ALTURAS – Moments after he saw the centuries-old junipers on the ground, Glenn Fair felt sick to his stomach.
A 60-year-old fishing guide from rural Lassen County, Fair has nothing against thinning forests to protect them from fire and disease. But the barren, dusty swath of stumps and downed junipers logged from public land last year and the adjacent house-high pile of wood chips was not that kind of cut.
Not only were trees mowed down across nearly 300 acres, they were leveled under a banner of ecological restoration, energy independence and climate-friendly power. It was portrayed as a win-win by the federal government, which was paying for the removal to undo the legacy of poor land management.
But to Fair, burning old-growth junipers in a wood-fired power plant to battle global warming just doesn't make sense.
"These trees are our carbon collectors," he said. "It's no different than if you went into a rain forest and cut it down."
The government's so-called "stewardship project" here in rugged, remote northeast California is a lens through which to view the changing nature of forestry. No longer is managing woodlands in California just about balancing jobs and the environment. These days, carbon, climate and restoration are part of the equation.
Juggling that mix is no easy task.
"There are no simple, formulaic answers," said Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust, which manages North Coast redwoods for lumber and carbon. "Climate change is challenging us to think more quickly and deeply at the same time."
Even government officials acknowledge that the Modoc County job – designed to restore the land to its more open, range-like pre-settlement condition – was botched.
"That cut was heavier than we wanted," said Peter Hall, a forester with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "We're learning from our mistakes and moving on."
New plan covers 1.2 million acres
This spring, the bureau and the U.S. Forest Service announced plans to dramatically expand the scope of the cutting. According to a more than 500-page environmental impact statement, the two agencies propose to use cutting and burning to eradicate junipers across 1.2 million acres – an area more than 11,000 times larger than Arco Arena and its parking lots.
The reason for such dramatic action, they say, is to address historic land management mistakes, including heavy livestock grazing and fire suppression, that have allowed juniper woodlands to expand. That expansion has choked out grass and brush that support wildlife such as mule deer and sage grouse.
"We're all in favor of forests," said Tim Burke, manager of the Bureau of Land Management's field office in Alturas. "However, what's happening here is not natural."
Others question the wisdom of cutting so many trees on the arid Modoc plateau at a time when rising global temperatures are increasing the risk of desertification – the spread of desert-like conditions.
"Almost anywhere else in the semi-arid world, forest cover of any density is viewed as an environmental asset," said Ronald Lanner, a retired Utah State University forestry professor who lives in Placerville.
What's more, some scientists say restoring the terrain to conditions that existed during the cooler 19th century – before global warming began to push temperatures higher – might not work.
"As a generalization, you really can't go back to the way it was," said John Helms, a retired University of California, Berkeley, forestry professor and former president of the Society of American Foresters. "In restoration, one should identify what vegetation best suits the land and society today, and ... the future, rather than 100 years ago."
Even within the Forest Service, not everyone agrees with the project's premise. Connie Millar, a research scientist with the agency's Sierra Nevada Research Center, said junipers are proliferating partly because of higher temperatures.
"I do believe there is a climate aspect," she wrote in an e-mail. And if that's the case, she added, trying to weed them out will prove costly, perhaps futile. "Removal may be a defensible socially desired goal. Nonetheless, I believe that it will take increasing effort, time, money. Eventually this may become a 'paddling upstream' practice.
Call The Bee's Tom Knudson, (530) 582-5336.
