For generations now, japan’s forests have been heavily managed for timber, one result is large stands of single species forests. They may look good, but not much can live there.

The outcome, say critics like Mariko Moriyama of the 20,000-member Japan Bear and Forest Association (JBFA), has been the creation of forests where few animals can survive. Vast single-species stands of timber lack the plant diversity found in natural forests, and plant diversity forms the foundation for animal diversity. Black bears, for example, are omnivorous but prefer to eat young leaves, insects, berries, and acorns — few of which can be found in timber plantations.

And what natural forest remains has been fragmented by roads and other development, leaving less and less room for Japan’s bears and putting them in conflict with humans — a clash that is rapidly driving down bear populations.

“The results of the experiment are in,” says Moriyama, who founded JBFA after a career as a middle school science teacher. “Japan’s traditional culture preserved amazing forests up until World War II. Our post-war approach has failed.”

The lesson is that the needs of a timber company managing a forest for lumber are not necessarily beneficial to other life in the forest. When lumber companies are put in charge of forest management, the only ones who will benefit are the forest companies.

One federal court has already done so, now there’s one more opportunity for a federal court to re-instate the roadless rule for national forests established under President Clinton, and void the changes to the rule made by the Bush Administration.

The Obama administration today appealed a Wyoming federal district court ruling that struck down the national roadless rule. The appeal will go to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.
The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, issued just a few days before the end of the Clinton administration, protected 58.5 million acres of America’s pristine roadless national forest lands from new road building and timber harvesting.

The appeal filed today is a response to the 2008 ruling by a federal district court judge in Wyoming, who invalidated the roadless rule nationwide. Judge Clarence Brimmer issued a permanent injunction against the rule, saying it violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Wilderness Act.

As an illustration of how the different Clinton and Bush policies affected the forests, during the Bush years the number of acres protected under the roadless rule shrank from 58.5 million to 40 million.

For all of us who lived through Dutch Elm disease and watched as entire neighborhoods were wiped clean of trees in a single season, this report sounds both familiar, and scary.

Thousand cankers, a newly recognized and devastating disease that attacks black walnut trees, has killed a large number of trees across the western states and has now moved eastward into several communities along Colorado’s Front Range, including Boulder and Colorado Springs and the Denver area.

Whitney Cranshaw, a Colorado State University entomologist, says this serious situation may become “catastrophic” if infective walnut twig beetles colonize in areas east of Colorado where black walnut is a native forest species.

Based on patterns seen in the West, such a colonization is “likely to develop into an uncontrollable outbreak,” he says.

Let’s hope they can find a way to prevent the spread of this disease before it becomes uncontrollable. Watching an entire forest disappear is a disappointment that no one really needs to go through.

In the seemingly endless ping-pong match over how to manage the nation’s forests, the cut down as much as possible camp has just had the ball slammed back at them.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated national protections for some of the country’s wildest forest lands, the latest twist in a nearly decadelong legal battle.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Bush administration had skirted environmental laws when it effectively repealed a 2001 rule that barred road building and timber cutting on nearly a third of America’s national forest land.

The so-called roadless rule, issued during the last month of Bill Clinton’s presidency, was one of that administration’s most controversial conservation moves. It spawned a host of lawsuits, contradictory court rulings and administrative maneuvers.

Wednesday’s decision does not necessarily settle the issue. A related case is working its way through another appeals court, and the Obama administration could take its own action.

You can bet this won’t be the final word on the issue, if nothing else, the Clinton roadless rule exempted Alaska’s Tongas Forest, so the nation’s largest roadless forest is still a question mark. But for the forests that were protected by Clinton and exploited by Bush, the pressure to build logging roads is off, at least for now.

Because of their long lives, trees are a good source of information regarding long-term climate change, and if the trees of Yosemite National park are any indication, there are indeed long-term changes taking place in our forests.

There are fewer large-diameter trees in Yosemite National Park today than there were in 1932, and warmer climate conditions have played a role in this decline, new research by government and university scientists shows. Large diameter trees are those that have lived the longest, often called old-growth trees.

Their new research paper carries a warning that more frequent and severe wildfires are possible in Yosemite due to the warming climate and a shift to fire-intolerant tree species.

Created in 1890 and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, Yosemite National Park is known for its granite cliffs, waterfalls, giant sequoia groves and biological diversity.

But the researchers say a decline in the park’s large trees means habitat loss and possible reduction in species such as spotted owls, mosses, and orchids as well as a mammal species known as fisher, which despite its name, seldom eats fish. The fisher, Martes pennanti, is a marten, a carnivore in the weasel family.

If you listen, you can hear it, it’s the world changing beneath our feet.

National forests and national parks seem to be on everyone’s minds today. First comes this dispatch from the NPCA regarding proposed mining operatons near Alaska’s Katmai and Lake Clark National Parks:

One million acres of prime wolf, bear, and salmon habitat adjacent to Lake Clark and Katmai National Parks could be opened to new federal mining claims with the stroke of a pen. Closed to mining since 1971, these wild Alaska lands are integral to Bristol Bay’s salmon-rich ecosystem that is anchored by these two grand national parks. A recommendation from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to lift this mineral closure and expand a modern day gold rush was issued in the last days of the Bush Administration and we need your help to send this bad idea back to the drawing board.

BLM recommended opening more lands to mining, but their faulty analysis failed to conduct sufficient scientific research on the impacts that these new mining claims would have on the region’s fish and wildlife. Plus, BLM’s decision ignored the overwhelming opposition of local residents and indigenous tribes! A new report issued by NPCA’s Center for State of the Parks clearly identifies this proposed mining district immediately adjacent to Lake Clark as the single biggest threat to one of America’s most pristine and wild national parks.

Next comes news that while the Obama Administration isn’t foollowing the Bush Administration’s lead as far as logging in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a different story in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

In a roadless area of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service has awarded the first timber sale under the new so-called Vilsack policy. Due to a series of lawsuits and conflicting court orders on the Roadless Rule, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced in May that he would personally review and approve timber sales in roadless areas across the nation.

The Orion North timber sale awarded Monday to Pacific Log and Lumber of Ketchikan will produce some 3.8 million board feet of timber from 381 acres in Thorne Arm on Revillagigedo Island near Ketchikan.

Roughly two miles of roads will be constructed to facilitate the harvest of timber for the sale, which is adjacent to Misty Fjords National Monument.

If the Tongass is cut up for timber, it will mean the end of the largest roadless forest left in North America. Alaskan timber interests may be happy about it, but for everyone else it’s the end of an era.

The Bush Administration’s logging plan for the Pacific Northwest, one of the last policies snuck in before the end of their term, was first chopped down by a federal judge at the beginning of the month, and now the Obama Administration has abandoned any plans they might have had to defend or go along with it.

The Obama administration is withdrawing the Bush administration’s last attempt at increasing logging in Northwest forests occupied by northern spotted owls and salmon.

Assistant Interior Secretary Ned Farquhar told a conference call of attorneys Thursday that they had determined the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s decision not to consult federal biologists over the logging’s effects on spotted owls and salmon violated the Endangered Species Act.

Notch up one victory for trees and spotted owls.

For too long, the United States’, and the world’s for that matter, policy toward forest management has basically amounted to no tree left standing. Whether it’s the rainforests of the tropics or the hardwood forests of more temperate climes, the short-term economic gains of cutting down trees has far outweighed efforts to take a longer-term approach, and has gotten in the way of valuing the worth of forests as forests. Bit by bit, though, we’re learning just how valuable a standing forest can be.

The deep green forests of the Pacific Northwest hold great potential to increase carbon storage and help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, if they are managed primarily for that purpose, new research has found.
In the complete absence of fire or timber harvest, the forests of Oregon and Northern California could theoretically almost double their carbon storage, according to scientists in the Oregon State University College of Forestry.

The authors recognized that a complete absence of disturbance is unrealistic, so their estimates were based on average conditions up until now that include variation in forest biomass, age, climate, disturbances and soil fertility.

If all forest stands in this region were just allowed to increase in age by 50 years, their potential to store atmospheric carbon would still increase by 15 percent, the study concludes.

And to show the international significance of recognizing the worth of preserving forests versus cutting them down, the same choice faces the residents of Indonesia.

Selling credits for the billions of tons of carbon that are locked in Indonesia’s tropical rain forests could be as profitable as converting these areas into palm oil plantations, a study released Friday found.

The study, in the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Letters, also found that conserving the 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) that are slated to become plantations on Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, would boost the region’s biodiversity. The 800 proposed plantations that were studied contain 40 of the region’s 46 threatened mammals including orangutans and pygmy elephants, the study found.

There’s a saying out there about people being entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. That’s one piece of reality that the Bush Administration never seemed to get into their collective heads.

The Bush administration made “greatly exaggerated claims” about the severity of wildland fire in the 2008 Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl, according to new research published Monday.

The controversial recovery plan recommended the elimination of forest reserves on over half of the owl’s range in order to promote widespread thinning in forests used by the owl, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

“The Recovery Plan is simply not scientifically justified, and would create substantial risks for the spotted owl,” said Chad Hanson, lead author of the study and a research associate at the University of California at Davis. “Areas of intense fire support peak numbers of wildlife species, including prey species upon which spotted owls depend,” he said.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should start over again with a science-based recovery plan that builds on the protective measures of the Northwest Forest Plan to recover spotted owls and hundreds of other old-forest dependent species regardless of fire,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy and former member of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery team for the owl.

“There is certainly ample time to carefully design experimental thinning treatments in fire prone forests such as tree plantations without eliminating old forest reserves,” said DellaSala.

Of course, we all know that when the Bush Administration talked about a “Spotted Owl Recovery Plan”, what they were really looking for wqs an excuse to log the forests the owl depends on for its habitat. That they would resort to basically making things up in order to justify their actions is, unfortunately for the owls, the forests and conservationists everywhere, simply the way the Bush Administration went about its business.

Another piece of Bush brush has been cleared out of the system. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the junk is being cleared away. This time it’s by a judge’s order.

A federal judge has struck down the Bush administration’s change to a rule designed to protect the northern spotted owl from logging in national forests.

U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled from Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday that the U.S. Forest Service failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of changing the rule to make it easier to cut down forest habitat of species such as the spotted owl and salmon on 193 million acres of national forests.

The Bush Administration had argued that the environmental impact of its forest policy could only be determined after the policy had been put into practice. For example, a decision to indiscriminately open a forest to logging could only be evaluated after the logging had taken place. By that time of course, it would be to late for the wildlife that depended on that forest for its survival.