Cherokee needs help in a hurry

By BOB HODGE, hodge@knews.com
June 29, 2003

The best thing that happened to the Cherokee National Forest the past few years may be the southern pine beetle.

While environmental groups have used an avalanche of lawsuits to stall any meaningful forestry management by humans, pine beetles pretty much ignore litigation. They got into parts of the Cherokee and killed acre after acre of pine thickets.

This was a good thing. It seems that not even the nuttiest environmentalist wants to save dead trees.

The dead and dying pines were knocked down and nature began the process of regeneration. The areas where the pines had been were opened up and plants that had been locked out of the eco-system began to reappear. These areas became "early succession" habitat and everything from bears to yellow-bellied sapsuckers took advantage.

Unfortunately, early succession habitat is at a premium in the Cherokee National Forest. If management practices don't change the Cherokee will become an increasingly old-growth forest.

Despite what many environmentalists say, that's not a good thing.

The U.S. Forest Service hopes to have a 10-year management plan in place within a year and is accepting public comment through Thursday. Comments can be mailed to: Cherokee National Forest, Content Analysis Team, P.O. Box 221150, Salt Lake City, UT 84122. E-mailed comments can be sent to Cherokee@fs.fed.us.

The battle is between groups which want to see proactive management and a variety of habitats in Tennessee's only national forest and those who want a 635,000-acre museum. Unfortunately, museums usually aren't considered lively and vibrant and neither are old-growth forests.

The Cherokee is predominantly a 60- to 80-year-old forest home to deer, bear, turkey and grouse, but an even wider and more-varied group of non-game animals. Most people think the hundreds of thousands of acres of forest that runs along Tennessee's eastern border is teaming with wildlife.

Well, it's there, but the number of deer is in decline, turkey populations are stable at best and black bears are often forced out of the mountains to search for food. Grouse populations have declined greatly and non-game species like golden winged warblers and yellow bellied sapsuckers have all but disappeared . . . and one of the reasons is because environmentalists are "saving" the forest.

Controlled burns and logging are both sound management techniques that mimic what nature and Native Americans did long before white men came to North America. Scientists for the environmentalists can disagree, but the vast preponderance of evidence is a forest with a variety of habitats is healthiest, and historically the Cherokee had a wide variety of habitats.

The Forest Service wants to have a management plan in place by January, but that's unlikely. Apparently environmentalists like lawyers about as much as they do trees, and the word is if things don't go their way more lawsuits are a fait accompli.

Management of the Cherokee National Forest shouldn't be left up to a bunch of pine beetles, but at least the beetles are doing something.

Bob Hodge covers the outdoors. He may be reached at 865-342-6314.