Staff
Stephen Sharnoff made a pitch last week to a Salem audience to gain more support for the nearly half-a-million-acre Douglas Fir National Monument he and Andy Kerr are proposing.
He was invited by the Native Plant Society to speak Thursday, April 28, in Salem.
Sharnoff, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., is working on the proposal with Kerr, a lobbyist who grew up in Creswell, and now splits his time between Ashland and Washington, D.C.
A national monument can be established by an act of congress or presidential proclamation, but Kerr and Sharnoff aren’t expecting President Obama to approve their proposal.
“Andy Kerr says maybe 10 years to get this because we’ve got to get significant support from groups in Oregon that are likely to be in favor of it,” Sharnoff said in response to a question at his presentation. “Then we’re in a position to go to the politicians – to Sen. (Ron) Wyden, in particular.”
It has to start within the state of Oregon, he added.
“Maybe by Hillary’s second term,” Sharnoff said. “(Kerr)’s kind of a veteran of these sorts of battles, so he has a sense of the time involved.”
Sharnoff met Kerr at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene last year. This year, the pair gave a presentation on their proposal at the event.
Sharnoff emphasized three key aspects of the proposal:
— They want it to be big;
— They want to protect the few areas of truly ancient forest, such as the area near Crabtree Lake on BLM land.
— They see stopping deforestation is a critical part of the efforts to reverse climate change.
The idea for the Douglas Fir National Monument was Sharnoff’s, though.
“During a recent trip the redwood parks in California, I started to wonder, ‘Why are there state and national parks to the redwoods in California that honor and protect redwood forests, but there’s nothing like that for the Douglas fir forest, which is just as magnificent as redwood forest?’” Sharnoff said.
Historically, it’s more important, ecologically more diverse and far more extensive in its range, he added.
“Douglas fir, Oregon’s state tree, the one on the license plate, was at the heart of these forests,” Sharnoff said. “Doug firs used to grow to an immense size. And the biggest ones growing on old lands near the rivers were the first to be cut.”
Douglas firs have been the main focus of industrial logging, he said, “that removed most of the trees over a vast area from the end of World War II to the early 1990s.”
“One might say that the ancient forest of trees was converted into a forest of studs, joists and plywood inside homes and buildings,” Sharnoff said.
Sharnoff has been a carpenter and building contractor most of his adult life, he said. He is also a noted nature photographer, specializing in lichens. His work has appeared in National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines and he has produced field guides on lichens.
“After the struggles over the listing of the northwest spotted owl and the adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan in the mid ‘90s, things changed dramatically,” Sharnoff said.
He added that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are doing a better job of managing land.
“I can’t resist mentioning that what’s been called forestry involves not only abuse of the forest but abuse of the English language,” Sharnoff said. “Old growth trees are not cut down; they’re harvested, even though no human planted them. But the plan is to regenerate a tree farm, not a forest.”
Sharnoff also took objection to the use of fire dangers as a reason to log.
“That’s ecologically indefensible,” he said. “Andy Kerr refers to that being like mugging a burn victim.”
“You know opponents, I might just interject, the usual thing we hear from opponents about the monument is that it’s a land grab, but private land would still be private land,” Sharnoff said. “They could still log it as they want. The only sense in which it’s a land grab perhaps, is that it would change, I would hope, the rules for logging on federal lands to some degree.
“So it might influence the output of timber from federal lands.”