Now Playing: The Daily Astorian
Topic: State & Local
Editorial in the Daily Astorian
04/05/2007
Witness the vanishing forests:
You have only to drive to South Bend, Wash., for confirmation of a major trend reported this week in the Tacoma News Tribune:
"Hundreds of thousands of acres of Western Washington forests are being converted to home sites, hobby farms and commercial developments."Brian Boyle, the popular former Republican state lands commissioner, told the Tacoma paper that Washington state is rapidly losing the vast forest that plays such a key part in its economy, culture and ecology.
"We're dismantling the forest, tearing it up, breaking it down into little parcels. It isn't the forest it used to be," said Boyle, a one-time Nahcotta, Wash., resident and now part-time leader of a University of Washington College of Forest Resources think tank.
Pacific County's distinctly lackluster land planning does make some faint effort to preserve forest in its land-locked interior, an area said to be a "paramount economic resource." When the county's comprehensive plan was adopted in 1998, about 65 percent of its land area was managed for long-term forestry production, with about 85 percent of that in private hands.
But forests near Willapa Bay and other major water bodies were zoned with an eye toward the very kinds of carving-up decried by Boyle. Five-acre "ranchettes" were envisioned for virtually the entire eastern and northern shores of Willapa Bay, as well as the banks of the Columbia River from Chinook Point east to the Wahkiakum County line.
This "Transitional Forest" is, in essence, a sacrifice zone targeted for high-end dwellings. While in a sense this is the way of the world, Willapa Bay's importance as the literal and figurative heart of Pacific County deserved more care than it received. What was once a pastoral and soul-restoring drive through the woods around the bay is now increasingly a pained tour through a tortured landscape.
Rampant forest clearing followed by subdivision of Willapa's shores has many parallels throughout Washington. The News Tribune article reports that by 2010 or 2012, an additional 300,000 acres of Western Washington timberland is targeted for conversion to other uses, according to a University of Washington estimate. A UW forestry professor says the big timber companies lack incentive to keep forests for logging: "It's not profitable to grow wood. It's not the way to make your money - certainly not in North America."
Private land trusts are working intently with some timber firms to save the most environmentally significant forest tracts, but there just isn't enough time or money to make a real impact.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has asked the Legislature to fund a $4 million "high-risk forest conservation program," to buy or lease rights to develop up to 5,000 acres of family-owned forest land. Other options include subsidizing timber companies to keep forests as tree farms or forming public development authorities to buy and manage timberlands, using municipal bond financing.
In Pacific County, citizens and officials need to revisit their comprehensive planning process to at least encourage different forms of forest conversion. It would be far preferable to cluster a group of homes together than to chop up Willapa's forest into little five-acre kingdoms.
Entire editorial published in accordance with Fair Use Law
