Ringside: Logging Saves Species and Increases Our Water Supply

There are obvious benefits to logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning of California’s forests. When you suppress wildfires for what is now over a century, then overregulate and suppress any other means to thin the forest, you get overcrowded and unhealthy forests.

California’s trees now have 5 to 10 times more than a historically normal density. They’re competing for an insufficient share of light, water and nutrients, leading to disease, infestations, dehydration and death. Up through the 1980s, California harvested 6 billion board feet per year of timber; the annual harvest is now 25 percent of that. We have turned our forests into tinderboxes, and that is the reason fires turn into superfires.

How we manage our forests affects our water supply in two critical ways. Massive wildfires consume vegetation and leave soil vulnerable to erosion. As USGS put it after the Caldor Fire, when rains arrive, the unfiltered runoff creates “increased sediment transport in streams. This sediment surge can fill up water-storage space in reservoirs, damage infrastructure, and disrupt water supplies.”

Another consequence of overgrown forests is less runoff. Snow remains trapped atop thick canopy and evaporates. Rain that might percolate into springs to feed streams and rivers is instead consumed by overcrowded trees competing for an inadequate supply of water. A 2011 study by experts from UC Merced reports that 60 percent of the state’s consumptive water comes in the form of Sierra runoff, and that when forest cover is reduced by 40 percent, total runoff will increase by an estimated 9 percent. California’s consumptive use of water, including urban and agricultural use, but not including diversions to maintain ecosystem health, is around 40 million acre feet per year. That means if California’s forests were thinned appropriately, 2.2 million acre feet of water (40 MAF x 60% x 9%) would be added to California’s water supply in an average year.

To some extent, how we manage our forests also affects our energy supply. More runoff translates into more hydroelectric power. And more logging and thinning translates into more biomass fuel. Today, there are 23 active biomass power plants in California, generating just over a half-gigawatt of baseload electric power. That’s one percent of California’s electricity draw at peak demand; not a lot, but enough to matter. Mostly built in the 1980s and ’90s, at peak, there were 60 biomass power plants in California. These clean-burning plants could be rebuilt and co-located near lumber mills. With modern engineering and a reasonable regulatory environment, they might even be able to make a profit without subsidies.

So why isn’t California’s timber industry being revived? The scale of the effort needed to restore California’s approximately 33 million acres of forest cannot possibly happen without involving the private sector. This is a national problem. According to Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities, an organization promoting active management of America’s timberlands, forest growth for the last ten years has been only about half the rate of forest mortality. They attribute this to neglect. And they claim that logging, thinning, and prescribed fire would eliminate overcrowding, eliminate superfires, and restore health and resilience to the forests.

This theory is corroborated by Californian wildlife biologists and foresters I’ve spoken with across the industry. A good example is the performance of the Creek Fire in 2020 that burned 380,000 acres, yet surrounded and spared the 20,000 acres of managed forest surrounding Shaver Lake. This watershed, owned by Southern California Edison, is managed through a combination of selective logging, mechanical thinning, and prescribed burns to maintain a historically normal tree density in the watershed surrounding the lake. And species counts on the SCE property are higher than in the surrounding national forest.

A similar story emerges on privately managed timberland further north. For years, biologists working for Sierra Pacific have tagged spotted owls, the “indicator species” that provoked a crackdown on logging that cripples the industry to this day. But what they observed was counter to the public perception. They found that spotted owls nested in second growth timber and relied on meadows created by clear cutting to find their prey. And the spotted owl counts in these managed forests exceeded the counts on adjacent national forest land.

A growing body of academic work is finally arriving to vindicate the data obtained by field biologists. From Forest Ecology and Management, “Our study demonstrated that the three forest thinning treatments applied in our study area resulted in greater species richness and abundance…,” and from USGS, “spotted owl use of heterogeneous forest environments makes sense in light of historical disturbance regimes of this region, which were characterized by frequent lower severity fire events that generated spatial and temporal landscape heterogeneity.” To be fair, the first of these studies focused on populations of pollinators, and the second was focused on owl populations in New Mexico. More work is required. Perhaps the California Dept. of Fish & Wildlife might take an unbiased look at this, while consulting industry experts who have spent their careers in the forest.

Inhibiting the restoration of a healthy timber industry in California, which would lead to healthy forests and wildlife, is the time it takes to acquire timber harvesting permits. Whether it’s navigating CEQA on private land, or NEPA on federal land, these permits take years to acquire, when it ought to take months. The investments needed to expand this industry require reliable, long-term, expeditious permitting. Sound familiar?

For the sake of California’s water supply, its energy security, the safety of people living in the forests, and the health of our trees and wildlife, Californian needs to revive its logging industry. To make it happen, organizations representing the timber industry need help. Water agencies, power utilities, and associations of firefighters should lend their support.

If nothing else, public perception must change. Responsible logging will not only reduce the frequency and severity of wildfires, and improve the health of the forests. Not only will it improve the quality and quantity of our water, it will create jobs and tax revenue, and help power our electric grid.

It will also enable something counterintuitive and critical to understand: precious and endangered wildlife can thrive in a responsibly managed forest.