Trees that are older than the conversation about what is, and what is not ‘old-growth’ forest still don’t always qualify as being ‘old-growth’ themselves. To be blatantly honest, the conversation about ‘old-growth’ forest still doesn’t even know exactly what to call them – depending upon what part of the world you’re in, you’ll hear terms like ‘primary forest’ and ‘ancient woodlands’ or ‘first-growth forests’ all talking about the same kind of place.
There’s even some debate about when the debate about what they are began. Deeming the forests of the United States as featuring trees that were older than the optimum age for harvesting during the logging boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s may well have begun the discussion from a consumption point of view, but as conservation became more of a focus (and the push for the National Wilderness Act of 1964 gained steam), finding a way to describe big patches of trees that are big and old and haven’t yet been subjected to human activity and interference needed a more lump-sum phrase for referral.
‘Old-growth’ forest soon emerged, even as a properly imperfect term. After all, one catch-all phrase to describe forests of pine and aspen and birch and beech and oak and fir and the rest of the numerous species – and their relative timelines and habitats – is pretty impossible. Bristlecone pines live for thousands and thousands of years, while mulberry trees, for example, rarely live more than 25-50 years.
If you planted an entire field of mulberries and watched them grow, flourish, and die without interference, is that ‘old-growth?’ And, if not, can some species never be considered ‘old-growth?’
Could the forested lands of the eastern US where logging stripped them bare hundreds of years ago now be considered ‘old-growth’ where they were re-forested long-enough ago and now flourish? In other words, can anywhere humans have ever impeded ever be returned to an ‘old-growth’ state?
It’s a very tricky thing, defining something with this many layers and that much nuance. However, until you can find a way to begin to define it, you can’t begin to quantify how much of it there still is, and until you can begin to quantify how much of it there still is, you can’t begin to track how well it’s doing – whether it’s growing, shrinking, or dying out completely. On top of that, until you can define what it is, you can’t tell exactly how much of it is already ‘protected’ at any level, be it state or federal (where it could fall under National Park, National Monument, Wilderness, National Forest, or Bureau of Land Management jurisdiction and management).
You simply cannot protect what you don’t know you have. So, the United States Forest Service (in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management) set out to answer those nebulous questions. What is it? Where is it? How much of it is on our land already? Is it coming, or going? Acting in response to the Biden Administration’s 2022 executive order #14072 on strengthening the nation’s forests, communities, and local economies, the USFS and BLM released their findings late last week in an all-encompassing 84 page PDF found here.
As for what an ‘old-growth’ forest actually is, I’ll let their latest attempts at defining it guide you:
Current agency old-growth forest definitions are based on the unique biophysical characteristics within regions of the United States corresponding with agency management units. The definitions recognize that tree species, climate, soil productivity, and disturbance history all influence the development of old-growth forests. Therefore, regional definitions account for the vast variation in old-growth forest character that occurs across North America, and these definitions are specific to vegetation types because even within a specific geographic area, no one definition
represents the diversity of old-growth ecosystems.
In other words, you’re just going to kind of have to know it when you see it. As frustrating as that must be for absolutists out there, that’s probably the most appropriate approach going forward, since establishing hard and fast rules blanketing all species would inevitably let important areas fall through the cracks. This definition establishes subjectivity as a driving force in identification, potentially giving the agencies who best study the situations the most leeway in determining what can, and should, qualify.
The USFS/BLM report contains graphs, maps, tables, and the like detailing just how much of what they now consider ‘old-growth’ forest exists on federally managed lands, breaking it down by species of tree, state, and agency. As of right now, of the roughly 178.5 million acres of forest on federally managed lands, some 33.1 million acres are considered ‘old-growth,’ with an additional 80.8 considered mature (and not quite ‘old-growth’ just yet).
Perhaps that latter distinction is of just as much pertinence – ‘mature’ acres that aren’t quite ‘old-growth,’ but will be in due time assuming there’s no outside interference from human activity.
When it comes to conservation efforts and attempting to protect additional lands from mining/development/industry, perhaps it’s the lands that are on the cusp of being ‘old-growth’ in near-future generations that are every bit as worthy of our focus as the ones that have reached that status under our own watch. After all, human migration across the continent has changed tremendously over the last handful of generations, with population centers emerging out of nowhere in areas that were previously devoid of human interference in just a matter of a hundred (or fewer) years. It sure would seem like baking that into conservation attempts ahead of time – instead of chasing them, as we’ve been forced to do since the beginning of the industrial revolution – could well be the biggest benefit from this latest report.
If nothing else, we now know what we think we have, and that means we can track how it’s doing – and we can earmark funds specifically for its management and protection, too.
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