One Friday afternoon this past July, a micro-burst hailstorm descended on our farm. I noticed right away that most of our vine crops had been decimated. The following morning, I noticed that a three-acre stand of maturing pine off the south end of the field had fared equally badly; those stems that weren’t snapped off about 12 feet up were blown over altogether.
The following week, I wrote an email to my farm customers and friends, describing the damage to the woodlands and expressing my hope that some of the timber could be salvaged before it started to stain. My local friends seemed to accept this use of the word “salvage” at face value. A college friend of mine living in Oregon, however, responded with several email attachments of newspaper clippings describing the west-coast fight over the definition of “salvage” and how, had I been writing from his neighborhood, I never would have used the term.
Those who oppose salvage cutting out West see it as a smokescreen concealing all manner of harvesting on lands and in situations that wouldn’t otherwise warrant it; clearcutting an old-growth stand after a forest fire, for example, or in advance of an insect infestation. Proponents see salvage cutting as taking economic advantage of a resource that would otherwise go to waste. The devil is in deciding how big the fire was, how old the old growth was, how extensive the beetle outbreak is likely to be, etc. etc., with each side giving no ground to the other.
In short, “salvage logging” has become a proxy for “the other side is trying to get away with murder.”
I pulled back from reading the email, looked out the window, cleared my head for a moment, and felt a sigh of relief. “Salvage,” it seems, is more or less just a word, and not the start of an argument, in this part of the world.
Why this is, I can’t exactly say. I like to think that Northern Woodlands has played a role in this more civil tone, though being an employee of the magazine, I’m far from an objective observer. I also think the fact that we live in the woods makes an important difference – nearly all of us use wood ourselves or know someone locally who is involved in the cutting and processing of it; the forest products industry isn’t just an abstract multi-national hereabouts. The scale of things also plays a role; if we’d clearcut 300 acres, instead of 3, I suspect a few of our neighbors might have had a few things to say on the issue.
In the end, we found a local jobber with a small forwarder who managed to round up the good stems and carefully bring them out to the road, running a gauntlet of pigs, sheep, Brussels sprouts, all manner of vegetables, and the many farm visitors on hand for pick-your-own berry season. I kind of like the fact that this timber harvest took place in the summer, in full view of everyone, instead of during the winter off season. In a small way, I hope it helps salvage the meaning of “salvage.”