Eastern Oregon notes

I'm absolutely crazy about eastern Oregon. It's a very diverse landscape with complex color, weather and lighting. Temperatures range from -20 and below up to 110+ degrees Fahrenheit, elevations from 800 to 10,000 feet, precipitation from pretty much nothing to 40 inches a year. Thanks to the rain shadow of the Cascades, much of eastern Oregon is high desert, but there's also jagged mountain peaks, lush forests, glaciers, extensive burned areas, and lots of rivers.

The conservation challenges on the eastside are quite complex. Massive salvage logging operations that are supposed to be saving the forest from itself are actually wrecking havoc with natural recovery. Cattle grazing is similarly disrupting the structure, function and composition of native ecosystems.

In addition to allowing widespread cattle grazing, the worst thing that public land managers have done to eastern Oregon is put out fires, which may seem counterintuitive, but it's true. Fire is critical to the health of dry forest types because it removes small brush and trees that compete with the old-growth trees for light and nutrients. Fire also creates forest structure that supports high levels of biodiversity. Without fire, many forests are more susceptible to disease and insect infestation.

Without fire, small trees that in some forests would normally have been killed by frequent fire are growing into the canopy of old growth trees. Hot, dry and windy conditions ("fire weather" that is related to global warming) drives fires that are climbing these fuel ladders into the canopies of older trees and killing them. This scenario is not universal—forests in eastern Oregon are diverse and many forests are characterized by high severity fires, or mixed fire effects. But there are many forests, particularly low elevation old growth ponderosa pine, that will likely be destroyed at some point absent sensible thinning and reintroduction of fire. I offer a technical assessment of needs and opportunities in a Word document you can download here.

These issues are complex and I don't pretend to have all the answers at this time, although I have taken up these subjects in some detail here.