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They found that without logging, forests were beginning to re-grow on their own, but where salvage logging had occurred, new seedlings were killed as heavy equipment scraped the ground and disturbed the soil. The study was submitted to the prestigious journal Science, and accepted for publication.
But the study enraged proponents of Walden's logging bill, as well as some pro-salvage logging professors in OSU's Department of Forestry (which gets about 10 percent of its funding from the timber industry). They asked the editors of Science to pull the report. Science refused. The paper had gone through the regular peer-review process and been accepted.
Then, after report appeared in Science, the Bureau of Land Management, which had funded the study, put a hold on the remaining funds left in the grant. BLM officials said the students had violated their contract by attempting to influence legislation pending in Congress - the Walden logging bill.
So, to recap the situation: when a forest engineering study that is funded by timber industry boosters is used to bolster legislation proposed by a congressman who is funded by the timber industry (Greg Walden gets more money from the timber industry than any other House member - over $100,000 in 2004 alone), that is called "sound science."
But when a group of independent graduate students studying ecology go out and make observations and measurements on the ground and get their paper accepted for publication by the most prestigious scientific journal in America, and that paper happens to contradict assertions used to justify pending legislation, that is called "junk science."
"Proponents of expedited logging can't provide a significant body of evidence that a nationwide program of logging in forests recovering from disturbance is scientifically justified," said Dominick DellaSala, PhD, a forest ecologist for the World Wildlife Fund. "Of the more than 30 scientific papers on post-fire logging published to date, not a single one indicates that logging provides benefits to ecosystems regenerating after disturbance."
Walden's bill is wrong on the science. And Greg Walden has lied to justify the need for his emergency logging law, blaming environmentalists for the delay in the logging plan that was actually caused by the timber industry's logging study.
America is beginning to wake up to the fact that the scientists were right about climate change all along, and that while the media is guilty of ignoring those warnings, the Bush administration is guilty of both censoring the science and of outright lying. It would be tragic to let a similar pack of lies bring the ax down on our last native forests.
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