On Friday, I was at the Trinity River in eastern Humboldt County, watching my son splash his way through water as clear as the sky above. One hundred feet upstream, a helicopter repeatedly dipped its bucket into the river, rising up each time to carry its load to one of the fourteen fires that broke out in our county and neighboring counties last week, the results of lightning strikes. As the helicopter passed over our heads, it trailed a stream of water from the bucket, and about three minutes later, it would be raining on us very gently for a minute or two.
This got me thinking, of course, about fire hazard and the toils of keeping cleared, defensible space around one's home when one lives in the country (which I do not). This in turn evoked thoughts of a local NGO in our north coast area, the Mattole Restoration Council (MRC), which is working to encourage homeowners in the Mattole River watershed to provide that defensible space by distributing grant money to help the homeowners get the work done. When each household maintains that magical 100-foot clearance, it benefits the entirety of this remote watershed, where it's often extremely difficult for firefighters to get quick entrance and egress on steep, narrow roads in scattered neighborhoods. With less flammable space around homes (and fewer homes that are themselves flammable--but that's another subject), firefighters can concentrate on attacking the flames in the wildland area rather than spending all their time worrying about defending structures.
This led to thoughts of other worthy MRC work: the organization is working on writing a Program Timberland Environmental Impact Report, a document designed to apply to owners throughout the watershed who want to practice sustainable forestry designed to return Mattole forestlands, many of which were highly degraded by mid-20th-century timber harvest practices, to healthy productivity while protecting water quality and other important values. Having a program document like this (i.e., an already-written "checklist"-type document) will make responsible forestry, which can be an expensive proposition for a small landowner, a real possibility for many watershed residents.
Which brought me to Sudden Oak Death. P. ramorum has moved to the very eastern edges of the Mattole River watershed. Soon, the disease could be one more thing for Mattole valley residents to worry about. Along with the MRC, UC Cooperative Extension has been holding informational workshops about SOD, but concern hasn't built as high here as in some areas of coastal California. This could partly be the result of a few dry years during which the pathogen has become less visible in southern Humboldt County because it has caused less tanoak mortality. On another level, though, it's understandable that many Mattole residents may have "wildland management fatigue" from worrying for so many years about fire, fish, and forestry.
Since Sudden Oak Death has not yet impacted the Mattole, there's a real chance that, given funding and political will, residents could do something the limit the spread throughout the watershed. But the disease is tagging along behind all those other equally important concerns. The question that occurs to me at this point, then, is this: Is there a way to unite these seemingly disparate domains? Given the realities of funding, in which each relatively narrow environmental issue attracts its own funding, scientific study, and advocacy groups, could some kind of comprehensive wildland management assistance ever materialize for rural landowners who need it, like the ones in the Mattole?
When our president talks about creating jobs to help our environment, this is what I see: an army of forest management experts and helpers, working in places like the Mattole to address all these wildland management concerns in a comprehensive manner. On any given property, these folks, organized into teams perhaps, would work on fuel hazard reduction and riparian restoration and erosion remediation and sustainable timber production and weed control and habitat protection and protection from insects and diseases. Considering how each of these management activities can often interact synergistically with the other activities, it remains a wonder to me that this hasn't already happened. It may just be that a vision like this, to come to fruition, will require a collective societal decision that wildland management is worth an investment.
The Mattole River: good for many uses.
Here on the north coast, Phytophthora ramorum kills tanoaks almost exclusively. We don’t have coast live oaks, and our California black oak population has steadily been decreasing because of land-use changes accompanied by corresponding changes in forest cover (a topic for another blog entry sometime). This year I’ve had the opportunity to see more majestic tanoaks than usual because of some projects we’ve been involved in—projects to save large tanoaks by applying a systemic fungicide that prevents infection by P. ramorum.
What we often see in our part of the world are dense thickets of small tanoaks, usually growing in clumps where it is obvious that all the trunks sprouted from the same mass of root tissue. Often these clumps are legacies of cutting in the past, either to clear land or to harvest the trees for the tannin in their bark (most of this occurred around the turn of the 20th century). When tanoaks are cut, the mass of budding root tissue at the base of the tree (called the “burl”) is stimulated to produce a multitude of new sprouts to replace the lost trunk. Although they still have the old root system, these areas of young, dense tanoaks haven’t established their dominance in the forest yet with expansive crowns, so they usually compete for forest floor space with lots of huckleberry and other shrubs.
Here’s an example:
However, here and there on the landscape you can find some groves of “old-growth” tanoak. These specimens easily compete for beauty with any of the true oaks California is famous for. Native Americans valued these groves for their abilities to produce vast quantities of acorns and took care of them to keep them accessible and healthy. Here's a big one:
There’s a common misconception out there that foresters and land managers don’t value tanoak or think of it as a “weed” tree because it lacks economic value in the wood markets of today. It is true that land managers sometimes try to discourage tanoak growth in certain stands of trees so that they can reforest those areas with conifers such as Douglas-fir. But this doesn’t mean that they always think of tanoak as a weed. In these cases, as with all land management activities, it’s important to think about management goals for the land and how best to work with the land to enhance an abundance of values.
In many cases, by attempting to control tanoak, foresters are trying to return to its historic condition land that was cut over years ago and left without any attempt to replant the Douglas-firs that originally grew there. In other cases, the soils, topography, and moisture conditions on the site are perfect for growing Douglas-firs, so the property foresters are trying to maximize the capabilities of that land to grow what is marketable. Tanoak is a beautiful wood with a lot of character, and if people come to value wood with these qualities, industrial forestry attention could shift away from its strong focus on Douglas-fir.
This also fits in with a larger societal picture of trying to take responsibility for our own needs for wood in California by growing and buying local rather than importing all our wood from places like Canada and Brazil that lack California’s stringent environmental regulations (check out this report--thanks to Yana Valachovic for the reference). As we try to puzzle out all the pieces of this complex picture by fitting needs for wood products into just-as-compelling needs for ecosystem stability and connectivity, aesthetic beauty, and wildlife habitat, we come to realize that tanoak is an important piece of the puzzle—and we see the damage that non-native, invasive species can potentially do when they rob us of such pieces.
