When Charles Miller was a boy, his father would frequently show up at his school around noon on Friday, check Miller out of class and head into the woods for the weekend, a habit and hobby Miller kept up throughout his life.

“I’ve lived here all my life and there aren’t many of these mountains I haven’t walked over,” Miller said. “I’m a tree-hugging dirt worshiper.”

Today, Miller is one of the staunchest opponents to a plan supported by a majority of Waynesville aldermen to do forest management — including timber harvesting — in Waynesville’s 8,600-acre watershed. Miller said he’s seen the effects of logging over the years and none of it is good.

“Hurricane Creek and Cold Spring used to be great big creeks and you can step across them now because of all the clear cutting,” said Miller, who works for Blue Ridge Paper Products’ Waynesville plant.

Since the town board started talking about the watershed in spring of 2004, Miller has become a regular at the town meetings and made a personal study of the issue. He’s interviewed loggers, conservationists, soil scientists, botanists, biologists, geologists, surveyors and ecologists to learn everything he can scientifically to back up what he saw for himself in the woods all these years. He’s talked to plenty of average people, too, in the past 18 months.

“To this day I’ve found around 10 people in the town of Waynesville that support cutting that timber up there, and three of those are associated with the timber industry,” Miller said.

Miller’s list of reasons for not logging the watershed is long enough to keep him talking for a day and he still wouldn’t get through them all. But the main issue boils down to a philosophical debate — can man work harmoniously with the forest, or does any kind of interference spell nothing but disaster.

“I don’t think it ought to be touched, not with logging,” Alderman Kenneth Moore said of the watershed. “Every time I go over here and turn on that faucet, I want to know that I’m getting a good, cold, clear glass of water coming right off the watershed.”

While logging horror stories from the past are hard to forget, society shouldn’t throw up its hands, walk away from nature and forsake environmental stewardship, said Aldermen Gavin Brown.

“It’s like being a good farmer or a good parent. Are we going to take care of our fields or we are going to take care of our children so they become productive parts of society? That’s the philosophical concept,” Brown said.

Life support

Opponents to forest management in Waynesville’s watershed say that nature knows best. Even the latest science and best ecologists can’t improve the natural processes.

“Let nature take its course. It’s been there all these years,” said Aldermen Gary Caldwell.

“Thousands and thousands of years,” added Moore.

The removal of one tree throws off the whole ecological balance of the forest, from microorganisms in the soil all the way up the food chain to black bears, according to Garrett Smathers, a Waynesville resident who was a former ecologist with the National Park Service and professor at UNC-Asheville.

“If you move a single tree you are going to kill something in the watershed that is supporting life for probably 100 or more different plants and animals,” Smathers said, and possibly thousands of microscopic organisms.

Smathers said any plan that includes logging is “tantamount to ecological destruction.”

Parts of the watershed have been logged and even clear-cut in the past: once in the mid 20th century and once in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, it is has the purest drinking water classification in the state.

Smathers said that doesn’t mean the forest is healthy. He said it could take 200 to 300 years for the watershed forest to recover from past logging and reach an equilibrium.

Dr. Peter Bates, a natural resource professor at Western Carolina University, said a natural equilibrium and healthy forest can be achieved much faster through forest management. Bates said more than just past logging has left its mark on the watershed. Farms, houses and even a community once dotted the watershed. There are 90 miles of roads criss-crossing it. Some are poorly constructed and eroding into creeks and need to be fixed or done away with.

“Some of what we need to do is restoration,” Bates said.

Miller is all for that, but said extra logging isn’t necessary to fix problems.

“Let’s go up there and fix some of these problems we got up there right now without creating more. Let’s replant this slaughter that took place back in the ‘80s,” Miller said.

Rapid response

Bates said placing a forest in a lock box untouched by man is impossible today. Nature is constantly being assaulted by unnatural threats.

The biggest threat to the forests is invasive and exotic insects, which are transported between continents and across continents by man. A blight that attacks oak species — similar to the one that killed the chestnuts nearly a century ago — has landed on American soil on the West Coast and could spread across the country. Sudden Oak Death attacks more than oaks. It kills 38 species including maple, beech, ash, rhododendrons and moutain laurels. It could wipe out half the watershed forest. It would take hundreds of years for a new species to fill the niche if nature is left up to its own devices.

“It’s like saying if I have a cancer I can’t remove it because I might die, but I might die if I don’t,” said Brown.

A similar analogy with different outcome was used by Moore, however.

“When you get sick or get a cold, nature takes over and takes care of everything,” Moore said.

Miller said the forests got along without us before and can get along without us again.

“One question nobody can ever answer to me is how did these Indians take care of this country before us white people ever got over here?” Miller said.

The debate over letting nature take its course would be a different story 500 years ago, Bates said.

“We have to be looking forward instead of looking backward. To look backward to the pre-European settlement forest, those were magnificent forests, but those conditions no longer exist,” Bates said.

In the past, nature adapted alongside gradual climatic changes that occurred over thousands of years, but couldn’t acclimatize to the rapid global warming predicted as a result of human activity on the planet, Bates said.

Air pollution and acid rain are other impositions by humans that high-elevation forests have been unable to adapt to.

“If we look at the most severe threats our forests have faced, none of them have been natural processes,” Bates said. “We don’t know what the next stress or threat to our forest is going to be. We have to think about what’s the next defense.”

Bates said the best defense is to have a diverse and healthy forest.

“Diversity will ensure a portion of the forest will survive the next threat,” Bates said.

That possibly means getting rid of the white pine plantations propagated in old farming fields. It could also mean thinning poplars that sprung up after past clear-cuts and have kept other species from growing.

“The better trees like walnuts and hickories and oak trees, they grow much slower. If you don’t manage and take care of those slower growing trees, you end up with a forest that is not as diverse,” Feichter said. “I want to make sure we protect those trees that are valuable to the forest that provide food and shelter for the forest critters.”

Bates said he didn’t want to give the wrong impression, though.

“We are not saying we have to manipulate every acre of ground. There are some areas where nature can runs its course,” Bates said. “A lot of what you are looking at, you aren’t going to do anything to. You’re just going to evaluate.”

Smathers said there’s one way to remove the guesswork.

“If you want to produce clean water, let Mother Nature pick the species,” Smathers said. “The best management plan is just to protect it.”