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By Bob Kelleher
Minnesota Public Radio
May 30, 2001
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More than 100 people met in Grand Rapids this week to consider a new future for Minnesota's forests. Department of Natural Resources Commissioner Allen Garber hopes to sell the group on his vision of forestry, providing raw material for a vibrant lumber industry, habitat for wildlife, and room for recreation.
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To test the idea, Garber has identified a 240,000-acre tract in Itasca and St. Louis Counties, that includes both public and private lands. And he's convinced the property owners to give his new management a try.
"It was an easy sell. Believe me, it was an easy sell," says Garber. "This idea of managing the forest by selectively harvesting, thinning, doing multiple entries over the life of the forest, and monitoring while you do it - they like it. And they think it could be the future for Minnesota forests."
Garber thinks a highly-managed forest can quiet the often vitriolic debate among forest interests. He says the approach would produce more wood, protect wildlife, and be visitor-friendly. It would reduce the current glut of young birch and aspen in Minnesota forests. But, he says, it would still provide enough of these small, soft, trees to feed the state's paper and pulp mills.
"The industry has told us that this is the only way to do it. Over the long haul we won't feed them the product they need by the way we're managing now. In fact, it was industry who came to us and said, if you continue to manage this way, you won't satisfy our needs," says Garber.
Key to Garber's vision are ideas drawn from Finland, a small Scandinavian country that produces about 25 percent of the world's commercial paper and timber. Forest researcher Allen Eck says Finnish forests have few dead or downed trees. The trees are widely-spaced, yet the forests carry more usable wood per acre than here, concentrated in larger, higher quality trees. Eck heads the University of Minnesota's Department of Forest Resources. He says U.S. visitors think the Finnish countryside looks much like a park.
The key to Finnish forestry is regular thinning - removing brush and weeds, culling weak trees, and making room for others to grow. It's much more hands-on than forestry practiced in Minnesota.
"We really employ almost all of these practices here - it's really just a question of degree. They thin early, light and often. We thin late, heavy, and seldom. And, the difference is a factor of two or three in terms of productivity," says Eck.
There are other advantages to a thin forest. Thickly-packed trees are a storehouse of flammable material. Recent wildfires in the western United States have shown how flames grow to dangerous crown fires in unmanaged forests, but are reduced to ground fires in thinned forests.
"So, we have pretty good evidence that thinning in the long term can really help our fire control situation."
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Not everyone likes the plan. The Ruffed Grouse Society has already expressed concerns. Society biologist Dan Dessecker says young forest - particularly young aspen forests - provide critical habitat for game species like ruffed grouse and American woodcock, as well as for rare songbirds like the golden-winged warbler.
"It relies very, very strongly on very young aspen forests, one year to five years of age. The golden-winged warbler is one of the most imperiled song birds in the eastern United States, and yet it is indeed relatively abundant today in northern Minnesota, precisely because we do have substantial amounts of young forest," says Dessecker.
Other environmentalists are interested, if not yet convinced. The Nature Conservancy's Ron Nargang says Minnesota's forest landscape is now an unnatural collection of trees harvested in square blocks.
"I think the key to getting over that hump is to get these multiple owners to say, 'Let's look at the forest as an organism, and let's manage it as one organism, and let's plan harvest patterns to cross ownership boundaries. Let's not have to block it off as a square line where one ownership ends and the next one begins.' That, to me, is the greatest opportunity that we've got here - collaborative management," says Nargang.
Nargang says it's difficult to draw direct parallels between Finland and Minnesota. Finland has a milder climate, even though it lies at as far north a latitude as Alaska. Finland also has a less diverse mixture of trees and wildlife than Minnesota.
And there's a warning from Finnish environmentalists to be very careful before copying Finnish forestry. The Finnish Nature League has been fighting to save Finland's remaining old growth, now estimated at less than 5 percent of the nation's forests. Kaisa Raitio say almost half the Finnish wildlife species considered endangered are in that position because of forestry practices.
"I would be very cautious about a forestry model that causes extinction, and endangered species. I would not recommend any area in the world to start practicing forestry as it is practiced in Finland today, without a very careful consideration of how to improve it," says Raitio.
However, she says Finland is moving toward what she considers better practices, albeit very slowly. A certification program is supposed to help protect biodiversity. More species are now being allowed in a forest's mix, and clear cuts are smaller than they used to be.
Moving towards the Finnish forestry model would be completely voluntary in Minnesota, but DNR Commissioner Allan Garber believes it will prove successful.
"If it's a good idea, it will fly. These people who own land - people who are in industry, in recreation, and have interests in wildlife - they're smart. And if it's not a good idea, they won't buy it."
Garber hopes to leave the summit with a team in place to oversee a demonstration forest which will use this new management strategy. The team would monitor the demonstration forest's wildlife, water quality, aesthetics, and timber production.
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