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.S.I'veread Plum Creek's publications and talked with their director of corporateaffairs, Bob Jirsa, who defends Plum Creek's environmental policies andsustainable forestry practices.I've also heard numerous Montana friendsvent unfavorable opinions about Plum Creek.Typical of their complaintsare the following: "Plum Creek cares only about the bottom line"; "they arenot interested in sustainable forestry"; "they have a corporate culture, andtheir goal is 'Get out more logs!' "; "Plum Creek earns money in whateverway it can from the land"; "they do weed control only if someonecomplains."Should these polarized views remind you of the views that I alreadyquoted about mining companies, you're right.Plum Creek is organized as aprofit-making business, not as a charity.If Montana citizens want PlumCreek to do things that would diminish its profits, it's their responsibility toget their politicians to pass and enforce laws demanding those things, or tobuy out the lands and manage them differently.Looming over this disputeis a basic hard fact: Montana's cold dry climate and high elevation placemost of its land at a relative disadvantage for forestry.Trees grow severaltimes faster in the U.S.Southeast and Northeast than in Montana.WhilePlum Creek's largest land holdings are in Montana, four other states (Ar-kansas, Georgia, Maine, and Mississippi) each produce more timber forPlum Creek on only 60 to 64% of its Montana acreage.Plum Creek cannotget a high rate of return from its Montana logging operations: it has to paytaxes and fire protection on the land while sitting on it for 60 to 80 years be-fore harvesting trees, whereas trees reach a harvestable size in 30 years on itssoutheastern U.S.lands.When Plum Creek faces economic realities and seesmore value in developing its Montana lands, especially those along riversand lakes, for real estate than for timber, that's because prospective buyerswho seek beautiful waterfront property hold the same opinion.Those buy-ers are often representatives of conservation interests, including the govern-ment.For all these reasons, the future of logging in Montana even morethan elsewhere in the U.S.is uncertain, as is that of mining.Related to these issues of forest logging are issues of forest fires, whichhave recently increased in intensity and extent in some forest types in Mon-tana and throughout the western U.S., with the summers of 1988, 1996,2000, 2002, and 2003 being especially severe fire years.In the summer of 2000, one-fifth of the Bitterroot Valley's remaining area of forest burned.Whenever I fly back to the Bitterroot nowadays, my first thought on lookingout my airplane's window is to count the number of fires or to gauge theamount of smoke on this particular day.(On August 19, 2003, as I was fly-ing to Missoula airport, I counted a dozen fires whose smoke reduced visi-bility to a few miles.) Each time that John Cook took my sons out fly-fishingin 2000, his choice of which stream to fish depended partly on where thefires were burning that day.Some of my friends in the Bitterroot have hadto be evacuated repeatedly from their homes because of approaching fires.This recent increase in fires has resulted partly from climate change (therecent trend towards hot dry summers) and partly from human activities,for complicated reasons that foresters came increasingly to understandabout 30 years ago but whose relative importance is still debated.One factoris the direct effects of logging, which often turns a forest into something ap-proximating a huge pile of kindling: the ground in a logged forest may re-main covered with lopped-off branches and treetops, left behind when thevaluable trunks are carted away; a dense growth of new vegetation springsup, further increasing the forest's fuel loads; and the trees logged and re-moved are of course the biggest and most fire-resistant individuals, leavingbehind smaller and more flammable trees.Another factor is that the U.S.Forest Service in the first decade of the 1900s adopted a policy of fire sup-pression (attempting to put out forest fires) for the obvious reasons that itdidn't want valuable timber to go up in smoke, nor people's homes and livesto be threatened.The Forest Service's announced goal became, "Put outevery forest fire by 10:00 A.M.on the morning after the day when it is firstreported." Firefighters became much more successful at achieving that goalafter World War II, thanks to the availability of firefighting planes, an ex-panded road system for sending in fire trucks, and improved firefightingtechnology.For a few decades after World War II, the annual acreage burntdecreased by 80%.That happy situation began to change in the 1980s, due to the increasingfrequency of large forest fires that were essentially impossible to extinguishunless rain and low winds combined to help.People began to realize thatthe U.S.federal government's fire suppression policy was contributing tothose big fires, and that natural fires caused by lightning had previouslyplayed an important role in maintaining forest structure.That natural roleof fire varies with altitude, tree species, and forest type.To take the Bitter-root's low-altitude Ponderosa Pine forest as an example, historical records,plus counts of annual tree rings and datable fire scars on tree stumps, demonstrated that a Ponderosa Pine forest experiences a lightning-lit fireabout once a decade under natural conditions (i.e., before fire suppressionbegan around 1910 and became effective after 1945).The mature Ponderosatrees have bark two inches thick and are relatively resistant to fire, which in-stead burns out the understory of fire-sensitive Douglas Fir seedlings thathave grown up since the last fire.But after only a decade's growth until thenext fire, those seedlings are still too low for fire to spread from them intothe crowns.Hence the fire remains confined to the ground and understory.As a result, many natural Ponderosa Pine forests have a park-like appear-ance, with low fuel loads, big trees well spaced apart, and a relatively clearunderstory
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