Heidi Holtan:
This morning we are getting the chance to chat with ecologist Dr. John Pastor. He is joining us this morning to talk about his new book: White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree. John is a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Thank you for being with us today.
John Pastor:
Thank you for having me.
John Latimer:
Good morning, John. Nice to see you.
John Pastor:
Good morning, John <laugh>.
Heidi Holtan:
So, what do you mean by a "foundational American tree?"
John Pastor:
That's a good question. Ecologists excuse the term "foundational species" for large plants that control the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems and food webs. And White Pine is the largest tree in the North Woods. Examples of other foundational species would be: Douglas Fir, Redwoods in the Pacific Northwest, Saguaro Cactus in the deserts, Big Bluestem in the prairie, and even kelp. In fact, 'foundational species' was first used to describe the role of kelp in the kelp forest off the coast of California and Antarctica. So, that's the ecological role of White Pine because it is so big, and so massive, and so common: particularly in the primeval North Woods. It controlled the flow of energy and nutrients that then went up through the rest of the food web. And so, without the foundational species, you certainly still have a food web and an ecosystem, but it's a very, very different one when the foundational species is lost.
As I was writing this book, I realized that it is also a cultural foundational species. If you think of the North Woods culture, which encompasses a lot of stories, from Native American cultures (from Iroquois and Anishinaabe peoples), the American colonies (the revolt from the British government revolved a lot around the control of White Pine in New England), the big Paul Bunyan era (which is still a big part of our culture of the Northwoods), [and the concept of] wilderness (which was first really brought to our attention by Thoreau because he went into Maine looking for big White Pines, but they were all gone). Out of that came a lot of his ideas of wilderness and what wilderness is and what wilderness means. And then, coming up to date, the beginning of forestry in this country by Gifford Pinchot and other people: Volney Morgan Spalding['s career] at University of Michigan revolved around restoring White Pine to reestablish a sustainable forest.
And then, in the 20th century, we get into the CCCs [Civilian Conservation Corps] and the Greatest Generation: my father and uncles, my wife's uncles, and probably your great uncles and so forth worked in the CCCs. And a big part of that was restoring White Pine. And then lately, White Pine, based on the work of Bud Heinselman in the Boundary Waters back in the 1970s, has shown us the new understanding of fire in ecosystems. And of course, we're now grappling with the role of fire in ecosystems, particularly out west, but also here in Minnesota. We've had several large fires in the last decade, and we are probably going to see more.
John Latimer:
I'm curious to learn more about the effects of fire on the White Pine, but I want to back up just a second and say my father was in the CCCs. He was at Badoura, and he was trained as a forester at the University of Minnesota. When he got out of the Navy after World War II, his first assignment was to try to eradicate Ribes (the gooseberry) which is a vector for a disease that affects White Pine.
John Pastor:
Blister Rust [a fungal pest]. Yes, that's the ultimate host for White Pine. And one of my uncles did that too. He said he got sick of gooseberries. He was never eat another gooseberry. But yeah, the eradication of the gooseberry and then trying to control Blister Rust was the impetus for the plant quarantine act back in 1900, which is the seminal legislation for controlling invasive species: Another problem that we have today. So, a lot of our culture and conservation issues, if you trace 'em back in history, many of them converge on White Pine. So, it's a cultural foundation: Our culture in the North Woods is founded on the ecosystem of the North Woods.
John Latimer:
What would it have been like? Can you take us into a stand of [untouched] White Pine? I've been to the Lost 40 and I sort of know what happens underneath [the pines], but that's not nearly the sort of stand of White Pine that you would've walked into, say in the Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin. What would that be like, just wandering around in there? What would the understory look like?
John Pastor:
Well, there's a lot of examples. There's a lot of variety. So, if you go to the Sylvania tract in the Upper Peninsula, the Huron Mountain area, the Porcupine Mountains, or the Boundary Waters (around Hegman Lake, for example, north of Ely), there's a lot of examples of White Pine forest and they're very diverse. So, first you would have these scattered big trees. It would not be pure White Pine. Pure White Pine stands were very rare. And people get the idea that it was all White Pine and nothing else. That's not the case. The White Pine would be mixed with a lot of other species. On moraines and soils that could hold enough water, [there would be] Sugar Maple here and Basswood. Out East, maybe Beech as well. Out east, we'd have Hemlock: Hemlock doesn't quite make it into Minnesota. It does to Jay Cook State Park. There's about 50 trees here. But as you go further east, White Pine would be mixed with Hemlock, which would be almost as big. But the White Pine would tower over everything, it'd be the biggest tree: about three to four feet in diameter (not all of them, but many of them). And if you stood back, or looked across the lake, you'd see a horizon that was defined by the deciduous trees, the Sugar Maples and Yellow Birch and Basswood and so forth. And then, towering head and shoulders above that, would be the White Pines. And you see that today: I think a really good example near Grand Rapids that's actually being managed is the Wolf Lake tract that the Rajala family manages. They are trying to apply much of what we've learned about the role of fire in the stands, and trying to replace fire with harvesting in a way that maintains the diversity of the stand as well as the large trees. So, that's a good example, but there was more variety than most people think.
John Latimer:
So, since you brought it up, let's talk a little bit more about the role of fire in, say, the present-day success of White Pine.
John Pastor:
So, after or just before World War II, one of the things the CCCs did was fight fire: Create fire breaks or so forth. That was the heyday of Smokey the Bear. Smokey the Bear actually was a great inspiration to me as a kid. I'd look at Smokey the Bear and think, "Oh, he's calling me to a life in the woods." I mean, I have a fondness for Smokey the Bear. But, we went a little too far in extinguishing fires, which is leading to a lot of the buildup to fuel woods and so forth.
Bud Heinselman (who was in the Forest Service in 1970s, and a very good friend of mine before he passed away a number of years ago) studied the role of fire in the Boundary Waters. He would go in and core trees and look at fire scars and so forth, and then he would correlate the shape of the White Pine canopy with the fire history. And as the forest got older and older, the canopy became more and more ragged. The large trees are pretty [resilient]: they stand up to ground fires pretty well because a bark is thick and corky and really does not burn very well. So, ground fires would come through and clear out a lot of the understory that was competing with the White Pine saplings (once the saplings got to be about 20 or 30 years old). But Sugar Maple and the other trees had thin bark at that age, and it would clear out a lot of the competition: not all of it, but a lot of it. So, the White Pine saplings would start to take off and eventually replace big White Pine in gaps in the canopy when the big White Pine trees died at 250-300 years or even more.
And then every 100-150 years, you'd get a big crown fire that would just come through and open up the whole canopy. (With the exception of a few trees and hollows and a few protected places: fire doesn't burn everything, but leaves a few trees.) Those trees would serve as seed sources for the next generation. So, Bud found that to maintain White Pine, you need this complicated fire regime of relatively frequent ground fires (like ground fires every 25-30 years or so) and then a big crown fire every 150 years. And a really good example of that is the Pagami Creek Fire a number of years ago (in the area north of Isabella). That was a classic natural fire that occurred exactly right on time, exactly 150 years after the last major fire in that area. It was set by lightning and did exactly what the previous fires did, and eventually that's going to regenerate White Pines again.
John Latimer:
I've been wondering: We're roughly a hundred years past the logging period when the loggers came through and took all of these big White Pines. A hundred years in good growing conditions will give you a White Pine that might be 24-30 inches in diameter at breast height. Through forest management and maybe the intelligent use of fire, will we ever see some of these big White Pines back (maybe in a hundred years)? Will we see this kind of forest coming back?
John Pastor:
Well, that's the hope. That's what John Rajala is trying to do in the Wolf Lake tract to feed his mills, to have big pine trees of high quality. The other thing is that research on how to do that using forest management is being done by the US Forest Service Experiments Station just down the road from you on the Itasca College campus by Brian Pollock and his colleagues. They have experimental forests throughout the Chippewa where they're trying various techniques to restore large White Pine and large Red Pine. This is a new kind of forestry called Ecological Silviculture. So, it isn't just single species silviculture [like] in the past where we say, "Well, on this site we manage for White Pine, and on this site we manage for maple, and over here we manage for Aspen," and so forth. It's, "How do we restore the kind of mixed species, fully functioning ecosystem and food web and still harvest it for timber?"
Many of the environmental groups- I mean, I was trained as a forester and a forest ecologist, but I'm also a tree hugger. I love the trees and I love the wilderness and Boundary Waters <laugh>. But, if you want to restore something to a prior condition, you have to pay for it. And everybody is in favor of biodiversity, including me. I mean, how could you not be? But biodiversity does not pay for itself. The only thing that pays in a forest is the harvest of timber. So, there is this sort of paradox that if we want to restore the forest to something approaching what looks like a healthy forest of before we white people got here, you have to harvest the timber to pay for that restoration: to pay for the planting. The harvesting of timber, if it's done right, mimics in a certain way (not completely, but in a certain way) the ground fires that swept through and occasion the occasional crown fire that swept through. So, it's something that the environmental groups have to come to grips with, just like the industry has to come to grips with that they should be managing for biodiversity. John manages for 23 species of trees in his stand, and every one of those 23 species goes through his mill and has a customer. So, we're entering a new phase where I hope there is less conflict between industry and environmental groups. The environmental groups recognize that you have to harvest timber to pay for the stuff, but the industry recognizes that it is not just one species that you manage for.
John Latimer:
I've been noticing (and this is maybe a little bit of a vector from where we've been talking,) but this year we had a heavy wet snow that came along in December. It stripped a lot of branches off of the White Pines. Now my experience, especially over at Norway Beach along Cass Lake a few years back, we had a straight line wind come through. The Norway Pines, which do not shed branches the way the White Pines do, were toppled, snapped off, whatever. The White [Pine] seems to stand up to that pretty well. Can you speak to that a little bit?
John Pastor:
Yeah. Well, old White Pines has at the base a big flare buttress to the roots, whereas the Red Pines tend to be straight up and down: they don't have that flare at the base. Now, that flare at the base partly gives them stability. The other thing is that the White Pine wood is more flexible than the Red Pine wood, so it can bend back and forth. It's strong in that way: it's just a stronger wood. But those kind of disturbances, like fire, were also natural. That's also what opened up the stands at a time. And if White Pine survives, and maple and Red Pine and other things get snapped off, then it's removing competition. We're really just learning about the role of winds and storms like that in the North Woods (particularly out here, but also in New England). The fires seem to be more important out at this end of the White Pine range. And winds and storms seem to be a little bit more important out east in New England. But we're just learning about the relative roles of these kinds of disturbances.
John Latimer:
We've been speaking with Dr. John Pastor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth Professor Emeritus, and John has been talking about the White Pine. John also has a wonderful book of essays called What Should a Clever Moose Eat, which I highly recommend to all of you who are listening, and this book on White Pines is equal to that. I enjoyed the little comment you made in the book, John, about trying to insert an essay about White Pine and finding, there're just too much to talk about.
John Pastor:
Right. When I was writing the Clever Moose Book- and I remember the interview you and Harry did of me many years ago on that book, it was a lot of fun- I wanted to write an essay on White Pine in this book. And then when I started thinking about it, I thought, "Well, it really deserves a whole book in itself." And then I started thinking about that, and that's what made me think about how the natural and human history, cultural history of White Pine are really intertwined in this country in a lot of interesting ways. More so than for many other tree species, I think.
Heidi Holtan:
John Pastor's new book is called White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree. It's published by Island Press.
John Latimer:
John, thank you for joining us this morning. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I could speak with you for hours, and I'm sure I would never run out of questions.
John Pastor:
Let's do that sometime, John.
John Latimer:
All right. It's a date.
Heidi Holtan:
Thanks for your time.
