cranes how to make the trip.
Kelley Tucker is with the International Crane Foundation, one of the
groups involved in the reintroduction project. She says this winter, four
young whooping cranes are flying with older cranes and sandhill cranes
on the migratory path. They’re relying partly on instinct, partly on the
lead of the older birds.
“The birds will be a couple miles apart, but some of the biologists have
said ‘I have a sense that the younger birds know where the older birds
are.’ Sometimes they’ll roost within a mile or two of the older birds.”
Tucker says eventually she hopes all the chicks will learn to migrate
from older birds, and the ultra light planes won’t be used. She says it’s
important for the cranes to make it back to Wisconsin in the spring to
mate.
Extinction is a natural process. But scientists point out that humans have sped that process up. A new study maps out the places on Earth where species are in the greatest danger of going extinct. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams reports:
Transcript
Extinction is a natural process, but scientists point out that humans have
sped that process up. A new study maps out the places on earth where
species are in the greatest danger of going extinct. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Rebecca Williams reports:
Conservation biologists are most concerned about endangered animals and
plants that are confined to just one location on earth, such as one
mountaintop, one lake, or one farm.
A new study finds there are close to 800 endangered species worldwide that
are found in single remaining sites.
Taylor Ricketts is the lead author of the study published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He says historically, most
extinctions have been on islands, but the species at risk now are found more
often on the mainlands.
“And I think that’s because our footprint on the mainlands has just grown,
and our habitat conversion of a lot of these places has intensified so much
that even the not particularly susceptible species are beginning to be
threatened with extinction.”
Ricketts says two thirds of these isolated sites don’t have full legal
protection. He points out it’s hard to protect species that are on land
with competing uses, such as agriculture, timber harvest or houses.
Air deposition is when air pollution settles out into lakes and streams and becomes water pollution. (Photo by Lester Graham)
We’re continuing our series, Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. Our guide through the series is Lester Graham. In this report he explains one of the threats that experts identified is air pollution that finds its way into the Great Lakes:
Transcript
We’re continuing our series ‘Ten Threats to the Great Lakes’. Our guide through the
series is Lester Graham. In this report he explains one of the threats is air pollution that
finds its way into the Great Lakes:
It’s called ‘Air Deposition.” Melissa Hulting is a scientist at U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency. We asked her just what that means:
“Air deposition simply is just when materials, in this case pollutants, are transferred from
the air to the water. So, pollutants in particles can fall into the water. Pollutants in rain
can fall into the water, or pollutants in a gas form can be absorbed into the water.”
So, it’s things like pesticides that evaporate from farm fields and end up in the rain over
the Great Lakes. PCBs in soil do the same. Dioxins from backyard burning end up in the
air, and then are carried to the lakes
One of the pollutants that causes a significant problem in the Great Lakes is mercury. It
gets in the water. Then it contaminates the fish. We eat the fish and mercury gets in us.
It can cause babies to be born with smaller heads. It can cause nervous system damage
and lower IQ in small children if women of childbearing age or children eat too much
fish.
One of the notable sources of mercury is from power plants that burn coal.
(Sound of coal car)
Railroad cars like this one empty their tons of coal at power plants all across the nation.
More than half of the electricity in the nation is produced at coal-burning power plants,
and with a 250-year supply, coal is going to be the primary fuel for a while.
One coal producing state is acknowledging that mercury is a problem. Doug Scott is the
Director of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. He says coal is important to
the energy mix, but we need to reduce pollutants such as mercury as much as possible.
“The policy of the state has been to try to work with the power plants to try to burn
Illinois coal as cleanly as you can. Now, that means a lot more equipment and a lot more
things that they have to do to be able to make that work, but we’re committed to trying to
do both those things.”
And, Scott says the federal government’s mercury reduction program does not go far
enough soon enough, but the electric utility industry disagrees.
Dan Riedinger is spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a power industry trade
organization. Riedinger says, really reducing mercury emissions at power plants just
won’t make that much difference.
“Power plants contribute relatively little to the deposition of mercury in any one area of
the country, including the Great Lakes, and no matter how much we reduce mercury
emissions from power plants in the Great Lakes Region, it’s really not going to have a
discernable impact in terms of improving the levels of mercury in the fish people want to eat.”
“Relatively little? Now, that flies in the face of everything I’ve read so far. Everything
I’ve read, indicates coal-fired power plants are a significant contributor to the mercury
issue in the Great Lakes and other places.”
“It’s really not quite that simple. Power plants are a significant source of mercury
emissions here in the United States, but most of the mercury that lands in the Great
Lakes, particularly in the western Great Lakes is going to come from sources outside of
the United States.”
Well, it’s not quite that simple either. The U.S. EPA’s Melissa Hulting agrees some of
the mercury in the Great Lakes comes from foreign sources, but recent studies show
some mercury settles out fairly close to the smokestacks. She says you can blame both
for the mercury in your fish.
“You blame the sources that are close by and you blame the sources that are far away.
The bottom line with mercury is that we’re all in this together and it’s going to take
everybody reducing their sources to take care of the problem.”
Taking care of the problem is going to take some money, and that will mean we’ll all pay in
higher utility bills. The Illinois EPA’s Doug Scott says it’ll be worth it if we can reduce
mercury exposure to people.
“We know what the issue is. It’s not a matter of us not understanding the connection
between mercury and what happens in fish, and then what happens in humans as a result
of that. We understand that. We know it, and we also know to a great degree what we
can do to try to correct the problem, and so, it’s a matter of just going out and doing it,
and so I’d like to think it’s something that can be done sooner rather than later.”
And since Great Lakes fish have elevated levels of mercury, sooner would be good.
It’ll take a while for the mercury already there to work its way out of the ecosystem and
return to more normal levels.
The makers of the non-stick coating Teflon say they’re going to reduce the amount of a chemical that’s causing health concerns. The chemical is used in the manufacturing process. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight
reports:
Transcript
The makers of the non-stick coating Teflon say they’re going to reduce the amount of a
chemical that’s causing health concerns. The chemical is used in the manufacturing
process. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Fred Kight reports:
The DuPont Company says the output of the chemical known as C8 will be cut by 90
percent by the end of next year. The chemical giant had agreed to the action in a deal
with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is studying whether C8 poses
health risks to humans.
DuPont continues to argue that C8 is not harmful.
Just a few weeks ago, a judge okayed the settlement of a class action lawsuit in which the
company consented to pay at least 107 million dollars to resolve contamination claims by
residents living near one of its plants in West Virginia.
A local water district official welcomes the C8 cut but says he wishes they had done it 20
years ago. And an official with the organization Environmental Working Group
complains the plan did not go far enough and would not eliminate exposure
to the chemical.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering
extending the use of a pesticide that the agency once decided was
not safe around children. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering extending the use of a
pesticide that
the agency once decided was not safe around children. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports:
The pesticide Dursban is sprayed on the ground during construction to protect new
homes from
termites. Four years ago, the EPA and Dow had agreed to phase out that use of the
pesticide by
the end of this year. Exposure to children was considered risky. Now, the EPA is
reportedly
considering lifting the ban. Jay Feldman heads up the environmental group Beyond
Pesticides.
Feldman says this would be like testing the safety of Dursban on humans without their
knowledge…
“They really should stop production, then stop use, do all the studies they want to
do with full
public disclosure and then revisit the issue. Not retain the use, allow people
unknowingly to be
exposed and then obviously put children at serious risk.”
In a report in The Washington Post, a Dow spokesperson indicated using new EPA
computer modeling, Dursban now “falls within an acceptable range” of federal
guidelines.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
Meredith Buhalis and her daughter Zoe. Meredith's breast milk was tested for PBDEs as part of a study by the Environmental Working Group. (Photo by Meredith Buhalis)
Couch cushions often have PBDEs in them... (Photo by Nicholas Sales)
...and so do TVs. Are there any health effects from being surrounded by these chemicals? (Photo by Craig Young)
Flame retardant chemicals help make our lives safer.
The chemicals are designed to keep plastics and foam from
catching on fire, but the flame retardants are worrying some
scientists because these chemicals are turning up in people’s
bodies, sometimes at alarmingly high rates. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
Flame retardant chemicals help make our lives safer. The chemicals are designed
to keep plastics and foam from catching on fire. But the flame retardants are
beginning to worry some scientists because these chemicals are turning up in
peoples’ bodies. Sometimes at alarmingly high rates. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
If you take a look around your house, you can find a lot of things that have
flame retardant chemicals in them. They’re in your television set, the cushions
in your couch, and the padding underneath your carpet. They’re known as poly-bromiated-diphenyl
ethers, or PBDEs. And they’re either mixed in or sprayed on plastics and foam to keep a fire
from spreading.
Five years ago a Swedish study found these chemicals were accumulating in women’s breast
milk. Studies in the U.S. followed, and researchers also found PBDEs in Americans, but at
even higher levels. In fact, Americans have some of the highest levels ever measured. And
over time, the levels have been going up.
(sound of baby)
Meredith Buhalis was one of those people measured in a study by an envrionmental organization
called the Environmental Working Group. Buhalis and 20 other first time moms sent in samples
of their breast milk. When the samples were tested, all of them had some level of PBDEs in
them. Buhalis says when she read the results she didn’t know what to think.
“I guess I kind of read the results and the study was like, ‘Oh, well that sort of sucks.’
I wish I knew more about what that meant. ‘Cause I don’t. You know, they don’t know what
that means.”
Scientists don’t know how or if the chemicals affect human health. And some scientists
think the government and the chemical companies aren’t doing enough to look into PBDEs.
(sound of typing)
In his office at the University of Texas in Dallas, Dr. Arnold Schecter is working on an
article about the flame retardants. He’s been studying toxic chemicals for more than thirty
years. He and some of his colleagues think PBDEs are a lot like another type of chemical…
“It reminds us of PCBs. PCBs structurally are similar to the PBDEs. So there is the worry,
or the concern, that they may have many, if not all, the toxic effect that PCBs have on humans.”
So far the data on PCBs strongly suggest that the chemicals can cause cancer in humans as
well as other human health effects such as damage to the nervous and immune systems. The
companies that manufacture the flame retardants say it’s not fair to compare PBDEs with
PCBs. They say the chemicals are vastly different.
But no one really knows whether the chemicals are similar in the way they affect human
health. That’s because no one’s studied the human health effects of PBDEs.
“Unfortunately, there are no published human health studies and I don’t believe any have
been funded by the federal government to date. Nor by industry, nor by any foundations,
which is a bit different than the situation with PCBs and dioxins years ago when many
studies were being funded.”
Some animal studies suggest that the chemicals can permanently disrupt the hormone and
nervous systems, cause reproductive and developmental damage, and cause cancer. All that
makes scientists such as Dr. Schecter especially concerned about the most vulnerable
population – developing babies.
Because of the concerns, the biggest manufacturer of these chemicals in the U.S. has agreed
to stop making two of the PBDE formulations that were found to accumulate in people. Great
Lakes Chemical says production will stop by the end of this year. The chemicals will be
replaced with another type of brominated flame retardant.
The Bromine Science and Environmental Forum is a trade group that represents companies
that make the flame retardants. Peter O’Toole is the group’s U.S. Director. He says so
far the amount of chemicals found in people doesn’t concern the companies, but the upward
trend does.
“And again, it wasn’t of alarming numbers, but the manufacturer was concerned that these
numbers were going up nonetheless. And they thought it was prudent, and they talked to the
EPA and EPA thought it was prudent if there was some sort of mutual phase out of those materials.”
Dr. Schecter says he commends the company for taking this step. But he says even though these
two formulations will be phased out, the flame retardants are already in our environment now.
He says his research has found high levels of PBDEs by wiping the plastic casing on television
sets, and in the dust found in homes. He says what’s in our homes now isn’t going to vanish,
so we need to figure out how the chemicals get into us, so we can avoid potential health problems.
For its part, the U.S. Envrionmental Protection Agency says large-scale human health studies
take a long time to develop. An agency spokesperson says the EPA first needs to learn how a
person becomes highly exposed. After that, they say researchers will be able to ask the question,
“for the highly exposed people, are there any health effects?”
(sound of baby)
That leaves people such as Meredith Buhalis, with a lot more questions than answers.
“We are thinking of having another baby, and I think I would really like to know more about
PBDEs. I think about it when I think about that.” (to her daughter) “Oh thank you. Hi, baby.
Hi, Zoe.”
The Federal government doesn’t plan to regulate the chemicals anytime soon. But some states
aren’t waiting for more studies. A handful of states have placed restrictions on certain
types of PBDEs. And in other states, legislation is pending.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.
American chestnuts (left) are smaller than Chinese and European chestnuts. The Chinese and European varieties are also resistant to the blight, making the imports more desirable to growers. (Photo by Lester Graham)
American chestnuts were an important food source for wildlife because there was a more consistent crop each year than acorns. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Bill Nash of Nash Nurseries holds the spiny husks that hold the chestnuts. The American chestnut grove behind him is 20 years old and has not yet been hit by blight. (Photo by Lester Graham)
Food is always a big part of the holidays. But one
traditional food has – for the most part – disappeared from American tables. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Food is always a big part of the holidays. But one traditional food has – for the most part – disapeared from American tables. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
(Sound of Nat King Cole singing, “Chestnuts roasing on an open fire…”)
That old chestnut of a song romanticizes roasting chestnuts as a part of the holidays. But a lot of us have never even seen chestnuts, let alone roasted them on an open fire. Chestnuts used to be a major part of the Eastern hardwood forest. There were millions of them. In fact, 25 percent of all the mature trees were chestnuts. But a blight, imported with some Chinese chestnut trees, slowly wiped out the American chestnuts. Now, they’re gone.
Well… almost. Much of the root stock is still alive. Sprouts grow until the blight knocks them back again. A blight only hurts the standing tree where it branches out.
And, in a few isolated pockets in the Midwest, the blight hasn’t reached the trees. A few American chestnuts are alive and growing and some of them are free of the blight. At Nash Nursuries in central Michigan, owner Bill Nash is guiding us through a rare sight… a grove of American chestnuts.
“These are 20 years old and as you can see, they’re fairly good sized. The American chestnut is quite a rapid growing tree. It’s well-suited for our climate, so it doesn’t have any of the problems that some of the hybrids do as far as growing and cultural care you have to take care of them. The Americans, you get them started and they’re pretty much on their own.”
In a few places in Michigan and Wisconsin there are small groves of chestnuts. They’re prized trees. They’re great for shade. The hardwood is rot resistant and makes great furniture and fence posts. And the chestnuts are eaten by humans and wildlife alike. Bill Nash says the tree will be popular again if it ever overcomes the blight that’s hit it so hard.
“The American chestnut will make another big comeback in this country as a yard tree, as a timber tree, as a wildlife tree.”
That part about a wildlife tree is more important than just worrying about the squirrels and bunnies. Chestnuts were an important food source for all kinds of animals.
Andrew Jarosz is a plant biologist at Michigan State University. He says the loss of chestnuts has been hard on wildlife populations.
“Chestnuts shed nuts in a more regular pattern than oaks, which will have what are called mast years – where they’ll have major crops, massive crops one year and very small crops in other years – which means it’s either feast or famine if you’re depending on oaks.”
Since the blight first began hitting American chestnuts about a century ago, researchers have been looking into all kinds of ways to stop it. One way is to cross it with the Chinese chestnut which has a couple of genes that resist the blight. But it takes a long time to breed out the Chinese characteristics from the American chestnuts and still keep the resistant genes.
Another approach is genetic manipulation. Genetically modifying the American chestnut tree to make it disease resistant. Again, work is underway, but it takes a long time. And even after success, it’s likely some people won’t like the idea of releasing a genetically modified organism into the wild.
The final approach worked in Europe when the blight hit there. It seems there’s a naturally occuring virus that kills the blight. It spread naturally in Europe. There are a few groves in Michigan that have naturally acquired the virus and it’s working to keep the blight at bay. Andrew Jarosz is working on the research. He says the trick is figuring out how to get the virus to spread to other trees short of manually spreading it on cankers infected by the blight.
“If we’re literally talking about millions of trees across probably, you know, the eastern third of the country, we obviously can’t treat every canker on every tree. And we need to be able to figure out a way to deploy the virus in a way that it can spread.”
Even with all that hopeful research, it’ll be ten years at least before some practical solutions end up in the forests, and Jarosz believes a couple of centuries before the American chestnut holds the place it once did in the forests.
Bill Nash knows it’ll be a while before there are major changes, but he is optimistic about the American chestnut.
“Oh, I would think the tree has a bright future. There’s enough people working on that, enough programs going on now… So, I would suspect that in the not-too-distant future we should have some of this progress made. You know, Robert Frost in his poem predicted the comeback of the American chestnut, that something would arise to offset that blight. And we’re starting to see that.”
Frost put it this way: “Will the blight end the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not, It keeps smoldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another parasite Shall come to end the blight.”
Seems Frost was an optimist too.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
November 4th is Election Day. Voters throughout the region will choose their mayors and city council members, maybe support a ballot measure or two. Basically, one vote can be the end result of a long argument about what matters most. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King thinks the democratic process would be a whole lot easier if we were all a little less… human:
Transcript
Nov. 4th is Election Day. Voters throughout the region will choose their mayors and city council
members, maybe support a ballot measure or two. Basically, one vote can be the end result of a
long argument about what matters most. Great Lakes Radio Consortium Commentator, Julia
King, thinks the democratic process would be whole lot easier if we were all a little less human.
Things would be so much simpler if people were like – hamsters, or jackrabbits, or snails.
The point here being that if our species were a little more uniform – the way most other species
are – we’d have an easier time with politics.
Seriously, think about hamsters: they like exercise wheels, sleeping during the day, and sunflower
seeds. They don’t like cats. They don’t like pokey little kid fingers in their eyes and they don’t
like bright light. There’s not a lot of controversy in the hamster kingdom because they all pretty
much have the same likes and dislikes. It would be easy developing a policy that hamsters could
really rally around. Can’t you just see their little signs: “More Plastic Tubing!” and “We Heart
Sunflower Seeds!”
But people, oh my goodness, just look at us: some guy likes mountains and some woman wants
the ocean. One kid is quiet and shy and loves butterflies. Another is loud and fast and wants to
play hockey.
We have no set habitat, or diet, or demeanor. Some of us run from a fight and others of us go
looking everywhere for one. There are humans who want to talk everything through, who believe
it’s a civic duty to explore a public policy. And there are others who’d really rather focus on
something, more pleasant, less potentially explosive, like which European woman will fall for the
latest Joe Millionaire .
There are certain needs we do all share – water, food, shelter, love. But even those things we
can’t quite agree upon. Is water for thirsty people, or for swimming pools? Is the food
vegetarian or barbeque beef? Is your shelter threatening a wetland eco system or is the darn
wetland robbing you of your dream home? Does love mean engaging in dialogue or leaving
people the heck alone?
It’s a cruel trick nature plays on our species. We’re tangled up together on this planet, some six
billion of us, with an infinite array of dreams and visions and yet there is just this one great big
ball on which we all live.
Politics brings out the best and worst in humans. We organize into factions that can build or
destroy, that can nurture the spirit or evoke the meanness that resides in all of us.
Unlike much of the animal world, we achieve our goals not through sheer instinct, but through
intellect and focused determination. We have to outthink and outwork our foes to prevail. Yet
win or lose, we’re still tethered to one another, forever sentenced to the toil of negotiation in the
face of endless human want.
There’s growing evidence that having pets is good for the well-being of their humans. A new study looks at the effect of pets on the lives of chronically ill children. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:
Transcript
There’s growing evidence that having pets is good for the
well-being of their humans. A new study looks at the effect of pets on
the lives of chronically ill children. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Tracy Samilton reports:
This study of children living with diabetes was performed by researchers
at the Human-Animal Bond Initiative at Michigan State University. It
found that the children who had close, loving relationships with their
pets had better coping skills and were better at actively managing their
disease than other children.
Researcher Linda Spence says that may be because pets can improve children’s self-esteem and
reduce stress.
“They are consistently there, no matter how awful a day you have. When you come home, they’re
as happy to see you as if you were some sort of celebrity.”
Spence says the next step is to find out what these families are doing
that encourages their chronically ill children to develop close
relationships with pets. She suspects such families treat their pets as
members of the family rather than just animals.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tracy Samilton.
Loggers and environmentalists fight continually
over the use of national forests. Managers at many national forests
around the country are developing new long-range plans.
(Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)
Jerry Birchem says the price of his raw material,
timber, has tripled in the last ten years, partly because of
time-consuming environmental reviews of timber sales on federal land.
(Photo
by Stephanie Hemphill)
Sierra Club member Clyde Hanson says the new
plan doesn't provide enough protection for old growth and
wilderness areas. And he worries the 90 miles
of new ATV trails in each forest could ruin the peace and quiet.
(Photo by Stephanie Hemphill).
Loggers and environmentalists are in a continual fight over the use of national forests. One of their battlegrounds is the long-range planning process. Every ten to fifteen years, the U.S. Forest Service designs a new plan for each national forest. Right now, several forests in the Northwoods are getting new plans. The Forest Service says it’s paying more attention to biodiversity, and wants to encourage more old growth forests. Critics on the environmental side say the new plans are just business as usual. Loggers say they still can’t cut enough trees. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:
Transcript
Loggers and environmentalists are in a continual fight over the use of
national forests. One of their battlegrounds is the long-range
planning process. Every ten to fifteen years, the U.S. Forest Service
designs a new plan for each national forest. Right now, several
forests in the Northwoods are getting new plans. The Forest Service
says it’s paying more attention to biodiversity, and wants to encourage
more old growth forests. Critics on the environmental side say the
new plans are just business as usual. Loggers say they still
can’t cut enough trees. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie
Hemphill reports:
(sound of car door closing, footsteps in woods)
Jerry Birchem is a logger. He’s visiting one of his harvest sites on
land owned by St. Louis County, in northeastern Minnesota. The highest
quality wood will be turned into wooden dowels… other logs will go to a
lumber mill… the poorest quality will be turned into paper.
Birchem tries to get the highest possible value from each tree. He says in the last ten
years, the price of trees has tripled.
“We have to pay more for timber and the mills want to pay less, and we’re caught in the
middle of trying to survive in this business climate.”
Birchem likes buying timber from the county, like at this logging site. He hardly ever
cuts trees from the national forest anymore. He’d like to, but the Forest Service doesn’t
make much of its land available for logging. The agency says it doesn’t have enough staff
to do the environmental studies required before trees can be cut on federal land.
Jerry Birchem says loggers need the Forest Service to change that.
“You know there needs to be processes set in place so you know, it doesn’t take
so long to set up these timber sales. I mean, they’ve got to go through so
many analyses and so many appeals processes.”
Birchem says it should be harder for environmental groups to get in the way of timber
sales. But not everybody agrees with Birchem.
Clyde Hanson lives in Grand Marais, on the edge of Lake Superior. He’s an active
member of the Sierra Club.
He says it’s true loggers are taking less timber off federal lands in recent
years. But he says the Forest Service still isn’t protecting the truly special
places that deserve to be saved.
He says a place like Hog Creek should be designated a wilderness area, where no trees
can be cut.
(sound of creek, birds)
“Very unique mixture, we must be right at the transition between two types of forest.”
Red pine thrive here, along with jackpine and tamarack. It’s rough and swampy country,
far from roads. So far, loggers have left these trees alone.
But with the value of trees skyrocketing, Hanson says the place will be logged eventually.
Forest Service planners made note of the fact that the Hog Creek area is relatively
untouched by humans. They could have protected it, but they decided not to.
“And we think that’s a mistake, because this is our last chance to protect wilderness and
provide more wilderness for future generations. If we don’t do it now, eventually there’ll
be enough roads or enough logging going on in these places that by the next forest plan
it’ll be too late.”
But the Forest Service says it is moving to create more diversity in the
woods. It wants a forest more like what nature would produce if left
to her own devices.
The agency says it will reduce the amount of aspen in the forest. Aspen has been
encouraged, because it grows fast. When it’s cut, it grows back quickly, so loggers and
paper companies can make more money.
The trouble is, an aspen forest only offers habitat for some kinds of animals,
such as deer and grouse. Other animals, especially songbirds, need older trees to
live in.
So the Forest Service wants to create more variety in the woods, with more old trees than
there are now. But how to get the forest from here to there, is the problem.
Duane Lula is one of the Forest Service planners. He says fires and windstorms are nature’s way of producing
diverse forests. They sweep the woods periodically, killing big stands of older trees, and
preparing the soil for pines and other conifers. Jackpines, for instance, used to be more
common in the northwoods. Lula says the only practical way for man to mimic nature is
by cutting trees down.
“We can’t have those fires anymore just because people live here, there are private
homes here. There’s no way that we could replicate those fires. Timber management is one way of regenerating those jackpine stands in
lieu of having major fires.”
But Lula says the main purpose of timber cutting in the new plan is to move the forest
toward the diversity the agency wants, not to produce wood. And he says that shows the
Forest Service is looking at the woods in a new way.
“The previous plan tended to be very focused on how many acres you were going to
clearcut, how much timber you were going to produce, how much wildlife habitat you
were going to produce, and this one is trying to say, if we have this kind of desired
condition on the ground that we’re shooting for, then these other things will come from
that.”
As it does in the planning process in other national forests around the Great Lakes, the
Forest Service will adjust the plan after hearing from the public. Loggers,
environmentalists, and everyone else will have a chance to have their say. A final version
will be submitted to the Regional Forester in Milwaukee early next year. It could then
face a challenge in court.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
