Editor's Column

Guest Columns

Woods Wisdom

Notes From All Over

By: Jim Petersen

Canopy mortality based on aerial-photo interpretations. Note the low mortality inside the wilderness where the Silver Fire burned in 1987, and the scale of variation in the northeast sector.

This map illustrates the horrific and widespread damage the 2002 Biscuit Fire inflicted on southern Oregon Siskiyou National Forest. The map is taken from the Forest Service’s recently completed Final Environmental Impact Statement.

In this issue, Montana writer and photographer Dave Skinner journeys to our southern Oregon roots to tell a heartbreaking story about the fiery death of one of America’s most enchanting national forests: the Siskiyou. Evergreen was founded in southern Oregon in 1985. Back then almost every community had at least one family owned sawmill. Virtually all of them were dependent on the federal timber sale program that sprang up in the West after World War II; but most perished a decade ago, victims of the program’s litigation-driven collapse.

Our mission was to encourage citizen participation in the rewrite of federal forest plans that occurred in the mid-1980s. It was a huge job. Forest plans are very complex, often running well over 1,000 pages. We translated seven of them into words ordinary people could understand; then helped build a supporting network of grass roots groups.

By the tens of thousands southern Oregon citizens publicly endorsed science based forestry in the belief that strong local support for rational decision making would keep their forests and communities healthy. In retrospect, they never had a chance, as you will learn in Mr. Skinner’s story about the take-noprisoners war that radical leftists are waging against science and the public. Blame it on an outdated Endangered Species Act, strife inside federal forest management agencies and a 30-year legacy of conflicting laws and regulations that Mr. Skinner and others have likened to the fabled Gordian knot: all the ammunition needed to topple the West’s timber-dependent communities.

The Biscuit Fire dispute, which is the focal point of this story, is only a symptom of the need for more regulatory reform. The publicly popular Healthy Forests Restoration Act, crafted by a bi-partisan congressional coalition and signed into law by President Bush last December, was a step in the right direction, but the lesson in “Siskiyou Showdown” is that we still have a long way to go.

Jim Petersen, Publisher