[Sustain] Forests - The West’s most ignored reservoirs

[Martin Zehr]

Forests - The West’s most ignored reservoirs
Felice Pace
Writer of Diatribes


In California and throughout the West everyone seems to be talking about global warming. Dominating the conversation are dire predictions about diminished water supplies that will result from shrinking snow pack in the West’s mountains. Conspicuously absent from the debate has been discussion of the impact of forest management on dry season water supply - “baseflow” in the lexicon of hydrologists.


The Western US may be the only place in the world where the connection between trees – or more precisely upland forests – and water supply is not recognized. Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai’, whose organizations have planted millions of trees in Africa, claimed in an interview with Sierra Magazine that everyone knows that where there are trees there is also water. She was wrong. With a few notable exceptions, the Western US is in denial about the connection.


This denial is reflected in research programs and management plans being crafted to address global warming. The Forest Service, for example, has a massive global warming research program underway with a focus in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. One would think that the relationship between forest management and water supply would figure prominently in that research. But one would be wrong. The connection is not a focus for research and is barely even mentioned on the research programs web site. You can check it out for yourself at http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pep/climatechange/.


Forest Service climate change research has instead focused on how climate change will change forests and habitats. Most prominently, the Forest Service projects larger and more intense fires and prescribes intensive forest management to reduce fire risk. Is it just coincidence that this emphasis coincides with the Forest Service long standing institution bias in favor of cutting trees?


Intensified forest management would result in increased compaction of forest soils and forest soils, it turns out, are the West’s #1 reservoir. On average 1/3 of healthy forest soil is empty spaces. These spaces fill with water during the wet season and release that stored water to groundwater, springs and streams throughout the dry season. Logging involves soil disturbance which compacts forest soils diminishing their ability to store water; the more intense the logging, the less storage capacity and the greater the negative impact on base streamflow and groundwater.


The State of California is in the midst of a massive effort to update its water plan to deal with global warming impacts. But here too forest management is not a topic of discussion. Instead there is a push to create more surface storage. Can California’s myopia have something to do with the fact that most of California’s upland forests are owned by Sierra Pacific Industries and other large timber corporations? Executives from these corporations populate all relevant California boards and commissions and they contribute generously to California politicians. Changing logging rules to protect and restore the capacity of forest soil to store and release water would be prudent in the face of climate change. But California politics make such a move unlikely.


Amid this wasteland of denial there are a few voices crying in the wilderness about the connection between forest management and water supply. One of those voices is that of Andy Lipkis, founder and CEO of Tree People based in Los Angeles.


While the Forest Service proposes cutting more trees in response to global warming, Tree People promotes tree planting to capture more wet season water for use during the dry season. You can check out Tree People’s programs at http://www.treepeople.org/.


Another voice in the wilderness is that of Forest Service researcher Gordon Grant. Grant – one the West’s most respected hydrologists – predicts that “in terms of what comes off federal lands, the value of the water, in my view, will eclipse the value of wood products.” Grant’s assertion might equally be applied to the West’s private forests. You can read more about Gordon Grant’s research and predictions at http://www.capitalpress.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=39012&SectionID=161&SubSectionID=1172&S=1.


Will westerners wake up to the connection between forests and their water supply? Will the capacity of forest soils to protect stream baseflow become a forest management imperative? And will the West’s giant timber corporations become the heroes of the West’s response to climate change impacts on water supply?


History does not suggest optimistic answers to these questions; more likely the traditional elites in industry, government and agriculture will continue to chase the chimera of new surface storage and ignore our most important reservoir – upland forest soils. As a result we may be looking at a future with more half full reservoirs, more over-pumped aquifers and less dry season streamflow to sustain westerners and the West’s stream ecosystems.


http://blog.hcn.org/goat/2008/03/14/forests-the-wests-most-ignored-reservoirs/?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email