The revision is likely to ramp up the fight over the state's legendary cypress forests and appears to bolster environmentalists' claims that the timber industry is cutting down trees that could help shield coastal communities against hurricanes.
Office of Forestry officials as recently as last month said nonlogging pressures such as coastal erosion killed far more trees than direct harvesting. The timber industry and its supporters seized on that position to deflect rising calls for a state-imposed moratorium on cypress logging.
But State Forester Paul Frey said a new analysis of the industry shows about 30 million board feet of cypress are being harvested annually, compared with prior estimates of less than 2 million board feet a year. The amount killed by natural processes, Frey said, is 21 million board feet annually. That's up from the 15 million board feet previously reported.
Frey contends that even at the new levels his office calculated, the logging does not hurt the long-term health of the cypress forests because they are growing at a faster rate than they are being cut.
But several organizations including the Sierra Club and the Gulf Restoration Network plan to announce a nationwide campaign today to discourage cypress logging in Louisiana. Their concern, shared by some state and federal officials, is that cypress stands cut today will not grow back because of man-made alterations to the coast's delicate natural hydrology.
During the past century, canals carved for shipping interests and oil exploration allowed tree-killing saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico to seep into the heart of swamps once dominated by freshwater. Also, levees and similar structures built around swamps now keep many areas wet year-round, eliminating the periodic dry spells that cypress need to regenerate.
In recent years, those problems have been exacerbated by a revival in cypress harvesting driven by market demand and the maturation of forests that were last logged in the early 1900s.
"Clearly our cypress forests are at risk from a number of factors. This bears out what we've been saying: that logging is a threat and continues to be a threat," said Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network. "The logging industry is incredibly powerful and has been very effective at advocating their interests. We need to make sure we are not cutting our own throat by allowing clear-cutting, allowing cypress logging in these forests."
In St. Bernard Parish, where extensive cypress and oak stands died off after the construction of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, the lack of a forest buffer was blamed in part for Katrina's surge toppling levees to the north of Chalmette. Where trees were still present, the levees were overtopped but generally held, researchers from Louisiana State University have said.
But environmentalists, too, have pushed misleading information about the extent of logging in cypress swamps.
In an opinion piece last month in The New York Times, Steve Fleischli of the Waterkeeper Alliance wrote that "Louisiana has stripped away 1,900 square miles of (cypress) swamp" in the past century.
However, most of those losses were in salt- and brackish-water marshes, not the swamps at the center of the cypress controversy, according to state and federal reports.
Frey's estimate of 30 million board feet a year translates into about 150,000 cypress trees annually, said Buck Vandersteen of the Louisiana Forestry Association, the lobbying arm of the state's $5 billion timber industry. The 21 million board feet killed by natural processes equals about 105,000 trees. That's based on a 32-foot tall, 20 inch-diameter tree yielding about 200 board feet of lumber.
But Frey said that even with the increased logging now acknowledged by his agency, it remains a sustainable industry. He compared the 51 million board feet logged or killed with an estimated 222 million board feet of new growth every year.
"If you purely look the numbers, if you're growing 222 million and you're only losing roughly 25 percent of it from removals and mortality, you're actually growing more than you're taking out, so that's sustainable. You're actually adding to the inventory," he said.
Frey also took issue with critics of clear-cutting, which he described as a standard forestry practice: "Clear-cutting is a regeneration system. If you clear-cut, you are favoring a species that needs full sunlight to regenerate, of which bald cypress would be one. You need to give it that sunlight to give it an opportunity to regenerate successfully," he said.
Vandersteen said the 30 million board feet of logged cypress was "only a fraction" of the 169 million board feet of all hardwoods harvested last year.
But the chairman of a scientific panel that released a report last year on the health of cypress forests warned that measuring the issue only in terms of board feet paints an incomplete picture.
Jim Chambers of the Louisiana State University School of Natural Resources said board feet measurements capture commercially harvestable trees, not the forest as a whole. A better measure, he said, is cubic feet of cypress, which includes all trees in a forest.
"The total cubic volume is more important in telling you the relative health of your forest over time," he said. "It's been leveling off for 20 years now and may be declining, and that tells us there are some problems in the resource."
Frey said the new figures emerged after his office analyzed cypress logging from 2000 to 2005, based on information compiled by the state in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The prior estimate of 2 million board feet was based on incomplete 2003 data, he said, and covered only stands of trees dominated by cypress and tupelo, another tree prevalent in swamps. The new data factor in additional cypress logged from mixed stands that include multiple species of trees.
An adviser to Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the new data underscore the need to come up with a cypress buyout program that would take away from landowners the temptation to cash in on valuable stands of cypress. The state Department of Natural Resources is seeking $20 million for such a program through money generated by the oil and gas industry, and the Nature Conservancy is seeking $36 million for a similar program. Neither has received financing.
"It really is crucial that we adopt some wise approaches here and try our best to get some funding for purchase or easements (of cypress stands) to protect a habitat that's in jeopardy," said Len Bahr, Blanco's coastal science adviser. "We need to practice some caution and also recognize how important this ecosystem is."
Frey's analysis also showed there are about 791,000 acres of cypress-tupelo swamp statewide, down slightly from previous estimates of 845,000 acres. That compares with historical estimates of 2 million acres of cypress-tupelo swamps prior to extensive logging in the 1900s.
A state-federal coastal restoration task force has estimated 231,000 more acres of swamp forests could be lost in the next 50 years because of factors other than logging.
Meanwhile, a governor's office advisory panel that was supposed to draft a plan for restoring the state's coastal forests has been stalled for several months over what recommendations to make to Blanco.
Bahr, who is co-chairman of the group with Frey, said the impasse reflects a division between Blanco's office and Commissioner of Agriculture Bob Odom, who oversees the forestry office.
"Bob Odom is elected independently. The governor doesn't have the authority to force them to do anything," Bahr said.
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Matthew Brown can be reached at mbrown@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3784.