Fish, forests, and floods

Last February, warm torrential rains fell atop deep mountain snowpacks in the Pacific Northwest, leading to massivefloods. Landslides and debrisflows, combined with recordhigh waters, wreaked havocacross an area extending from Oregon's Willamette Valley to southwestern Washington, and all the way to northern Idaho.Not since the winter of 1964-1965 had the region experienced such widespread and destructive flooding. The floods sparked renewed debate about the extent to which timber harvesting and other land use practices contribute to the magnitude and effects of flooding. In the polarized climate that now marks forestry, this debate is often presented in black and white terms: either logging caused the flood's destruction or it had no effect at all. But more than 40 years of research into the ways in which logging practices affect the environment has taught us that nature resists such simplistic characterizations. The flood of 1996 offers an opportunity to examine land management practices of the past, present, and future, gleaning useful lessons from the detritus that the flood left behind.