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Consider all costs of timber harvest
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Coward
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(Part Two)
The Fisher Creek Timber Inventory promotes forest management only if that management meets three criteria of sustainability: 1) ecological sustainability; 2) economic sustainability; and 3) social sustainability. I will discuss whether the town can justify cutting the timber in Pinnacle Park in the context of these three criteria.
Ecological sustainability
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Guns, Germs and Steel,” has recently written about what happened to societies that made poor environmental choices. He lists a number of processes by which societies undermined their environment and then collapsed and disappeared from the face of the earth. The first process on his list is deforestation.
“Different societies respond differently to similar problems. For instance, problems of deforestation arose for many past societies, among which highland New Guinea, Japan, Tikopia and Tonga developed successful forest management and continued to prosper, while Easter Island, Mangareva, and Norse Greenland failed to develop successful forest management and collapsed as a result. How can we understand such differing outcomes? A society’s responses depend on its political, economic, and social institutions and on its cultural values. Those institutions and values affect whether the society solves (or even tries to solve) its problems.” (Collapse, Viking 2005, p. 14-15.)
Forestry is a science that was developed right here in Western North Carolina at the Cradle of Forestry, just over the mountain from Canada community. Ultimately forest management is a commercial pursuit. Its purpose is to produce timber, which can be cut down, sawed up and sold for money. There is a developing body of science that says that when you remove the biomass, i.e. cut down the trees, you remove the nutrients necessary to sustain the healthy growth of the next generation of trees. At some point you remove so much that the soil is depleted and a new forest is stunted and worthless as a crop. That is probably a factor in the parts of Pinnacle Park where no good timber is growing now. Furthermore, the sustainability of the forest must include the entire forest, not just the commercial crop.
What about other plant and animal species living there? Cutting down a forest utterly alters their home. The Inventory does not address these issues. Pinnacle Park is a watershed. Pure, clean water gushes down Fisher Creek into Scotts Creek and helps keep the Tuckaseegee River one of the cleanest in WNC. The land-disturbing activity that will occur from a timber cut will pollute far more than just Fisher Creek. The effect on the fish and other aquatic life will be severe. This assault on the environment will also have a damaging effect on economic sustainability.
You have only to consider local names like Buffalo Creek, Wolf Creek and Panthertown, and the fact that there aren’t any more buffaloes, wolves and panthers in WNC to know that when we humans dramatically alter our environment, the coyotes move in. I question whether forest management that does not sustain the biodiversity of the forest, its habitat and its other non-commercial plantlife is ultimately sustainable.
Economic sustainability
Since forest management is a science that should be practiced by forestry experts, if the town chooses this alternative, it should build into its budget the position of a full-time forest ranger with enough financial backing and equipment to do the job right, and the Forestry Department should become a permanent fixture, just like the Maintenance Department and the Police Department.
If the town is going to follow the long-term management plan that the Inventory advises, it must budget the building of many miles of new roads. The Inventory states that there are about 2.3 miles of passable roads. It also states that they are poorly maintained, and other roads are old and impassable. The Inventory fails to note several important facts in that regard: first, that only a few thousand yards of roads run through good timber; second, that all of those roads running through good timber are too steep and narrow to be commercially viable (the east-west roads at high altitude aren’t steep but they run through forests with little commercial value); third, in other places where there is harvestable timber, the roads don’t exist at all. To harvest the timber the Town will have to build big new roads all over Pinnacle Park, and because of the reduced slope required by modern environmental standards, many more miles of road will have to be built than now exist. If the town is going to use wise forest management practices, those new roads need to be engineered and surveyed and thereafter they need to be maintained continuously for the next half century.
People are often deceived into thinking that all this road building can be avoided by “helicopter timbering.” Helicopters don’t just fly over the land and pluck the trees out of the forest. The trees are still cut down, dragged to staging area, hauled by trucks to pick-up areas and then lifted out at $4,000 per hour. If you want to see what a helicopter cut looks like, go to the Blue Ridge Parkway, south of Balsam Gap in Jackson County, and look at all the roads that were built for a helicopter operation.
Eco-tourism is not something new to us here in WNC. People have been coming here for years for the scenery and the peace and quiet. The Chamber of Commerce regularly directs visitors to the trails in Pinnacle Park when they ask, “Where can we go hiking somewhere close?” Afterwards they stay awhile and spend their money here in our community rather than in Gatlinburg or Asheville. That is sustainable economic activity that we could lose, because no one is going to suggest that our visitors go to the headwaters of Fisher Creek and look at stumps.
If the town is prepared to give all of this up and manage the headwaters of Fisher Creek as a timber stand rather than a park, it should be honest enough to prepare its citizens for a long-term, sustainable management commitment, which over the long haul will produce a few years of revenue. In other years the management will mean years of expenditure, supported solely by tax dollars. If it is looking for a revenue-generating timber cut with no management, it will be mimicking the same brand of ecocide that the leaders of Easter Island practiced right before their society collapsed.
Social sustainability
So, the issue on Fisher Creek boils down to this: does the town want to cut down its trees, manage its forest, or preserve Pinnacle Park? To quote from Collapse again: “... more than half of the world’s original area of forest has already been converted to other uses and at present conversion rates one-quarter of the forests that remain will become converted within the next half-century. Those losses of forests represent losses for us humans, especially because forests provide us with timber and other raw materials, and because they provide us with so-called ecosystem services such as protecting our watershed, protecting soil against erosion, constituting essential steps in the water cycle that generates much of our rainfall, and providing habitat for most terrestrial plant and animal species. Deforestation was a or the major factor in all the collapses of past societies ...” p. 487.
You cannot address social sustainability without factoring in the wisdom and courage (or the lack thereof) of elected politicians. So you have to ask the question, “If the town board commits to long-term forest management, will a future town board honor that commitment?” Obviously, this present townboard is considering breaking the lease that a previous town board entered into with the Foundation, so the answer to this question is, “Probably not.”
If the town board contracted with some other entity, like Pinnacle Timber, to manage its forest, would a future town board, in a year of tax-raising budget crisis not look to the precedent set by this town board, and break a management lease and clear cut the whole thousand acres? If so, so much for social sustainability.
It is far more likely that future social sustainability in Pinnacle Park will be insured if it is left alone and the people get to enjoy it for the things that the Foundation has tried to insure, like recreation and education.
There is no question that without recreation people would be unable to cope with the stress of life. A ballgame well played, a weekend on the lake, a concert, a movie – these are the things that enable us to go back to work in the morning. We use enormous amounts of public funds to support our public recreation fields and parks and pools. A peregrine falcon migration, a brook trout finning underneath a rhododendron bloom, a trillium patch, a rime-iced spruce forest, a waterfall – you find these for free in Pinnacle Park, and it re-creates your life just as effectively as a stair master at the fitness center.
The educational opportunities are no less abundant. Pinnacle Park has supported elementary school science classes, senior class projects, Eagle Scout and merit badges, university level research, a Leadership Jackson seminar and at least one master’s degree. It has been available for club and school service projects, court-ordered community service, juvenile detention service and demonstration projects. Ironically, even now students are using it to conduct a timber survey. These are the types of activities that sustain and build up society. All that will be lost with a timber cut, except maybe for research projects on bad decisions-making.
There are hundreds of thousands of acres of U.S. Forest Service land all around us, and it is managed to a fare-thee-well for timber production. There is where timber should be managed and cut. Our national park is brim-full with people from all over the world, and you can drive right through it and enjoy all the nature you want without ever stepping out of your car, if you can tolerate bumper to bumper traffic. You might have to walk a little ways into the woods to enjoy Pinnacle Park. There you will discover that it is a quiet little preserve, still wild and beautiful, and for the most part untrammeled. Why ruin it for the sake of short-term gain?
I appreciate the effort that went into the Inventory. The town board can now make a rational decision. I urge it to remember what Henry David Thoreau said many years ago; it is still true today, perhaps now more than ever: “We need the tonic of wildness....In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
(Editor’s Note: Coward is president of the Pinnacle Park Foundation, but the views expressed in this column are his own and not an official position adopted by that board.)
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