Small Town News

Forest managers face many challenges, but collaboration is a good way to start

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Payette Forest Coalition

If you are like many Idahoans who love hunting, fishing, and all of the other recreational activities our great state offers, you probably take our national forests for granted. You figure they've always been there and they always will be, but there are several reasons that may not be the case unless we find better ways to manage and protect them.

This summer marks the 100-year anniversary of what may have been the largest American forest fire. Before it was over 10,000 men were on fire lines from eastern Washington across the Idaho Panhandle and into western Montana. Three million acres, including the finest white pine forest in the United States, were laid waste and 86 lives were lost. The fire left enough dead timber to fill a freight train 2,400 miles long.

In the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps crews were still clearing away dead timber from clogged trails and canyons. Between 30 and 40 % of what burned in 1910 burned again in subsequent fire seasons, thereby destroying a good deal of what had been replanted and grown back naturally. Where once great forests had grown, now there were only great fields of brush. Erosion and bark beetles became major problems.

Most of what was burned black in 1910 is green again, but even now the seeds for the next catastrophic fire have been sown. If you look closely at much of Idaho's national forests you will notice that in many places they have too many trees per acre, and the ground is littered with dead and dying trees that have been falling for decades. In addition, mountain pine beetles are killing trees at an alarming rate. British Columbia has lost its huge lodge pole pine forests to beetles and the epidemic has moved into the northern U.S. at an alarming rate. Since 1996 pine beetles have chewed through more than half of Colorado's 2.2 million acres of lodge pole forest and have moved massively into Wyoming, Montana and Idaho national forests.

One can reasonably speculate about the causes of these problems, but in one sense what is causing them is less important than how we begin to better manage forest problems going forward. The Forest

Service has been unable to effectively manage our national forests for well over a generation. Environmental lawsuits have nearly halted thinning and timber sales in national forests, and the Forest Service made mistakes with an earlier philosophy of suppressing all fires. Fire is a natural method of forest management.

Healthy forests require periodic treatment by thinning and prescribed burning to prevent the type of dangerous fire situation we now have in our national forests. The problem is that the national forests have been unmanaged for a long time, and the West has been in a 50-year drought. That combination of forest overcrowding and debris fuel buildup on the forest floor is creating much larger and hotter wildfires. Because so much available fuel feeds these fires, an extreme scorched earth effect results where new seedlings cannot grow.

Another problem is that the cost of fighting these fires is huge and getting bigger each year. We tend to think of the suppression costs of these fires as the main costs, but they are really the tip of the iceberg. Longer-term rehabilitation costs include re-seeding and re-mulch-Ing, thinning and fuels reduction, and flood control. Fire suppressions costs, which are often considered synonymous with the full costs of a wildfire, are only a fractions of the total costs associated with such an event. Studies have suggested that total wildfire costs range from between two and 30 times greater than the reported suppression costs.

After years of confrontation between the timber industry and environmentalists, which has brought forest management to a near stand still, there may be a way to break the vicious cycle that has damaged the well-being of our national forests. In recent years there have been growing attempts to get environmentalists, timber industry representatives, citizen groups that use the national forests for recreation, and Forest Service officials to sit at the same table and talk about what interests they have in common that can help the Forest Service to better manage our national forests for sustainability, recreation, and economic purposes. The forests, as a sustainable natural resource, and their associated rural communities will benefit from better forest management.

The Payette Forest Coalition is one such group of citizens, conservationists, environmentalists, business and recreation representatives and government officials, which formed in June 2009. The Coalition's mission is to advise the Payette National Forest regarding the development, administration and monitoring of stewardship projects in order to achieve landscape scale (100,000 acres or more) conservation goals.

Early on the Coalition defined its primary goals as: Improve wildlife habitat Contribute to the economic vitality of the communities Reduce wildfire hazard Encourage woody blomass utilization

I am proud to be a member of the Coalition. The exciting part of this collaboration process is that diverse grou ps of individuals and organizations are coming together to formulate goals that they have in common and that are achievable, despite individual differences. I am not going to pretend that this is easy work. There are heart felt differences of opinion and disagreements that arise that have to be reconciled, but we proved that when you treat each person and their viewpoint with respect, differences can be resolved for the good of the whole forest and the communities associated with it. And that is something that hasn't been achieved for quite some time.

My next article will elaborate more on the details of what we are trying to achieve and how we are going about it.



Copyright 2010 The Adams County Record, Council, Idaho. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.

© 2011 The Adams County Record Council, Idaho. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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