Last April, Mary Demkovich was the first person to climb into a platform overlooking the floor of Indiana's Yellowwood State Forest. For the next eight months, a group of about 20 would take turns spending their lives in a tree named Prometheus. \nThe tree-sit ended on a Sunday in December. While the equipment and supplies were packed away, the uncertainty about the fate of the trees still lingered. \nMonday, the news came that the timber harvest would continue. After a full day of phone calls and meetings between officials, Monday ended with a cancellation of the logging that was scheduled for Tuesday.\nNow, nearly three months later, one of the results of the eight-month demonstration is the opening of the lines of communication between forest activists, officials in charge of managing the forests and the public.\nBefore the state forest system was created, the forests in Indiana were severely overharvested and in desperate condition, said Natalie Himebaugh, information specialist for the Department of Natural Resource's Division of Forestry. When the DNR took over, the task was to rehabilitate the forests, planting trees and waiting for them to regrow. \nNow, more than 100 years later, the DNR still manages the growth of the state forests in Indiana, including annual logging on about 3,000 of the 150,000 acres that make up the forests, Himebaugh said. Of those 150,000 acres, 7,400 are not logged for environmental reasons, she said.\nWhen a tract of land is slated to be evaluated, an inventory of the land is taken and reviews are done to protect wildlife and historical markers, said Jim Allen, property manager for Yellowwood and Morgan-Monroe State Forests. Foresters select trees on an individual basis, taking into account factors such as whether the tree is in danger of dying, is diseased or if its removal will help other trees flourish, he said.\n"Our hope is to improve the health and vigor of the area along with providing a renewable resource for (industry) and money for state and county," Allen said.\nOn a designated day, loggers will gather at the offices and turn in bids for the trees, with the highest bidder purchasing them. In Yellowwood and Morgan-Monroe State Forests, 12 to 15 sales are conducted each year, with a varying number of trees cut at each sale, Allen said. The canceled sale from the tree sit would have logged 78 trees, but numbers have reached as high as 600, he said.\nHimebaugh said 82 percent of each sale goes to the Division of Forestry fund, with 15 percent of the sale going to the county or counties where the sale takes place. She said up to half of the county money goes to local fire departments. \nFor the Division of Forestry, the primary purpose of logging on public lands is to maintain the health of the forest, Himebaugh said.\n"I think of timber harvesting as trimming your hair," she said. "It helps your hair grow healthier, and it's the (same for the forest). It keeps the forest habitable to support a wide variety of animals and allows for multiple uses on the property."\nHimebaugh also said to keep state forests available for multi-purpose activities such as hunting, hiking and fishing, the selective logging of certain trees is necessary. It replaces the damage that natural occurrences such as tornados and fires would otherwise accomplish.\nBut what is truly the best for the forests, and the opinion of what is "healthy," is essentially the crux of the debate between the state and opponents of logging on public lands. To the Indiana Forest Alliance, a non-profit group focused on halting state forest logging, the health of the forest rests in its ability to complete its natural cycle of growth, or becoming an old-growth forest, coordinator Joshua Martin said. He said allowing the forest to progress through its life cycle provides nutrients for the land and gives space to animals to inhabit older or dying trees.\nAnd even though selective logging is not as devastating as clear-cutting, the effects on the land can be detrimental, Martin said. With risks of erosion, side effects of man-made logging roads and the potential for trucks to leak fuel, the effects on the land can go beyond just removing timber, he said.\nBut, Himebaugh said, short-term negative effects could mask benefits that would not be seen for five to 20 years. \n"You can't look at a forest, especially at a timber harvest, and say immediately that this is good for the forest," she said. "A timber harvest is not a pretty picture immediately afterwards. It's not pretty. But emotions aside, when you look at the benefit for the forest you have to take that long-term view and see into the future."\nMartin cited the state parks, which are not logged, as an example of how banning logging can still maintain a healthy, viable forest. Without logging, the parks are still useable to the public, he said.\nBut from the DNR's perspective, logging is necessary to keep forests living and ongoing.\n"In just 100 years the forests of Indiana are healthier than they've ever been," Himebaugh said. "That proves forest management works."\nSelective logging can be beneficial, depending on the perspective from which one is looking at the issue, said J.C. Randolph, professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and director of the Midwestern Regional Center of the National Institute for Global Environmental Change.\nIf a tree is cut to make way for other trees to grow, the impact depends on whether the growing trees are seen as having commercial value in the future, or if all trees have equal value in the forest as part of an ecosystem, he said.\nRandolph said while there could be short-term damage from the process of logging, techniques can be used to minimize the harm to the forest, also known as best-management practices. He said with a responsible harvest, the forest could repair itself in about a year.\n"You're talking about living organisms," he said. "They can and do respond to damages like natural (occurrences), or they respond to human disturbance."\nThe DNR also said logging in state forests is necessary to demonstrate sound forest management practices to private landowners, which own 85 percent of the forests in Indiana. By holding logging demonstrations, the DNR is teaching private landowners how to protect the forests, Himebaugh said. \nBut the IFA's Martin said the DNR has not backed up the idea of educating landowners with data explaining how many people are reached and how much of an impact it is making. Himebaugh said the number of loggers reached varies, depending on the type of demonstration.
A change of pace\nDespite the ever-present divide that separates the two ideas about the forests, the news coming out of this issue contains unprecedented events.\n"This is the most receptive the DNR has been toward us," IFA volunteer Kara Reagan said. "It's come a long way in the past six months."\nDuring the tree sit, logging opponents asked Rep. Mark Kruzan, D-Bloomington, to sponsor a bill in the Indiana General Assembly to immediately ban all logging on state forests. Kruzan agreed, filing the bill for the purpose of raising awareness in the legislature, he said. He said fellow representatives were aware there was state forest logging but not aware that only about 1 percent of all revenue raised by logging are generated by state forests.\n"I don't know that they realize it's going on in the very state forests they visit with their families," he said.\nKruzan decided to pull the bill from the House Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development committee, killing it.\n"The votes would not have been there to pass it," he said. "Secondly, the DNR showed it was working with the citizen groups, and I didn't want to take an antagonistic approach to them and lose the progress we'd made.\n"In part it was purely a political decision. I didn't want to the bill to be defeated after we'd had so much success."\nAbout a month and a half after the tree sit ended, members of the IFA, DNR and representatives of Gov. Frank O'Bannon's office sat down to discuss the issue.\n"It was more or less just an opportunity to all sit down at the same time and share what we were looking to do and listening to those concerns," said Beth Compton, deputy council to the governor and an executive assistant who handles environmental policy. "It's something we would certainly do for other groups and in regard to other issues." \nBefore the meeting, Compton requested additional information on the issue from the IFA. \n"Basically they knew the whole story of the tree sit, and it got really emotional at the end once the governor's office got involved," Martin said. "They knew of these people with this passion to sit up in a tree for eight months. They knew there was lots of passion behind it, but they wanted us to supply them with rational arguments, facts and figures and demonstrate to them that there was some kind of reason behind this rather than just tree-hugging hippies.\n"That was a great opportunity for us because, I mean, that's really what we've been wanting to do the whole time is really talk to them about something of substance and not have to sit in a tree in order to be heard." \nMartin said the meeting focused mainly on the need for public input from the DNR. Unlike other government agencies, the DNR has no appeals process for the public concerning logging, Kruzan said. \nThe DNR has agreed to hold public meetings to discuss the issue. Open houses at the state forests will allow the public to stop in during a four-hour period, talk with officials and submit their comments, which will be kept on file at each forest location, Himebaugh said.\nThe open house for Yellowwood/Morgan-Monroe State Forest will be held Tuesday, March 26 from 3 to 7 p.m.\nHimebaugh also said the Division of Forestry is working on establishing a formal way for the public to voice its opinion, something it does not currently have. It is expected to begin later this year, she said.\n"I think what we're getting into is something more formal -- something that we can track and be able to bring together input from a variety of sources," she said. "We've always welcomed public input, but never before have we tried to put that into a bigger process."\nWhile the IFA is disappointed the public meetings weren't in town hall meeting style, they are still satisfied that the lines of communication are more open than ever before, Martin said.\n"We were sort of almost driven to having to get up on that soap box in the tree or use that platform to speak from because we didn't have any other ways to be heard in the normal traditional fashion or some sort of formal fashion," he said. "People weren't listening no matter what we did. A tree sit gets people's attention, and now that we have their attention it gives us an opportunity to submit those arguments"
