Word: morrisonism
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Stewartt and Forestry Consultant Peter Morrison, working with the help of the Wilderness Society, have just nailed down what is either a very large bureaucratic fraud or a conveniently jumbled process of long-term fudging. Environmentalists had suspected for a long time that the Forest Service had vastly overestimated the amount of old growth -- virgin forest -- still left in the Northwest. Traditionally, the Forest Service has disapproved of messy, tangled old-growth forests, whose dank, rotting understory and ancient trees it has referred to as "overmature" and "decadent." It has preferred to clear-cut the old growth, and then treat...
Overestimating the amount of old growth still standing, by underreporting clear-cuts or by counting mature second growth as primal forest, is convenient because it reduces the urgency of squawks from environmentalists. But Stewartt and Morrison (a Forest Service employee moonlighting on his days off) drew circles in red pencil around old-growth areas on the Forest Service's own aerial maps. Then they flew off to find the trees...
...turned out, had already been sold, clear-cut and trucked off. In six national forests in Oregon and Washington, they found that only about 33% to 50% of the sample tracts listed as old growth were still forested. "Several years of clear-cutting simply are not accounted for," says Morrison. In the Olympic National Forest below us, only 106,000 acres remain of the 217,000 claimed by the Forest Service. In Oregon's Siskiyou, 142,000 acres remain of a claimed 433,000. Much of what was still uncut was broken into tracts too small to serve as habitats...
...extraction of resources." Valley walls too steep to walk on have been scraped to bare earth. Acreage bulldozed for shopping malls looks like this. Until these ravaged uplands reseed themselves -- which on the steepest slopes simply may not happen -- erosion is inevitable, and the most reliable yield, says Forester Morrison in disgust, will be "sustained sediment" in the streams that drain them. We head eastward to a landing field near Mount Rainier National Park...
SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR: Donald Morrison...