Quercus quandary; as beetles kill millions of trees, a debate rages in the Ozarks: replenish red oaks or leave them alone?

A million acres of dead trees, and more dying. That's a conservative estimate of the damage (lone to date by a particular beetle, the red oak borer, throughout the Ozark highlands forest region of Arkansas and Missouri.

It's a plague of biblical proportions, but this pestilence is here and now, the product of a process gone awry, the long-term price exacted for the greed, indifference, and mismanagement of America's woodlands during the cut-and-run logging operations that prevailed nearly a century ago.

The red oak borer, Enaphalodes rufulus, is not an alien invader that has managed to circumvent natural defenses. Instead, this one inch-plus, sturdy light-brown long-horned beetle has been around as long as the oaks have. In a healthy forest, most red oaks will contain a few E. rufulus beetle larvae, generally the older, larger, mature trees that the insects favor. But not enough to make vast acreages look like Vietnam after Agent Orange.

Due to the prevalence of even-aged stands, today's Ozarks offer a unresisting feast for erupting insects. This is an aging forest growing on thin, droughty soils, a dense woodland stressed for nutrients from lack of thinning, its trees suffering from various funguses, root rot, and the debilitating effects of two consecutive years of serious drought.

For the beetles, the sum of all these stress-inducing conditions adds up to a red oak smorgasbord. Beetle numbers have exploded, resulting in huge tracts of woodland containing dead or dying trees alongside seemingly healthy oaks living on borrowed time as infestation intensifies and defenses wane. On mountaintops where environmental conditions are harshest, trunks of 80- year-old trees stand like graveyard markers, testimony to a tremendous economic and aesthetic loss.

Discuss all this devastation with Len Bollman, the U.S. Forest Service's oak sustainability coordinator for the Ozark and Ouachita national forests, and he'll point out that the troubling scene has cultural implications as well. Bollman's task is one of public relations as well as scientific recovery. Sawmill owners want borer-devastated areas open to salvage; alarmed private tree growers demand an explanation for the outbreak as well as timber sale counseling; local environmentalists want the Forest Service to step back and let Mother Nature take her course.

To date, barbershop theories for the outbreak range from too few bats to too much Forest Service manipulation a quarter-century ago. Almost all agree that the Ozarks are out of natural sync and that forest health won't improve without long-range planning. It's the ultimate goal of all this planning that divides forester/loggers from environmentally minded natives. Bollman calls it science versus emotion. Opponents of the Forest Service's pro- posed oak management plan contend that the future of these trees is as much a spiritual matter as a scientific one. As a spokesman for one local conservation group points out, the Forest Service "needs to read their own money--in God we trust."

Red oak borer biology is as basic as it can be destructive. Adult insects lay eggs on the trunks of various oaks: northern red, southern red, black, Shumard, and scarlet. The eggs hatch, bore into the phloem layer just under the bark, excavate a chamber up to 2 1/2 inches in diameter, extend a tunnel some 2 inches deeper towards the heart of the tree, then go straight up for 2 to 4 inches. This process takes around two years. The adults emerge by chewing their way free.

Outbreaks are on an odd-year basis, with another major emergence due in 2003. In the past, foresters felt that six borer wounds in a red oak was cause for worry. Now, some trees in the Ozarks have been found to harbor 500 to 600 of the voracious pests.

The Swiss cheese effect of borer dining has sawmill operators sweating as the value of the riddled boards begins to crash. Red oak timber brings about a dollar per board-foot. but that's for number-one grade. Today, top grade oak timber is increasingly hard to find, with borer-perforated trees more suitable for paper or pulpwood.

Unfortunately, too many of the standing snags are riddled well past the point of timber salvage. National forest supervisors list public safety concerns as their number one priority and are actively posting signs around campgrounds and along trails warning of falling limbs or maybe even entire trunks. Crews can't cut fast enough to eliminate dead trees that pose a danger. Already two cars traveling on Arkansas highways have been hit by falling oaks.

There's little foresters can do about the outbreak itself except lots of research while they make plans to restore what was lost. And, with a half-million acres in Missouri now under attack and outbreaks reported in Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, entomologists and scads of fellow researchers are scrambling to understand and document this anomaly of nature, one that rivals the worst of forest fires in its capacity for destruction.

While the entomologists take notes, Bollman and associates are seeking to build public support for a recovery plan. They feel that the Ozarks have been manipulated by man over thousands of years in an effort to maintain oak forest, and that management practices should replicate what the Indians appeared to favor and the white man found upon his arrival. Arkansas fish and game officials want the oak regimen to remain, citing the bountiful acorn crop that feeds favored game animals including deer, bear, and turkey. Sawmill operators favor reestablishing red oaks on areas decimated by borer outbreaks. It seems like a win-win situation, since Forest Service nurseries have tens of thousands of red oak seedlings ready to plant. The only hitch is selling the plan to environmental groups. They want extensive forest manipulation to end, seeing the beetle outbreak as an excellent opportunity to slam the brakes on what they consider to be little more than commercial tree farming on public lands.

At the present, natural regeneration following a big red oak kill is mostly shade-tolerant species like red maple, which have little commercial or wildlife value. The Forest Service plan would sell off salvageable oaks, burn the remaining stand, prepare the site for seedlings, and then replant red oaks. A regular burning regimen would follow, one that would favor oaks while controlling competition. The professionals believe that fire is the key to keeping the Ozarks in an oak-dominated order. Opponents believe it's all a spin to provide more even-aged timber for the sawyers.

Public opinion ranges from the Sierra Club way of thinking, which calls for an end to all logging in national forests, to the shared opinions of local groups in the hard-hit heart of the Ozark National Forest. They remain suspicious, fearing the recovery plan is a guise to generate even-aged growth of a popular commercial species.

Howard Kuff lives on an enchanting collection of acres within the national forest near the backwoods community of Red Star, Arkansas. Kuff's property is just above the headwaters of the Buffalo National River, and his place is a fern-draped Eden surrounded by the smooth gray bark of big beech trees, springs that splash downhill over rocks adorned with emerald moss shaded by barrel-broad, zebra-striped northern red oaks. One of a legion of back-to-the-land immigrants who settled in the Ozarks around a quarter-century ago, the Wisconsin native has mostly bears and birds for neighbors and likes it that way. What he doesn't like is high-impact forest management requiring bulldozers, herbicide applications, and a regimen of fire.

Kuff, wife Kate, and their two children carved out an Ozark existence the hard way. The family lived on their land in a tipi until a meager log cabin could be built. Today the log cabin serves as flooring for a lovely two-story nontraditional home supplied by solar power and water from a spring. Kuff pours tea and talks on a cell phone while visitors savor a little 60s nostalgia and reflect that not all the old commune/hippie/counterculture eventually drifted back to a job in daddy's bank in New Jersey.

The Kuffs are firmly and tenaciously a part of this soil, and they exhibit a fierce determination to defend its ecological integrity. Howard is past president and current board member of the Newton County Wildlife Association, a grassroots group that can mobilize up to 500 members from throughout these hills whenever someone perceives a danger to plants, water, and wildlife.

"In 1975 we organized a grassroots effort to stop the Forest Service's aerial application of herbicides to kill hardwoods in the Ozarks," Kuff says. The wildlife association managed to win a federal court decision blocking the practice, and the group has been an off-and-on thorn in the side of the federal foresters ever since.

"We started with between 50 and 100 concerned citizens, and we've increased that number fivefold over the past 25 years," Kuff said. "Our focus remains Ozark National Forest management practices, and we plan to remain an active voice in that management."

Most of the wildlife association members believe the oak die-off is a natural process. The current Forest Service plan to manage for oaks by introducing a fire regimen, they say, results from setting short-term goals that are geared toward commercial harvest.

"This plan doesn't consider the long-term health of these woods," Kuff says. "They claim that historically the Ozarks burned every few years and that these fires maintained an oak savannah, but that's just guessing. I've lived here 25 years and I've never seen a fire out here yet."

Wildlife association members have an offering of their own. The group's proposed "citizen management plan" is, Kuff says, more in sync with popular public opinion than the current Forest Service proposal. Essentially what the environmental groups want is increased emphasis on trail development and low-impact recreation, less on economic benefits. They believe the Ozarks have greater long-term economic benefit as a recreational forest, so that planning should focus on preserving the overall ecologic web, rather than managing for harvestable limber.

"We're hoping for a compromise of some sort, a plan more in line with the public comment we've received," Kuff says. "We believe that's better than other tactics we've seen, like telling landowners with red oaks on their property that they need to cut and sell now, otherwise either the borers or the environmentalists will get the timber."

Kuff and friends feel it's economic insanity to prop up a logging industry that barely scrapes by as it is. "This is the poorest county in Arkansas and it has been forever, no matter how much the Forest Service manipulates the woods to help 20 or so small sawmills," the forest activist alleges. "The Forest Service is managing thousands of acres to sustain what amounts to a meager industry at best."

"We believe that the desire to carry out extensive management within these Ozark forests has gotten out of hand," Kuff says. "What passes for long-term planning here is basically opportunistic, a way to take advantage of any given situation, and short-term economic gain remains the driving force behind the methodology. It's time for a change."

Kuff's fellow environmental activist Kent Bonar is an anachronism, a throwback to old style, hands-on naturalists like Bartram, Audubon, and Thoreau. Bonar has been an interpretive naturalist for the Arkansas state parks system, the subject of a documentary film, and an artist who supplies superb quill pen and ink drawings of Ozark flora and fauna for guidebooks and scientific keys.

Bonar travels the rugged hills and coves around the Upper Buffalo Wilderness on foot, carrying out his life's work of documenting the rich and often obscure natural history of the Buffalo River headwaters country. For Bonar this quest is a spiritual summons of sorts. The only compensation he receives is a few dollars in royalties for published drawings and the personal satisfaction of accomplishing a mission he feels he was called to do. Walk with Bonar for even a few minutes in this densely shaded hardwood forest, and you'll realize that few will ever know these woods as intimately as he does.

The borer outbreak is a symptom, not the cause of all this red oak die-off, Bonar says. "The cause is man's constant tinkering with the natural order of things. We just can't leave the woods alone."

Bonar believes the reason for catastrophic onslaughts such as the current borer explosion results from "people causing disturbances on an unpredictable basis. We're totally out of snyc with natural processes, and by keeping things out of sync we create a never-ending need for more management plans and programs."

The backwoods naturalist is among many who feel the Ozarks should to left alone to heal themselves, even though the results won't be known in this lifetime. They want to reestablish the old natural equilibrium, even if it does cost the sawyers a valuable red oak resource and even if deer and turkey end up shortchanged on the acorn crop.

Forest Service supervisor Len Bollman, on the other hand, believes his practical approach represents good stewardship as well as good science. Bollman wants to harvest as many of the salvageable oaks as possible, considering that the riddled trees still make good paper--if they hold together long enough to reach the mills. His plan calls for leaving a percentage of the ubiquitous snags for wildlife habitat, and he promises there will be no salvage operations on slopes with a gradient of more than 35 percent.

Bollman adds that he plans no management within riparian areas along stream corridors, and that existing roadless areas will be left as is. Elsewhere he wants to use fire to manage for oaks.

Most of the current players in this Ozark sylvan drama won't be around to see the long-term results currently being debated. Bollman's red oak seedlings won't mature for decades, and it will take generations for the Ozarks to reestablish some sort of natural ecological rhythm if left alone. And that's assuming a hands-off management theme is truly "natural" in woods that have known human habitation for at least 10,000 years and probably many, many more.

In the end the foresters will do as they've been trained, and the local environmentalists will have the option of their day in court. No matter who wins, the Ozarks are destined to endure a major change, one only our grandchildren will be able to measure. All we can do at the moment is witness the sobering display of carnage, encourage civil debate, and then hopefully find the vision to once again establish the sort of diversity that provides the natural checks and balances that combat these outbreaks... no matter the short-term cost.

Gary Lantz writes from his home in Norman, Oklahoma.