Reflections

...Time after time, we provoke mouse population explosions by attempting to control coyotes, turn fertile areas into chemical-soaked deserts by demanding too high a crop yield too fast, drain aquifers dry through improper irrigation, and decimate fish stocks through over-harvesting and destruction of habitat...

...The tussock moth episode of 1971-1974 was nothing new...

...But those who take the time to explain the way natural systems work, and how they can best be cultivated for human benefit over the long run, are slammed as "no-growthers" advocating an "era of limits...

...The data suggest that the entire scare was, er, a mistake...

...We might draw a couple of morals from the tale of the tussock moth...

...The other moral is one that is even more difficult for a technological, quick-fix society to accept...

...The moth is native to the fir forests, and has gone through cycles that include periodic three-year population explosions since time immemorial...

...The tussock moth story recalls a hundred tales of environmental mismanagement, but we don't seem to get the message...

...For a while, the tussock moth generated banner headlines in the Northwest...

...Or perhaps the story should be included in an updated version of James Thurber's Fables for Our Time: the moth in wolfs clothing...

...For one thing, DDT from the moth counterattack has spread from the point of application, just as predicted...

...Hundreds of thousands of acres of prime forest-land were being denuded, said Forest Service timber managers...

...Elsewhere in the country, the story was at first merely a distant alarum, something like the rumored approach of the South American killer bees a few years later...

...It has been almost a decade since it fluttered through television broadcasts and newspaper columns: devourer of the Northwest forests, unstoppable scourge of the Douglas fir, marauding insect Tamerlane to the timber industry...

...point of view...

...This mild thinning promotes photosynthesis throughout the forest, and over a period too long for the evening news to grasp, forty years or more, the overall growth of timber is actually spurred...

...Another is the heavy cutting of the Pon-derosa pines that dominate the more arid slopes, and their replacement by the commercially superior Douglas fir...

...modern timber management practices, however, have suppressed this natural regulatory mechanism...

...One had the vague impression that DDT must have had something to do with the defeat of the invader...

...If something wasn't done, the West might soon be treeless and bare...

...The tussock moth invasion would have run its course in the same manner with or without the DDT...

...One is a natural-world analogue to the old adage, "If the machine ain't broke, don't fix it...

...Frightening prospects, to be sure, for a timber-dependent region...

...The most recent spurt was the greatest ever reported, but the studies suggest several good reasons why: One is that the moth is controlled by the fires that in the normal course of events sweep frequently through the dry forest-lands of the Northwest...

...Most trees affected by the moth turn brown during infestation— lending themselves to ghostly photographs of "dying" forests—but survive...

...It is typical and understandable that foresters, in light of the values they absorb from society at large, attempt to make the most of short-term gains and ignore the long-term benefits that accrue from balance...

...Good Lord, would even the Bering Strait be enough to stop it, or would the invincible moth go on to swallow Siberia as well...

...To the extent that the tussock moth caused any genuine problems, then, they were problems of unhealthy forest management, not unhealthy forests...

...Indeed, if the Forest Service rushes into the fray earlier during the next inevitable tussock moth outbreak, the length of the infestation might actually be increased because the natural peak-and-decline cycle of the insect population would be suppressed and thus drawn out...

...But they should be grounds for placing the tussock moth in the environmentalist bestiary alongside the coyote, the snail darter, and the bald eagle...

...But then the Forest Service and the timber industry began pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency to lift the ban on DDT spraying and allow full-scale war against the winged terrorists...

...Only the weakest trees succumb...

...It now seems that the tussock moth may actually play a vital role in forest ecology— and a valuable one, from a homocentric Phillip Johnson is a free-lance writer in Eugene, Oregon...

...It has to do with patience...

...If we are to have any hope of surviving another generation of environmental "managers," we had better learn that Mother Nature keeps her own schedule...

...Eight years later, there have been a couple of developments on the tussock moth front...

...The EPA caved in forthwith, DDT was dumped on some 400,000 acres in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and, sometime later, the moth depredations ceased...

...The tussock moth is actually beneficial, but its benefits take half a century to be realized...

...Finally, the researchers call attention to shoddy timbering practices which leave the soil compacted or eroded and damage many trees, reducing the resistance of the forest...

...The results of the research, of course, have not shown up on the evening news...

...For another, scientific researchers, including a team from the Forest Service, have released the results of their studies of the great tussock moth invasion...

...Fond though the Forest Service is of pesticides, sometimes they just are not necessary, even from an industrial forester's point of view...

...Higher and drier than usual in their new habitat, the Douglas fir are more vulnerable to infestation...

...a national brouhaha ensued...