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Seeing the Forest
Seeing the Forest
Seeing the Forest tells the story of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon — how it made a successful transition from timber extraction to ecosystem restoration.
Once the epicenter of conflict, the Siuslaw today is an exemplar of cooperation and collaboration.
They harvest wood sustainably by thinning overly dense monoculture stands that are a legacy of the earlier days of unrestrained clearcutting. This not only improves the health of the forest by providing better habitat, but also creates local jobs and provides revenue to fund other restoration activities.
These activities include stream and watershed restoration, installing large culverts for aquatic organism passage, road maintenance, and road closures. All of these activities create more local jobs, in a virtuous circle that benefits the people, the forest, and salmon.
This is the story of how one national forest evolved from seeing trees as its primary resource, to seeing the forest as a whole.
Seeing the Forest from Alan Honick on Vimeo.
Text by David Bollier
In the 1990s, many communities in central Oregon were torn asunder by the “War of the Woods.” Environmentalists had brought lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service for violating its own governing statutes. For decades, timber companies had been allowed to clear-cut public forests, re-seed with tree monocultures, and build ecologically harmful roads on mountain landscapes.
Environmentalists won their lawsuit in 1991 when a federal judge issued an injunction that in effect shut down timber operations in the Pacific Northwest of the US. While the endangered northern spotted owl was the focus of much of the debate, the health of the entire ecosystem was at risk, including the Pacific salmon, which swim upstream to spawn.
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Disappearing Lake Shows Drought’s Extent in New Space Image
Disappearing Lake Shows Drought’s Extent in New Space Image
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| Aerial view of Goose Lake on the border between California and Oregon taken June 25, 2015, NASA Earth Observatory Landsat 8 – OLI. Credit: Jesse Allen |
A lake straddling the California-Oregon border looks like an empty swimming pool in new photos taken from space.
The water levels of Goose Lake and its several neighboring lakes depend on the season’s rain and snow amounts, and California has been in a drought. A camera onboard NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite captured the lake’s current dry spell on June 25, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.
The photo of the parched lake is a stark contrast to a photo taken by NASA when the lake was hydrated two years prior, on June 3, 2013.
Goose Lake State Park has a “dry lake” advisory on its website as of May 13: “The Lake is dry and not available for boating or fishing from the park.”
When Goose Lake brims with water, it spans about 145 square miles (375 square kilometers), with a depth of about 24 feet (7 meters). There are eight fish species native to the Goose Lake basin, including the redband trout, suckerfish, tui chub, lamprey, Pit-Klamath brook lamprey, speckled dace, Pit roach, and Pit sculpin.
When the lake is dry, the fish head over to the tributary streams connected to Goose Lake. Redband trout used to be commercially fished, but its populations have not been consistent from year to year.
Most of Goose Lake’s water flows in during the spring and early summer and comes from snowmelt that accumulates in its eastern streams. Goose Lake also receives water from groundwater basins.
Goose Lake overflowed in 1881, but dried up in the summers of 1851, 1852, 1926, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934 and 1992.
Dryness in the 1920s shriveled the lake to the point where wagon tracks left by gold miners of the mid-1800s appeared on the exposed lakebed, according to the Earth Observatory.
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