Beyond the Timber Wars
By Lisa Bramen
Photos By Chris Crisman
It's a rare mild February morning in southwestern Washington, a place so famous for winter squalls that beachfront hotels here offer storm-watching packages. A few miles inland, project manager Tom Kollasch is following faint elk trails through a stand of coastal rain-forest on The Nature Conservancy’s Ellsworth Creek Preserve.
Shards of sunlight slant through the canopy, illuminating an under-story thick with ferns and deep-green shrub. The ground is damp and spongy with moss. Moss is everywhere, in fact—coating rocks, draped like ragged shawls over thick spruce limbs, colonizing fallen hemlocks that collapse into shreds underfoot.
These few hundred acres of old-growth forest represent a rare glimpse of the region’s ecological past. Washington is logging country, and nearly every forest that isn’t protected for conservation has been harvested at least once in the past century. In the Willapa Hills surrounding the preserve, patches of recent clear-cutting stand out like fresh scars.
In this little oasis, though, some trees have managed to reach old age. Many were already centuries old when Lewis and Clark first glimpsed the Pacific Ocean a few miles away at Cape Disappointment in 1805. Some of the cedars here are more than 1,000 years old. No wonder a few are creaking and groaning plaintively.
A more unexpected sound is the faint rumbling and beeping of heavy equipment in the distance. The surprise is that it is coming from a logging operation on Conservancy land, funded by Conservancy dollars. ...
http://www.nature.org/magazine/archives/beyond-the-timber-wars.xml
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