February 28th, 2006

Oregonian Opinion: The OSU Forestry Controversy

In today's climate, if a scientist follows his findings to wherever they lead, he risks sticking his neck into a congressional noose.

Donato's nationally recognized research suggested that commercial logging sets back recovery of forests in the first years after wildfires by crushing seedlings that grow naturally in the wake of fires and by creating tinder that invites future conflagrations.

Those findings are at odds with the official line of the Northwest timber industry and its supporters, including Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Brian Baird, D-Wash., who used the hearing to launch what bordered on a star chamber attack on the 29-year-old student's integrity as much as his research. That Walden and Baird are pushing a bill to expedite post-fire logging by easing environmental laws may be, of course, sheer coincidence.

Irony abounds.

Although Donato's findings are far from the last word on logging charred forests, they were peer-reviewed and published by the editors of Science magazine, one of the nation's premier scientific journals.

On the other hand, the spiritual sire of the Walden-Baird bill is a 2002 report by John Sessions, a professor at the OSU School of Forestry. Sessions' report contended that up to 2.5 billion board feet of timber could be commercially harvested in the area of the 2002 Biscuit fire in Southwestern Oregon -- in contrast to a 278 million board-foot cut that same year in Oregon and Washington combined -- with salutary effects on the Siskiyou National Forest. The Bush administration seized on those findings to
propose one of the largest timber cuts in history.

The record shows that Sessions' academic specialty is road engineering, that he was hired by the board of county commissions of timber-dependent Douglas County, that his team did not include one forest conservation biologist, that his work was not subjected to peer review and that he tried to quash the Donato article before Science magazine printed
it.

"It is unfortunate when people prematurely draw policy implications from single studies before the scientific process has finished its job," wrote Hal Salwasser, the dean of OSU's School of Forestry.

"Part of scientific integrity is making sure you don't make generalizations beyond the limitations of your data," intoned Baird.

Well, yes.

But remarkably, the comments of Salwasser and Baird were not directed at the Sessions report, which wasn't peer-reviewed, but at the Donato report, which was.

Last week a lot of folks came to Medford not to praise Donato, but to hang him. And John Sessions? No noose for him. In fact, the congressmen didn't call on him to defend his research or his censorship efforts. But that may have been sheer coincidence, too.

Les AuCoin, a Democrat, is a former U.S. congressman from Oregon who served for 12 years on the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service. He is a co-author of "Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy," to be published this spring by Island Press.

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