Interview with Ben Thompson

Where did you formulate your ideas about sustainability?

Malcolm and Ben Thompson in the woods.

Ben: My dad (Malcolm) and I spend a lot of time in the forest. Over the years our primary focus has evolved into: how can we remove trees without damaging the environment? Without destroying the habitat of the thousands of plant and animal species? We have learned to observe what nature does and try to imitate it. These observations form the basis of our philosophy ... principles that define the business and set limits on what we as a family will do to make the business profitable without exploiting timber resources in an unsustainable way.

Here's the policy we have adopted: "The vast majority of timber we remove is salvage from wind-blown, diseased, insect infested, fire killed trees or from timber cut in a thinning operation to promote growth in the remaining stand. We've structured the company so that as a group we are dedicated to meeting the needs of the company and our customers without compromising the health and stability of the areas in which we work."

Nature and the forest is our perfect example of sustainability because it can go on and on for all time. Nothing is wasted. So we pattern what we do after that.

What is "waste"?

Ben: I think first of all that sustainability and waste are like opposites. It's impossible to be sustainable if there’s any waste.

Ben Thompson

What we call waste, and what is actually waste aren’t necessarily the same thing. To some in our industry, leaving limbs behind ... in fact, leaving anything in the woods to rot, is a waste. But that's not a waste ... it’s needed out there. Nature is always producing stuff it doesn't use, that goes back into the ground. Leaves. Nuts. Branches. Dead animals. But none of those things is waste because it's part of a cycle that keeps rolling forward.

An example of waste would be making a brushpile and burning it. You cut some wood... I have no quarrel with that... the forest won't miss a few trees. But then you gather all the limbs from a bunch of trees into one place ... and burn it! I consider that to be a waste.This takes away the nutrients from a whole area and put it in one spot and burn it. Now if you could spread it out over the whole area and burn it, (without destroying the forest) then it might not be a waste. Because that’s what happens naturally. So what people call waste and what is actually waste, frequently, are two different things.

Plastic in a landfill... that’s a waste. In fact, the whole landfill's a waste because everything is just buried ... and prevents a whole group of organisms to make their living, reprocessing everything into a useful form again. So a landfill, and especially something totally outside of nature like plastic in a landfill, is not going to do anybody any good. But a log in the woods, laying there rotting, is frequently called waste -- and it’s not. Millions of bugs, beneficial bacteria, worms, birds, mushrooms, rodents, snakes, foxes, raccoons ... plus a whole bunch of future bushes and trees ... all make their living off of that dead and rotting tree. Even a tree that dies when part of the forest catches fire is not a waste. It feeds a different, and important, part of the whole ecosystem.

If we think about it, most of the trees in the woods are used way longer than anything we cut. A tree in the woods will last 150 years or more... and we hardly ever use wood that lasts that long.

How do you define "Sustainable Forestry"?

Ben: Sustainable forestry involves identifying some principles that we're going to abide by when we interact with nature.

We agree that nature knows best. We want her to lead us and guide our steps.

We agree that nature tolerates, and works with disturbance. In fact, nature creates disturbances: lightning-strikes, fires, floods, wind storms, snows that bend trees over, and storms that add snow and ice until they break off. Sometimes a whole stand of trees are flattened in that way. What those disturbances do is create openings for new trees to start. The sun and rain hitting disturbed soil cause the seeds to sprout. That is how nature fosters multiple species in a stand, and uneven ages of trees.

Most of the time, though, nature works gradually,much more gradually than we do... after all, each of these fir and larch trees lives twice as long as we do before they're even getting to their prime. But if we want our forestry practices to be sustainable, we've got to copy what nature does.

And what does she do? She thins a forest very slowly. If it gets too thick something will die, or something will get stunted. Stunted means it quits growing or grows at an extremely slow rate. So we try to thin it enough, by cutting little trees down, to give a few trees a chance to get bigger. It's like a patch of carrots, where you pull some out when they're all too crowded together. (Hopefully, you put the ones you pulled into the compost heap!) Or, when they’re bigger, sometimes you pull some out and eat them, and the others get bigger yet.

If you keep doing that, the forest gets more productive than if you just left it alone. In the same way nature works, you try to keep it growing. Species diversity is real important for that. Although some forests don’t grow completely diverse, most do. And generally if you have multiple species in a forest it makes a much healthier forest, with lots more potential for harvesting some of the wood.

How are Montana forests commonly managed?

Ben: The most common method used to be clear cutting. Now a common method is to cut shelter wood or seed trees. This method clears the land except for a few trees. Clearing is okay at times, but we see that a more selective approach to timber harvest would be best at least half of the time.

In my opinion some agencies allow the loggers and timber companies to take too much wood per acre. The traditional method cuts just about everything except for a tree every 75 feet. That leaves mature, big trees.... but that’s like coming into a city and taking all the children and middle aged people, and leaving the old people. And when you do that, a lot of the old people that are left blow over! Because the woods are opened up too much! They need the youngsters to help them stand up. Those old trees are valuable but they need other trees to support them. And you don’t want to clear too much right next to them because then the wind can get started. A lot of the trees are dominant, so they’re pretty wind-strong... There’s a place for that kind of management but nature doesn’t do the same thing all the time. It changes. So we don’t want to do the same thing everywhere. We need to adapt to the landscape. Even if it’s the same type of forest, the same forest will have a little different types of things in different places. That’s more natural. The wind will blow down a bunch of trees over here, and none over there, and ithe insects kill a few trees here and none over there.

When this high percentage of trees are harvested it leaves plenty of room to work with the heavy equipment. But the problem is, that's like going into a city and removing all the children and grownups under the age of 30. When trees have had companions competing near them for their whole life, you can't just cut them and expect them to be stable. They need the younger trees to shield them from the wind and to lean on!

And another reason we prefer to selectively harvest a lower percentage of trees is the effect on wild life. If you take everything but those big trees, it wipes out the environment for a lot of the wildlife that lives in the woods. A big tree by itself doesn’t make a forest. A good old-growth forest has big trees in it, but there’s a lot of other trees in it too. So if you take out everything but a big tree every 75 feet, there’s a lot of animals that don’t really have a place to go.

Do they actually cut out all the little trees and just take them away?

Ben: Yes, there are times when they cut everything and pulp em. In one day habitats disappear, the nutrient cycle is broken, and the trees left behind become more vulnerable. We much prefer what we call an uneven age forest. ... A healthy old growth forest is what you’d call an uneven age stand. There’s old trees and young trees. All at the same time.

Once a forest fire kills all the trees then a whole new generation of young ones come up and that’s an even-age stand, at first. So the timber practices now go for an even-age harvest because it’s easy.

We like the uneven age, because, for one thing, trees live to different ages. Like a larch can live 500 years and a grand fir lives 100. After 100 years you start having younger trees coming in to replace the grand firs, amid the older trees.

So we try to manage it that way... you have the younger ones coming, and we might take out an older one, and make way for the younger ones, to give them a chance to get big. You kind of overlap the growing cycles ... and you can actually produce a lot more by doing it that way. And also you then have all the habitat for the wild life at the same time.

There’s a place and a time to make a clearing, because there’s other types of wildlife that can use a clearing. So we’re not saying you should never make any clearings. We’re just recommending that you do things BESIDES making clearings. Right now there are so many clearings being made that we’re advocating the selective harvest system.. because it needs to be done more, we think.

Is there any benefit to leaving dead standing trees?

Ben: "Snags" are really important. While a grand fir snag may stand for 10 or 20 years, giving nutrients to insects and nesting places for birds of all kinds... a Douglas fir or larch snag will often stand for a century or more, after it dies.

That's why we always leave some snags in every stand we are privileged to work. We leave snags of a variety of species, to accommodate the nesting needs of woodpeckers and other animals that use their holes after they make them. And we also leave dead trees as a food source for bugs etc. And we will leave green trees that got broken off half way up, because they'll rot from the top down. We're just looking for every opportunity we can to mimic nature. Just by observing what's out there naturally, we try to make sure all of it's there all the time.

Can the amount of "old growth" forests in Montana be increased?

Old Growth is the climax forest. You can have the young forest or the climax forest, and the climax forest is the best. With old growth, you have old trees and rotten trees and young trees and all of it mixed. That’s the highest value, the ancient forests that are so priceless because there aren’t very many of them left. However -- in those forests, the seral species end up dying out -- because the wind will blow them over, an insect will kill one -- and they need an opening to start over. So frequently an old growth forest will end up morphing into a stand of shade-tolerant trees, and then it will stay that way. In fact, it will naturally degenerate even further, until it gets to where there are not even big trees. If the shade tolerant trees grow too thick, then they won’t get big, and when they get stagnated, then they develop rot, and pretty soon you’ll have a forest of smaller, rotten trees, and not much variety in species.

Nature’s way of taking care of that -- because it will happen -- is eventually to burn it up. And just start over again. And as humans I think we can prevent that.

What we would like to see is the timber management style that creates more old growth, instead of just taking it away. It takes time but we can actually help younger stands become old growth by selective harvesting. We can help old growth stands maintain the species diversity longer, than if we just didn’t do anything. And at the same time we can harvest wood from those forests ... But we need more acres to work with because we’re harvesting fewer trees at any one time from those forests.

The river, the forest, the Montana sky... it's all part of one interdependent system.