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Some of the participants in a forestry roundtable discussion March 2, 2024, in Spearfish included, from left, State Forester Marcus Warnke; Ben Wudtke, executive director of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association; Robert Christian, former president, Black Hills Log Haulers Association; and Republican U.S. Reps. Dusty Johnson, South Dakota; Doug LaMalfa, California; and Austin Scott, Georgia. (Courtesy of Rep. Johnson's Office)
Dusty Johnson resents the implication that he’s looking out for the timber industry at the expense of the Black Hills National Forest.
“The idea that anyone in government wants to allow the timber industry to cut what they want to cut is absurd,” Johnson told South Dakota Searchlight. “I think it does a tremendous disrespect to this process.”
Johnson, a Republican who is South Dakota’s lone U.S. representative, disliked a recent commentary written by retired U.S. Forest Service employee Dave Mertz and published by Searchlight. Mertz wrote the commentary in response to Johnson’s March 2 forestry roundtable discussion in Spearfish.
“Repeatedly,” Mertz wrote, “panelists stated what the timber industry needs. Never was there any concern for what level of timber harvesting the forest needs.”
We know what the timber industry needs, but what can the Black Hills provide?
Timber companies bid for the right to purchase and harvest timber in areas designated by the Forest Service. Debates about logging in the Black Hills have intensified since 2020, after Forest Service researchers published a draft “ General Technical Report ,” which came to be known as the “GTR.”
The researchers said wildfires and a mountain pine beetle epidemic drastically reduced the number of trees suitable for logging. They said the forest had only half the trees needed to sustain the level of timber sales allowed in the forest plan.
That level is 181,000 “CCF,” with 1 CCF equaling 100 cubic feet of timber. Annual harvests of 70,000 to 115,000 CCF would be more sustainable, the researchers said.
Debates about the research ensued, resulting in official challenges and some clarifying responses from a review panel . Meanwhile, timber sales have declined. A sawmill in Hill City closed in 2021, and timber industry officials say more closures could happen.
Read on for more of Searchlight’s interview with Johnson about forestry issues, with questions and answers edited for length and clarity.
How did you get your education on forestry issues?
My real education came as chief of staff to then-Governor Dennis Daugaard during the mountain pine needle epidemic, when I spent a lot of time focusing on state efforts. We were lucky we had a timber industry in place then that was able to step up.
It is amazing: You can look at a side-by-side photo of Custer State Park, properly managed, next to Black Elk Wilderness Area, managed by the federal government, and you can see the terrible carnage that the pine beetle exacted on Black Elk. It is dead. Millions of trees, dead, for miles.
And right next to it, Custer State Park, which had been properly thinned and was not an attractive target for the pine beetle, survived.
If the state is better at managing the forest than the federal government, why did the last major wildfire in the Black Hills — the Legion Lake Fire, which burned 84 square miles — start in Custer State Park?
Well, lightning strikes are a little random.
Lightning didn’t start the fire. Wind blew a tree onto a power line in the park.
But my point is that the causes of forest fires are pretty random, right? This is like saying, “Why does the guy who goes to the gym every day get a heart attack and die, but the guy who doesn’t, didn’t?” You can properly manage an area and still have forest fires. There are no guarantees.
But I don’t want to bicker about a straw man. If you can find an expert in South Dakota that tells you that treating at a sustainable level increases the risk of forest fire, then I’ll give you a comment. But the state clearly manages well in Custer State Park. That lowers the risk of forest fire, but it doesn’t lower it to zero.
How do you respond to Dave Mertz’s criticisms of your forestry roundtable?
He seemed to take issue with the fact that we had members of Congress from California and Georgia there. Let’s be clear: Doug LaMalfa is the chair of the Forestry Subcommittee. This is literally the U.S. House’s most powerful and influential member related to how we manage our national forests. So I think if we’re going to talk about forest policy, it absolutely makes sense to have those kinds of leaders. Austin Scott is the vice chair of the full Ag Committee.
Mr. Mertz also suggested that we only focused on what numbers were needed to save industry, as opposed to what numbers were needed to save the forest. He’s absolutely wrong about that.
And then when I tried to dive into the math about what the forest can provide, Dave sort of contradicted himself. On one hand, he said we didn’t talk about what the forest inventory is; then, when I started to get into the math of forest inventory, he criticized the fact that we got into a discussion of forest inventory in a way that he thought was too cursory. But that’s how you start conversations, right? You start big and then you move to more detailed analysis as you dive in.
This debate goes back to the findings in the “GTR.” It seems to me you either believe that research or you don’t. Do you believe it?
I don’t think it’s quite that cut and dried, and I think the Forest Service feels the same way. Remember, at the roundtable, we had the regional forester there. He never alleged there’s not enough inventory. He talked at some point about, “Well, if we had 20 million dollars more, we could go out and make more of this inventory available.”
Wasn’t he contradicting his own experts’ research, then?
The GTR never said that you can’t do treatment in the Black Hills. The GTR is ultimately about what’s the appropriate level. And I think more to the point, if the Forest Service doesn’t think 120,000 CCF is doable or healthy, why do they continue to have their annual harvest targets be 120,000?
Whatever their targets are, they’re selling less timber. Is it possible the Forest Service leaders don’t believe their own targets are attainable?
I think the Forest Service clearly must disagree that the research is cut and dried, because they continue to say one thing publicly and then they don’t act in that way. I think that’s a pretty big problem. I think in our form of government when you’ve got people who promise to do something and then don’t deliver, that’s noteworthy.
But I don’t want to turn this into bashing the Forest Service. They have a lot of incredibly dedicated professionals, and there were a lot of very kind things said about the Forest Service at the roundtable about their willingness to go above and beyond in some ways.
Data visualization made with Flourish
Mertz and some other experts say the reason timber sales are down is because the trees just aren’t there. How do you respond?
The data does not support that. The total inventory is only off 20% from the all-time peak, from the levels that caused catastrophic wildfires and the mountain pine beetle epidemic.
And so I think part of the question is, what do you want to manage to? Do you want to manage to 20% off the all-time peak, or do you want to manage to a different number? And Dave can say, “Oh, it’s just not out there.” That’s not what the GTR says. The GTR doesn’t say that the annual harvest target should be zero or 5,000 or 20,000 CCF.
But it says the harvest should be reduced.
I’m not saying it’s got to be 120,000 CCF. The only reason I get focused on 120,000 is that is what the Forest Service says their target is, year in and year out.
We want to determine what the healthy harvest target is. It seems as though the broad cross-section of experts indicate that there is a lot of timber in the Black Hills.
People might disagree whether it’s 70,000, 100,000 or 120,000 CCF, but certainly there are millions of cubic board feet that should be treated on an annual basis, and everyone agrees with that. And so then the broader question is, why aren’t we coming close to even those reduced targets?
So what’s the answer? If it’s not for a lack of trees, why isn’t the Forest Service doing more timber sales?
That’s really the whole point of the field hearing, which is what roadblocks are there that either Congress or the Forest Service can remove, or are there additional tools we can provide so that we can get to those numbers?
What we do know is that once you lose the infrastructure, it’s gone forever. We can talk about the risk on one side of the ledger, but we don’t want to assume there’s not any risk on the other side of the ledger. And that is if the Spearfish sawmill closes, we will have the lowest level of timber harvest infrastructure in modern history in the Black Hills, and we will pay a long-term price. The forest will pay a long-term price for that.
You mentioned getting rid of roadblocks. What are the roadblocks?
The Forest Service talked a little bit about money. That was hard for Representatives LaMalfa and Scott and I to understand, given that they also admitted they have more money than they’ve ever had.
They did mention openings. They have about 75 open positions in the Black Hills National Forest. We talked about what can be done to streamline that bureaucracy. It takes more than six months to go from an open position to a field spot. That is clearly a bureaucracy problem.
I also think there is a sense that much of this inventory is located in areas that have not been traditionally harvested, and so we probably need a more innovative approach to figure out how to get there, to get in there and make sure that it’s safely harvested.
Are you talking about areas that are particularly rugged, steep or remote?
Yes, slope is an issue, and technology has come a long way. We have seen in other national forests that there are areas that are able to be safely harvested that were not safely harvested 20 and 50 years ago.
It does require a different way of doing things, and new technology always brings disruption and the need to learn on the job. And I think if we did not have a timber industry on the verge of collapse, then we could probably take the time for the Forest Service to just learn at a natural and organic pace. But I do think we’re in a challenging spot, and so I think higher than normal urgency is called for.
Why is logging necessary for a healthy forest?
We know that the mountain pine beetle likes dense stands. We know that fire likes dense stands. That provides the kind of fuel load that fire needs to rage dangerously and quickly through a forest. So if you can thin the forest, you drastically reduce both fire damage and disease damage.
We see this in nature all the time. When a particular species gets overpopulated in an area, nature’s reaction to that is to have a disease go level a devastating cost on that overpopulated inventory.
We’ve got tools at our disposal to be able to avoid that in the forest, which is why the overwhelming consensus of stakeholders is that we want to go in and manage to a sustainable level in the Black Hills, because that’s better for everybody.
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The post Q&A: Johnson calls criticism of his forestry hearing ‘absurd’ appeared first on South Dakota Searchlight .
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