>>Louisiana agonizes over the future of its cypress forests
BYLINE: By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: MANCHAC, La.
BODY:
Bald cypress, Louisiana's state tree, has never been sacred - even today as the Bayou State's coastline sinks and disappears into the Gulf of Mexico.
From the outset of European settlement, Louisiana's vast cypress stands were used for caskets, water tanks, fortresses and ships. Sweet-smelling cypress shingles were almost as tough as slate and tile. Demand was steady and by the early 1900s Louisiana's coastal forests were nearly gone.
Now, history is about to repeat itself.
A second growth of cypress has sprung back across Louisiana's once-denuded coastline. And loggers, timber companies and saw mills are revving to take their cuts at an estimated 1,462 million cubic feet: Cypress harvest No. 2.
"There's a massive, massive, massive amount," says logger Jay Huber. "This timber is 80 years old. It will take a vast amount of time to cut it all and big business is coming there."
But standing in the way of the second felling of Louisiana's coastal forests are environmentalists, whose political clout has grown in the recent years because of Louisiana's catastrophic coastal land loss.
An area the size of Delaware - 1,900 square miles - is under water, gone. Swamp forest has turned into grasslands, grasslands into marshlands, and marshlands into open water.
It's now or never, environmentalists warn. Don't cut. Don't repeat history. Stop the loggers.
"I don't see a lot of people chaining themselves to trees - it's too hot! - but there's a lot of emotion," anti-logging advocate Michael Greene said as he guided a boat through stands of cypress that rise like elongated pyramids out of the swamps and marshes northwest of New Orleans.
"You see 50 meters back there, how it loosens up and there's no overstory," he said, pointing to an area clear cut a decade ago. "Something might grow back. In some cases you get trees, in some cases it's shrubs and in some cases you get marsh and it sinks."
He went on: "Can you imagine the redwood forests without redwoods in California? Sustainability is the issue. The changes around here in the last 100 years have been monumental."
No one disputes the changes. After all, cypress built Louisiana.
Timber operations cleared the way for towns, sugar cane fields and New Orleans' suburbs. Loggers were heroes who hacked at the omnipresent swamp, a place filled with alligators, disease-carrying mosquitoes and deadly snakes.
But this time around, environmentalists say, if the cypress goes Louisiana can kiss goodbye any thoughts of cypress harvest No. 3 in the year 2105.
"Talking about regenerating cypress in these ecosystems is like talking about regenerating oak forests in Manhattan. We're beyond that point," said Oliver Houck, an environmental lawyer at Tulane University.
Yet many of the people who run Louisiana don't see it like that.
"If you harvest it, it will regenerate," said Bob Odom, head of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. "What's better: to have a dead tree or a live tree? If you let it sit there and it dies, it's not a benefit to anyone."
Other forces are fueling the interest in logging the coast. Stocks are running low in Florida and other cypress-abundant states and gardeners are lapping up cypress mulch.
"It's being sold at all the main retail sores, Home Depot, Wal-Mart and Lowe's - that we know of," said Barry Kohl with the Louisiana Audubon Society. Environmentalists are now passing out brochures against cypress mulch at garden club meetings.
"Why should you take a 100-year-old cypress tree and put it on a plant," grumbled Rocky Rakocy, a 50-year-old crabber and catfisherman in Manchac. "They're dying and there aren't many left. Leave 'em alone."
The future of Louisiana's forests may rest in the hands of Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
She'll need to take some action on a new state report which recommends saving the cypress forests by designating areas in need of protection.
"This is a working wetland. We're not trying to preserve it as a national park, that has never been our objective," said Sidney Coffee, an environmental adviser to the governor. "Is it important for us to show that we're green? I think it's important for us to show that we're taking a balanced approach to this."
The fear is that landowners will repeat history.
Take the Manchac swamps. In the years after the Civil War, the chocolate-brown waters and cypress swamps around Manchac were bought up on the cheap by Midwestern lumber companies.
"The people don't count. They didn't own the land. The lumber companies owned the land," said Roman Heleniak, a semiretired historian who specializes in the area. "They had pretty much thinned out the lumber reserves of the Great Lakes region and we had vast amounts of lumber here and it was cheap."
The loggers did a thorough job. Today there are only snippets of what the virgin forests might have looked like.
Some beautiful trees dating back 1,000 years are now part of a national refuge called Cat Island, a lazy bend in the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge. People can make the trek to the preserve's National Champion Bald Cypress Tree, the largest bald cypress east of the Sierra Nevada with its diameter of 16.5 feet and girth of 49 feet.
Out in the delta's basins, a few old groves are still around. Either too remote or too gnarled to cull, loggers left them alone.
"I guess people looked at it as a swamp and a quick buck," Heleniak said. "Nobody thinks 50 years ahead, and it's the same today."
The timber industry concedes that history cannot be repeated: There'll never be another harvest like the first one.
According to the Louisiana Forestry Association, there are 800,000 acres of cypress and its swampy cousin, the water tupelo, that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Out of that, they want to harvest up to 10,000 acres a year.
"We're not the bad guys here," said Frank Vallot, who just opened a cypress saw mill in Roseland - one of the first in decades. "There are some areas that we want to cut today that they cut 20 years ago - that's regeneration. ... I'm an environmentalist: If the trees do not regrow, then I'm out of a job."
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On The Web:
New report on Louisiana's coastal wetlands forests: coastalforestswg.lsu.edu
GRAPHIC: AP Photo
LOAD-DATE: July 10, 2005 |
