By JEFF STANT, guest columnist
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources’ plan to log the Yellowwood backcountry area is being driven by an ideological obsession to manage trees in our state forests as a crop, rather than concern about the health of the forest as asserted by DNR Director Cameron Clark in a recent guest column in the Brown County Democrat.
Rather than logging virtually all of the state forests, the law that Mr. Clark cites requires the DNR to manage the state forests for all Hoosiers’ benefit.
Mr. Clark is mischaracterizing the history of this forest and the DNR’s role in its return. It was not “an ecosystem that barely existed until the foresters planted it.” Aerial photographs taken of this area in 1939 show most of it was closed canopy forest. Tract histories indicate the DNR has inventoried forest stands, let the forest grow older and reforest naturally and done no planting, thinning or harvesting on most of the 29 tracts in the backcountry area.
Nine of the “previous 13 harvests” that Clark refers to took place before the backcountry area was created in 1981. The other four were carried out since Jack Seifert, architect of the 400-percent increase in logging in the state forests, took over their management in 2005. These four were in single tracts on the perimeter of the backcountry area, not extending across three tracts to its center as this logging will.
While the DNR’s forestry improves forests for timber harvests, forests thin themselves naturally and do not need foresters to accomplish this task. If the DNR were logging for the health of the forest, it would recognize research that indicates certain percentages of each subspecies of ash are resistant to the ash borer although their genetic markers have yet to be determined. The DNR’s plan to log ashes whether they’re resistant or not will hasten the demise of this species.
To reach these trees, they will be building roads throughout the logging area, damaging many other trees, crushing box turtles, salamanders and other animals which hibernate in the humus, scraping forest to bare dirt and opening the forest to more sunlight. IU research shows that these very logging activities have caused explosions of Japanese stiltgrass and other nonnative invasive plants throughout the state forests.
Two hundred twenty-eight scientists from Indiana universities wrote to Governor Holcomb, urging him to let areas in our state forests like this one return to old-growth condition to maintain their health and resiliency to an onslaught of diseases, pests and erratic weather. They assert that setting aside areas of our state forests as controls enables managers to understand whether adjacent forests are being logged sustainably and determine how natural forests are regenerating and responding to climate change.
Indeed, before 2005, 40 percent of Indiana’s state forests, 60,000 acres, were set aside for recreational and ecological purposes and as “old forest” control areas. Today, that percentage has been reduced to 2.5 percent, 4,000 acres, so that 97.5 percent of our state forests can be managed for timber production.
We do not have state cornfields or state soybean fields in Indiana. Our limited state forests should not be managed as though their primary purpose is to provide trees as a crop to a few private timber buyers.
Governor Orr recognized the true public value of this more-than century-old-forest when he set it aside as a “backcountry area” in 1981 for the “wilderness seeker” to “experience a forested area looking much the same as it may have appeared a century and a half ago.”
Please ask Mr. Clark’s boss, Governor Holcomb, to uphold this legacy for you and your grandchildren.
Jeff Stant is the executive director of the Indiana Forest Alliance. He can be reached at [email protected] or 317-602-3692.
