Resources and Reflections

Source;  PhysOrg.com
June 21st, 2009 By JEFF BARNARD , Associated Press WriterEnlarge

In this May 15, 2009 photo, Lomakotsi Restoration Project crew supervisor Aaron Nauth stands on the stump of a centuries old tree and looks over an old clearcut that his team has thinned on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest outside Takilma, Ore. (AP Photo/Jeff Barnard)

(AP) — On a steep slope of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, a crew of young men with chain saws and hardhats worked their way through an old neglected clearcut, cutting brush and young trees and piling the remains to be burned later.

Freshly trained and closely supervised, the crew took care to leave behind volunteer sproutings of dogwood, madrone and huckleberry as well as the sugar pine and Douglas fir planted here 20 years ago. The pattern is designed to grow into a healthy forest less vulnerable to wildfire and better for fish and wildlife, rather than just turn out timber.

The House Hope Stewardship Project, taken off the shelf with $1.4 million from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, will thin and restore 890 acres.

It’s a tiny fraction of the 60 million to 80 million acres the U.S. Forest Service estimates need it nationwide, but people here feel as if this is a start – not only to grappling with the growing threat of wildfire in a warming climate, but in healing rifts between environmentalists, the timber industry and the Forest Service that have left the national forests in limbo.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is peace in the valley, but we are closer than ever before,” said Shane Jimerfield, director of the Siskiyou Project, a local conservation group that grew out of the protests.

The national forests of the Northwest became a crucial national lumber source after World War II when the baby boom fueled a huge demand for new houses. But by the 1980s scientists began to worry that species like the northern spotted owl and some salmon were headed for extinction due to a loss of habitat.

Environmentalists won court orders stopping that logging, and the Clinton administration came up with the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, which cut logging by more than 80 percent and set aside huge areas for fish and wildlife habitat. After President George W. Bush was elected in 2000 his administration tried to dismantle the Northwest Forest Plan and increase logging but was repeatedly blocked by more court rulings.

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