Focus 580; Forest Primeval: The Natural history of an Ancient Forest

With the practices there right now he is a private consultant in sustainable forestry and he serves as museum research associate in Zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of a great many scientific articles and another book which is about the future of Forestry It's entitled The redesigned forest. The book that we'll be talking about some this morning is entitled forest primeval the Natural History of an ancient forest it is published by Sierra Club books and it charts the history of this forest from its germination to close to the present day at least the time when our guest came in contact with it and it presents a side by side. History of this forest with what is going on in the rest of the world and what it does I think is real is really reinforce just how old and stately and majestic this kind of forest is. As we talk with Chris Mayer you are certainly invited to call him and talk with us.

You have questions or comments. The telephone number here is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line and that one's good anywhere that you can hear us and that number is 800 2 2 2 1 9 4 5 5. So again it's 3 3 3 wy allow and 800 to 2 to WY allow Mr. Mays or hello. Thanks very much for talking with us today we appreciate it. My pleasure. I am interested in just a start. Maybe having you expand a little bit or talk a little bit more about something that you have written here in the introduction to your book in the very beginning here you write that writing this book has forever changed my sense of the forest. My sense of humanity my sense of history my sense of the humanity of history and my sense of the history of humanity. What in what ways did writing this book cause you to start to think differently about forrest.

Certainly that's something that you prior to this head know and would know a lot about it had a lot of experience with the thing that was interesting was my experience with the force was only within my lifetime which is a very very infant testable piece of history and in writing something that goes back a thousand years carrying the human struggle for consciousness forward in dealing with the human suffering over a thousand years gave me a real sense of just how old the thousand year old tree is in terms of the human experience. The other thing is that in giving me a sense of history the thousand year old tree is in the living continuity within that sense of history and history tends to be somewhat disjunction you just get it out of history books. It's something which happened in the past. But here is a living thing they could actually witness a thousand years of history. And that puts it in a whole different dynamic. Finally the history of humanity began embodied in the life of a

single tree. I didn't really have a context for how much human suffering and struggle and striving for consciousness really took place in a thousand years span and it's been incredible. And look at it on the flip side. Looking at the humanity of history the history of humanity I began to realize just how much human suffering has been caused by human beings beating each other. That was nothing I had ever really put together. I see that things are going on today but I realize that they're no different today than they were a thousand years ago. Doing things different is we have created far more sophisticated ways of killing each other. You know one of the things that I think the book really does is to impress on one the the true age of these forests and because I mean you know it's easy to talk about your old growth forest and the fact that yes certainly they've been there a long time but when you

when you set the sort of the history of these areas alongside the history of civilization it's at least it struck me in a way that. I hadn't thought about it before just what it is we're talking about. One you mention here that in fact that there is a fairly a tree in the Sequoia National Park that in one thousand sixty eight. So some some years ago at that time it was estimated to be thirty eight hundred years old. Three three thousand eight hundred years old and it would have had to germinate in 1832 B.C. and that that pretty much stopped me in my tracks that you know you can talk. You did talk about yeah these forests are old and they're old growth forest but when you have to when you sit there and think this tree germinated 1832 B.C. It impressed me impressed me very much and I saw all the trees aren't that old I guess there are some trees that are even older than that for years.

We get mixed up though in looking at the forest in trees and thinking the big trees are necessarily the oldest trees Bristlecone Pine is in a little Norrell scrawny thing growing on mountain tops which have been secluded from fire or probably wouldn't have gotten so old so Age has nothing necessary. It's not necessarily correlated with size. And this is one of the things that I find really interesting when dealing with the public. Last summer I took a group out to Mount Rainier National Park and we looked at the big trees down below which were maybe four hundred years old some of them and then I took them up the sub Alpine and said Welcome to the ancient forest it we're looking at stunted things that were 600 years old me so what are you talking about. Well the trees the timber line were actually older smaller scrawny piddly little things but they were far older than the big towering giants down below that had to do with growing site and how they grow. It's no different than somebody who's malnourished standing next to somebody who's well nourished no one can be big and massive the other small of a can be the

same age. When you when you look at this kind of forest what what what are the the I'd say the identifying characteristics. What is it that sets this place apart from anyplace else. Well in old growth forest in the Douglas fir region Douglas or hemlock takes on the old growth characteristics between 250 between 200 250 years of age. And it's things like the crowned the top of the tree the Living Portion the green portion becomes looks like a broken bottle brush. They become very individualistic. And because of the way they've grown the brain to tend to behavior on one side than the other as the light as trees begin to die out of the system the light comes on and branches grow more on one side. So they begin to lean and the other thing that happens is the bark has now become very thick and protects them from fire at the ground level. The limbs off. Don't start til they're 60 feet above the ground and be what we call the episodic

community the community of plant that live up in the tree tops like some of the lichens which are really two plants and one a lichen is an outside of fungus and inside it houses algae algae produce the food from the synthesis. The fungus can't and the fungus the algae. These types of things begin to develop in the top of the tree when they're about 200 250 years old. The other thing is the trees begin to die singly now. Up until that time till about one hundred twenty years two hundred fifty years suppression kills the trees in other words the trees are competing with each other for light in the weaker ones die out. But as the canopy of the forest gradually opens up as it gets older it's now single trees that die and the thing that's interesting about tree death is theoretically an underlying theoretically trees are immortal unlike human beings that. Cannot replace heart liver brain because those organs do not remove themselves. A tree renews its entire living tissue every year and so replaces its whole immune system. What

kills trees is the harshness of their environment. Disease injury. And if the trees are injured let's say one big tree falls in it brushes against another one and it goes through the bark and bears the wood of scrapes down the wood on the side of the tree and leaves no maybe 10 feet long by 6 inches wide. It leaves a womb. Well that wound is a place for beetles to attack for fungal spores to Liam and they can start invading the wood and then it can heal over in a hundred years later the tree dies with the tree it's been dying gradually for 100 years. But the thing is you don't see it. And so the trees gradually go out of the city and one by one in the stand opens up in. There are a lot of declining trees dying gradually understand all of this is part of the physiological age or old growth of the forest. There is also it must be something something special about this. This part of the United States or this part of the world does that. That means that we have these forests where they

are gathered that around the United States. There are other places where there are quite old trees or there have been and they may have been lost but again there may be it's climate maybe it's geology that somehow means you know makes this such a great place to grow these kind of trees. Well all of all of what you've said is basically true if we go back one and a half million years in the Northwest Pacific Northwest Douglas fir for example was just one of the trees that was in the higher elevations 1 1/2 million years ago it was the same forest out here at the low elevation that you have with this is now on the East Coast. It was the Eastern deciduous forest. But at the Ice Age began to come on the Pleistocene began to move forward. The cold adapted trees conifers the douglas fir the Larch is the hemlock. They began to come lower down because they were better adapted in the Eastern deciduous forest of The Hickory to Elm.

Chestnut Sidra died out it was forced eastward. Then as the Ice Age continued the spruce which now is only found in the northern part of Canada in the Bore Yule forests white like spruce it came down and they did to what is today the Great Plains in until twelve thousand five hundred years ago. That black and white spruce was in Texas so the Eastern deciduous forest was pushed eastward as the boreal forest came down Actually it wasn't so much push eastward it died out. The conifers which include the spruce which are more adaptive to the cold took over. Then an interesting thing happened about 10000 years ago when the Pleistocene closed in the modern age came on and Elaine started warm up again and keep in mind that the difference between the Ice Age and what we had to days only three degrees centigrade. It's a very very small. Incremental change in temp in average annual temperature. Well what happened at that time was that the land dried out fires became more important again. Now the conifers had

claimed the northwest pretty much in Douglas for the first time became dominant. So Douglas fir has only been dominant in the force for about 10000 years since the close of the last ice age. As the ice age closed in the warming trend started this spruce moved northward again in the Eastern deciduous forest and Juniper sort of cover what is now the great plains until fire came in and fires would sweep through and push the deciduous force eastward and allow the grasslands to form and form the Great Plains. That's maintained by fire since humans have been suppressing fire. There have been problems with trees. The eastern forest begin encroaching in the Great Plains and now they're having to manually control the forest. Out here we have the richest conifer force in the world. There are 25 species of coniferous trees. Seven major ones. They live longer and grow larger than anyplace else in the world. And it is if the climate geology and they were isolated here during the Ice Age

and this is their most favorable habitat. Well I guess this morning is Chris maser. He was a research scientist with the US Department of the interior and currently is a private consultant sustainable forestry. He's a museum research associate in Zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle he's also an author who's written a number of scientific articles most of them but they have to do with the forests including his recent book The redesigned forest and we're talking about another book that he's written in titled forest primeval the Natural History of an ancient forest and we'd be we'd be happy to have any comments or questions that you would have. You just pick up the telephone give us a call three three three wy L.L. 800 1:58 WY. What was it that brought you and the Department of the Interior to a parting of the ways. Well a couple of things. The first was. I had a wonderful experience with them and there's no bitterness on my part but what happens in research often is it has an influence on policy and policy in this case was the

allowable cut. Some of the research that we have been doing over the last 10 years was beginning to show that the cut was not sustainable. And this is an interesting thing in our law. The law is the multiple uses yield act but sustained is past tense. And the only way you can have a sustained yield is to have a sustained cut and when you run out of cut you run out of fuel. And what I began to understand was that we needed to change one word in the law rather than insisting yield it needed to be sustainable yield which means present projected into the future. Well that wasn't the case. And the more I was pointing this out in the more our data showed that what we were doing was not sustainable. The more the forestry program the folks the running force you program in the Bureau of Land Management became concerned and told me that I was having an impact on policy. And I said well it isn't me. There have been probably 10

of us working on this and I'm not. I was hired as a scientist. You know it's hard to find the truth. The fact is the best we understand if that has any impact on policy that's your problem not mine. And what happened finally was that it was strongly suggested by the Washington office that I'd be censored everything I say and write be censured by a committee before I was allowed to speak. And I would not put up with that because I have to live with me. No one else does. And if I give up my integrity professional or personal I have nothing of value to offer anybody including myself. So I had to draw the line. What what is the rate of loss today of a forest in the United States is that A is that a figure that you sort of have in your head. No but I could tell you that astronomical because whenever we cut a forest we replant trees but we do not reforest. No one has ever been reforested an acre. We don't even know what a forest is.

We don't know what all the pieces are. The entire NASA's space program has fewer moving pieces than one acre of ground and putting a person on the moon to simple it's black and white is hit or miss. It's a soft landing or a squish. But managing an acre of ground is all gray. We don't know the outcome. This is something that I think it's good for people to understand because because they may not you know really understand the difference between trying to recreate a force that has been cut and the kind of replanting that you know that a timber company or a paper company or or whatever would say that they would that they are doing and it would give you the impression that what they're what they are doing what they are trying to doing is recreate what was there before. And the I guess the fact is that you just can't do it. Or maybe you can't do it very quickly. Well they're not even trying what they're doing is to averting forests to plantations. They're making glorified Christmas tree farms which are designed around

an economic base to turn a profit and to do that they're simplifying what they're really doing is trading forcing on corn fields to grow trees instead of corn. They're very simple they have lost most of their biological diversity. They have no concept of the cumulative effect another cumulative effect of the easiest way I can define that for somebody who isn't familiar with it is to consider that when I was younger and I tried for a while to find a line of sobriety by taking a shot glass and sipping fine vintage wine over an evening and I was absolutely convinced in my mind that I could know I would know when to stop before I became a need. Well I always learned but only after I crossed the line and then too late. This is cumulative effect as each class cumulated the alcohol until it reached a point of no return. That's what we're doing when we manage the land the way we're doing it. In economically we have set the cut down the forests gotten rid of

at least half of its divert biological physical functional diversity. We're planting trees in rows and we're making one assumption that's a carry over from a German economist who came up with what's called the rotation concept which is to link the time trees need to grow before they can be cut and that is very simple. We assume that sunlight soil fertility in quantity water quality in quantity and the quality of the air are constant values not variables constant. Therefore the only variable we manipulate is how fast we grow the tree. No that isn't true soil fertility water quality air quality in the quality the sunlight the reaches the forest going through the polluted air are all variable. But we look at them as though they're linear in that their constant values in all of our economic models omit them. So they're considered there soon to be constants. All of the moms are lenient of forces cyclic So we have no

idea of what we're doing over time. Now we can't this doesn't mean we can't have a sustainable force we can't. It doesn't mean long is bad it isn't it doesn't mean we can't have a good timber industry we can't effect I will always argue for the timber industry but on the basis of a biologically sustainable forest not an economically sustained yield because we can't have an economically sustain yield of anything until we first have a biologically sustainable forest. See we're looking at the system backwards. We focus only on the product not in the processes. It's like a box cake. If you take a box of cake and dump it out even it has a recipe in it. What if you dumped that you've dumped out ingredients ingredients are only half the cake. The other half of the cake is the interactions among the ingredients the causes the cake to rise you've got ADD WATER eggs so forth those are still ingredients but if the process is the cause the cake to do with it does can't take place likely that the baking powder.

And when the cake then you drop it on your foot and break your instep. You don't have the kind of cake you wanted because one ingredient and therefore its interaction was omitted. That's what we're doing to the force. We leaving out half of it. The interactions between soil water air and sunlight. That is what creates the forest. So we look at the force and think it's only trees. When I tell you I have a caller here who would like to talk with let's do that. We'll go headline number one. Hello. I had a couple questions. First had to do with the role of forest fire in a sustainable forest. I think it was Scientific American about six months ago had an article about the national park forest fires and the thesis there was that it was a very natural thing for at that stage in the life of the forest for there to be massive forest fires because there's so much dead growth that it was

very there's just a lot of kindling wood it was very flammable and the net result was that it cleared out the area for new growth and left the soil fertilized by the ashes. The second question is related to what you're just talking relate that in a. Look in the way that they're reading timber now or the personal story cutting the original growth replanted cut that down a non-thinker in the second or in some places third growth. They have cut down without forest fires being a regular part of it without opening time. How that affected the soil fertility. Those are excellent questions. Let me write down your last one. So the lack of forest fire. OK let's deal with the fire first. OK the thing that drives drives the universe is what we call catastrophic disturbance. Fire is

a could be catastrophic distributes it can kill a whole forced flood is a catastrophic disturbance in Florida hurricanes take the place of fire and blow the forest down read it and burn it up. So fire is a natural part of the system particularly since the close of the last ice ages the world warmed up. Now there are two kinds of fire that affect the forest in. One is a catastrophic fire. It's what we call a stand a stand it's a group of three let's say that you have a thousand acres and you should draw a line around call that a stem that a portion of the fours stand replace and fire the forestry places that fire which is so hot today would be called a wildfire that actually killed the forest. But it doesn't burn it up. It leaves a lot of the dead trees standing. Some of them fall over. This is nature's investment of the nutrient capital stored in those trees back into the

soil which is then manifested in the New Forest. The other kind of fire is what's called the stand maintenance fire or the forced maintenance fire this is one that creeps around on the ground and it had burns at different intensities it might flare up in a snag it might kill a tree here or here or there will burn up a few logs. What it does basically is it kills the underbrush including the understory or shade tolerant trees. Now Northwest that hemlock in cedar Douglas fir is not shade tolerant. It's also depended on fire in order to grow. Douglas fir is what we call a fire the climax and the climax unlike the last stage in a play. Well if there's some disturbance that prevents the play from ever getting to the climax scene then you have you're always stopping one scene short. That's what fire does. So when the fire goes around in the ground it cleans up a lot of the dead wood in so you don't have these massive accumulations all over it also kill

the understory trees like the hemlock and cedar and this is critical because if those trees are allowed to grow in they will grow up to their green portion is in the green portion of the over story or the big tree 60 to 100 feet above the ground. You now have a ladder for the fire to ground fires to go all the way up into the crown. If they're burned out you don't have that if you have two things operating. The first is Douglas fir has very thick bark. It protects the wood from the fire. About 60 feet and the other thing is is that these fires keep the ground clear of debris and so the flames never get high enough to reach up into the live branches. So fire actually fireproof the old growth forest maintenance fire. What happened when we eliminated fire. If we had not only allowed the fuel to build up but we have also allowed these understorey shade tolerant trees to grow tall

enough to get into the crown of the big trees. Now we set the West up to burn in Yellowstone and my opinion was pablum. I don't think we've seen anything yet. But keep in mind in all of this that the greatest catastrophic disturbance has been the human being who disrupted all of nature's cycle that kept the forest healthy in changing. Yellowstone would not have been so bad if the Park Service had burned it prescribed fire as ecologists told them to do a decade ago. I suspect many of our national parks are trouble because of lack of fire. And they're either going to introduce fire back into the parks or we're going to lose more than Yellowstone. OK that's the first part. The second part is with the forest. If you plant a crop of trees and then cut them plant cut plane cut first of all what you do is used up the count of the nutrients in the soil. Fire does not necessarily replace nutrient. It volatilized some of them like nitrogen

burning. But what fire does is it starts the forest over in allows the shrubs to come in which are like crop rotation to a farmer in the northwest for example we have a shrub called the you know the snow Bush. And it's a it's a special once you notice that you time it. It comes in following fire. It has little nodules on the roots that contain nitrogen fixing bacteria. Now that means a bacterium can take can go up into the atmosphere take nitrogen out of it and convert it to an ammonia product at the Shrub can use in a lot of that leaches into the soil. The other thing is there's a fungus growing on trees which are an extension of the root system which are absolutely necessary for the trees to survive the trees feed the fungus sugars from their crowns and the fungus goes out into the soil and picks up water phosphorus in 1000 Jinnah moved into the trees root tip the tree cannot get this itself. It so happens that you know this the snow Bush

maintains in the soil. Some of these same fungi necessary for the douglas fir forest when it comes back in. So what fire does periodical you start the forest over. Create a lot of habitat diversity. It proves the forth within the forest the changes the force that prevents it from becoming a smorgasbord for insects. It creates a lot of habitat diversity in how the trees rot. One day being killed by fire or stress and so forth. All of this builds diversity into the system that putting it into a tree farm takes out. And so by eliminating fire from the tree farm your limb and eating even more of the diversity through time. And the other thing is we don't know everything fire does is beneficial. We only see the appearance of it's burning something up but we try to get money for years to study charred wood and find out what fire did to alter the chemistry in the wood this left out the force and how it rot. But it wasn't a crisis. So we could never

get the money to study you still question the need to be answered. I am concerned if fire is ever removed from the ecosystem because it has played such a dynamic role in shaping the ecosystem to the way that we find it desirable. So it makes it patently no sense to me to take out one of the main agents of change that has given us what we want and we have no idea what removing it will do. Get your question going. Yes I was just wondering. Also though what effect does concretely. I think I've heard that the yield has been reducing in the third planting of crop lumber in the Cascades. Has this notice really been affecting the yield and how much longer do you think that it will be able to be sustained or will be sustained by the big timber companies. Is this going to be something that will finally just deplete the soil to a point where nothing can grow very well that

is now you're getting closer to it. In Europe they found that by the end of the second crop they had lost they lost 30 percent of the U. And if you look at the Old Forest the one that was originally there that we cut in and put into a plantation we removed from forests and put into plantation. What we're doing is living on. The savings account that has been built up in the soil over the thousands of years that the forest has been cycling through the soil we call this the old growth goodness of the soil in other words the carryover component. If you cut the forest today there's a lot of woody material left and there's a lot of it already incorporating into the soil. That storage available nutrients. But if you put in a crop of trees and you take out as much of the product as you can and then you do this again and again what you're doing is drawing down the soil nutrient account until you deplete the soil and this is happening China is happening in Europe. It's happening in the southeastern United States and it's happening in the northwest. Yes you're absolutely correct what we're doing is mining the soil of its

nutrient capital. And this is not even good economics. And this is what I meant by reinvestment with the question you ask is critical in any business including this radio station. Pardon the capital that's made part of the monies made is reinvested in maintaining equipment. But if you look at money it's symbolic of the value we place on something else. You will find we spend zero dollars in maintaining the health of the soil that grows the entire forest. So unless we maintain the health of the fertility of the soil on purpose consciously we can only draw down the account because we're taking more out that we're putting in. We're not balancing it counts in every business we were operate that way goes bankrupt and so will the force. And that's our choice. We choose to give. Too bad you're only the product and not the system. And that is a mistake humanity has made all over the world. We do not reinvest any biological capital in any renewable natural resources to that I know of so.

Mr maser is formerly a research scientist with the US Department of the interior Bureau of Land Management and he is now a private consultant in sustainable forestry and also a museum research associate in Seoul at the University of Washington in Seattle. He's written a number of scientific articles most of them dealing with some aspect of forests including a recent book and titled The redesigned Forest which is about the future of Forestry and some of the issues that we've been talking about this morning. If you have again if you have questions you can pick up the telephone and give us a call. Three three three wy allow 800 two to two wy allow that is our first number is our local line and the other is our toll free lines all in the matter where you're listening you can use that number. Is it is it possible with the kind of demand that we have for wood products today and also especially for paper that we can we can satisfy the demand and yet not get to the point where we've destroyed all of the forest or

depleted the soil through tree plantations to the point where we can't grow anything anymore. That's an excellent question let me answer this in two ways. First of all we can have a sustainable forest I want people to understand that plantations are not evil. It's just that they cannot be continued in perpetuity in a straight line. Let's say that we grow plantation two or three times and the tree growth begins that you begin to grow up then we have to allow the the area to leave it alone for maybe 200 years 300 years to allow it to heal itself. To replenish the soil and to fix the processes we have broken like a lake if I break my leg the doctor can put a pin in and a cast on it but he can't heal it. It only heals with time the force is the same way. So we can have a sustainable force but now there comes the other part of the question and that's me. The demand is a contrived thing.

We humanity a particularly Western civilization and capitalism we have this weird notion of confusing need and desire. When we think we need something what we're saying is we want something. That's why I always think of the catalogs that we my wife and I are bombarded with that we never order as torture books. Because the unit didn't have a thought in your head that you needed anything or wanted anything to go through a catalog of oh my God here's this sweater and I've got to have it now I need it. That's what that's a want a desire. The question we need to ask is What is the necessity for humanity to survive. That's very different from need. If we in our purchasing would be more conscious of the consequences we cause in how rapidly we're depleting the world of its resources. In ask the question what is necessary for me to have to be comfortable not what do I want but what is necessary. We'll be looking at the world very differently. I think

there is still enough of the forest left. And I think we can heal enough of the forest to meet humanity's necessity. I think however if we stick with needs we are already beyond the carrying capacity of the world's forests at the rate we're cutting them down. Well let's take another caller here we have someone on our toll free line a little bit wondering recently they've been doing market days in the unit. A pair of black Americans are very very concerned about being violent but finally they are not going to change their lifestyle in any way whether it be disposable diaper the kind of car they drive almost anything. So isn't it almost like President Bush is really the perfect president because he said I'm very concerned you know the terrible anger the absolutely nothing but your question is fantastic what it reminds me of Arnold Toynbee the famous

historian because ma'am you put your finger right in the nose I just finished writing a book about this very thing. Arnold Toynbee studied 26 civilizations the collapse in asked the simple question why did they collapse. And his answer was because they either wouldn't or couldn't change to meet the changing needs. And this is his concept has been corroborated by two people who used to work with the Soil Conservation Service. The discovery was that the civilizations collapsed when they used up the fertility of the topsoil. In other words because they refused to change they brought about their own demise. And I would suggest we're headed in precisely the same direction because we refused to change. Now understand change is very frightening. A couple of weeks ago we our favorite dog died a dog we loved very much. And all of a sudden that fast within the click of a finger a whole life was

changed. It was excruciating but keep in mind that the Buddhists have learned that the only constant in the universe is change and we must honor change to what we do is try to kill it all the time. We have to change if we are going to survive. And that's a choice. Change is a choice. If we do not change how we purchase things. If we do not change our consciousness level yes we will outstrip the forests we are killing the soil. I took part in a committee of Congress struggling with the 1995 farm bill and one of the things that was a rude awakening for me is that solar Rose is no longer the number one problem in the agriculture the United States today its pollution of our groundwater there one hundred forty two chemicals in our groundwater different fertilizers that weren't there before. But unless we change we're going to poison the whole world. And I think it's fascinating about this is the soil. The very day that one of the most humble things on earth we walk on it every day and

we take it for granted that is the stage to which the entire human dramas enact it as we are killing to soil. We're killing ourselves in direct suicide nuclear weapons the bomb is not the threat to the world. The bomb is the soil that we're killing daily because we refused to change our thinking. Ma'am your question was beautiful thank you. OK I can about half a minute sojourn which can only heating your annoying you know what it was. Say what's the name again. Bigotry for a great pine rail we need overturning here. IMHO tree grown. Oh this is something that they're pinning on air pollution. They did in Katrina. But it happened very quickly and we can go in. You know a couple of weeks. There are lot of things to kill trees and what we tend to do and I don't know whether chair pollution or not or whether it's chemicals in the soil so pollution whatever. But

let's look at that for just a second. There are lots of things killing trees in the world today but nobody is looking at their management practices. Everyone's pointing the finger at air pollution. And my point is that we tend to exclude ourselves from taking any accountability for what is going on and we can't do that. We are where we are today collectively by the individual choices that we as human beings make. We always have a choice. Choice equals hope hopen choice equal human dignity. As long as I am breathing I have a choice not of the circumstances but how I react to the circumstances. Therefore ultimately I am responsible for my actions and I must be accountable for them. Your question about your statement about change is correct. No one wants to be responsible or accountable for himself or herself and we have to be. We can only change the world one person at a time because we cannot legislate values or feelings. They come from

inside. We have to take the responsibility to change. And I believe in people if we are each willing to be responsible. I think we can turn the world around. Laugh Track about Europe the rhetoric the turmoil prac turning to prove to me turn me into major problems. In reality where you get your information. It's very bad and I get my information because I worked in Africa I worked in Asia and I lived in Europe and we also had a conference here not too low in fact my last trip to Europe was in 85 looking at forced problems. I correspond with Europeans and we had a conference here in which some eminent European forces came over and they're absolutely shocked at what we're doing because they said we learned over the last century it doesn't work why are you still doing it. I mean I know you're trying right. There are no trees and when you can't know there are trees. A European story is a fairly complicated one one first thing if they cut out

their force years ago over a century ago for a whole number of reasons war the Industrial Revolution etc. they had to try and heal a force to rebuild one. And they made some mistakes. They weren't wrong they weren't bad people they were wrong in that they did the best they could to there's no criticism or blame. I look at it as the world's longest experiment and it didn't work so now we need to look at doing it differently and the more Litan Germans particularly are they are no longer clear cutting the way they used to. Switzerland is illegal the plant monocultures. Going back to managing with nature as one German professor in. He was a past force Meister said at Oregon State University late last year to going back to managing with nature that the intensive management that they have been practicing has been killing the soil. And they only have one place that he knows of a pine forest which is a natural site that has room for more than three rotations three

plantations. So they have caught on to something but we don't want to change. It's like the Rosyth luxuries as would everyone else buy. If everyone else would change their mind then I don't have to and I can stay within my comfort zone that's your basic problem. We just have about five minutes left and I have a couple of other callers I'd like to try to get at least one of the men we may not be able to get both. So I hope they get some the callers questions and I do want to move on here to somebody on line number one let's do that. Hello. I question that. Being carefree and caring Kotick starfaring care. Now Iris. Even our catalogues are often a good thing. Some of them say we don't offer to cook because we don't believe and the forestation are concerned about the rain forests etc. and others you know make a point of of stating their stance and I reading from one even that they're concerned about the world's rain

forest. That's why they only purchased teak furniture made of wood harvested from a self-sustaining plantation in an age and then they go ahead to ask you to contribute to the Rain Forest Alliance in New York. I don't think I'm going to buy any for one thing it's very expensive but every time I see this I wonder is this a response of all. Our attitude you know plantation mining what you think about that. Ma'am I think you're your intuition what your heart is telling you is correct. I don't know of any plantations that have proven over time the long run to be sustainable. And it's a country to basically a contradiction in terms because we know more in the United States probably in the Germans in Europe about forestry than anyplace else in the world and we haven't been able to grow sustainable plantations. So I doubt seriously that

anyone in Indonesia has when we look at something we call it sustainable keep in mind that the crops of corn you have a crop every year but the forest may take 80 to 100 years for one crop. And as long as it exceeds our lifetime we think of it is sustainable and my point is I will consider it sustainable when I seen 10 crops in a row and I won't see 10 crops and row no one in history has ever grown more than three. The Germans as I said there's one pine forest now in its fourth but that's the only one I know of anywhere. And it appears to be sustainable but the others patently haven't been. So I would suggest that Indonesian plantations are not sustainable. The other point is a very quick one. Well we're all sending money down to protect the rain forest we're cutting out the force in the Pacific Northwest that actually have more living tissue per acre than the rainforest do. We're cutting out the biggest force in the world with the biggest trees and the greatest amount of living tissue. But we're not looking in our

backyard we're criticizing everyone else and I suggest there's some hypocrisy there also. I want to squeeze in one more person who will go to line number two. Hello I'll have to ask if you can to to be brief though. OK real quickly pointed out that here in 1971 in a country in the middle of the agro chemical bout where we're here Mary and Douglas County which state. ELEANOR HALL I told you I mean here you go I'm trying to be real brave. I've been working 19 or 20 years calling up the Ag Department every time the farmers come out here and write new chemical because we have shallow wells. The last episode was with a farmer who's buying 40 acres around this with paraquat and I came out and stopping got the man off the tractor and pointed with the stop because they didn't have any cover on their heads in the one of the lot of they was about 20 about 20 miles an hour. I immediately called the Department of Agriculture the department the Agricultural Department at the

U of I tried to talk to everyone in regards that were giving advice to the farmers at that time I believe this was five years ago. They came out and met with me in the kitchen and I said ma'am don't you know that the chemical companies that won this concert you're taking on a really big you know a big plan to take them on that I've said what I've got a combination of it is the advice that these four farmers get from their land grant colleges if not always in the bath or far sightedness. And I the three scientists that I talked to about paraquat maybe they're one of them could come to any conclusive evidence of how long it stays on the ground. So I probably can use it if they need you know the Ag Department in our land grant university and I are giving advice to the farmers. If they've got a tanker has it can generally and this oil depletion and to water and to water poisoning and are granted ground water if they're going to be any

change in policy with the advice given to the farmers. Because I think they feel like they're up against the wall. And I'll hang up Sure. They are in many ways up against the wall because their lifestyle is changing also in. They don't have a choice in this anymore. You put your finger on the pulse of the issue here. From what I've seen in this country the last bastions against change of the universities in Congress. I worked as a scientist for 20 years ma'am and I wouldn't know a scientific truth if I stepped on one because I don't know scientific lie. What we do know is that we are struggling to uncover things. But I would suggest that science and technology without a great deal of humility is dangerous and that's exactly what you're talking about when we approach these things as though we know something that reaches beyond our lifetime and we know what these things do in the soil. We are practicing one of the ultimate human arrogance is what we're doing is passing

on a terrible debt to the future. In California Proposition 65 has forced the chemical companies to re-evaluate and examine all of their chemicals and they've come up with some nasty surprises. I would hope that what California has done goes nationwide. If you'd like to know more about it write to somebody in the legislature in California about 65 and they'll give you much better inches than I can but they're finding some very nasty surprises in the chemicals the chemical companies are selling. We're going to have to leave it at that because we're just about actually we'll past our time. Chris I want to thank you very much for talking with us we appreciate it. My pleasure have a wonderful day. And again for people who are interested in this topic we have been talking in part about a book that our guest has written his name is Chris maser and that's spelled m e s e r. It's published by Sierra Club books the book is called forest primeval.