Editorial: Burning questions in Oregon

Monday, Jan. 23, 2006 | 9:01 a.m.

A handful of Oregon State University professors last week asked a prestigious journal to hold off publishing a study concluding that the best way to help forests recover from wildfires is to leave them alone.

The research, the results of which were published Friday in the journal Science, was led by an Oregon State graduate student, whose team studied the region burned in southwest Oregon's 2002 Biscuit Fire.

The site served as the poster child for representatives from the Bush administration and from Oregon State University as they pushed for logging as the best means of restoring fire-damaged forests. But the recent study team discovered that logging in the fire's aftermath actually stunted recovery by destroying seedlings and littering the ground with flammable tinder.

According to the Associated Press, nine OSU professors and members of the U.S. Forest Service asked Science to refrain from publishing the study pending further review. The journal's editors printed the study, saying it was submitted to the usual strict peer review process by independent scientists.

It's hard to understand why the professors would balk at such ground-breaking research by one of their own students -- unless it has to do with OSU's College of Forestry receiving about 10 percent of its funding from a logging tax.

College of Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser has testified in favor of a congressional bill that would acclerate post-fire logging. And two of the university's professors wrote an earlier report that supports aggressive logging's restorative qualities.

Institutions of higher learning are supposed to be the places where students learn to question conventional beliefs and gain the courage and freedom to publish the results of their studies -- even when they're unpopular. That politics shouldn't play a role isn't just academic.