Forests shouldn't be fuel source.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Shannon Wilson For The Register-Guard

Behind closed doors, the biomass energy and timber industries have been lobbying Gov. Ted Kulongoski, legislators such as Sen. Vicki Walker, and Oregon members of Congress.

The lobbyists' aim is to assure policymakers that all of Oregon's public forests (nearly 17 million acres) need to be thinned or logged to reduce the frequency and severity of forest fires, while at the same time promoting the fringe benefit of extracting forest biomass as a green and renewable energy source.

Here is what the pro-forest biomass people are asking for: contracts for a minimum of 20 years on at least 150,000 acres, with no limits on the size of the trees to be taken.

This is being done without soliciting diverse input from grass-roots conservation groups, scientists or the public.

The governor, legislators and some larger conservation organizations are planning to give them what they want through legislation and by subsidizing large centralized forest biomass electricity generating plants. Such plants, once built, will have an insatiable appetite for forest biomass.

A major guise of the forest biomass extraction argument is thinning the forest, or `backcountry fuels treatments,' to protect forest communities and their homes from wildfire. While fire fuels thinning within 100 to 200 feet of homes and structures is necessary in fire-prone ecosystems, sound science does not agree that removing fire fuels beyond 200 feet has any beneficial effect on lessening the occurrences or consequences of wildfire. Scarce financial resources should not be wasted on these `backcountry' fuels treatment projects where they do the least good.

Oregonians should also question whether biomass from natural and native forests is a `green' or `renewable' fuel source. Biomass fuel sources - like fuels garnered from agricultural and orchard waste, landfill biomass decomposition, wastewater treatment, animal manure and urban wood waste - may be acceptable as renewable biomass fuel sources. However, the stripping of state or federal forest lands is not an acceptable form of biomass fuel.

A natural forest is a highly evolved and extremely complex functioning ecosystem. Human hands have thus far not been able to re-create a natural forest.

An example of what is at stake can be found in Southern Oregon's Siskiyou mountains. Currently, the Bureau of Land Management is proposing tens of thousands of acres of `understory thinning' (or what some are calling `understory clear-cuts') on native or natural forests on federal public lands in the name of fire fuels reduction.

The Klamath-Siskiyou forests are some of the most botanically diverse forests in the world. In one acre of these forests one can encounter 20 or more species of woody understory shrubs and trees, with up to 15 species of conifers, and a plethora of plant and fungi associations.

Within this botanically diverse ecosystem arises an incredibly diverse population of butterflies, bees and amphibians, many of which are endemic, as well as 70 species of native and migratory birds. All these species need this forest complexity to reproduce, forage, and hide from predators.

With global climate change looming, we need to apply the precautionary principle or the do-no-harm principle to the so-called `management' or non-management of the remaining complex functioning forest ecosystems. Native and natural forests on public lands should not be treated as a fuel source for the profit of the timber, biomass or utility industries.

Shannon Wilson of Eugene, a forester, energy conservation consultant and biological technician, is co-director of Cascadia's Ecosystem Advocates and chairman of the Oregon Sierra Club's Many Rivers Group.