Time for amends: a case for careful cutting.

As recent Western floods have shown, clearcuts can spell trouble for downstream neighbors.

Common sense dictates that high levels of clearcutting can accelerate flooding and erosion. A great deal of research, including new studies by the Forest Service and Oregon State University, reinforces this observation. This research documents increased runoff and erosion from heavily roaded and logged areas and supports the observation that high levels of upstream logging clearly encourages downstream flooding. Nevertheless, many Northwestern politicians and "bureadamics" will predictably deny the obvious, dodging much needed forest practice reforms by calling instead for further studies.

Many of the western Oregon drainages most dramatically impacted by 1996's floods were downstream from high levels of recent corporate logging. Unlike state and federal forests, private and corporate forests are not required to maintain even minimal sustained yield. Consider, for example, the upper drainage of the Mohawk River in Lane County lays inside a vast industrial forest acquired by a new corporate owner during the last decade.

When corporate forestlands trade' hands, they are often quickly cut to repay capital outlay. This is exactly what happened in the uplands of this watershed, as an air photo inspection or flyover reveals. The effect of increased flooding in the Mohawk, a tributary of the Willamette, has been observed far downstream, particularly in the bottomlands around Corvallis and Salem.

In 1996, several million acres of corporate timberland changed hands in Oregon. There are also millions of acres of corporate land cut over during the post-war building boom that will soon be ready to fall again to an industry that uses increasingly smaller logs. How quickly will these lands be cut and what will be the downstream effects? Oregon's Forest Practice Rules, although not mandating sustained yield, recently limited the size of individual clearcuts to 120 acres by maintaining thin buffers between cuts. However, a private forest owner can still "legally" cut 85 percent of every section (one square mile). When a watershed is quickly stripped in this fashion, only a fool would deny higher levels of flooding and erosion during increasingly common rain-on-snow events.

Between no clearcutting and cutting everything, there are reasonable solutions to minimizing flood damage caused by logging within the context of a warmer, wetter climate and a burgeoning population.Watersheds already critically impacted by too many roads and recent clearcuts should be identified and harvested lightly, if at all, for the next few decades. Watersheds not yet critically impacted should be conserved by the careful timing and planning of new roads and cuts. Steep or unstable sites should be subjected to much smaller clearcuts, retention of evenly distributed, well-rooted trees throughout every acre, and aerial yarding systems that minimize soft disturbance.

In the Northwest, immense corporately owned forests and tree farms dominate public waters, fisheries, highways and, indirectly, downstream communities and properties. Society gives these timber corporations the benefit of huge property tax breaks and further subsidizes them with cheap federal timber, public access, fire and insect protection, and forest research.

Would we be unreasonable to require major forest owners to conduct equally benevolent logging practices on their upstream lands? Perhaps the last round of property tax reductions freely bestowed on timber corporations should have been traded for reductions in logging rates, quid pro quo.

Logging-exacerbated levels of runoff, debris, and sedimentation from this year's floods have damaged salmon spawning grounds, oyster beds, grain fields, dairy farms, public roads, sewage and water systems, and private homes and have even taken lives. Why wait for our congressmen to bravely ignore corporate campaign contributors and initiate substantial forest practice reforms? Reducing flood damage by requiring major landholders to maintain a reasonable amount of forest cover should be instigated by those who presently pay the price of overcutting. If our downstream quality of life and environment are to be maintained, voters will need to begin holding timber corporations responsible for the public costs of their private actions.

Roy Keene, a forestry consultant in Roseburg, Oregon, last wrote for the magazine in May/June 1995.