Restoration Update Winter 2025
WHEN IS IT OK TO KILL A TREE?
by Ken Carloni
I chose the title for this article after I posed this deliberately provocative question to spur discussion with a group of forest scientists and activists a while back. Forests the world over have been systematically managed for millennia, and fire was the only real tool our predecessors had to select which trees lived and which died. We now have far more powerful industrial means toward this end. As the new arbiters of life and death, how should we use these tools with wisdom and humility?
Aldo Leopold, the mid-20th-century forester and philosopher, wrote, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”. I vividly remember the first time I saw an industrial clearcut. Having spent my early years in New England, I had only known the selective logging my Vermont neighbors employed to cut pine and spruce logs for local mills. It was 1979, and the beauty and grandeur of the Pacific Northwest was calling me. I had recently defended my master’s thesis at the University of Connecticut, loaded my dog and all my worldly possessions into my rusty Volkswagen Squareback, and headed west. I landed a job as a research assistant at OSU, and on one of my first days off, I looked at a map with a big green area labeled “National Forest” (which I naively assumed was akin to a “National Park” or “National Monument”), and headed in that direction.
As I came around a corner and saw a fresh clearcut stretching from ridge to ridge with no stream buffer, the shock to my system was like a kick in the chest. I stopped my car, got out, surveyed the carnage, and said out loud, “This can’t be legal.” But of course, it was – and still is. This was the beginning of my journey to environmental activism in the 1990s and gave me the drive to go back to school and earn a Ph.D. in Forest Ecology from the College of Forestry at OSU. If I was going to argue for forest conservation on ecological grounds, I was going to need the same union card as those in positions of power who were treating forests as commodities.
When I arrived back at OSU, the College of Forestry was splitting down the middle with the clearcut/herbicide/plantation foresters on one side of the seminar room and the ecological foresters on the other. I was lucky enough to have pioneering forest ecologist Dave Perry take me on as a graduate student. Dave had worked with other luminaries in what was then called the “New Forestry” movement, which began to view forests as integrated ecosystems rather than as an agricultural crop to be “harvested”. Fires were becoming larger and more frequent. The nearby 1987 Silver Fire had just burned nearly 100,000 acres – small by current statistics, but the largest fire in Oregon’s recorded history up to that time. I set about trying to understand the patterns and processes that had created the mosaic of forests our forebears found when they arrived in this land.
Although I thought I was going to be figuring out how slope, topography, and storm tracks drove the fire regimes of the past, I soon began to suspect from the historical, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence that the firestick was by far the most significant driver. Thousands of stumps from scores of clearcuts in the Little River Watershed gave up their secrets in the form of tree ring chronologies and fire scar dates. And over 200,000 acres of aerial photos, satellite images, and vegetation sampling plots completed the story. Grueling statistical analyses then confirmed to the western world what the people of the land had known for millennia: our forests were born of fire and sustained by the Indigenous hands that lit it.
Native people were one of the two major landscape-level keystone species; humans controlled the fire regimes of their home territories, and their partners, the beavers, controlled the hydrological regimes. When we think about “natural disasters”, our minds often go to fires and floods – “acts of God” over which we have no control. But the preemptive efforts of these ecosystem allies greatly decreased the impacts of fire and rain, and minimized their dangers.
Tribal people were fully integrated into their habitats, and European concepts of natural vs unnatural and sacred vs secular did not exist. They managed all of the land, either intensively as they judiciously burned camps, huckleberry patches, camas meadows, and the trails that connected them, or extensively as they ran fires under open-understory old growth parklands to improve forage for game animals and to maintain pine nut and acorn “orchards”. On the other hand, Europeans, living in permanent villages with wooden houses, saw fire as the enemy – a force to be subdued before it destroyed your home and crops and left you starving in the cold. Technology would tame the wilderness and make a safe place for humans to live apart from nature.
Here in the Northwest, the extirpation of both keystone species – one by disease and violence, the other by over-trapping – replaced their ecosystem services with 20th-century technology that mechanized logging while effectively suppressing fire. The finely-tuned landscapes of the people gave way to new forest types not seen before the rise of industrial management: miles of even-aged monoculture plantations with remnant patches of ancient forest filled with young, flammable trees, now “protected” from fire.
Those chickens have now come home to roost as the most flammable forests the Northwest has ever known – dense, fuel-choked plantations surrounding primary forests that haven’t seen a firestick for well over a century – burn in a warming climate with a range and severity rarely, if ever, seen before Europeans arrived. I am not passing judgment on the culture that got us here – people are products of their era and their stations in life, and the vast majority do what they believe is right. But the lesson is clear from examples throughout history and across the world: people that arrive in new and different landscapes apply the same technologies that worked in the “old country”, often with disastrous results.
In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that the first humans to migrate to North America in an earlier warming climate brought with them not only the weapons that made them the new top predators, but also the firestick that turned shrublands into grasslands, making winners of deer, elk and bison, but losers of mammoths, dire wolves, and giant ground sloths.
But archaeological evidence here on the Umpqua reveals a thriving indigenous population that produced artifacts for daily living that remained consistent for at least 3000 years. This suggests that countless descendants of the new occupants of this land eventually got it right and settled into the rhythms of the new ecosystem.
The evidence for active Indigenous landscape management, and the dramatic changes brought on by western technology, left me with the urge to emulate that prehistoric shift from foreign occupier to aboriginal manager. But a warming climate and a new extinction event of our own making means there is no going back to the pre-European landscapes of the past. I began to ask: How do we take the lessons of both the prehistoric and the industrial past and build an indigenous ecosystem that again includes humans as co-beneficiaries?
I knew that this would be like trying to turn the Titanic with a canoe paddle, but I stuck my paddle in the water anyway. In 2011, I began working with a nonprofit (the Yew Creek Land Alliance) to manage 380 acres of abandoned ranch and timberland to conserve and restore native biodiversity and repair ecosystem functions. The giant Doug fir that used to grace the hills are now all stumps, but massive ancient oaks and madrones, blessed by their lack of monetary value, still live.
The absence of Indigenous fire and subsequent cattle grazing for over 60 years has allowed conifer seedlings to grow into flammable thickets that are crowding out the ancient hardwoods that originated long before the first white man set foot on this ground. To protect the legacy trees that support hundreds of other species and connect us physically, genetically, and spiritually to ancient nature, those conifers had to go. I have now become a tree-killer. And in our resurgent conifer forest, I also choose which trees live and which die so that the trees that support the most life can support even more, and long after I die, become old growth.
And just as Native hunters thanked the spirit of the buck they just killed, we too, honor the trees we cut by milling them into beautiful lumber, or making their tops and limbs into biochar to sequester carbon and revitalize the soil.
Looking back over one shoulder to Western science, and over the other to Indigenous wisdom, we can look forward to once again becoming Indigenous people.
Epilog: Back in 2013, as Umpqua Watersheds wrestled with questions of where, how, and why to do restoration work, I developed a set of restoration principles with feedback from Stan Petrowski and the UW board. They can be found at https://umpquawatersheds.org/what-we-do/restoration/ (scroll down a bit). I urge anyone who wants to go beyond the philosophy of restoration and into the nuts and bolts to have a look at them.
Now a dozen years old, they are due for review and revision — I would welcome any feedback to ken@umpquawatersheds.org.