Emily Brock

The Challenge of Reforestation: Ecological Experiments in the Douglas Fir Forest, 1920–1940

SINCE THE seventeenth century, writers have linked the economics of lumber to the natural history of forests and trees.¹ Understanding how a forest grows was seen as the first step in understanding how one could harness the forest's production of lumber. I examine one place where the intersection of the economics of lumber and the biology of trees is especially tightly coupled: the regeneration of forestlands. If a reliable flow of lumber is to be assured, the regeneration of forests is an obvious necessity, but recreating a forest after it has been obliterated by clear-cutting requires more than simply planting new seeds where the old trees had been. In the Pacific Northwest, the complexities of this problem first were realized in the early 1920s, as the region's lumber industry began to falter economically. Despite efforts to control the flow of lumber, reforestation of Douglas fir forests in this period were generally not successful.

Examining forest and range management in the ponderosa pine forests of eastern Oregon, Nancy Langston concluded that "there is no way to work with the land and not end up changing it;" there is no way to reassemble the forest as it once had been.² By definition, sites of reforestation are no longer "wild." Clear-cutting and other human activity on a site made reforestation necessary, and even if reforested, that site never can regain its original wildness in the eyes of many observers. Such a site, no matter how natural it appears or how sophisticated its restorers' technique, has been permanently altered by human intervention. Langston and others have examined reforestation as a component of forest management, and as such have argued that anything less than a successful recreation of the original forest is a failure of management.³ However, reforestation efforts most often have not been intended to recreate the primeval forest, but to stave off erosion, retain game animals, or prepare for another harvest of trees in decades to come. Marcus Hall recently has termed such partial reforestations, rehabilitations, and restorations as "repair." Even if they are imprecise or ineffective, such repairs can be important for their impact on both the landscapes and the people involved. Environmental historians often have neglected stories of reforestation, restoration, and rehabilitation of damaged ecosystems. Conversely, historians of ecology often have neglected the effects of ecological science on the interactions of humans with their landscape. Recently, historians and others from across the environmental-studies spectrum have begun to examine these imperfect repairs more carefully.⁴ These writers generally have looked at either the environmental effects or the ecological basis of reforestation and restoration. Yet both are important to explore. By bridging the distance between environmental history and the history of ecology, a more complete understanding of the history of the Douglas fir forests of the northwest can be gained.

This article considers the process of establishing techniques and theories for repairing Douglas fir forests as important as how successful these techniques were. Theories of plant ecology intersected with the practical concerns of forestry in the 1920s and 1930s, and in turn both deeply affected the Pacific Northwest lumber industry. Academic plant ecologists' theories informed foresters' expectations of Douglas fir regeneration. Pacific Northwest foresters experimented with reforestation techniques that were rooted in ecological theory but branched out in directions ecologists had not considered. This article examines some of the most important attempts by forest workers to develop a viable system of reforestation in the Douglas fir forest in the 1920s and 1930s. These men, trained in scientific forestry, struggled with finding a balance between artificial intervention and natural regeneration. The demands of corporations and federal, state, and local governments were also important in shaping reforestation techniques, since these parties determined the techniques' implementation. I argue that the unsuccessful and partially successful reforestation efforts of this period deserve not just to be lamented but examined for their own sake. By looking at how and why reforestation failed, we can better understand the motivations driving the foresters and lumbermen, and begin to understand their conceptions of the forest as a whole.

Economic and Practical Aspects of Logging

TO UNDERSTAND the environmental history of the Douglas fir forest, one must examine patterns of logging in the region. The effectiveness and scope of reforestation have been governed in large part by the realities of lumber industry activity. Decisions by foresters and other policy makers were made in reaction to logging activities; thus exploring the realities of the Pacific Northwest lumber industry is an important part of understanding reforestation in the region. Forests of the Pacific Northwest dominated by Douglas fir were valued in the 1920s and 1930s primarily for that species' worth as lumber. Reforestation therefore generally was conceived of as the regeneration of the Douglas fir species alone. The Douglas fir had been, since the early 1900s, an exceedingly important industrial commodity. In the mild and damp climate of the Pacific Northwest, individuals of this species regularly grow to heights of 175–200 feet, almost always with a perfectly straight, non-branching trunk. Hence logging an acre of Douglas fir yielded far more board-feet of lumber than logging an acre of most other species.⁵ Furthermore, the lumber produced from the Douglas fir is dense and straight-grained, making it ideal for house-framing, floorboards, and veneers—some of the most lucrative wood markets. Some of the other species in the region, such as western red cedar and western hemlock, were not nearly as prized by lumber companies, who often would rather leave those trees standing on a site than take the effort to cut them. With the growth of railroads, milled lumber could be transported to distant markets, and the informal opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 allowed west-coast lumber to begin reaching east-coast and overseas markets even more quickly and relatively cheaply. This trickle of commerce became a flood with the end of World War I and the canal's formal opening in 1920.⁶ Once western lumber manufacturers began publicizing the value of the Douglas fir over other more familiar softwoods in the 1920s, the demand for it grew exponentially as builders and lumberyard operators became familiar with its versatility. While this was a boon to the industry in the short term, the finite supply of mature trees and the long growing period of the species hinted at future troubles for the burgeoning market.

The Pacific Northwest was one of the last regions of the country to see large-scale logging, and the logging there was different from that in the lumber-producing regions of the South, New England, and the lake states. The boom years for logging in New England and the lake states had been in the nineteenth century, and the logging had been slow, using horse- or oxen-drawn carts and waterways to bring logs to sawmills. Because of the slow pace and small scale of most of those lumber operations, loggers often selected only the most merchantable trees, leaving the rest for future harvests. Decisions about which trees to cut could be made based on the age or species of tree, or the shape of the trunk, a process that came to be called selective logging. Decisions about which stands to cut also were based on vagaries of topography and access to mills. In contrast, in the northwest and other regions, the boom years of logging came in the early twentieth century. Clear-cut logging, which never had been favored farther east, became the norm in the Northwest. This was due in part to the rugged topography of the region, since sparing trees was very difficult on a steep slope. It also was due to the nature of the Douglas fir, which usually grew in pure stands rather than mixed with other species, making selective logging less necessary. Finally it was due to the changes in the technology of logging. Because Douglas fir, like some other softwood species, is likely to shatter on impact with the ground if its descent is not slowed during felling, a system of pulleys was developed to assist the process. These pulley systems, and many other aspects of log transport, were governed by steam-powered "donkey engines." Such overhead logging methods were paired with cable yarding systems that dragged the logs to their loading sites. Because these complex systems were most effective if used to remove every tree on a site regardless of its merchantability, clear-cutting was much more viable financially than selectively logging the same site.⁷

Figure 1. Clear-cut logging in Cowlitz County, Washington, in the 1920s.
Overhead cable yarding allowed for quick removal of every tree from a logging site. These new yarding techniques created a distinctive star-shaped pattern of grooves in the duff, visible in this photo.
Photograph No. 624, "Current Douglas Fir Operation. Weyerhaeuser Timber Company operation, Cowlitz County, Washington." File title: Weyerhaeuser Timber Company Photographs Purchased from K. S. Brown. Pacific Northwest Research Station Historical Files (uncataloged); Records of the United States Forest Service, Record Group 95; National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Alaska Region (Seattle).

Logging also changed significantly with the development of the commercial railroad network in the lake states in the 1870s. While previously it had been necessary to have access to water to float logs to the mills and milled lumber to the lumberyards, it was now possible to transport lumber overland. In the Midwest, rail lines were used mainly to transport milled lumber, but as the center of the lumber industry moved west in the 1890s and 1900s, the uses to which the rails were put changed. In the Northwest, short rail lines often were established right up into the area of the forest being cut to bring the logs to the sawmills below. This new use of short-range rail transport was in part a result of the ruggedness of the landscape in the Northwest, where the slopes being cut were often treacherously steep, and the waterways were often not navigable. Railroad logging also was appealing because it seemed to hold the promise of faster and bigger profits for the lumber companies. However, the expense of laying rail was so great that in practice railroad logging was rarely as profitable as hoped. In order to recoup expenses, it became common practice to clear-cut everything within reach of the rails. The arrival of gasoline-powered truck and tractor logging in the Northwest in the late 1930s finally brought with it some degree of flexibility in choice of logging method, although for the most part clear-cutting continued to be the norm.⁸

The economic reality of the Pacific Northwest lumber industry is an important backdrop for thinking about reforestation. While for the nation as a whole the Great Depression began in 1929, for the Pacific Northwest lumber industry one could argue that it had started in 1926. The lumber companies in the area had made a series of blunders in estimating the supply and demand of Douglas fir and in responding to competition in the marketplace. The complex economics of maintaining an even flow of lumber to meet demand, without overcutting the vast quantities of standing timber, had collapsed. In 1927, a financial and consulting entity known as the National City Company was asked by representatives of several of the largest Douglas fir lumber companies to "investigate the industry with a view to ... suggesting ways and means, if any, of stabilization through a merger."⁹ The resultant report clearly demonstrates the logging business's attitude toward reforestation, even under the threat of imminent exhaustion of their sources of lumber. There is no illusion about the dire straits faced by an industry in a period of overproduction and depressed prices. Extrapolating from production and use patterns, the report states that "by the end of another fifteen or twenty years the supply of privately owned Douglas fir timber in the Pacific Northwest will just about have reached the point of exhaustion." Yet that assessment is immediately followed by a dismissal of the importance of any kind of active Douglas-fir reforestation effort whatsoever in the fifteen or twenty years to come. The report lists some considerations it says are necessary prerequisites to economically viable active reforestation: "there must be a very strong faith in the future of lumber prices—large investments are required with the certainty that returns on such investments will be deferred for at least fifty years or over, extremely careful continuing supervision is required to protect against fire and even with such supervision, the fire hazard is always present—property taxes must be low to prevent the investment from this cause alone from becoming excessive—reasonable proximity to markets is necessary—the species being reforested should be in good demand at prices relatively high as compared with other lumbers."¹⁰

These prerequisites, then, "rather definitely rule out reforestation in the Pacific Northwest." Clearly, the pessimistic attitude of many in the lumber industry would affect the participation in large-scale reforestation of cutover lands, especially since the lumber companies' representatives had a large voice in the deliberations of the Forest Service. Yet reluctance to reforest was not universal. Many in industry, as well as government foresters and academic ecologists, were interested in finding successful ways to regenerate forests.

Theories of Plant Climax and Succession

IN THE EARLY twentieth century, many of the botanists interested in the new field of ecology looked for rules that govern the interaction of species in a particular location. In the late nineteenth century, European plant geographers first articulated the vegetational climax as the natural state of the vegetation at a site, determined by climate and topography. The climax was extremely stable, and was thought to replace itself indefinitely in a given location unless interrupted by fire, landslide, or other catastrophic event. The climax also was thought to be composed of the species most ideally adapted to a site, species that had evolved specifically in response to the site's requirements. Thus, a desert, forest, or grassland could be identified by its climax species, with climate and species linked together inextricably. The idea of the climax was accompanied by that of succession, the process of progression toward the climax. The rules of succession were similar to those of Ernst Haeckel's evolutionary premise, prevalent at the time, that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." That premise claimed the development of a single human being from embryo to infant mirrored the evolution of the human species from single-celled organisms, through proto-amphibians and early mammals, to homo sapiens. Both of these ideas held weight mainly for their predictive ability and for the way a simple axiom could make comprehensible what previously had been seen as undifferentiated or chaotic phenomena.¹¹ While many individuals were involved in the development of the succession-and-climax theory in ecology, two were especially important in the context of forestry. Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederic Clements both addressed the impact of the succession-and-climax theory for applications in forest management and ecology. Their works were widely read by foresters as scientific support for their understanding of the ecological dynamics of plant communities.

Cowles, a plant geographer at the Hull Botanical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, performed the foundational research for plant ecology in the United States in the mid-1890s. He studied the plant life of a three mile wide swath of sand dunes at the southern shores of Lake Michigan, in the area that is now the Indiana Dunes State Park. Strong winds off the lake move the dunes around regularly, burying growing plants and constantly changing the topography. A newly formed dune, then, "by burying the past,... offers to plant life a world for conquest, subject almost entirely to existing physical conditions."¹² The newest dunes and those closest to the lakeshore are mainly sand dotted with what Cowles called "primitive" assemblages of plants, mainly hardy herbs and xerophytic grasses. As one moves farther back from these areas, one sees progressively more plant cover of a progressively more complex sort. Cowles explicitly linked this spatial progress back from the newest dunes with temporal progression of plant species in a single idealized location. He stated that "in the historical development of a region the primitive plant societies pass rapidly or slowly into others; at first the changes are likely to be rapid, but as the plant assemblage more and more approaches the climax type of the region, the changes become more slow." Likewise, as one moves away from the xerophytic plants of the fresh dunes, the "dunes pass through several stages, finally culminating in a deciduous mesophytic forest, the normal climax type in the lake region."¹³ Cowles's work with the sand dunes showed a real-world example of the revegetation of an area left devoid of plants. His description of the orderly progression from bare ground to self-sustaining climax forest appealed to the desire of many early-twentieth-century ecologists to find rules that governed the complexity of ecological observations. His implication that the changes in the plant community of a single site over time mimicked a gradient of increasing ecological complexity across a length of space satisfied as well.

Following Cowles's work, American ecologists in the first decades of the twentieth century expanded and refined the succession-and-climax theory, systematizing the study of succession and climax through the development of methodologies and terminology. Many of these ecologists were Midwestern land-grant university professors, and as such were especially eager to find practical and industrial applications for their research. Frederick Clements, of the University of Nebraska, was particularly aware of the consequences of succession-and-climax theory for silviculture. He addressed the topic both in his general works and in pieces in the Journal of Forestry written specifically for foresters. Clements's work emphasized the orderly and predictable nature of plant succession. The climax plants of a location always would return eventually after any disturbance short of the catastrophic; there was an almost mystical undercurrent to the idea of this inescapable progression toward the climax. The theory of succession and climax appealed to many scientists because it explained a facet of biology that no previous theory had done. In place of a chaos of taxonomy and geography, such ecological theories offered a simple and appealing framework for further silvicultural study. The idea of a climax was appealing for more emotional reasons as well. If a location had a fated climax plant community, which, once present, would dominate unchallenged, then there was a sort of manifest destiny in the plant kingdom. During this era of settlement of the prairie and western frontiers, a belief in the inevitability of white men's dominance of the landscape was prevalent. A theory which pointed to the inevitable dominance of the most noble plant species and the subsequent stability of that dominance might have seemed especially appealing.¹⁴

Although the succession-and-climax theory was pivotal in the development of notions of forest growth of the 1920s and 1930s, this was not because the Douglas fir was itself a climax species. Indeed, it was generally agreed that the species was in fact the last step in the succession before the climax species. The Douglas fir in the low- and mid-elevation Pacific Northwest live from three hundred to five hundred years, while high fire-danger summers occur every three to ten years; thus over the life span of the fir the probability of fire was quite high. Each fire would arrest patches of the forest before reaching the climax, and after the burn the succession process would begin again. In the absence of fire, Douglas fir eventually would be replaced with shade-tolerant Western hemlock and red cedar. Because of the statistical likelihood of fire occurring before this stage, however, the actual climax of the forest was only rarely found. This curious situation had been widely remarked upon by botanists, ecologists, and foresters at least since 1902.¹⁵ However, it was not until the 1920s that observers began discussing the implication of this for the economic aspects of the Douglas fir. The natural climax forest, dominated by cedar and hemlock, was not the forest desired by the lumber industry, and hence succession would have to be artificially arrested through forest management to assure the continuation of commercial logging.

The subclimax nature of Douglas fir was not generally thought to be a serious problem for the continuation of the Pacific Northwest lumber industry, since faith in the human ability to successfully manipulate nature ran deep. The reforestation of logged sites would not be a process of natural regrowth, but instead could be artificially controlled by human intervention through tight control of species succession. Ecologists as well as those tied to the forest industry wrote of the possibilities for human manipulation of the Douglas fir forest. The French plant ecologist Josias Braun-Blanquet asserted in 1927 that humans could maintain a site at any subclimax seral stage that was desired, and that "freed from the hand of man the vegetation again moves toward the climax."¹⁶ Yale forester H. H. Chapman put it in economic terms when he said that in the Northwest, "the establishment of climax types of more shade-enduring species, which are usually inferior in utility, is a pure accident."¹⁷ Frederic Clements also saw the subclimax Douglas fir through the lens of economics. He pointed to the ways in which succession could be manipulated in order to maintain an earlier stage of succession through controlled disturbances of the location such as selective logging, grazing, and controlled burning. Although he had faith in the human ability to manipulate the forest effectively, he nonetheless warned of the difficulty of maintaining the precise successional stage desired. Subclimax forests can be maintained indefinitely "against the return of the climax dominants only by means of fire, but when this tool is employed too frequently, unintentionally or otherwise, the subclimax is itself displaced by an earlier seral [successional] stage."¹⁸ Foresters' interest in succession-and-climax lay mostly in the utility of natural succession to govern the reseeding of a logged site, not in the makeup of the climax forest. Artificial reseeding was costly, time-consuming, and unreliable, making reseeding governed by natural succession appealing. But even if reseeding of each successional stage could occur through natural processes, the management of the site as a whole would be tightly controlled. A truly natural reforestation of a denuded site in the Douglas fir region, without any control of the factors involved, was not the point of foresters' interest in the theory.

The Seed-Storage Theory of J. V. Hofmann

ONE OF THE EARLIEST research centers for forestry in the Pacific Northwest was founded in 1913 at the site of a fledgling Forest Service nursery. The U.S. Forest Service's Wind River Experiment Station was located near Carson, Washington, south of Mount St. Helens in what is now the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.¹⁹ The first director, J. V. Hofmann, still was finishing his doctoral thesis at the University of Minnesota's School of Forestry when he was hired. Hofmann's main duty at the new research station was to investigate possible methods of reforestation of the Pacific Northwest, a problem just coming to prominence as the new clear-cutting regimens quickly laid bare the forests. Further complicating his assignment was the fact that artificial reforestation methods for cutover national forests were distinctly out of favor, both among the perennially cash-strapped Northwest loggers and within the USFS administration. The legislative mandate for the USFS at the time was the 1897 Forest Management Act, which precluded the service from requiring any artificial reforestation efforts, although requiring logging techniques that would enable or encourage natural reforestation was still legal. Thus, Hofmann was encouraged to explore the natural regeneration of Douglas fir, while still keeping an eye toward development of cutting regimens that would facilitate quick regeneration.²⁰

Figure 2. J. V. Hofmann.
J. V. Hofmann, center, and his assistants in the field, during Hofmann's study of the natural regeneration of Douglas fir following forest fire. This study led to his seed-storage theory.
Photograph No. 7, "The Personnel of the Columbia Study—Watson, Hofmann, Kraebel." File title: Papers of J. V. Hofmann. Pacific Northwest Research Station Historical Files (uncataloged); Records of the United States Forest Service, Record Group 95; National Archives and Records Administration—Pacific Alaska Region (Seattle).

This seemingly impossible set of directives did not discourage Hofmann. Within five years he had developed a theory of Douglas fir reproduction by which the full regeneration of the forest required almost no action on the part of either lumber companies or the Forest Service. This feat is even more impressive given that there was almost no previous research on the reproduction of Douglas fir to suggest possible methods of attack. His seed-storage theory, laid out in 1917 in a single lengthy paper, hinged upon the character of the duff, the layers of decomposing needles making up the topmost stratum of the forest floor. Hofmann noted that within several years following forest fires or logging, one often saw seedlings hundreds of feet away from the nearest living mature tree. This was too far, he believed, to be the result of seeds blown by the wind from the seed trees into the treeless areas. He concluded instead that the seed had been dropped by trees before the disturbance had swept through the area, and had lain in the duff since that time. He stated that "the duff contains a large number of germinable seed, which might remain dormant there for a number of years and which evidently germinates and results in a dense stand of young growth as soon as the forest is cut down or burned over and light and heat are admitted to the ground."²¹ Hofmann argued that all forest duff in the Douglas fir forest contained large amounts of seed, from many different years, all waiting for the opportunity to germinate. He strengthened his argument by describing a fire that had burned so uncommonly hot on the ground in places as to destroy the layer of duff entirely, leaving only the mineral soil which had lain beneath it. "[W]herever the duff and litter were not burned out of the forest floor, there developed an area of more or less dense reproduction," he wrote. He concluded that where the intensity of the fire had burned away the duff, the seed had burned with it, while where the fire had burned at a more moderate intensity and the duff had remained, "seed must have been produced and stored in the forest floor before the fire and have retained its viability through the fire."²² Hofmann saw the activities of rodents as pivotal in this storage of seed, because they cached large amounts of fresh seed within the duff layer as a food source for the winter months.²³

Hofmann's paper relied almost entirely on deduction from observation and from the synthesis of results obtained from other researchers' experiments on various plant species. This is most evident when Hofmann discussed the viability of Douglas fir seed after a year or more under the duff. Hofmann described the duff as the ideal storage medium: "[I]t is not at all surprising that germination should be delayed under the forest cover. The cool shaded layers of leaf mold and general duff of the forest floor, which in the virgin Cascade forests seldom feel the warmth of the sun, constitute an ideal storage medium. Under conditions so unfavorable to germination and so favorable to its retardation, it can easily be imagined that the germination of forest tree seeds can be delayed to the limits of their various powers of dormancy." He admitted that he had not succeeded in getting Douglas fir seed, or any other forest tree seed, to germinate after being retrieved from the forest floor. Furthermore, an attempted experiment to bury fir seed for set periods of time, then unearth and study the seed, was aborted after rodents disturbed the experimental containers after the first year of the study.²⁴ Hofmann relied instead on the work of other researchers to determine the viability of seed. For example, he cited unpublished research from Idaho's Priest River Experiment Station, where western white pine seed recovered from the forest floor was found to be still viable. He also cited unpublished reports from Forest Service nurseries in which germination of redwood, incense cedar, sugar pine, and a number of other western forest species had been delayed by several years. Such studies did not, however, address the question of wind-borne seed entering the nursery grounds from elsewhere, a fact that Hofmann did not highlight. The most persuasive studies on the long-term viability of seed, and the only ones that had been published, did not involve forest seed at all. While Hofmann cited the work of six different researchers on long-term seed viability, he acknowledged that none of them were studying forest tree seeds.²⁵

Hofmann was certain that the wind could not have been responsible for seeding areas more than about one hundred feet from any seed trees. This assumption, like the ability of stored seed to germinate, was pivotally important to his theory. In his observations of burned areas, he interpreted each site's pattern of seedling growth as showing seed tree effects only very close to those trees, while seedlings farther away he attributed entirely to seed stored in the duff. His conclusions were always definitive, stating for example that the "peculiar distribution of the reproduction ... shows very definitely that the green timber remaining after the fire has had very little influence on the general occurrence of the Douglas fir reproduction over the burn."²⁶ His interpretations of such observations are notable for their reluctance to consider any other possible cause for the observed patterns of seedling growth, such as differences in soil, topography, or animal activity.

While Hofmann knew that Douglas fir was not the climax species of the Pacific Northwest forest, his theory of seed storage nonetheless relied heavily on the influence of the succession-and-climax framework. The second-growth forest would return, he asserted, and be exactly the same as the first growth, only if humans neglected the cutover site entirely. If left alone, Hofmann insisted, the seed stored in the duff would replicate the lush cover of fir more quickly than any artificial reforestation project could do the job. Indeed, even the mild intervention of a slash burn, to clear the cutover area of debris, would impede the forest's natural regeneration. There is an echo, in such complete faith in the seed's ability, of the more providential ideas of the succession-and-climax, by which any disturbance is only a temporary setback on the march to the climax. Hofmann also believed that once understood, the succession-and-climax pattern in vegetation could be manipulated easily. Hence while he believed that the reestablishment of the Douglas fir forest would be accomplished best by letting nature take its course, he also believed that stopping the succession at the subclimax could be accomplished through human intervention. Hofmann stated that all the factors which might lead to the replacement of Douglas fir by the climax species were "within the control of man, and it is on [these factors] ... that the scientific management of Douglas fir must be based in order to keep the Pacific Northwest region under continuous natural production of this most important species."²⁷

Hofmann's sangfroid with regards to the regeneration of the forest was appealing to lumber company officials, who were interested in regeneration but not in large monetary investments on such an extremely long-term proposition. While officials at a few of the largest Northwest lumber firms, such as the Weyerhaeuser companies, felt their corporations would still be solvent to cut the second growth on their privately owned land, most of the lumber industry could not afford to take such a long view. For the most part, lumber companies abandoned both privately and publicly owned land after the merchantable timber had been removed. However, the long view was shared by some within the Forest Service, on whose land most of the clear-cutting occurred, as well as many of America's conservation-oriented politicians and private citizens. The Forest Service enacted regulations to force lumber companies to practice enough silviculture to ensure regeneration in the cutover lands. By the 1920s, Washington and Oregon also were enforcing state laws requiring lumber companies to burn the slash and debris remaining on cutover lands in order to reduce the likelihood of a more serious and unmanaged fire after the site had been abandoned.²⁸

If Hofmann's seed-storage theory was right, however, then the lumber companies could ensure regrowth without doing much of anything during or after the cut. There was no need to leave seed trees or untouched patches of trees on the site to assist reseeding, since the "distance to which seed trees are capable of restocking the ground is limited to from 150 to 300 feet."²⁹ Hofmann's theory even undercut the value of slash burning, a nearly universal and state-mandated technique. Of a 1914 clear-cut in which slash burning the following spring had scorched the duff, he wrote that "if the slash had not been burned the area would have been covered with a good stand of reproduction of the same species as the original forest and in about the same proportion."³⁰ Several timber industry figures seized upon Hofmann's theory as proof that slash burning in the Douglas fir region caused more harm than good. At the 1925 Pacific Logging Congress and elsewhere the seed-storage theory was specifically cited to argue against the custom and law of slash burning under the theory that the fast-appearing new fir seedlings would eliminate fire potential better and more permanently than any other method. While slash burning was not as expensive as most silvicultural techniques, nonetheless the process was labor-intensive, dangerous, and unpredictable. The potential existed for slash fires to ignite larger, uncontrolled burns if the humidity or the wind changed during a burn, and several large destructive wildfires had been attributed to escaped slash burns. Some looked to forest science for any excuse to stop the compulsory burnings, and Hofmann was one of the few to have explicitly addressed the issue. Commercial foresters within the Douglas-fir region were split on the practice, as seen in a 1930 survey, which showed that six firms still maintained that slash burning was good silvicultural practice, while two firms insisted that preventing any slash fires was preferable.³¹

The seed-storage theory's appeal to lumber producers also led to its consideration during the debates leading up to the passage of the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924, which enlarged the national forests and expanded state and national fire protection and reforestation programs. William Greeley, the head forester of the USFS at the time, was aggressively supportive of the theory. He believed that the lumber companies' techniques needed no modification, even when they were harvesting on publicly owned lands. At the same time, following Hofmann, Greeley agreed that federal commitment to fire protection on both public and private forestlands was of the utmost importance, not only to protect merchantable standing timber but also to protect stored seed and young seedlings in regenerating areas. Once the Clarke-McNary Act, with all of its support of the lumber industry, seemed certain to be ratified by Congress, Greeley suddenly changed his approach. In a letter to all of the Forest Service's branch chiefs, district foresters, and forest supervisors, Greeley worried that many in the Service may "have absorbed the 'practical' point of view so far that they have partially lost their professional vision and their professional punch as foresters."³² Indeed, although some had questioned the seed-storage theory years earlier, it was not until 1925, after the passage of the Clarke-McNary Act, that an attempt was undertaken to systematically test Hofmann's results.³³

By the mid-1920s, lands that had been prepared after clear-cutting in the late 1910s according to the hands-off prescription of J. V. Hofmann should have begun to show the first signs of regeneration. In a great number of these sites, however, there was little evidence of any regeneration of the Douglas fir; instead there was growth of brushy and noncommercial species, or worse yet, landslides and other devastation of the landscape. Some foresters, publicly or privately employed, never had accepted the seed-storage theory in the first place and were now pointing to these failures in reforestation as refutation of the theory. These critics included such well known figures as E. T. Allen, a former Forest Service regional forester who had become the executive director of the Western Forestry and Conservation Association, a lumber industry lobbying and public relations concern. The combined pressure of public and private foresters' comments, the obvious failures of cutover sites, and finally Hofmann's 1924 resignation from his post at the Wind River Experiment Station, altogether led to the long-overdue reassessment of Hofmann's theory.³⁴

The project of retesting the elements of the seed-storage theory fell to the new director of the Wind River Experiment Station, Leo Isaac. Although most foresters were ready to reexamine Hofmann's theory, there was still a large contingent of adherents, mostly among lumber company operators. Isaac's project, then, would be vital not only to further scientific knowledge of the Douglas fir forest but also to methods of forest regeneration on thousands of acres of cutover lands. In 1925, Isaac began experiments designed to address the two most problematic areas of Hofmann's work, the belief in the long-term storage of the seed and the disbelief in long distance wind-borne dissipation of the seed. The first experiment to produce results explored the patterns of seed flight. To replicate the height at which the fir's cones released their seeds, Isaac used a custom-built kite, which suspended seed dispersal units made from oatmeal canisters. When the kite attained the proper altitude, a string tripped the doors of the canisters, letting fir seed fly out. While the oatmeal canister did not, of course, mimic the mechanism by which the cones naturally dispersed seed, it did replicate the wind and altitude conditions of the seed's release. Because the trials were done in winter, the researchers could find the seed easily after it had landed on the snow. Isaac found that seed flight was much farther than Hofmann had assumed, often as much as a quarter mile from the release site. Isaac performed his experiments in the landscape in question, and his kite allowed a near approximation of the wind conditions in the top of a Douglas fir. Thus, as near as possible, this experiment directly addressed Hofmann's theory.³⁵

Several years later, Isaac also published a refutation of Hofmann's assertion that Douglas fir seed could remain viable in the duff for several years. Isaac buried seeds in the duff—not only of Douglas fir but of seven other Northwest forest species. To avoid the rodent problems that had thwarted previous seed germination experiments, Isaac placed the seeds, buried in duff, in cages, and then buried the cages in the forest in an approximation of natural conditions. No germination was found after the first or subsequent years.³⁶ Isaac's double-edged refutation of Hofmann's theory convinced many who had been hanging on to it because of the appeal of its utility and convenience for regeneration. Some people did still advocate it, generally those with little interest or training in scientific forestry. In a 1968 interview, Isaac noted that some people "still think that Hofmann is right. They see seedlings coming in two to ten years after the burn and ... they still think that Hofmann's theory of seed storage in the duff is right." He said these stubborn individuals were "[l]oggers and the small timber operators. But the older men that know the country and that look at [those] cutover lands that were idle for a generation and [were] not restocking are well aware that seed wasn't in the soil."³⁷ More complex and expensive methods of regeneration, it now seemed, were the only way that Douglas fir would ever grow again on the immense swaths of cutover lands in the Pacific Northwest.

Wind, Rabbits, and Other Problems

THE MID-1930s saw an increasing public interest in reforestation of Douglas fir. The Lumber Code of the New Deal's National Recovery Administration stipulated that steps be taken to ensure reforestation following any logging. In addition, a series of giant, devastating wildfires swept across Tillamook County, Oregon, an area covered with some of the finest old-growth forests in the state. The Tillamook burn let the general public, as well as the professional community, feel the loss of an entire forest in a way few in the region had before.³⁸ Foresters had more reason than ever to try to find workable methods for reforestation of logged lands.

However, there was little agreement on why cut-over lands did not naturally regenerate themselves to replicate the previous forest cover. The theories of both the professional ecologists and of Hofmann had concluded that the regenerated, "second-growth" forest would of necessity resemble that of the original forest. In the cut-over lands of the nineteenth century, while second-growth climax forests were now coming into maturity, a good forty years after most logging had ended, the species composition was much different than that of the original forest. The ignorance on this subject was now widely recognized by both foresters and ecologists. The plant ecologist Braun-Blanquet, a follower of Cowles, noted that following clear-cutting, "a phase with many 'accidental' pioneers of a ruderal [weedy] character is followed by a sod carpet ... from the eighth year onward, herbs and shrubs decrease continually because of the increasing shade of trees, until the equilibrium of the high shady forest is reached."³⁹ Uncharacteristically, Braun-Blanquet did not enumerate the tree species making up this "high shady forest." While succession did occur, it resembled the expected succession only on the coarser taxonomic scales; the species in this climax forest were not necessarily the same as those of the initial old-growth forest. Braun-Blanquet realized that post-logging succession was still little-studied and unpredictable, stating that "we have few precise data on the simultaneous ecological changes, and the subject must be recommended for further study."⁴⁰

Ecologists were becoming aware that the succession-and-climax theory was not appropriate for predicting recovery from clear-cutting. But were foresters, or for that matter loggers, receptive to this idea? Two forestry professors, in a 1929 survey of forest science, said bluntly that "the second growth forests on the cut-over timberlands of the North Eastern and Lake States are commonly of inferior quality. The more desirable [tree] species have to a considerable extent been replaced by less valuable ones."⁴¹ While the forests of these regions were different than those of the Pacific Northwest, both in species and topography, this phenomenon did not bode well for the area. Any person interested in maintaining a permanent logging industry had to be concerned with these findings. Were the forests of the northwest sufficiently different from the forests of the northeast and lake states that similar problems would not result? In the mid-1920s the Forest Service stated vaguely but optimistically that "a material increase in lumber production from much old [cut-over] regions ... appears probable" within several decades, and the Forest Service saw an imminent renewal of defunct logging towns.⁴² For those without the Forest Service's faith in human problem-solving abilities, however, the problem of reforestation remained. With the waning of popularity of the seed-storage theory, other possible reforestation methods were considered, yet, attempts at natural reseeding and seedling planting both failed to deliver a workable solution.

In the earliest government timber sales in the Northwest, around 1905, the Forest Service had recommended the use of seed trees, hoping to gain easy natural regeneration without having to give up much of the saleable board feet. The seed-tree technique, by which a few widely scattered trees were left after logging to reseed the entire cutover area, was relatively common in other parts of the United States, and occasionally seen in European forestry. It was reportedly successful in some instances, ensuring reseeding of the cutover area while being simple and inexpensive for loggers to put into effect. It had been used mostly, however, under conditions quite different from those in the Pacific Northwest, where weather and topography were much more extreme than elsewhere. The tree species for which it traditionally had been used were also very different from the Douglas fir. The roots of most species of trees grow fairly deep, wrapping themselves into the layers of rocks and soil. The roots of the Douglas fir, however, are shallow, spreading over a fairly wide area but not reaching deep into the poor soil of the area's hills and mountains. Further, the fir is taller and less flexible than many species, which means its trunk, not just its branches, sway in the wind. When fir are growing densely, in natural forest conditions, most of the wind's force lifts up and over the treetops. However, where stands have been thinned through selective logging, where there are abrupt edges between clear-cut and natural land, or where single trees have been left exposed, the full force of the wind strikes the tree. In such a case, especially if recent rains have softened the ground, the tree can be toppled. Yet even though this phenomenon of "windthrow" was known, seed trees still were used for reforestation into the late 1910s.⁴³ An assistant forester at the Wind River Experiment Station, Charles Kraebel, wrote in 1917 that "since every tree left on a cutting reduces the lumber yield of the area..., it is essential to leave as few trees as are necessary to assure the reforestation of the area." He recognized the possibility of wind effects, stating that "[o]pen-grown trees should be preferred" because they are "more windfirm than forest-grown trees." However, choosing open-grown trees was impractical in this case, he argued, since few Douglas fir were open-grown within densely forested areas being logged.⁴⁴

By the mid-1930s, the failure of the traditional seed-tree method in the West was widely recognized. The standard complex overhead technology used to make large area clear-cuts necessary was being phased out with the introduction of more modular and flexible "truck and tractor logging," by which it was economically feasible, though by no means necessary, to make smaller areas of harvest. Because of the ruggedness of the landscape and the denseness of most Douglas fir forests, however, traditional selection techniques still were impossible even with truck and tractor logging.⁴⁵ Modifications of seed-tree techniques still seemed as though they might hold promise for the Douglas fir region. The Forest Service's Thornton Munger was the first to hint at such a modification in 1911, when he suggested that "[w]hen there is danger that solitary trees will be windthrown,... the seed trees should be left in groups, so that they may mutually support each other."⁴⁶ Yet Munger's prescription was left theoretical, and the methods and effects of grouping seed trees received little attention. Twenty-five years after Munger's writing, George Drake, a forester employed by the Simpson Logging Company, was experimenting with methods of natural regeneration of cutover areas, although he admitted that those methods were "on the whole untried and still in the theoretical stage." He hoped to retain the benefits of the seed-tree method without the risk of windthrow by increasing the size of the seed-tree groups and decreasing the size of the clear-cut areas. Drake called his technique "IMPROVEMENT GROUP SELECTION where small areas [two to 10 acres] are clear cut in order to create favorable seeding conditions." This differed from the standard clear-cut logging technique, which he termed "AREA SELECTION," in which areas of tens or hundreds of acres are cut at once.⁴⁷ Leaving seed trees in scattered dense patches still did not prevent extensive windthrow along the borders of the clear-cut. Drake still warned the logger not to overlook "that in the partial cutting of timber stands, heavy windthrow often follows such cutting."⁴⁸ While the goal of natural regeneration, as always, was tempting to lumber companies' foresters, the exact size and shape of the patches to be cut remained in question.⁴⁹

The 1930s also saw the first attempts at using nursery stock for replanting Douglas fir, usually with extremely discouraging results. Using hand-planted Douglas fir seedlings circumvented the unpredictability and time delay of natural succession through the grass and shrub stages, skipping right to the desired fir stage in a human takeover of the natural order. In theory, the expense of artificial reforestation would be offset by its convenience and reliability, although that was not often the case in practice. In 1934, A. W. Moore, a U. S. Bureau of Biological Survey researcher, reported that small herbivores, mainly "two genera of rabbits[,] have in many instances thwarted or seriously interfered with efforts to replant logged-over and burned areas." Within the span of a year, rabbits were capable of such damage that seedling "plantings in some locations have suffered losses greater than 95%."⁵⁰ The study concluded that heavy predation by rabbits at a site was to the result of a population explosion precipitated by logging and slash burning. "If the burn is not severe," the study explains, "maple, willow, and huckleberry roots sprout, ferns appear and within three years the favorite food of this rabbit covers the area."⁵¹ Furthermore, Moore and other researchers noted that logging, agriculture, and settlement had caused population declines and behavioral changes in the predatory species of the Pacific Northwest, namely wildcats, carnivorous birds, and coyotes. This then affected the size and behavior of the rodent populations.⁵²

Moore's study, written mainly for use by companies undertaking large scale reforestations, recommended liberal application of lethal poisons such as strychnine to the seedlings as the only way of maintaining the planted seedlings.⁵³ Also writing in 1934, Walter P. Taylor, a researcher at a U.S. Forest Service experiment station, took a more ecologically conservative stance toward rodent control while still advocating extermination. "[T]he most scrupulous care" must be taken "to carefully restrict the killing of the detrimental species to the particular areas where they are clearly detrimental and ... even in such areas, to reduce them only to the requisite point" through prudent trapping.⁵⁴ Obviously not personally acquainted with Moore's works, Taylor assured readers that "it is fortunate for the interests of wildlife, trees, and man, that the trained and sympathetic personnel of the U. S. Biological Survey and their federal and state coöperators are being looked to in planning the work in wildlife research, control, and conservation."⁵⁵ Whether one preferred the heavy handed approach of Moore or the light touch of Taylor, it was clear that artificial reforestation, for all its benefits, was still an extremely expensive option. The necessity of a large expense and continual protection of artificially reforested sites, as described in such reports, served to discourage further reforestation attempts by logging companies eyeing the bottom line. The high rate at which these attempts failed made the idea that regeneration could occur through natural means, given the right set of circumstances but unaided by human hands, seem all the more appealing.

Conclusion: Reforestation in Context

BECAUSE DOUGLAS FIR was so commercially important, its regeneration was important not only for the health of the landscape but also for the economic well-being of the region. However unique and dominant it was, though, it did not live alone. While reforestation methods in the 1920s and 1930s evolved, nearly all of them focused only on Douglas fir. Foresters working on the problem in those decades wanted to work in conjunction with the natural processes of regeneration. But to a large extent they still were trying to determine the biology and mechanics of those processes. Their failures were often a result of incomplete understanding of the basic ecology of the forest. Moreover, not all of their recommendations for reforestation were received with equal enthusiasm by public or private forest managers. Lumber company and government employees were more likely to enact recommendations that were convenient and cheap, like those of J. V. Hofmann. Foresters were, of course, aware of their work's reception by decision makers, and may have more widely publicized those recommendations more likely to be adopted. There is no evidence of conscious decisions to use methods known to be ineffective simply because they were easier. But it is clear that many decision makers in industry and government chose not to abandon some methods even though they were of questionable efficacy.

It is important to note the difficulty foresters had in determining success and failure of reforestations. Because the experimental projects were centered on only one species, only through that species could the experiment be understood. However, Douglas fir grow very slowly, so a decade can pass before the full results of a single planting begin to appear. Thus, when confronted with one failure, preventing a host of others could be impossible. In 1945, for example, the American Forestry Association produced a survey of the conditions of the forests of the Douglas fir region. Out of the 26 million acres of commercial forest land, the author determined that reforestation following cutting or fire on 3.3 million acres had failed. All of that land had been deforested prior to 1930. The condition of the land that had been deforested in the last fifteen years, 2.1 million acres, was determined to be still undecided. Though the report noted that "[m]uch of this land was logged under systematic methods designed to ensure reseeding," the author declined to determine the success or failure of those methods.⁵⁶ The slow-moving bureaucracy of the Forest Service and the obstinacy of the lumber industry only amplified this problem. As Leo Isaac noted, Hofmann's seed-storage theory still had its adherents well into the 1960s. The natural time lag between theory and results, and the congenital conservatism of big business and big government, conspired to make reforestation a singularly complicated issue.

This time lag also shows why problems and failures of any sort of environmental repair project are important subjects of study for environmental historians. The experiments in reforestation from eight decades ago are still visible on the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest today. On many sites where natural reforestation was anticipated, new trees never have become established. These places become permanent bald spots in what was once unbroken forest.⁵⁷ In artificial plantings, the species chosen for planting and the siting of each tree on the landscape mean that the decisions of the forest scientists in the 1920s and 1930s still can be detected on the landscape. In some areas, for example, mature trees now stand in unnaturally orderly rows or other patterns following the lines of long-past clear-cuts. Douglas fir live so long that the decisions made about them by foresters, loggers, and managers affect several generations. While studies of past reforestation activity thus can explain the disorder of some of the resultant forests, that should not be cause for undue condemnation. As sustainable forestry advocate Chris Maser has written, "we must be prepared to make mistakes, misjudgments, as we learn how to restore the forests of the world, but mistakes will be forgiven if we learn from them."⁵⁸

Emily Brock is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Her dissertation is on the history of reforestation and restoration in the Douglas fir bioregion. She also has a master's degree in ecology from the University of Oregon.

Notes

Special thanks to Andrew Isenberg for his encouragement and advice on this project. Thanks also to Adam Rome, Angela Creager, two anonymous reviewers, and the members of the Princeton University History of Science and Nature & Culture Colloquia for their invaluable comments, and to Cheryl Oakes of the Forest History Society for her guidance in the archives. Grants from the graduate school and the history department of Princeton University made this research possible.

^1.� The earliest treatises in this tradition are Arthur Standish, The Commons Complaint: Wherein is Contained Two Speciall Grievances ... and Four Remedies for the Same ... (London: 1611); and John Evelyn, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions (London: 1664).

^2.� Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 306.

^3.� Langston, Forest Dreams; Paul W. Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World War Two (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). For a more neutral view of reforestation in the Northwest, see Michael Williams, Americans and their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

^4.� Marcus Hall, "Repairing Mountains: Restoration, Ecology, and Wilderness in Twentieth-Century Utah," Environmental History 6 (October 2001): 584–610; and Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Neil M. Maher, "A New Deal Body Politic: Landscape, Labor, and the Civilian Conservation Corps" Environmental History 7 (July 2002): 435–61 also has successfully addressed the issue of reforestation in the New Deal era recently. For examinations of environmental repairs from across the environmental studies spectrum, see A. Dwight Baldwin, Judith de Luce, and Carl Pletsch, eds., Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Paul H. Gobster and R. Bruce Hull, eds., Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000); and William R. Jordan III, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Several environmental authors recently have examined environmental repairs through the lens of an ambitious new reworking of restoration called "rewilding." See, for example, Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, "Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation" Wild Earth 8 (Fall 1998): 18–28; Dave Foreman, "The Rewilding Institute" Wild Earth 13 (Winter 2003–2004), 2–3.

^5.� The Pacific Coast Redwood is the only commercial species exceeding Douglas fir in board-feet per acre.

^6.� Arthur E. Rockwell, "The Lumber Trade and the Panama Canal, 1921–1940," Economic History Review 24 (1971): 445–62.

^7.� Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 77–112; Richard A. Rajala, Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest: Production, Science, and Regulation (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998); Edwin Van Syckle, They Tried to Cut It All: Grays Harbor—Turbulent Years of Greed and Greatness (Seattle: Pacific Search Press, 1980), 81–97; Ralph W. Andrews, Glory Days of Logging: Action in the Big Woods, British Columbia to California (Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer Publishing Company, 1994); Williams, Americans and their Forests. Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997).

^8.� William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991); Langston, Forest Dreams; Van Syckle, Grays Harbor.

^9.� "National City Company Report on the Douglas Fir Lumber Industry," unpublished report [1927], 3. Box 72, National Lumber Manufacturers Association archives, Forest History Society, Durham, N.C. Some typographical errors in excerpts from this report, notably the substitution of the letter "m" for a space, have been removed for readability. Emphasis in original. See also, Harold K. Steen, The U. S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976).

^10.� "National City Company Report," 19–20.

^11.� Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation (1876; reprint, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1990); Eugenius Warming, Oecology of Plants (1909; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977); Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Origin of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairie: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

^12.� Henry Chandler Cowles, "The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan," Botanical Gazette 27 (1899): 95–117, 167–202, 281–308, 361–91. Quote, 96.

^13.� Cowles, "Ecological Relations," 112.

^14.� Hagen, Entangled Bank, 15–49; Langston, Forest Dreams, 122–30; Tobey, Saving the Prairie; Worster, Nature's Economy.

^15.� E. T. Allen, The Western Hemlock, Bulletin 33, U. S. Bureau of Forestry, 1902; Thornton T. Munger, "The Cycle from Douglas Fir to Hemlock," Ecology 21 (1940): 451–59.

^16.� Josias Braun-Blanquet, Plant Sociology: The Study of Plant Communities, revised, edited and translated in 1932 from the 1927 original by George D. Fuller and Henry S. Conard. Facsimile edition (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1965), 325.

^17.� H. H. Chapman, "Is the Longleaf Type a Climax?" Ecology 13 (1932): 328. See also Henry J. Oosting, The Study of Plant Communities: An Introduction to Plant Ecology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1948), 277–8; Munger, "Cycle from Douglas Fir to Hemlock."

^18.� Frederic E. Clements, "Experimental Ecology in the Public Service," Ecology 16 (1935): 349.

^19.� The center was located in the valley of Washington's Wind River, a tributary of the Columbia River. For historical sketches of the Wind River Experiment Station and the earliest years of research there, see Margaret Herring and Sarah Greene, "Forest of Time: Research at the Wind River Experimental Forest 1908–1919," Forest History Today (December 2001): 36–43; Ivan Doig, "Early Forestry Research: A History of the Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station 1925–1975" (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Forest Service, 1976).

^20.� Rajala, Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest, 95–96; Leo A. Isaac with Amelia R. Fry, "The Seed-Flight Experiment: Policy Heeds Research," Forest History 16 (October 1973): 54–60; J. V. Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction from Seed Stored in the Forest Floor," Journal of Agricultural Research 11 (October 1917): 1–26.

^21.� Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction," 3.

^22.� Ibid., 12.

^23.� Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction;" J. V. Hofmann, "The Establishment of a Douglas Fir Forest," Ecology 1 (1920): 49–53; J. V. Hofmann, "Furred Forest Planters," The Scientific Monthly 16 (1923): 280–3.

^24.� The results of the first year are in Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction," 21; the failure of subsequent years is described in Isaac and Fry, "Seed-Flight Experiment."

^25.� Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction," 20, n. 1 and 2. As Hofmann's colleague Leo Isaac wrote dismissively, "he got that idea from some viable wheat seeds that had been taken out of a tomb somewhere in Germany several hundred years after they were stored there." This was not, however, an unusual sort of inference to make; see for an example of a wide review of tree-seed germination studies, M. Büsgen, The Structure and Life of Forest Trees, 3rd ed., revised and enlarged by E. Münch in 1926, English translation by Thomas Thomson (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1929), 392–8.

^26.� Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction," 7.

^27.� Hofmann, "Establishment," 53.

^28.� "National City Company Report"; William G. Robbins, Lumberjacks and Legislators: Political Economy of the U. S. Lumber Industry, 1890–1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982); William G. Robbins, American Forestry: A History of National, State, and Private Cooperation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985); Rajala, Clearcutting; Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. Tweed, Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (Three Rivers, Calif.: Sequoia Natural History Association, 1990); Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Susan R. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Williams, Americans and their Forests; James K. Agee, Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).

^29.� Hofmann, "Natural Reproduction," 23.

^30.� Ibid.

^31.� George C. Joy, "Improving Our Slash Disposal Practices," and L.F. Cronemiller, "Slash Disposal in the Selective Cedar Operations," transcripts of papers presented at a meeting of the North Pacific Section of the Society of American Foresters, Portland, Oregon in 1927. "Report of the Committee on Industrial Forestry [Draft]," 1930, 38—all three, box 26, Society of American Foresters archives, Forest History Society, Durham, N.C. Leo A. Isaac and Howard G. Hopkins, "The Forest Soil of the Douglas Fir Region, and Changes Wrought upon It by Logging and Slash Burning," Ecology 18 (1937): 264–79; Chapter VI, "Effects of Timber Operations," in Elliott A. Norse, Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1990), 161–219; Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Agee, Fire Ecology; Robbins, American Forestry, 95–96.

^32.� William B. Greeley to Branch Chiefs, District Foresters, and Forest Supervisors, 4 April 1924. Excerpted in Robbins, American Forestry.

^33.� Rajala, Clearcutting; Robbins, Lumberjacks and Legislators.

^34.� Rajala, Clearcutting, 111–9; Isaac and Fry, "Seed-Flight Experiment"; Thornton T. Munger, oral history interview with Amelia R. Fry, Forest History Society archives, Durham, N.C.

^35.� Leo A. Isaac, "Seed Flight in the Douglas Fir Region," Journal of Forestry 28 (1930): 492–9.

^36.� Leo A. Isaac, "Life of Douglas Fir Seed in the Forest Floor," Journal of Forestry 33 (1935): 61–66. After this refutation of Hofmann, Isaac extended his research to more general studies of succession after logging and fire in the Douglas fir region. Leo Isaac, "Vegetative Succession Following Logging in the Douglas Fir Region with Special Reference to Fire," Journal of Forestry 38 (1940): 716–21.

^37.� Isaac and Fry, 58. Emphasis in original.

^38.� Larry Fick and George Martin, The Tillamook Burn: Rehabilitation and Reforestation (Forest Grove: Oregon Department of Forestry, 1993); Brian R. Payne, "Trends in Reforestation and its Cost in the Pacific Northwest," U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1964; Gail Wells, The Tillamook: A Created Forest Comes of Age (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999).

^39.� Braun-Blanquet, Plant Sociobiology, 283.

^40.� Ibid.

^41.� I. W. Bailey and H. A. Spoehr, The Role of Research in the Development of Forestry in North America (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 32.

^42.� Unnamed Forest Service source, quoted in "National City Company Report," 19.

^43.� Thornton T. Munger, "The Growth and Management of Douglas Fir in the Pacific Northwest," Circular 175, U.S. Forest Service, 1911; H. A. Fowells, Silvics of Forest Trees of the United States. Agriculture Handbook 271, Division of Timber Management Research, U.S. Forest Service, 1965; Rajala, Clearcutting; Herb Hammond, "Clearcutting: Ecological and Economic Flaws," in Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry, ed. Bill Devall (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books and Earth Island Press, 1993), 25–31.

^44.� Charles J. Kraebel, "Choosing the Best Tree Seeds: The Influence of Parental Character and Environment upon the Progeny of Douglas Fir—Study Will Extend Over at Least Forty Years," Journal of Heredity 8 (1917): 483–92.

^45.� John R. Bruckart, "Taming a Wild Forest," in Trees: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1949, ed., Alfred Stefferud (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 326–34.

^46.� Munger, "Growth and Management," 17.

^47.� George L. Drake, "Selective Logging," Forest Practice Notes Vol. 1 No. 10, memo to the Joint Committee on Forest Conservation of the West Coast Lumbermen's Association and the Pacific Northwest Loggers Association, 20 July 1936. Box 20, National Forest Products Association archives, Forest History Society, Durham, N.C., 2. Emphasis in original.

^48.� Ibid., 2–3.

^49.� See, for example, Jerry F. Franklin, "Natural Regeneration of Douglas-Fir and Associated Species Using Modified Clear-Cutting Systems in the Oregon Cascades," U. S. Forest Service Research Paper PNW-3, 1963.

^50.� A. W. Moore, "Control of Rodents in Reforestation," unpublished report of Project #20 of the Denver Control Methods Research Laboratory, Bureau of Biological Survey, 1934. Box 96, National Forest Products Association archives, Forest History Society, Durham, N.C., 1. For an extensive review of the literature on this topic from the 1920s through the 1960s, see M. A. Radwan, "Protecting Forest Trees and their Seed from Wild Mammals (A Review of the Literature)," U.S. Forest Service Research Paper PNW-6, 1963.

^51.� Moore, "Control of Rodents," 5

^52.� Moore, "Control of Rodents"; Walter P. Taylor, "Some Animal Aspects of Reforestation and Erosion Control," Journal of Forestry 32 (1934): 8–10; Hofmann, "Forest Planters."

^53.� Moore, obviously enraged at the little animals, states that to "the mild mannered antivivisectionalist" advocating nonlethal means of deterrence, "an unpadded cell is recommended." Moore, "Control of Rodents," 2. See Hofmann "Forest Planters," for an appreciation of these same species.

^54.� Taylor, "Animal Aspects of Reforestation," 10.

^55.� Ibid.

^56.� Burt P. Kirkland, "Forest Resources of the Douglas Fir Region," unpublished report to the Pacific Northwest Loggers Association and the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, July 1946, Box 11, American Forestry Association archives, Forest History Society, Durham, N.C., 9—summary table "Forest Condition (Age) Classes by Area, 1945."

^57.� Paul Hirt, Conspiracy of Optimism; Chapter VII, "External Threats to Ancient Forests," in Norse, Ancient Forests, 220–42.

^58.� Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989), 230. See also Maser, The Redesigned Forest (San Pedro, Calif.: R. & E. Miles, 1988).

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