Debate over the impacts of salvage logging continues.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Jim Wells For The Register-Guard

With Tim Ingalsbee and Catia Juliana, I co-authored the "Ecology of Fire" alternative in the Warner Fire Recovery Project Final Environmental Impact Statement, which set a number of precedents when it was published in 1991. Later, I wrote the proposal for the world's first fire process research natural area, using the Warner Creek fire area east of Oakridge. So I've been watching the current debate about post-fire salvage logging with great interest.

I particularly liked seeing the Jan. 20 guest viewpoint by private forester Paul Chapman, "Logging, replanting benefits burned lands." I liked it not because he reflected the narrow, utilitarian view of foresters, wherein dead material becomes "worthless" when it decomposes. I liked it not because he failed to mention that young plantations contribute far more to reburn intensity than spotty, naturally recovering stands do.

No, I appreciated Chapman's essay because he brought up some heretofore missing subject areas relevant to this complex subject. Here are a few more:

There are no statistically significant data to support arguments for post-fire salvage logging. All the evidence cited is what is called "anecdotal."

The report authored by Oregon State University professors John Sessions and Michael Newton (`Dissenting OSU faculty try to delay anti-logging article," Register-Guard, Jan. 21), which claimed that aggressive logging would restore forests in the Biscuit Fire area after the blaze, used only computer modeling based upon assumptions derived from only a handful of examinations of old stands.

Anecdotal evidence from the Warner fire has contradicted every single claim that natural processes would not adequately allow the forests to recover.

More significantly, a variety of actual studies conducted in the Warner Creek area began to demonstrate that most of the sacred cow assumptions about the effects of intense, large-scale forest fires in west-side Cascade forests were myths.

Some sites burned so intensely that it was assumed they would have no natural regeneration for at least seven years. Every one of those sites was peppered with seedlings two years later, distributed in what are considered ideal spacings. Nowhere in the burn have brush or hardwoods ever overtopped the regenerating conifers. And so on.

Warner Creek is one of many places that point out that we have not done enough homework to be able to reliably predict when it will make sense to salvage log, and when it will not.

Post-fire salvage sales are generally money losers for the U.S. Treasury. Salvage sales are offered either in areas where the big, valuable trees have previously been logged, or in areas that are too steep or rugged to have been logged economically.

For instance, in the Biscuit Fire area, even green timber sales, at $500 per 1,000 board feet, had become uneconomical before the fire. Salvage sales after the fire, at $70 per 1,000 board feet, are even less economical.

Programs to conduct post-fire salvage logging are not free-market enterprises that enrich public coffers and finance recovery work. They are entitlement programs - welfare for upper-level public land managers (who do no recovery work themselves), and welfare for logging companies and timber mills.

There are other ways to derive revenues from post-fire forests.

A well-known, extremely tasty and high-priced wild mushroom, the morel, grows most prolifically the year following a forest fire (and, to lesser degrees, for several years after that). However, few, if any, grow in areas where timely post-fire salvage is conducted.

Can we all agree now to establish research protocols, a primary research area, and congressionally endowed funding to move the post-fire recovery debate from opinion to fact?

Of course, I would suggest that we begin by taking a hard look at using Warner Creek as a laboratory for post-wildfire studies, but that is an essay for another day.

Jim Wells is president of Oregon Wild Edibles Co. in Eugene.