Unlikely Allies: Collaborative group works past differences to focus on forest health

Unlikely allies (including Oregon Wild) are joining forces to improve conditions on the Malheur National Forest and put people back to work in the woods - one project at a time.

Unlikely allies are joining forces to improve conditions on the Malheur National Forest and put people back to work in the woods - one project at a time.

The allies began working together almost a year ago as the Grant County Collaborative Group. Since then they have selected the site for a first project - Dads Creek - and have chosen a new name for themselves, the Blue Mountains Forest Partners.

The process has been bumpy at times.

"You can't take these very different individuals, with widely divergent values, and throw them together in a room and expect it to be just great, all the time," said Eric Wunz, of the Malheur National Forest. But he and others are encouraged by the way people have stayed with the process.

The partnership includes state and federal agencies, community members, the Grant County Court, forest products industry officials, logging contractors, the non-profit organization Sustainable Northwest, and representatives of environmental and conservation groups.

"We're an extremely diversified group," said Mike Browning, a private logging contractor who helped get the effort going.

Frustration over the stalemate in the woods was a big motivator for Browning and others who have joined the collaboration. They tick off a litany of concerns: forest fuels building up due to decades of fighting fires; expensive litigation that stops harvest and salvage work in the woods; budget and staff cuts for the Forest Service managers; mill shutdowns across the region; high unemployment; destabilized rural communities ...

The situation has prompted some to re-evaluate strongly held positions of the past.

"Maybe it's an exaggeration, but 20 years ago, some of these folks would have been at each other's throats," said Tim Lillebo, a field representative with Oregon Wild, formerly the Oregon Natural Resources Council. "Now we're sitting side by side. Sure there's still disagreement - Which tree to cut? Who knows? - But we're talking.

"And we're all learning from each other."

Participants say field trips to the woods have helped to shape their alliance.

"You can sit in a room and put forth your position all day long, in the abstract," Wunz said. "But you go out and actually see how this tree is competing with this other tree that I value ... It changes things.

"Even within the Forest Service, we can have a disagreement in the office over treatment of a stand, but we go out into the woods and it's usually not an argument anymore."

With the collaborative group, the viewpoints are even more divergent, but the goal of a healthier forest - with its ramifications for wildlife, recreation, jobs, communities and more - has become the meeting point.

On the Dads Creek project, the group hopes to:

• Reduce the threat of wildfire near homes and community infrastructure.

• Increase forest diversity and fire-resiliency.

• Enhance presence and diversity of hardwood trees.

• Enhance water habitats.

• Enhance old-growth forest characteristics.

• Offset the project costs and create economic opportunities through use of woody biomass removed in forest treatments.

While the group has identified two other areas for possible projects, Dads Creek got the nod for No. 1 because it is part of the wildland urban interface - a designation for areas where homes and forest are intermingled. The partners, in a fact sheet on the project, noted that "current forest conditions poses problems for ecosystem health and adjacent homeowners."

The Dads Creek project includes about about 7,500 acres of Malheur National Forest and Bureau of Land Management land west of Dixie Summit and on both sides of Highway 26.

Fire is a significant threat to private property in wildland interface areas, which "makes it higher priority for us," said Wunz. That also give land managers some tools and flexibility under the Healthy Forests Recovery Act.

Wunz said the area is a mix of forest types and conditions. West of the highway, there is predominantly second growth timber - mostly ponderosa pine with some Douglas and grand fir - that was railroad-logged in the past, with pine and fir trees on south-facing slopes. East of the highway, the terrain is marked by timber on west-facing slopes, crossed by streams, and larger, more diverse species of trees.

Wunz said the site offers great opportunities to show how to manage old-growth stands to increase the viability and fire resistance of large trees. That could include taking out some smaller, competing trees - an idea that traditionally has drawn opposition from environmental groups.

"But one of the alternatives is large fires - like the Thorn Creek Fire - which just kill everything," Wunz said.

The collaboration proposes active management to correct past sins.

Lillebo agreed that there are areas where trees need to be removed to restore the health of the stand.

"I'm not talking about cutting down the old growth, but there could be a lot of sawlogs," he said.

He said there will always be some restraints on management in sensitive areas, but that trying to let the forest heal itself is not a good option.

"Just doing nothing, everywhere, will not solve the problem," Lillebo said.

Decades of firefighting have left too many stands vulnerable to major fires, not just the small fires that sweep through the trees and clear out the brush.

"Fire itself is not bad," said Wunz. "But when you start losing 10, 20, 30,000 acres at one time, that's not good anymore."

The Forest Service's role in the project will be to collect data and prepare recommendations for what can be done on specific stands in the area, within the standards of the Malheur Forest's plan.

Wunz said the group will consider preliminary proposals and could have a "landscape proposal" by the end of June for further review by biologists and forest specialists.