San Jose Mercury News

Want to save giant trees? A chain saw can do wonders

2/14/05

By Thomas Bonnicksen

John
Muir called the giant sequoia ``the noblest of a noble race.'' These massive
trees, the largest in the world, grow only in the Sierra
Nevada. Huge sugar pine and other large trees surround them.
``They are giants among giants,'' wrote University of California
professor Joseph Le Conte when he saw the giant sequoia forest for the first
time in 1870.

Today,
seven times more trees than is natural crowd this irreplaceable forest, and
each year it becomes denser. The forest is unhealthy, and the fire hazard is
extreme. Yet we have done little to solve the problem.

Now
some are suing to block a plan by the Forest Service to deal with the wildfire
situation in the Giant Sequoia National Monument. This modest plan calls for
removing too few trees to offset even the number of new trees that grow each
year. To be effective, the plan should remove more trees to halt excess growth
and substantially reduce the number of existing trees.

It
seems some people have forgotten the McNally fire of 2002, which burned 151,000
acres and came within less than a mile of the sequoia groves. Jim Paxon, speaking for firefighters, said, ``If fire does get
in the Trail of 100 Giants, we won't be putting firefighters in there to try to
stop it.''

30 years of research

I
know this forest better than most people do. I began in the late 1960s as a
ranger in Kings Canyon National Park
working on the first prescribed fires and interpreting them to the public. I
also conducted research with my colleague Edward C. Stone, a University of California-Berkeley
professor, on this forest over the next three decades. Our work forms the basis
for the Forest Service plan to restore the monument.

In
the 1960s, the Park Service cut intermediate-sized trees before using
prescribed fire. It knew that prescribed fire is a crude tool that can cause
more collateral damage to a forest than good. The most recent example is the
damage it caused to the George Washington Tree. However, a chain saw in the
hands of an expert is surgically precise. As A. Starker Leopold, professor and
former chief scientist of the National Park Service, said, ``A chain saw would
do wonders.''

Unfortunately,
some environmentalists stopped the Park Service from cutting trees, and decades
of destruction by prescribed fire followed. They would rather see forests burn
than cut individual trees to save whole forests.

There
are twice as many intermediate-sized trees (up to 30 inches in diameter) today
as there were in the historic forest because of 125 years of excluding fire.
Prescribed fire cannot reduce the number of trees this size without severely
damaging the forest.

In
addition, few people realize that unnaturally thick litter that now covers the
ground generates so much heat when it burns that even a small fire can kill
large trees by cooking their roots. The loss of thousands of huge trees from
prescribed fire has become rampant in national parks.

Stone
and I warned the Park Service about this terrible loss in 1976. The Park
Service conducted a study that shows we were correct. Nevertheless, the
destruction continues because they ignored their own study and us.

Now
the Park Service has added the 3,000-year-old Washington Tree to the list of
casualties from its prescribed fires. This is the second-largest tree in the
world, named after the father of our country. Even so, the Park Service refused
to protect it from a fire it deliberately let burn.

Watched it burn

The
fire took six weeks to reach the Washington Tree. The Park Service had plenty
of time to act. Instead, it chose to stand back and watch the fire destroy its
top and largest branch. This weakened the tree so much that a recent storm
broke it in half. It will probably die.

How
could the Park Service let its own prescribed fire destroy a national treasure
and many other giant trees? It could have saved all of them. It takes only a
few minutes and a garden rake to clear thick litter from around a tree to keep
fire away.

I
cannot speculate on why some people would rather see huge trees and whole
forests killed by fire rather than use 21st-century knowledge and tools to
prevent the destruction. I just know that the anti-management philosophy is no
justification for sacrificing national treasures.

Let's
use common sense and the best available science to make decisions about our
forests. This is not about politics. This is about protecting our national
heritage.

THOMAS
M. BONNICKSEN is professor emeritus of forest science at Texas A&M
University, visiting
professor at the University of California-Davis and visiting scholar at the
Forest Foundation, which is supported by the California Forest Products
Commission. He wrote this article for Knight Ridder.

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