Archive for February, 2012

While the Bureau of Land Management pilot projects in Southern Oregon have shown promise for bridging the gap between environmental groups and the timber industry, not everyone is excited about the projects’ potential.

In fact, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was in Medford this week to tour the “Pilot Joe” project site, the Oregon timber industry issued a statement (PDF) calling the project a “failed experiment.”

The Oregon industry group, the American Forest Resource Council, also sent out a press release saying Salazar’s visit was a “bunch of PR” that draws attention away from the much larger problems facing forest management in the Western states.

The professors leading the Medford project — Jerry Franklin, a retired professor of ecosystem science at University of Washington, and Norm Johnson, a retired professor of forestry resources at Oregon State University — have apparently heard the criticism before.

During the tour with Salazar, Franklin said:

“Some of our friends in the timber industry have referred to this as boutique forestry. We are taking out half of the basal area in these stands. That’s a serious operation. We’re obviously producing wood, and we’re producing it in a way that’s commercially operable.”

But the timber leaders have the numbers to back up their argument. When the BLM first started planning the Pilot Joe project two years ago, the bureau looked at 50,000 acres in the Applegate Watershed, according to the timber group’s statement. By the time the project actually got underway, it covered just 245 acres, said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council.

“Ultimately, Pilot Joe provided just one week’s worth of timber to a local mill, cost significantly more to prepare and appraised at values so low that the project would provide little-to-no revenue for county governments facing the end of Secure Rural Schools payments. We agree that the current timber management system is broken. Unfortunately, more projects like Pilot Joe aren’t the answer.”

Watch as the size of the project shrunk as project leaders attempted to “avoid every controversial issue, thus rendering the effort useless as a blueprint for future management,” according to the Oregon timber group:

The BLM started by looking at the entire Applegate Watershed…..50,000 acres
They limited the area to that which was already covered by existing NEPA….7,622 acres
They then removed areas with (concerns around litigation, protests and other issues)….1,938 acres
They only included areas where all Survey & Manage survey requirements
had already been met….1,384 acres
They excluded “uneconomical” areas due to light touch management….463 acres
They avoided other areas to address additional public concerns….245 acres

Instead of the pilot projects, federal officials should focus on fundamental change in how federal forests are managed, such as a bipartisan plan introduced in December from Oregon Reps. Peter DeFazio, Greg Walden and Kurt Schrader, according to Partin.

“We wish we could believe the promises of Secretary Salazar and this Administration when it comes to providing a sustainable level of timber, but their track record over the past three years has been abysmal. Instead, we are offered nothing more than more planning, process and empty promises while the forests of Oregon and the communities that depend on them suffer.”

Good news out of Southern Oregon: three pilot Bureau of Land Management forestry projects led by retired professors are showing promising results so far.

The projects in the Medford, Roseburg and Coos Bay forest districts, which we last wrote about here, “indicate it’s possible to retain old trees, protect watersheds and wildlife and still provide jobs,” said Jerry Franklin, a retired professor of ecosystem science at University of Washington, and Norm Johnson, a retired professor of forestry resources at Oregon State University, this week in the Oregonian.

The projects have been successful enough that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ken Salazar will hold a town hall meeting in Medford on Tuesday, Feb. 21. to discuss the pilot project there.

The projects were designed to bridge the gap between the concerns of timber companies and environmental groups, and so far, it appears that’s possible, according to Franklin and Johnson.

A lay person’s reaction to seeing the projects might be, “Oh my gosh, there’s still a forest here,” Franklin said Wednesday afternoon. He and Johnson were on their way to the 900-acre Medford project, where 250 acres was sold for timber and is being logged.

Large old trees will be left standing while other trees will be logged, but none by clearcutting. In addition to producing wood products, the work will reduce the threat of damage from fire or disease and increase the diversity of tree stands, Franklin said.

The projects represent a middle ground between timber industry advocates who call for intensive logging and environmental groups that want the forests preserved, he said.

“They want you to believe that’s your two choices,” he said, while the projects show there are “a whole array of choices.”

The Coos Bay and Roseburg project sites are being prepared for timber sales later this year. Franklin said BLM staff adapted quite easily to the revised management directives.

It’s been months now since local and federal leaders started trying to figure out a solution for timber-dependent counties in the West that are facing the loss of federal timber payments. In the meantime, the affected counties in Washington, Oregon, California and Idaho are already feeling the pinch.

In Lane County, Ore., the sheriff’s office is preparing to close half its jail beds, cuts its patrol staff to only four deputies and stop supervising parolees who are convicted of misdemeanors. Every department in the county, not just the sheriff’s office, will be forced to cut 25 percent of their budget next year.

California Watch just took an in-depth look at the timber payment problem in California and said the problem will be particularly acute in rural schools. According to Siskiyou County Schools Superintendent Kermith Walters, even if Congress comes up with a solution, it may come too late.

“The fact is the students are going to lose on this,” (Walters) said.

It’s not just the timber industry at stake – it’s the economies and well-being of rural residents across the West, according to the California Watch story.

For forest counties, timber brought more than just revenue: It provided jobs that kept families working, children in schools and enrollment afloat. When the timber industry left, so did families, draining schools of much-needed attendance money.

Between 1990 and 2010, the number of workers in logging in California dropped 65 percent, to 1,800, state data shows. Related industries, including wood product manufacturing and sawmills, have seen similar declines. The state now imports about 80 percent of its wood.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Joe Silva, Tuolumne County’s superintendent of schools. “We have the wood right here … but we’re restricting ourselves out of business.”

In Siskiyou and Trinity, California’s biggest timber counties, unemployment rates, not seasonally adjusted, are consistently higher than the state average – at 18.3 and 17.8 percent, respectively, compared with the state’s 10.9 percent in December. K-12 enrollment in both counties has dropped 30 percent in the last 15 years.

“What we’re seeing is people leaving because we don’t have anything here. We don’t have an economy,” said Walters, the superintendent, who has lived in Siskiyou County his entire life.

With such high stakes, it was disappointing to see environmental groups in Oregon come out with a tone-deaf proposal to replace the timber money. Instead of renewing the payments or increasing the timber harvest to help local residents, the environmental groups proposed raising the harvest tax on private forest owners and raising property taxes for residents of timber-dependent counties.

Reaction to the environmentalists’ proposal was quick.

“Their plan is simple and it won’t work,” said Oregon Democratic Reps. Peter DeFazio and Kurt Schrader, and Republican Rep. Greg Walden.

The Medford Mail Tribune said a plan from the three congressmen to increase the timber harvest “might sound to most people like a reasonable compromise. But the environmental movement stopped compromising a long time ago.”

The Coos Bay World:

Conservation groups want Oregon’s timber counties to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But first, they want to take away our boots…If this is a joke, it’s a cruel one.

Just days after announcing new management rules for federal forests, the U.S. Forest Service said it was undergoing an ambitious series of 20 forest management and thinning projects around the country.

The two Washington projects are in the Colville National Forest and the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. What’s notable, according to KPLU Radio, is that the Forest Service is devoting millions to existing public-private partnerships that emphasize cooperation, rather than projects that have yet to get off the ground or that don’t have a wide variety of stakeholders.

(Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack) announced a new round of grants on Thursday for collaboration in national forests – all aimed at taking better care of the nation’s managed forests, with the ultimate goals of preventing expensive wildfires, promoting recreation and creating badly needed jobs in rural areas.

Forest Service Associate Chief Mary Wagner was at Vilsack’s side as he announced the grants during a conference call with reporters.

She says keeping the national lands that border on Canada healthy has been challenging.

Some stands of pine in Washington have become beetle infested and vulnerable to wildfires. In order to promote more healthy, resilient forests,Wagner says, the US is funding these collaborative efforts.

“To address climate impacts and how they are changing forests,” she explained.

In Colville, about $1 million will go for the first time to the Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition and in Okanogan-Wenatchee, a second year of funding will be granted to the Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative.

Gov. Christine Gregoire and Public Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark issued a press release saying how pleased they were with the project funding.

“This investment is good for our forests, and it’s good for our economic recovery,” Gregoire said. “This funding will help develop new models of sustainable management while creating jobs in rural parts of our state. I commend those involved in developing this proposal. Their collaboration has paid off.”

The thinning projects across the country come with a dose of reality though. The Forest Service pledged to increase its lumber production on federal lands from 2.4 billion board feet in 2011 to 3 billion board feet by 2014, a 20 percent increase.

According to the Redding Record-Searchlight:

(3 billion board feet) is, surprisingly enough given the housing bust and stereotypes about Democratic administrations’ tree-hugging priorities, more than any year since 2000. The 3 billion board-feet goal, however, is still a smaller harvest than most years in the Clinton administration — and less than one-quarter of the 1980s peak.

It’s probably fatuous to imagine that kind of timber cut could come back, but it’s an economic loss the rural north state and similar regions still struggle to replace.

We’re in a new world and the harvests of old won’t be returning anytime soon. Still, as the Redding paper points out, it’s important to recognize that the management of federal forests is changing.

At least the Forest Service is, slowly, trying to find a sustainable way forward. Every little bit helps.