Wilson Joins Anti-Logging Campaign

Leading Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has joined a campaign to protect Southeastern forests from a new logging technique.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Pellegrino University Professor emeritus was the lead signatory of an open letter asking for a comprehensive review of chip milling, a highly automated technique used to convert logs into wood chips for pulp and paper.

"As a native Alabamian, I am particularly concerned that our natural areas be recognized for their full value and protected from chip mills for the sake of future generations," he wrote in a letter soliciting signatures.

Wilson was the only Harvard faculty member among the 100 scientists who signed the July 7 letter.

"I became aware of the radical deforestation of much of the state of Alabama when I was in my teens," Wilson said.

"The native forests of Alabama are under continued pressure even though they're down to just a small fraction of the original cover," he said.

In the letter, which was addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the scientists demanded a new study to estimate the dangers forests may face due to increased logging.

"We are concerned by the fact that chip mills are rapidly proliferating in this biologically rich region promoting increased unsustainable logging and increasing the pressure on already threatened ecosystems," the scientists wrote.

According to the letter, no federal study has yet been conducted on the total environmental effects of chip milling.

The process of operating a chip mill has been studied and does not in itself greatly damage the environment, said Jon Ellenbogen, co-director of the Southeast Forest Project, which organized the campaign. But the logging required to feed the chip mill may have significant effects.

"The risk in unregulated chip mill practice is not so much in the production method but its efficiency," Wilson said.

An average chip mill can convert about 10,000 acres of forest into wood chips each year, Ellenbogen said.

The rapid expansion of chip milling has been especially noticeable because it has encouraged the logging of areas that would otherwise have been ignored.

"Because of the nature of chip mills, you do a lot of clear-cutting," Ellenbogen said.

Chip mills are able to use smaller or misshapen trees that are unsuitable for furniture or other forest products, providing a market for previously unmarketable trees.

"They don't need to be very selective," he said.

According to the letter, there are currently 140 chip mills in the United States, more than 100 of which were constructed in the last decade.

The scientists described the areas affected as extremely important from an ecological perspective--"[they are] some of the richest temperate forests on earth," they wrote.

"The main value is the maintenance of biological diversity," said Wilson. "When you cut a natural forest and replace it with farmland or a tree farm, you go from thousands of flowering plant species...to perhaps one tree species and a tiny number of organisms associated with it."

"The system is not only impoverished, but it is less stable," he said.

The World Wildlife Fund recently ranked the long-leaf-pine regions of the Southeast as one of the world's 200 "most outstanding and diverse" ecosystems.

"These are one-of-a-kind ecosystems," said Dominick A. DellaSala, former director of U.S. forest conservation for the World Wildlife Fund and currently the director of its Klamath-Siskiyou regional office, who drafted the letter. "We lose these ecosystems, there's nothing to replace them."

The call for a study comes as the pulp and paper industry shifts its center of production from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast.

"There's been an explosion of chip mill operations in the South in the last couple of decades," DellaSala said.

According to Danna Smith, executive director of the Dogwood Alliance, a North Carolina-based forest advocacy group, Southern forests are already beginning to show the strains of increased logging.

"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service admits that removal of pines and softwoods has already exceeded growth," she said. Smith said the agency predicts that removal of hardwoods such as oak and maple in the Southeast will exceed growth within 12 to 15 years.

But according to Cathy A. Dunn, vice president of corporate communications for Willamette Industries, forest products companies that own the chip mills do not encourage any specific type of logging. Private landowners harvest the timber and then sell it to the chip mill for processing, she said. Willamette owns 10 chip mills.

"Willamette's position is that it really should have a very healthy impact on our forests because some of the Eastern forests have been overmanaged in the past with selective cutting," she said.

She said the logging that often occurs to feed chip mills instead produces "a good, diverse, representative forest" as no group of trees are favored over others.

Wilson, however, said he views that theory with "mild amusement."

"This is assaulting the forest and extracting part of its biomass," he said. "There aren't many ecosystems in the world that are going to be helped in any way by that."

DellaSala said he agreed with this assessment. As a member of the National Research Council, he recently completed a study of sustainable forestry on non-federal land.

He predicts a three- to four-fold increase in plantation forestry over the next three to four decades due to a surge in demand for pulp and paper.

"The Southern ecosystem just cannot sustain that level of harvest," he said.

"The real bottom line," Wilson said, "is that we're losing too much of America's biodiversity already."

According to recent estimates by The Nature Conservancy, about one percent of America's land and animal species is now extinct, and about one-third are considered vulnerable, Wilson said.

Since the letter was written, there has been some progress, Ellenbogen said. A four-agency team including representatives from the EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the U.S. Forest Service has assembled to discuss chip milling and make a full recommendation.

This recommendation may come as soon as November or as late as the end of December. The agencies have not yet committed to a full study.