Forester says drought in Northern Rockies is our own doing
Special report by Tim Bacon,
retired independent forestry consultant
March 21, 2001
With severe drought all around us, it's past time to face up to the
function that forests play in the regulation of weather systems and realize
the great damage wešve done.
Trees are like hydraulic pumps lifting large quantities of water to the
leaves and needles where evaporation takes place. Through evaporation,
forests release huge quantities of water into the atmosphere which is
carried by air currents hundreds of miles. That's how forests create their
own weather and why the name rainforest is unique to forested areas.
Which brings us to the clear relationship between increased deforestation
and the decreasing precipitation levels in the northern Rockies. The
problem is not just heavy logging here in Montana, it's actually more the
logging on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada.
Coastal forests get the rain blowing in off the ocean, which they evaporate
in huge quantities back into the atmosphere for the prevailing winds to
bring to the northern Rockies. However, over a century of coastal
deforestation has resulted in steadily decreasing evaporation. In other
words, more logging on the coast has meant less rain inland.
In an article, "California's Logging and Montana's Fires," in the winter
2001 issue of Earth Island Journal, Lance Olsen of Montana says, "Missing
from the controversy over western fires is the story of water's migration
from the temperate forests of the Pacific Coast to the dry inland forests
of the Rockies, and the role that West Coast logging is clearly having in
the overall loss of precipitation inland.... A paper by two USFS
hydrologists summarized the situation succinctly: Deforestation desiccates
(dries) the atmosphere."
While more logging along the U.S. and Canadian coast continues, the dry
spell here in the northern Rockies will phase into the first stage of
desertification. History has seen this process before. It was long term
logging on the north coast of Africa many centuries ago that was eventually
responsible for the creation of the Sahara Desert by drying up the
atmosphere so rain no longer reached the interior.
I checked with Dr. Steve Running, professor at the University of Montana's
School of Forestry, about the relationship between increased deforestation
along the west coast and drought here in the northern Rockies. He said,
"the theory of West Coast clear cutting contributing to Rocky Mountain
drought is meteorologically credible, although difficult to prove
scientifically." Dr. Running's lab writes software programs for NASA
satellites.
So time will tell, like it already has in North Africa. Unfortunately here
and now that process is accelerated by global warming, increasingly
efficient logging operations and now by trade agreements and organizations
such as NAFTA, the pending Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the
World Trade Organization which pose a tremendous threat to the world's
forests.
Unless drastic action is taken, the northern Rockies will probably look
more and more like Afghanistan. Once our Montana forests die from drought,
our streams will dry up, then fish and animals die, and without forests
providing shade and cooling evaporation, temperatures will go up even more,
further increasing the drying.
What we obviously need to do is end large-scale industrial logging and
reduce our demand for wood and paper products. For example, instead of
cutting down our forests to provide paper products, we should utilize 100%
recycled paper and tree-free alternatives such as wheat, hemp and kenef.
Houses we can build from recycled lumber, strawbales, or rock.
We must also do much more to restore our forest ecosystems, both here in
the northern Rockies, along the West Coast and throughout America. Let's
put our loggers to work helping to restore the natural processes that once
regulated our climate and provided ample moisture to the northern Rockies,
before desert conditions take over. Do we really want to hear our children
and grandchildren raging at us for waiting too long to make needed changes?
The good news is that some former mill towns in the Pacific Northwest have
made surprisingly smooth transitions to non timber based economies, and
others can follow suit with less difficulty than they expect. There are
many other kinds of employment, but business as usual is rapidly ending our
forest cover.
Forests are one of the crucial mechanisms that hold the rest of life
together. We've cut too much for too long. Lets restore our forest cover
while we still have a chance.
Tim Bacon lives in western Montana