Gordon Hommes

What if…

Last week while planting and fencing white cedars along the Stewart River I had a thought. It started with, “What if”, and evolved from there. The cedars I was planting were part of an effort to restore what had been lost over a century ago when industrial-scale logging and unchecked wildfires completely transformed the northeastern Minnesota forest from that dominated by long-lived tall pines, cedars, and spruce, to that dominated by short-lived deciduous species like aspens, birches, and red maples. Sure, a few old pines and cedars, or small groves of them, were spared for one reason or another, and these—like the one at the White Pine Rest Area up county road 2 south of Greenwood Lake—amaze the visitor with what once was. But for a number of reasons the old forest has yet to recover, and likely never will.

My initial thought was, “What if the early loggers had been prohibited from cutting trees within 100 feet of a stream, or even 50 feet?”. Most of our creeks and rivers have very little groundwater inflow and depend on shade to keep them cool enough to support brook trout. Ironically, it was during those old logging days when trout from the lowest part of North Shore streams were introduced into the headwaters where they never originally existed due to the waterfalls downstream that blocked their migration. Logging railroads crossed those upper reaches, and that’s where the fish were both introduced and pursued by early tourists.

The loss of streamside cedars was especially tragic because they are extremely effective at shading streams; have dense, extensive root systems that hold shorelines in place; and can live for centuries. But once gone, they are hard to restore because whitetail deer (not originally inhabitants of the north shore, or found in exceedingly low numbers) eat them like candy. Except in the gnarliest terrain, you cannot just plant them and expect them to survive, because sooner, rather than later, they will get eaten. Cedars need to be fenced for at least a decade—an expensive, time consuming process—so it’s no small wonder that the vast majority of cedars you see growing along our streams are relics that survived the old logging days and subsequent slash fires. And those are a tiny fraction of what was there back in the day; long reaches of some streams have very few cedars at all.

What if early loggers were required to leave one mature white pine per acre as a seed source to regenerate the forest for future generations? Had that been paired with efforts to limit wildfires burning through logging slash (some of which were actually legally required for a while) there can be no doubt that there would be a far higher pine component in our forests than there is now. Going farther, white pine stands can actually sustain selective harvesting indefinitely, as has been demonstrated on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. But the mindset at the time did not include any kind of land ethic. Logging companies owned tens of thousands of acres of land and the “pineries” were viewed as a resource to be exploited. A few delusional folks thought the cutover lands could be sold and converted to farmland, but one wonders how many ever stood on the sea of stumps, char, and rocks and still made that assessment. If there is an upside to this, it is that these lands—millions of acres across the region—were abandoned, tax-forfeited, and returned to the public domain in the form of state, national, and county forests.

What if imports of tree seedlings from European nurseries didn’t happen? At the end of the 19th century there was a public awakening in the northeastern states, an outcry over the sheer amount of land left devastated by unchecked logging, and so a large-scale effort to replant the old pineries was undertaken. The problem was that American tree nurseries could not keep up with the demand, but European nurseries could provide large numbers of seedlings cheaply. But at some point white pine blister rust came to America on those seedlings, a disease that related European pine species could tolerate, but which North American white pines had little resistance to (sound familiar?). Old photos show that the blister rust was already impacting white pines here in Minnesota before 1910, and the disease has had a devastating impact on restoring the species here ever since. The State of Minnesota put little effort into planting white pines for decades due to the high mortality rate from the rust, although the US Forest Service has been working on developing rust-resistant trees for close to a century with some limited success. Had white pine blister rust not showed up we would, again, have far more white pines.

In recent decades, largely as a result of research by bear biologist Lynn Rogers and others, there has been a resurgence in efforts to restore white pines to the landscape in greater numbers. White pines are a keystone species with important roles in the Great Lakes forest, ranging from being refuges for young black bears to important nesting sites for bald eagles. I’m glad to see it.

I pondered the “What ifs” as I planted trees. Being a middle-aged man, I won’t be around when the cedars I planted grow to anything resembling real trees, the ones that keep shorelines in place during floods and shade tumbling trout streams. I thought of all the white pines I’ve planted over 30 years. Many have succumbed to the blister rust, but many others have grown into sizable trees, taller than my house and beginning to play their role in the ecosystem. I imagined that if humanity could take all that time and energy to wreck something, then maybe it could invest the same in fixing it.

Gordon Hommes is a geographer, educator, wilderness tripper, and musician—in no particular order. He lives in the North Shore Highlands.