Moving from Neglect to Active Forest Restoration

The Colville Community Forestry Coalition: In northeastern Washington, north of Spokane, there are vast expanses of forests, ranging from low elevation and low slope to high elevation and steep slope stands. There are several hundred thousand acres that have been logged once or twice and that have become densely overstocked, some are disease prone, and all are relatively unproductive. The threat of wildfire looms; it isn’t a question of “if” these forests will burn. It is only a question of “when”.

The Colville Coalition was formed about a year ago and has local loggers, mill owners, equipment operators, environmental activists, educators, local politicians, citizens at large and the agency personnel sitting at the same table. The commitment or the “blood oath”, as I like to call it, is that we will not devolve back into the conflicts of the past twenty years. We are not here to beat up each other. We will use our best creative thinking to solve the problems that are preventing forest restoration. We are up front about it, if you can’t go along with this commitment to problem solving, then you are not welcome at this table.

We have set two very important sideboards, or parameters. First, we are not talking about accessing old growth. It simply isn’t in our discussion. Our focus is on the hundreds of thousands of acres that have already been logged once or twice; the “already managed forest lands”. Second, we are not talking about extensive new road systems. In fact we may be able to see the elimination of some roads.

Even with these sideboards, this is still a very delicate tightrope, but it is much needed. Local communities are collapsing. My home town of Twisp saw the mill close down in 1984. 180 union scale jobs left and 500 related jobs left. In a town of roughly a thousand people, this closure destroyed the town economically. I served as the Mayor of Twisp and I’ve sat on the economic development council and no one seems to have a solution to the collapse of rural communities in the wake of forest resource closures. Rural communities dry up and blow away or turn into tourist towns with very low wages; that’s Twisp, my home town. Families cannot make it on $10 or $12 bucks an hour. This results in stressed and broken families, alcoholism and crime, violence and the mean polarities between “Nazi loggers” and “radical environmentalists” that keeps haunting our communities.

I come at this issue from the angle that there is a lot of good work that needs to be done to restore the integrity of the overstocked and unhealthy forest landscape. A lot of guys and gals could find good work with a meaning to it, doing this restoration work. There is plenty of work to do. Plenty of family wage jobs could be created. And rural communities would find themselves revitalized.

I have a favorite saying about this: “When the local guys drinking beer at the Antlers Tavern talk about their work, because they will, and they are talking about forest restoration in their own terms, then we will change the ethics of small communities across the west. No amount of preaching about “sustainable communities” will change the ethic as well as will good work that has inherent value.”

There is a lot of tension in this effort. Years of mistrust isn’t easily put aside. So, the Coalition has decided to focus first on the wildland/urban interface fuels reduction needs in the area. There are plenty of houses scattered among the forestlands. There is a ski hill and housing developments. Structures, homes, towns, schools, infrastructure need to be protected from the threat of wildfire.

The Colville Coalition is beginning to work with the US Forest service as they move into their Colville National Forest Boundary Urban Interface Project. It is a large project. It will address many thousands of acres that are interspersed with homes in the National Forest boundary. If we can build trust on several of these wildland urban interface fire plans, then we may be able to move out into the broader forest landscape that is in need of fuels reduction thinning. That is the strategy. Find ways to build trust and develop the larger goals once a track record has been proven.

Mike Petersen from the Lands Council, on the panel, will be able to tell you more about these details. He has become expert on the fuels reduction topic. And these other panelist will go into their experiences on this topic. So, I want to talk just for a few more minutes about a basic concept.

Rachael Carson’s book, Silent Spring, was published in 1962. Forty years ago. We now have an environmental culture. Look at you---look at “us”. We have come a long ways and yet we all know that there is still a lot more to do. The protection of ecosystems, the good fight to save places, needs to continue; probably forever. But we need to move from protection to active restoration. We need to repair the damage that was done. We need to remedy the neglect. I hope in my lifetime that we will move to a commitment to the restoration of the damages that were done over the past generations. I think we have first the responsibility to “stop doing what we are doing wrong” but then we also have the responsibility to repair the damages that have been done.

The position that the Forest Service and the State take is that the public won’t be willing to pay for the cost of thinning out these forests. Over and over I hear that remark. Well, if the real story were told, if the real values of a functioning watershed were expressed in dollars and compared to the cost of putting out wildfires, I think the public would gladly re-invest in the forest. The clean water, clean air, carbon sequestration, the soil stabilization, etc. is worth something like $560 per acre. Bruce Lippke can explain that in more detail.

The point is that we need this story to be told. We need to cut a lot of small trees for the health of the forest ecosystem. This needs to be done carefully and on a site by site basis. The “no-cut” philosophy and political stance has permeated the environmental community to the point that it is rare to find an environmentalist who understands that we need to cut specific trees, that we need loggers, that we need mills and that we need to get busy or the already managed forest landscape will burn up.

The science and the ability to implement restoration forestry are fairly well known now. It is, of course, a site specific matter: Which application for which site. These can be worked out in collaboration. That is what we are trying to do through the Colville Coalition. I would say that we all have the duty now to break the deadlock. If we do not, then the legal culpability, the seat of negligence, could shift from how the damages were caused in the first place to lay at the feet of the uninformed activist who blocks the progress on the thinning of the already logged densely overcrowded forest stands. It is the old proverb: “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”.

This is a delicate topic. I have raised these negligence phrases in order to get your attention. But more than anything, I implore you all to come to understand the need for forest thinning on a large scale. I want you all to come to realize that the logger is the man power needed to accomplish this good work. And I want you all to appreciate the investment that it takes to operate a $39 million mill that utilizes the small diameter material. These are the tools of forest restoration.

We need to collaborate with what’s left of these tools. We need to preserve the ones that still operate, like in Colville. Then we can rebuild small communities like Twisp, based upon the good work of forest restoration. There is a lot to do.

I want to close with a short quote from what I call governing principals: “We have a moral and social, not to mention an ecological, obligation to take the task of restoration seriously. If we commit a fraction of the public funds to the ecological restoration of the forest resources as we have committed (good choice of words) to the degradation of the forest ecology, we would make serious progress ecologically, socially, and economically. It is good work waiting to be done and it will rebuild a legacy for the future.”

Thank you.

Jim Doran

March 8, 2003

PS. “It is one thing to take a stand against things that you don’t want. It is a more demanding endeavor to describe and create what you do want.”