Groups Aim to Make West’s Forests Safer From Wildfire

Against the spectacular backdrop of the headwaters of the Metolius River, a busload of people listened raptly as Scott Aycock talked about making flooring out of skinny little pine saplings.

Why would anyone be listening when there was so much beautiful scenery to see? Because Aycock was describing one local vision of a brave new world of wood products manufacturing based on making the forests of the West safer from wildfire.

His presentation was part of a collaboration between the Nature Conservancy, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Department of Interior called the North American Fire Learning Network. It brings together scientists, public lands managers, community groups and other interests to share success stories on their new relationship with wildfire.

The two-year, $2-million program has tapped 150 people for a series of four weeklong workshops throughout the country focusing on 25 different ecosystems and elements of the National Fire Plan, a $2.2-billion national strategy for dealing with wildfire.

“What is driving a lot of this is the fact that this National Fire Plan is such a huge undertaking,” said Art DuFault, fire and fuels liaison for the BLM director. “We need to have as much collaborative support and interaction with a whole range of players to have this thing make sense.”

Such close collaboration between federal agencies and a conservation group is unusual, especially at a time when the Bush administration has faced off against so many of them over such issues as oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, logging on national forests and industrial pollution.

But the Nature Conservancy is different. Rather than trying to influence legislation or public policy, it buys and manages land to protect it as fish and wildlife habitat.

“My experience working in Utah and Nevada is that the communities are very anxious and very receptive to moving ahead,” DuFault said. “They just need a little direction. This blueprint coming out of the Nature Conservancy is a good one to follow.”

Nationwide, wildfires this year burned 7.1 million acres and $1.4 billion was spent putting them out, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

“With the attention paid very recently because of huge conflagrations, not only this last year, but also in 2000, we finally have an opportunity with the general public to get in and create some community-driven efforts,” DuFault said.

One community that took a leap forward is Camp Sherman, a vacation and retirement settlement along the Metolius River, where the organization Friends of the Metolius created a demonstration of what various approaches to thinning forests would look like on the ground.

“If you came to the Metolius to play, you had to run into it,” said Gregory R. McClarren of Friends of the Metolius.

The Heritage Forest Demonstration Project includes 11 different plots, culminating in a demonstration of what a ponderosa pine forest looked like at the turn of the century, before the Forest Service began putting out all the fires.

“People say, ‘What’s commercial thinning?’ and we can say, ‘It’s this one here,’ ” McClarren said.

Aycock said it is easy to build community consensus over where to do thinning: the WUI -- pronounced WOO’-ey, for Wildland-Urban Interface, where the vacation homes meet the forest. The hard part is finding agreement over what kind of thinning the Forest Service and BLM should do.

That problem with public trust grew out of the fast-paced logging of the 1970s and 1980s, which led to the spotted owl lawsuits of the 1990s and the current battle over President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative, which would ease environmental regulation to speed logging to thin overstocked forests, even in remote areas far from homes.

“A lot of it is based on gaining a common understanding of what kind of forest you want, and what is an acceptable way to do that,” said Kris Martinson, environmental coordinator for the Sisters Ranger District of Deschutes National Forest. “People are very, very alarmed about logging because of what happened on the national forests in the 1970s and 1980s.”

The difficulty is compounded by direction from the top changing with each new occupant of the White House, she added.

“We look forward to a 180-degree switch every four years,” she said. “That is part of the difficulty, and that is part of the public trust. That makes it difficult regaining the public trust when the administration proposes things that alarm people.”

The approach to thinning needs to be different for each landscape, said Merrill Kaufmann, a Forest Service research ecologist.

For example, mature ponderosa pine, with its thick bark and high crowns, is adapted to survive low-intensity fires that clear out brush and saplings. Lodgepole pines have cones that release their seeds after being heated, so that new forests sprout from the ashes of the old ones.

Other ecosystems, such as subalpine forests, have little relationship to fire.

With lumber prices low and Deschutes County down to just two wood products mills following the timber industry contraction of the 1990s, timber sales off national forests are going begging, especially if they are made up of the skinny trees produced by thinning, Aycock said.

That’s where making flooring out of small ponderosa pine trees comes in.

“Right now, there is no investment climate,” Aycock said. “We’re trying to develop a pilot just focused on the small stuff so investors can see what is coming out five to 10 years down the road. Without that, there will be no fuels treatment in the area.”