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"Getting the cut out" in Michigan's Upper Peninsula
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TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT - NATURAL RESOURCES POLICY ADVISORY
(please distribute freely)
TAP-RESOURCES
July 25, 1996
This post was prepared by the Environmental Resources
Information Network (ERIN) for TAP distribution.
Many thanks to Don Henson and Ned Daly for their
assistance in preparing this post. -Arthur Clark,
ERIN Project Coordinator
INTRODUCTION
The National Forests of the United States, along
with other public lands, are an increasingly important
part of our natural heritage. In addition to providing
recreational opportunities, our national forests contain
a wealth of biological resources. While the economic
value of timber, oil, gas, and coal extraction has long
been recognized, our society is only beginning to truly
appreciate the full economic and aesthetic importance of
the plant and animal life of our forests, their biotic
diversity (biodiversity).
The scientific trend towards cataloging and
protecting the rich diversity of plant and animal species
found on public lands has often been resisted by the
forest products industry and the Forest Service. The
Forest Service remains more interested in "getting the
cut out" than cataloging and protecting rare species.
The story that you are about to read is not, unlike the
plants its author studies, at all rare. Don Henson's
particular circumstances are doubtless unique, but the
general theme of Forest Service indifference and
sometime hostility towards rare species protection is
a fact of life for conservationists who have dealings
with the agency. To many conservationists, the Forest
Service often seems to see what it manages not as living
forests, but as mere collections of timber, rotting on
the vine every day it remains uncut.
The following narrative of botanist Don Henson
illustrates how Forest Service resistance to studying
and preserving biodiversity is squandering the wealth
of our nation in more ways than one. As taxpayers
whose money is being wasted, and as citizen-owners
of the national forests whose natural heritage is being
destroyed, we should all be concerned and outraged by
Don's experiences.
My (So-Called) Life as a Botanist in Michigan's U.P.
By Don Henson
In August 1970, my wife and I hiked into an interesting-
looking forested area along a rural highway north of our
home near Manistique, Mich. The purpose of that first
venture into the natural world of Michigan's upper
peninsula (the "U.P.") was simply to take a break from my
career as a still-life painter. Jane and I had moved to
the North Woods only weeks earlier, and we were eager to
spend our leisure time outdoors investigating the beauty
of our new-found paradise.
That hike was the beginning of a 25-year journey of
botanical discovery that has taken me up high emotional
peaks ~ locating numerous rare plant sites in Michigan,
including the first known site for Carex heleonastes (a
sedge) in the contiguous 48 states ~ and down low
emotional valleys ~ witnessing the destruction of
thousands of acres of the unique habitat necessary to
support many of the plants I have found.
My artist's knack for sensing fine subtleties in my
surroundings proved to be a crucial element of a good
botanical field eye. Within a few years, my botanical
discoveries were attracting attention from the botany
community at the University of Michigan (UM). I
donated all plant specimens collected each season
to the UM botany staff, as required by the terms of my
Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) permit
for collecting rare plant species. It became obvious that
my avocation was becoming my second vocation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, amateur and professional
botanists regularly made field trips to the U.P. to see
the previously unknown sites of many interesting plant
species that I had discovered. Federal and state agencies,
private individuals, and companies increasingly asked me
to conduct threatened and endangered plant surveys. In
1982, I was chosen as a member of a Michigan committee to
determine the threatened and endangered plant list for
the state.
Throughout my first 20 years of field work, I often
experienced resistance from state and federal forest
managers when I insisted they follow laws that protect
rare plants. Since 1991, when I discovered a grass
species new to science and plants new to Michigan on
Forest Service and other lands, I have not received
any requests for bids to conduct rare plant surveys
on public lands.
In 1993, a private landowner hired me to survey a
proposed timber sale on the Ottawa National Forest in
Michigan. I found a listed endangered sedge and rare
morphological specimens of the genus Botrychium (moon worts
or grape ferns). Subsequently, the Forest Service forbade
me from collecting any more plants on the Ottawa NF without a
newly invented "special use" permit. In order to be issued a
"special use" permit, I had to agree to turn over all my
collected specimens to the U.S. Forest Service. This
requirement, of course, conflicted completely with my Michigan
DNR permit which required me to deposit all my specimens at the
UM herbarium. My eight-year study of plants in the Ottawa NF
has been halted. Neither the Michigan DNR nor the Forest
Service will give me written permission to avoid compliance with
their respective requirements. As such, I have not collected
any specimens in the Ottawa NF since July of 1993.
The end of my specimen collecting has frustrated both
me and the University of Michigan herbarium curator, A.
A. "Tony" Reznicek. We were especially frustrated when
I encountered the second-known site in all of the the
eastern U.S. for Prosartes hookeri, a species of fairy
bells, in the Ottawa NF this past summer. There will be
no Prosartes hookeri among the specimens I am preparing
to send to Reznicek from last summer's work. I will be
sending a color slide of the plant to the herbarium, but
this is hardly adequate. As Reznicek said, "It is hard to
dissect a slide."
My loss of surveying work on the Ottawa NF (and Hiawatha
NF as well) has not only caused financial losses for me
and scientific problems for the UM Herbarium, it has also
greatly increased the cost to taxpayers of inventorying
rare plants in the national forests. I have calculated
that the average cost for me to locate one rare plant
species was around $1,000. The Forest Service, which now
does the surveying work in-house, is spending around
$30,000 per rare species located. This is especially
infuriating in light of Office of Management and Budget
regulations (OMB Circular A-76) which prohibit government
agencies from duplicating services that are already
available from established small businesses.
In the mean time, the Ottawa NF Forest Service staff has
not been able to work out a memorandum of understanding
(MOU) with Michigan DNR and the UM Herbarium regarding
the collection and deposition of rare plant specimens.
Discussions between Ottawa NF staff and DNR had been on-
going for at least five years. The Ottawa NF Forest Service
wanted to develop a MOU with the University of Michigan
Herbarium concerning species to be deposited there. Reports
I have received indicate that the Ottawa NF staff was so
unprofessional in these discussions that the University of
Michigan participants terminated the dialogue and ruled out
any future resumption. I cannot see how this could be such
a problem for the Forest Service, since I have been able to
deposit specimens at the UM herbarium for the past 25 years
without any formal written agreement.
After 25 years of botanical research, I can see that the
upper peninsula of Michigan provides a unique environment
for investigating several scientific puzzles. The U.P. is
bordered by Lake Superior to the north, Lake Huron to the
southeast, Lake Michigan in the south-central, and the
state of Wisconsin to the southwest. Multiple periods of
glacial advance and retreat which ended 10,000 to 15,000
years ago formed the present Great Lakes configuration and
left behind huge drainage systems in the U.P: the Menominee
River in central and southern part and the Ontonagon River
in the western part. A large portion of the Menominee River
system is within state forest lands, while the Ontonagon
River system is almost entirely within the Ottawa National
Forest.
As the glaciers melted, water that created the original
branches of these rivers at times flowed south to the
Mississippi River, sometimes flowed east through Ontario,
Canada, and perhaps even flowed northeast to Hudson Bay.
In the thousands of years since, the rivers have provided
temperature buffer zones and unique microclimates for
plants and animals on their banks and in the floodplains.
The warmer water buffers against frost, providing a
longer growing season in these areas. This has preserved
habitats for some communities of plants in the U.P. which
are now usually found further to the south. Some of these
plants are not found anywhere else within hundreds of
miles of the U.P.
I have discovered numerous "disjuncts" in the U.P. more
common to far regions of the United States and Canada,
such as Bartonia paniculata, or screw-stem, from the
Atlantic coastal plain. Western disjuncts have also been
located, such as the large yellow western monkey flower
that Reznicek and I found in the Ottawa National Forest
some years ago. Many years of investigating such clues
has led me to realize that the U.P. encompasses a
laboratory of stranded, lost worlds which are similar
in many ways to the islands of the world's oceans that
have provided insight into the evolution of plants and
animals. These lost river habitats are ideal monitoring
zones for measuring the effects of changing weather
patterns, fire suppression, the diminishing ozone layer,
and other phenomena of scientific concern.
However, federal and state forest managers, as well as
the private forest products companies, continue to
clearcut, plow, spray herbicide on, and replant trees in
many of the most sensitive areas. Pieces of nature's
puzzle are being destroyed at an alarming rate. The U.P.
is losing its invaluable natural scientific laboratories.
Acquiring an understanding of how ecosystems naturally
function requires intense effort and time spent in the
less-managed areas of the upper peninsula of Michigan and
elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I remain banned from collecting plants on the
Ottawa NF. Foresters from the Michigan Department of
Natural Resources are plowing up and planting monoculture
red pine on a previously unplowed 10,000-acre oak-pine
savanna/prairie in Menominee County. Private timber and
paper companies have punched many new logging roads into
previously inaccessible wilderness in Marquette County,
adjacent to the McCormick Tract designated wilderness.
Many of these areas are rich in rare plant species.
So far, outcries from politicians, lawyers, and
scientists have only slightly slowed the devastation of
the unique, lost worlds of Michigan's U.P. Most of the
laboratories of nature in other parts of the country have
already been gobbled up by urban sprawl, agricultural use,
or gigantic swaths of pavement; and pressure remains
intense on the tiny patches left. It is often said that
the timber barons of the turn of the century knew no
better when they clearcut the original timber stands.
Today, we know that even-aged timber management
(clearcutting) and monoculture reforestation are
disastrous to biodiversity. We know that these approaches
can also cause severe erosion and water quality degredation.
Hopefully, today's managers of Michigan's upper peninsula
will reassess and change their approach before our
priceless treasures are lost forever.
[Portions of the above article by Don Henson were first published in the
March/April issue of the Association of Forest Service Employess for
Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE) journal, The Inner Voice, and are reproduced
here with the author's permission.]
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