"In twenty years, I'm hoping that people will look back and say, 'Oh, gosh, we need to… do some more thinning than we had done, and make it look more like those old guys thought it should look."
Smith: I would see us trying to emulate the structure of the forest for the last eight or ten or twelve thousand years. And that's one of very, very open grown forest. Early settlers, of course, talk about riding at full gallop through the forest. You could drive a wagon through the forest. So we need to have this more open forest. We need to have this lush understory returning, and we need to have fire back in on a more frequent basis.
Now, you don't have to do that everywhere. It does not have to be done on every acre, and it does not have to be done exactly like it was in presettlement times. But it needs to emulate that. So we need to have 15 to 25 percent of our forest, perhaps, in a presettlement sort of condition—a condition that emulates that early forest—not very many trees, lots of lush understory; clumpy, groupy pattern where the trees grow; and we need to have fire going through more frequently, maybe every seven or eight or twelve years, rather than every two or three or five or eight years. But certainly more frequent fire, and a forest that's capable of allowing that sort of fire.
Kern: Can you explain how you and the Ecological Restoration Institute come to decide what an area should look like after thinning?
Smith: Yeah, I can. Actually, a lot of what we are looking at is to create the forest, or to restore the forest so that it looks more like the presettlement forest. But we recognize that today it's different than it was 125 years ago. And so we have to consider things like other people's concerns about it, about the production of forest recreation, or of forest growth for timber. And so we provide this background of information to agencies and to the public to help make those decisions. So we're saying, "Hey, the forest should be much more open, it should be a much stronger component of understory, and this is why: It provides for more butterflies and more birds and more carab beetles and other components of the ecosystem. Now, the public and the managers have to take that kind of information and fit it into this particular situation for this hundred acres or thousand acres or ten acres." We can help them make those judgments about what it should be. In very few instances will it be fully restored to presettlement condition, even though it should be, because of other political concerns. So there will be some sort of mitigation for those concerns when we finally decide to thin the forest. So we're typically leaving more trees at the cost of the understory development. But that's what's happened.
In twenty years, I'm hoping that people will look back and say, "Oh, gosh, we need to go in and do more thinning than we had done, and make it look more like those old guys thought it should look."