Indiana Forest Cover

A couple of years ago, I heard a great discussion of Indiana's forest management on Homegrown on WFPL. Bernie Fischer, of the Indiana Division of Forestry, explained that, prior to American settlement and colonization, Indiana had 85% forest cover and 15% prairie. By about 1900, it had declined to 7% forest. It has since rebounded to 20% forest, but very little of that is remaining old-growth forest.

It's a pretty interesting factoid, and an interesting interview overall. Here are some quotes from the episode, which I believe is the December 18, 2004, show; their Web site has been redesigned, and I can't find the link to the original.

BOB HILL: Speaking of woods, we'll go across the river to Indiana briefly, and talk to the man up there who's in charge of the forests, and find out how people can take care of their lands, and all of this information will be applicable to Kentucky residents, too. ..To help us out, we're going to have Bernie Fischer; he's been director of the Indiana Division of Forestry since 1990. As such, the former Purdue University professor and extension forestry specialist supervises 150,000 acres of woodlands in the state's 13 state forests, and also supervises the state's 18 district foresters, who will provide on-site guidance to private landowners. He also supervises the state's two seedling nurseries, which annually sell six million tree seedlings and wildlife shrubs. Bernie, welcome to HomeGrown...
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JENEEN WICHE: Before we get into more, like, forest-related things, define a forest for me? Are there issues in terms of old-growth forests versus newer forests versus like, a natural sort of forest, and a plantation type of forest, do you know what I mean? Like, what is truly a forest?

BERNIE FISCHER: We lump them all together, and any spot of ground out there that's probably over an acre of trees, we consider a forest. We assume it's not a place where you mow underneath, and you, it's more natural than that. But obviously, if someone plants a forest, and takes care of it and grows trees in a natural setting, we consider plantations just part of an extension of a natural forest.

WICHE: But aren't plantations...are those harvested?

FISCHER: O yeah, plantations. Now, people grow all kinds of forests for lots of reasons. And only one of those is harvesting. You know, recreation, hunting, all the other reasons. So thes forests have lots of reasons. But normally when people plant trees, they're planting them for a purpose, somewhere down the road, to harvest the trees.

BOB HILL: Bernie, we have a lot of forests in the southern part of the state here, but when you get above say, Seymour, off to Chicago, it's pretty much farmland. Now, was the state that way 300 years ago, or was all that land cleared at one point to make that farmland?

BERNIE FISCHER: It was mostly cleared. Indiana originally was 85% forested, about 15% prairie; and agriculture hit northern Indiana, and it was flat, and it was great soil, and they cleared it. And now we just have remnant woodlots here and there. The conservation reserve program has added some forest. We actually have counties way up in northern Indiana that are actually increasing in forest acreage as people are taking, say, marginal farmland and setting it aside and planting trees and putting it back in forest.

JENEENE WICHE: So how many acres in Indiana now is, the percentage is...

BERNIE FISCHER: Four and half million acres of forest land, about 20% of the state is forested. And that's from a low in the early 1900s of about 7%. So we've rebounded.

WICHE: So how much is state, how much is federal, how much is privately owned of those forests?

FISCHER: 85% is private, so private owners are the dominant player; federal's about 5%, state's about 5%, and other holdings, military and other things, are about 5%.
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HILL: ...There's almost a poetic image to the old-growth forest, "Don't touch my land"; but that's pretty difficult for a private homeowner to do and see any success in a hundred years, isn't it?

FISCHER: We have basically almost no old-growth forest left. The reaction we get from a lot of landowners is, if a landowner owns, say, 40 acres, we find that landowner usually has a favorite tree or two out there that's already quite large, maybe at least an older tree, a hundred years old or whatever. And sometimes the landowner is most concerned about "What do I do to protect that tree? Not the whole woods, I like to go look at that particular tree. Because it's special: it's big, it has an odd shape, or whatever." So, you tend to, as a forester, very quickly pick up on that, and say "OK, I want to make sure I do something good for that area over there, for that tree, and the rest of the land has smaller trees on it, and they want them to be large over time. What can I do to make them grow faster?"

HILL: There is an old-growth grove up near Dale, the Pioneer Mothers Forest?

FISCHER: There's Pioneer Mothers...

HILL: It's a beautiful bunch of woods...

FISCHER: And there's a nice, there's also Donaldson's Woods at Spring Mill State Park; there are a few isolated holdings, but boy, they're small, and they're really rare and hard to find. But yeah, there are a few out there. There's also a few in Kentucky I've heard about, I can't give you off the top of my head, but you've got a few in Kentucky, too.

WICHE: So when you all go in to assist the private forest owners, landowners, is there also an understanding of the rest of the ecosystem in the forest, when you suggest certain types of management practices?

FISCHER: Yeah, we're always thinking about water quality, because forests are the best protectors of water. So if you're going to put in a road system, if you're going to do a timber harvest, we want to make sure that we protect the water, and usually we do that through what we call "best management practices". And those are generally so you keep ground disturbance to a minimum, and you direct water flows away from streams, so that the soil doesn't get into streams. A lot of landowners, their number one goal, when you ask them what their goal is, and they'll say "I want more wildlife". So you have to ask them, well, "What kind of more wildlife". But wildlife is, it really is an interest. And generally if you want wildlife, you want a variety of habitats. You want some big trees in one area, you want small trees in another area, maybe a brushy area, so that you get a variety of wildlife. Because wildlife for a lot of people means birds, and different birds like different kinds of habitat. So it's all-encompassing, and in fact, many landowners, if you have them list their goals, wildlife will be first, aesthetics will be second, hiking or whatever, which relates to those first two, might be third, and then maybe timber harvesting is fourth or fifth. So we are generally not talking about timber first. But we do talk about that too, because a lot of the landowners will say, "Yeah, but someday, my son's going to go to college, and I might need a little extra revenue, or...how can I do things right?" And most landowners want to do things right.

Fischer also discusses the procedures for helping private landowners manage their land, from a state's perspective. The foresters will meet landowners on the site and provide advice based on their goals, although long-term management for timber harvesting needs private foresters. He notes that as little as 10 acres may be sufficient for timber management and discusses the process of timber sales and harvesting on private land.

Haiti & the earthquake

A week ago, on January 12 at 4:53pm, a powerful earthquake struck Haiti. The images from the disaster, such as this graphic Boston Globe photo gallery, are staggering. The Guardian has a map of relief efforts.

The NYT brings together eight ways the rebuild Haiti. Felix Salmon advises not to give money to Haiti (at least, not earmarked for Haiti); AidWatch concurs and has more advice. Similar thoughts here, although aid can relieve immediate suffering. Jeffrey Sachs and David Brooks consider postdisaster reconstruction.

Econoblogger Tyler Cowen was anticipating a Haitian renaissance hours before the earthquake struck. He'd luckily avoided being there on holiday, a trip influenced by his history with Haiti. Cowen discusses other ways to help Haiti, geopolitical speculations about Haiti, and considers why is Haiti so poor. It's a topic of great interest: Why is Haiti so poor?

Some point to the timeline of U.S. involvement in Haiti. Haiti's history of terrible governance is justly infamous. Ronald Bailey argues that Haiti's lack of human, social, and institutional capital explains its lack of wealth. A news report from last summer highlights the lingering colonial debt:

The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

The debt, 150 million gold francs, would be the equivalent of about 1.4 million troy ounces. That amount of gold today is worth nearly $1.6 billion. Haitian mud cakes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) are an attempt to cope with the physical suffering of chronic hunger.

There's also been interest in Jared Diamond's comparative discussion of Haitian and Dominican history, environment, and development in chapter 11 of Collapse. Diamond's discussion is a broad overview, but he begins with Haitian deforestation:

To anyone interested in understanding the modern world's problems, it's a dramatic challenge to understand the 120-mile-long border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the two nations dividing the large Caribbean island of Hispanola that lies southeast of Florida. ...From an airplane flying high overhead, the border looks like a sharp line with bends, cut arbitrarily across the island by a knife, and abruptly dividing a darker and greener landscape east of the line (the Dominican side) from a paler and browner landscape west of the line (the Haitian side). On the ground, one can stand on the border at many places, face east, and look into pine forest, then turn around, face west, and see nothing except fields almost devoid of trees.

That contrast visible at the border exemplifies a difference between the two countries as a whole. Originally, both parts of the island were largely forested... Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti. ...In Haiti and the Dominican Republic just as elsewhere in the world, the consequences of all that deforestation include loss of timber and other forest materials, soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, sediment loads in the rivers, loss of watershed protection and hence of potential hydroelectric power, and decreased rainfall. All of those problems are more severe in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, more urgent than any of those just-mentioned consequences is the problem of the loss of wood for making charcoal, Haiti's main fuel for cooking.

...there were many reasons why deforestation and other environmental problems began earlier, developed over a longer time, and proceeded further in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. The reasons involved four of the factors in this book's five-factor framework: differences in human environmental impacts, in various friendly or unfriendly policies of other countries, and in responses by the societies and their leaders. Of the case studies described in this book, the contrast between Haiti and the Dominican Republic discussed in this chapter, and the contrast between the fates of the Norse and the Inuit in Greenland...provide the clearest illustrations that a society's fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.

EDIT
I've been updating this post significantly in the time since I posted it, mostly to add more links. Nicholas Kristof interviewed notable aid critics, who emphasized the need for assistance to earthquake victims, and advocated garmet sweatshops. Kristof has defended the importance of sweatshops in 2000 2006, and 2009, echoed by Paul Krugman. Andy Kershaw demands a more respect for Haitians.