In Shawnee National Forest, a debate swirls around how to best protect trees amid climate change and wildfires
The Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois is a mosaic of towering trees, lush wetlands, and commanding rock formations that provide native habitat for a diverse range of plants and animals, including 19 oak species.
As wildfires rage across Canada, Hawaii, and Louisiana, the forest is also a microcosm of an emerging national debate about how North America should manage public lands. Climate change is hastening extreme weather events and drying ecosystems, putting forests at risk.
“It’s impossible to remove our hands completely. We are to blame for climate change. We’ve brought in invasive species. We’ve extinguished historic wildfires. We’ve carved roads through the forest. As a result, our impact on our forests is unavoidable,” said Chris Evans, a forest research specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
However, the U.S. In the face of the climate crisis, the Forest Service and environmentalists have opposing views on how to care for the Shawnee and other forests.
The Forest Service wants to play a more active role in promoting woodland health and reducing wildfire risk, while many environmentalists want to establish preserves where nature can heal itself.
The primary goal of the federal agency is to regenerate native ecosystems and increase biodiversity lost due to poor farming practices and fire suppression dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.
“If we don’t actively reintroduce disturbances in this ecosystem using tools like fire and timber harvest, we will lose a community that is disproportionately important for wildlife,” said Michael Chaveas, forest supervisor of Indiana’s Shawnee and Hoosier National Forests.
The Forest Service has invited timber companies to log parcels of both forests in order to encourage new tree growth, a practice that environmentalists in Illinois have seen before.
John Wallace left his job as a public land manager in Carbondale in 1990 to devote his life to halting commercial activity in the Shawnee. He tethered himself to a log skidder with a bike lock as part of a 79-day occupation of a logging site. Authorities had to use a blowtorch to forcefully remove him and arrest him. His protests eventually contributed to the lifting of a 17-year logging ban in 2013.
Wallace now sees timber lorries driving into Illinois’ only national forest, and he has resurrected the fight to keep them out, this time with climate change at the forefront.
According to Wallace and his allies at the Shawnee Park and Climate Alliance, the mature oaks in the 289,000-acre forest must be left alone so they can optimally sequester carbon and the forest can naturally heal from human disturbances.
These environmentalists want the Forest Service to hand over control of the Shawnee to the National Park Service, whose mission is to preserve natural ecosystems and prohibits for-profit resource extraction.
Popular tourist destinations, such as Garden of the Gods, would be designated as national parks with the strictest land use regulations under the proposal. The remainder of the Shawnee would become the nation’s first climate-change preserve. Public hunting, backcountry camping, and other noncommercial recreational activities would be allowed, but trees would be left alone.
“Climate change is occurring rapidly, and we must take immediate action.” … We need to protect and promote natural ecosystems for their ability to sequester and store carbon,” Wallace said.
Climate protection
Healthy forests reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are the primary cause of climate change, by absorbing more carbon than they emit. According to the Biden administration, all U.S. forests combined absorb more than 10% of annual domestic greenhouse gas emissions.
However, whether forests are carbon sinks or carbon emitters is determined by how they are managed. Large, mature trees sequester the most carbon; trees emit carbon when cut down; and fires emit carbon.
The Alliance, which has the backing of the cities of Carbondale and Murphysboro as well as the Illinois Audubon Society, is part of a growing movement to protect forests.
Local opposition has grown in Indiana to Forest Service plans to increase logging and prescribed burning in the Hoosier forest. A federal judge in Oregon ruled last month that a Trump-era rule change allowing large trees in the Pacific Northwest to be harvested violated several laws. A week ago, a coalition of 28 environmental organizations sent a letter to the Forest Service opposing a logging project in Wisconsin’s Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, citing concerns that it does not align with the Biden administration’s most recent environmental recommendations.
The Biden administration has designated mature and old-growth forests as “critical carbon sinks.” In April, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management created an initial inventory of these forests in response to an executive order to protect them from climate change threats and increase carbon sequestration.
The Alliance’s campaign expands on this movement by advocating for the establishment of the first national preserve specifically designed to protect mature trees in order to capitalize on their carbon sequestration potential. To begin, Congress would need to pass legislation transferring the forest to the Park Service.
There is no agreement, however, on how much priority should be given to protecting mature trees.
According to Eric Holzmueller, a forestry professor at Southern Illinois University, forests are complex ecosystems, and focusing solely on preserving older trees to optimize carbon sequestration is shortsighted. Trees die and grow at different rates, and these rates change over time, making it difficult to forecast sequestration levels.
“It’s a difficult puzzle because there isn’t a clear answer.” “(Carbon sequestration) can be complicated, and no one has looked at the details of how the proposed management actions would help or hinder the forest’s ability to accumulate carbon,” he said.
Before deciding whether and where to allow old trees to grow naturally, Holzmueller says more research is needed to determine how much carbon the Shawnee is currently storing and whether certain parts of the forest sequester more carbon than others.
Holzmueller is also concerned that the Alliance is prioritizing carbon sequestration over promoting biodiversity and resilience to unpredictable natural disasters such as storms, floods, invasive insect outbreaks, and fires, which could result in massive tree loss.
‘Huge fire risk issue’
Climate change necessitates confronting wildfires of unprecedented intensity in new locations.
“These fires and how they are behaving right now will not be as severe as they will be in the next decade.” “We have yet to see the full impact of climate change and how it will affect wildfire behavior,” said Kimiko Barrett, lead wildfire researcher and policy analyst at nonprofit research organization Headwaters Economics.
Though it has no history of large wildfires, southern Illinois is not immune to this increased risk.
“We have a huge fire risk issue here, and because we live in a humid climate, we think it will never happen to us, but it can.” “Take a look around the country,” said Charles Ruffner, a forestry professor at Southern Illinois University.
Excessive heat and dryness exacerbated this year’s unprecedented and devastating fires in Canada, Maui, and Louisiana.
Prescribed burns are used by the Forest Service to reduce flammable vegetation in the Shawnee, but the Alliance claims that these fires, combined with logging, are making the Shawnee drier and more fire-prone.
The Shawnee forest floor is naturally moist, making it less vulnerable to large fires like those seen in the West. However, logging trees leave behind leaf litter and fallen branches. It also allows more sunlight to reach the forest floor by opening the canopy. The sun then dries out the leaves and branches that would otherwise decompose in natural moist conditions, resulting in prime fire fuel.
While prescribed burns reduce the fuel load, the first thing to grow back after a fire is herbaceous growth, which dies in the winter and adds fuel to fires.
While Ruffner and other local forestry experts acknowledge the potential for prescribed fires and logging to dry the forest floor, they believe that a large drought in the Midwest is more likely and dangerous.
“If we had a serious drought that lasted two to three years and killed a lot of that midstory, we would have communities that would lie in parallel to the same thing that we saw in Maui and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 2016 around the Great Smoky Mountains,” Ruffner said.
Wildfires burned more than 10,000 acres in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park during a severe drought in 2016, which has similar forest conditions to the Shawnee. Over 14,000 residents and tourists were forced to flee, and over 2,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. At least 97 people were killed and 2,000 structures were destroyed in the deadliest fire in the United States in more than a century in August in Maui, where exceptionally high winds and dry conditions had been reported.
The Forest Service has burned an average of 9,233 acres per year in the Shawnee to reduce fuel loads over the last ten years, with many acres burned multiple times over several years.
Ruffner believes that more burning in strategically selected areas is required to thin the forest and remove understory brush.
Creating a climate preserve with intact trees will be counterproductive to mitigating the Shawnee’s “huge fire risk issue,” according to Ruffner.
Furthermore, he and Barrett emphasized that communities must consider not only how to manage their forests, but also how to prepare their residents.
“People, communities and neighborhoods need to be better prepared for wildfires, but to do so requires a fundamental and significant upfront investment in how, where and under what conditions homes are placed in harm’s way,” Barrett stated.
Because wildfires are rare, few communities in southern Illinois have community wildfire protection plans in place to reduce fire risk. These plans would include practical measures such as the use of fire-resistant building materials, the development of communication plans, and the thinning of brush along highways to prevent fires from spreading onto the road.
Business interests
Swaths of barren land break up dense forest throughout the Shawnee. On the outskirts of these logging operations, piles of trunks await loading onto timber lorries and transport to mills in Kentucky and Missouri. According to Wallace, these lorries have taken over roads that were once dominated by hikers and horseback riders.
According to the Forest Service, when the injunction was lifted in 2013, 17,200 cubic feet of timber were harvested, or the equivalent volume of just under one-fifth of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. That figure had risen to 712,100 cubic feet by 2022, the equivalent of eight Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Under the jurisdiction of the U.S. The Forest Service’s mission is to ensure forest “health, diversity, and productivity,” which requires balancing the many benefits of the forest, including providing natural resources such as timber.
“Storing carbon is one of many goals for a healthy, resilient forest,” Chaveas stated.
However, members of the Alliance argue that the mandate to make the forest hardy and profitable is inherently conflicting and not in the best interests of residents.
The Forest Service awards contracts to the logging companies with the highest bids, many of which are from out of state.
According to Alliance, communities would benefit more from the Shawnee if it was managed by the Park Service because the agency’s mission to preserve the forest for “enjoyment, education, and inspiration” would boost tourism.
Southern Illinois’ economy has traditionally been based on coal. As the industry declines, Murphysboro Mayor Will Stephens believes that the establishment of a national park and preserve could rekindle interest in the area and help to revitalize the economy.
“We have to have a bias toward action in rural America, to try to find ways to make our communities vibrant and multidimensional so that when we go to market them in a regional or national way, people will make a decision to come see us instead of seeing somebody else,” he stated.
In rural West Virginia, where the economy has also suffered as a result of the coal industry’s decline, the establishment of the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in 2020 generated $96 million in economic impact in 2022, including over 1,000 new jobs.
Although the Forest Service lacks an economic analysis of commercial logging, Chaveas stated that “Southern Illinois clearly sees economic benefits from the projects on the forest.”
Even if the timber companies are not from Illinois, they employ local loggers, equipment operators, and truck drivers. A portion of the timber sales also goes to the Secure Rural Schools Program, a federal program that helps to keep local schools and roads running in areas where the tax base is constrained by federal land.
Nonetheless, “maximizing revenue or focusing on commercial interests do not factor into our decisions or actions,” according to Chaveas.
According to him, each harvest site is carefully selected in the best interests of the forest.
Biodiversity restoration
According to the Forest Service’s most recent Forest Management Plan, published in 2006, restoring the Shawnee to its pre-westward expansion conditions is a top priority.
“Our forests are not prepared for the shocks of climate change largely due to the legacy of land use,” Chaveas stated.
When settlers arrived in the mid-nineteenth century, they cleared vast swaths of forest in order to plant corn, potatoes, wheat, and oats. Poor farming practices and over-logging rendered the soil infertile over time, and southern Illinois entered a period of severe economic decline.
In an effort to restore the forest and stimulate the depressed economy, the federal government established the Shawnee National Forest in 1933. However, the reforestation process that followed was relatively quick, resulting in further loss of the native landscape.
Pines, which were introduced to control erosion, have largely supplanted native oaks in many areas. Simultaneously, suppression had emerged as the dominant fire management strategy. Small, naturally occurring wildfires were put out before they could do their ecological job of clearing the understory and allowing sunlight to reach the forest floor.
Because oaks require sunlight to grow, young oaks were gradually replaced by maple and beech trees that thrive in shady conditions. Wildlife that uses oaks for habitat has suffered as the oak population has declined.
The legacy of American settlement has resulted in a forest that lacks age and composition diversity.
“If you just let a forest drive into a low diversity system dominated by a few species, there are fewer species to adjust to.” “Maintaining as much diversity as possible allows for greater adaptation and adjustment to climate change,” said Evans, a forestry specialist at U. of I.
The Forest Service claims that by logging pines and mature oaks to open up the canopy and burning to clear the understory, it is encouraging the growth of young oaks, which, according to Chaveas, are more efficient at sequestering carbon than mature trees.
Even if they can sequester carbon faster, young trees have a much lower capacity to store carbon than older trees. The trees that are felled in the process also emit carbon into the atmosphere.
“It takes 10 to 30 years for a cleared forest to regrow and become a carbon sink again.” So it’s releasing more carbon than it’s sequestering for the next 10 to 30 years, which is bad. “That’s not something we have time for,” Wallace said.
Recent research in the Shawnee and nearby deciduous forests has also revealed that forest clearing has not resulted in successful oak regeneration.
“The best way to regenerate oaks is to keep mature, acorn-producing oaks standing and not use heavy equipment where young oaks can be found,” Wallace said, citing concerns that the machinery could harm young oaks.
The journey ahead
This summer’s devastating wildfires forced the country to confront the delicate relationship between forests and worsening climate change.
The Chicago area felt it firsthand when smoke from Canada’s wildfires obscured the skyline on several days in June and July. According to the air quality monitoring site IQAir, Chicago had the worst air quality of any major city in the world on June 27 due to the fires.
And those fires were thousands of miles away.
The Alliance is drafting legislation as the Forest Service continues logging and burning projects in the Shawnee. Members hope to introduce legislation on Capitol Hill to establish Shawnee National Park and Climate Preserve by April 8, the date of the next total solar eclipse.
Crowds gathered in the Shawnee six years ago when it was designated as one of the best places to view the 2017 Great American Eclipse.
“Everyone said to me, ‘We had no idea this place was here,’ all these visitors. What a hidden treasure! Who knew the Shawnee was so unique?Wallace remembered.
The forest is expected to be a prime location again for the 2024 eclipse, and he hopes that as visitors marvel at its beauty, they will be inspired to join the campaign to preserve it.
Finally, Alliance members recognize that protecting the Shawnee alone will not result in sufficient carbon sequestration to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, they hope that their campaign will inspire others to take similar actions.
“It isn’t going to solve our climate problem, but taking the first step is always the most difficult one when it comes to change and the Shawnee is the perfect candidate,” said Wallace.
