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Pioneering National Forest Collaboration Celebrates 10 Years of Success

Restoration provides path to new model for public lands management

Diverse stakeholders come together to celebrate ten years of hard work redefining forest management in the Pacific Northwest.

Contact:
Chandra LeGue – 541.344.0675 (office) and 541.915.2563 (cell)

Twenty years ago, the Siuslaw National Forest was home to some of the bitterest battles over old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. Today, thanks to the collaborative work of dozens of non-profit organizations, timber companies, watershed councils, and other partners, the Siuslaw is a model for forest management in the region.

This week, the Siuslaw Stewardship Group celebrates its 10th anniversary and collects a national honor – the Two Chiefs Award. The recognition comes jointly from U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Chief Tom Tidwell and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Chief Dave White for exemplary collaborative work to support conservation.

“It’s a fitting tribute for the Siuslaw to win this award during our stewardship group’s tenth anniversary,” commented Chandra LeGue, who has represented the conservation group Oregon Wild on the Siuslaw collaborative for six years. “The restoration efforts here have really changed the game for national forest management and made people realize that collaboration can lead to jobs in the woods without environmental degradation.”

Home to coastal salmon, the threatened marbled murrelet, and some of Oregon’s fastest growing trees, the Siuslaw National Forest was a hot spot in the fight to stop ancient forest logging in the 1980s. During the height of public lands logging, the timber sale planning program looked far different than it does today under the guidance of the stewardship group. Then, plans to clear-cut or salvage log old forests were pushed through as fast as possible, drawing inevitable appeals and litigation aimed at saving wildlife or large trees.

After the Northwest Forest Plan went into effect in 1994, forest planners were required to preserve more old-growth and riparian habitat for native wildlife that had been pushed to the brink. Managers at the Siuslaw National Forest saw an opportunity to advance restoration goals, and new “stewardship authorities” provided an opening to pursue a new type of management through collaboration.

In 2001, the Siuslaw Stewardship Group was formed. It has brought diverse stakeholders together to design projects from the ground up based on commonly held goals of ecological restoration. Additionally, the new stewardship law has allowed for dollars generated through stewardship timber sales to “stay on the forest” and be reallocated towards various types of forest and watershed restoration work. Under the new system, timber companies are more certain that sales will move forward, and the money paid to remove trees from the forest is plowed back into enhancing forest health in other parts of the Siuslaw.

The anniversary of the Siuslaw Stewardship Group comes at an important time. Despite the many successes of collaboratively-based forest management, short-sighted special interests and the politicians they influence have continued to push for a return to large-scale old-growth logging. Oregonians are still unsure if a Bush-era plan to log Bureau of Land Management forests in western Oregon (the WOPR) will some day move forward. There is additional uncertainty surrounding habitat protection plans for threatened wildlife such as the northern spotted owl.

“Even though we’ve had so much success in the Siuslaw, there is still a lot of work left to be done to expand this restoration vision across Oregon and the rest of the region,” added LeGue. “If we could just finally move beyond the tired old debate over logging ancient forests, we could see the restoration model take hold and – who knows – the Willamette, Malheur, and Deschutes National Forests could be winning the Two Chiefs award in the years to come.”

Facts and figures on ten years of restoration in the Siuslaw.

A flow chart of how the Siuslaw Stewardship Group works.

More details on the celebration event for the 10th anniversary.

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