The fire season that began November 15, 2010 was devastating, which spawned more than 29,000 fires, burned more than 3.9 million acres, destroyed 2,912 homes and claimed 10 lives, including those of four firefighters.

Was this a problem with our national forests and environmental challenges? No, it was in Texas, and those fires had nothing to do with legal challenges of timber sales but everything to do with drought, wind, and high temperatures.

But if one takes the recent Thomas Bonnicksen (ironically from Texas) commentary in Evergreen, Death Of A Forest: Why we Should Care, at face value, our forests are ready to explode in flame, mostly due to litigation and our nations' environmental laws. I thought we were through with the big bad fire scare stories but this is a real throwback.

Ignoring the science that weather drives fire far more than fuel loads, and the fact that you can't fire proof forests, but you can fire proof your house, Bonnicksen does a disservice by pointing fingers in the wrong direction. The final laugher is when Bonnicksen describes bringing a group of people to a burned stand and how they don't see wildlife in their brief visit. Was that scientific research or was it just noisy people with an agenda? Before we start throwing out our environmental laws, we should ask ourselves if we want to return to the days of fouled rivers, dirty air and clearcut hillsides.

How do people want their public forests managed? According to the Oregon Forests Values and Beliefs Study, commissioned by the Oregon Department of Forestry at the height of the recent recession and published in June 2010: "Oregonians want timber harvesting to remain an important part of Oregon's economy, but only if harvesting is done in a sustainable manner. This means balancing economic, environmental and recreational interests -- having a healthy harvest each year while maintaining all that they value about the forests." Every collaborative forest group I am involved in shares this same philosophy. But we find sometimes the Forest Service doesn't want our help and has systemic problems that hamstring its restoration goals. I want to explore those problems, but first a little ecology.

The U.S. forests and their cohorts of wildlife, insects, fungi, plants and trees evolved with fire. That fire came in varying intervals from every few years to every few hundred years. The often maligned lodgepole stands often burned in a stand replacing manner. If you do the numbers of forested acres, and fire intervals you quickly see that across the U.S on average a few million acres are bound to burn annually. But the big fires only occur during the right weather conditions, such as the 1910 fire in north Idaho that spread with hurricane force winds. But, on some sites, such as those at lower elevations and near communities, there has been a substantial fuel buildup, due to fire-suppression and logged stands growing up with thickets of trees.

Given this, most groups, including ours, support some human intervention, especially in drier sites near communities. But how about looking at practical solutions to implementation? Can we work together to solve challenging resource issues? Some say that collaboration is an avenue to getting work done on the ground. Others, like frequent Evergreen contributor Barry Wynsma, don't care for public input. Here is Wynsma responding to comments on a project in North Idaho "I must admit that while this exercise has been useful and enjoyable, I feel somewhat uncomfortable with having the group write the purpose and need rather than relying on the professionals that we taxpayers are paying to do this work." This attitude among current and former Forest Service staff is a challenge for collaboration, because it sends a "Don't tell us how to do our job" signal when it is painfully obvious the agency is unable to do its job.

Bonnicksen and Wynsma both like to call anyone who doesn't agree with their view an extremist. I would call Bonnicksen a "soft" scientist who cherry picks his research to support his views, and Wynsma is an old school forester who helped oversee the massive clearcutting and roadbuilding on the Idaho Panhandle that took place until our nations environmental laws stopped it (for the most part). So what does a collaboration minded "extremist" do when his partners in the woods product industry and the rural communities next to the public forest need help? We collaborate.

Not all collaboration works well

How a collaborative group interacts with the Forest Service can help define both the level work that a collaboration will accomplish, as well as its longevity. My experience with collaborative efforts on three National Forests (the Colville, Kootenai and Idaho Panhandle National Forests) has given me valuable insights of what works and what doesn't.

Most forest collaborations seem to start at the project level, often a fuel reduction project. The goals are usually to build trust with diverse interests, find common ground on how a project is designed, and build a working relationship with the Forest Service. The way it has worked on the Colville National Forest is that the Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition developed silvicultural and management guidelines independently of the Forest Service. These guidelines are then used to indicate the LEVEL of SUPPORT that the coalition would give to a project. We developed these guidelines independent of the Forest Service, and it empowered our coalition when we found common ground on issues such as thinning, regeneration, road density, etc. This seemed to be working, to a point.

Then we realized a dirty little secret - the agency was bringing us projects after they had already decided what they wanted to do! They had usually invested several years in looking at a project area, and designed a timber sale, well before the project went to scoping. So all we were doing was providing them with a few nuanced comments, and as long as the projects generally fit within our coalitions guidelines we would be supportive. While I am generally satisfied with the two dozen projects we have supported, and there has been no litigation for nearly 10 years, only a small fraction of what our coalition thought would be appropriate to treat has been carried out.

On the Idaho Panhandle and Kootenai Forests, the Forest Service has usually been in the room, and this has slowed the ability of the collaborative groups to find common ground. At some point it is important to have the Forest Service look at collaboratively developed guidelines and give their thoughts. But, I believe groups need to be careful about creating or developing guidelines WITH the Forest Service. First, I have noticed a tendency to defer to the agency when they are in the room, which can lead to the collaborative group simply rubber stamping projects. I also believe developing guidelines with the agency could violate the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and create severe pushback from those not in the collaborative group - who might legitimately feel that some "deal" was being made with a particular segment of the public.

What if the Forest Service doesn't follow our guidelines? When components of a project fall outside the guidelines, we meet with the agency and try to resolve/accept those components so that we can still give a high level of support. The high level of support commits the members of the coalition to supporting the project, even in court - so it has had the effect of giving more certainty that Decisions will go forward. The result is that out of two dozen projects on the Colville National Forest, all but one have received a high level of support (the other was a medium level). For The Lands Council the guidelines have also been an effective way to communicate to other conservation groups what a project will look like and that has increased their buy-in. Our guidelines are "draft" in the sense that new science, input from the Forest Service, etc. can always modify them a bit.

Bureaucratic Culture

So what happens when a National Forest has no appeals or litigation and wide agreements on how to manage forest stands? In the simplistic world of Bonnicksen, the timber floodgates should open, forest health should return and wildlife will abound. In the real world, there are structural and budgetary problems with the Forest Service that mean projects will not get planned and implemented. Forest Service staffing has dramatically decreased over the past two decades, you can blame Congress for cutting budgets. But the agency also has internal problems. The revolving door of supervisors and rangers is serious problem and not just because new transfers have to learn their new turf. The incentive to rise up the pay scale by being competent just means the best people will be transferred out of the office, while the rest, including underachievers, stay put.

Conservation and Industry

Once conservation and timber interests find a way to get along, we find that we both want to push the agency to improve their performance. Here is part of a conservation memo that recently made the rounds, it could apply to any national forest:

Objective: Create the means by which the Forest can treat more acres and generate more timber consistent with our collaborative agreements even as its budget declines due to federal cutbacks. Our measure of success is lower unit costs through collaboration.
Analysis: We been intently evaluating the breakdown in productivity, and comparing notes with collaborations on other forests. Though there are positive exceptions, we judge the problems to be generally systemic and institutional, relating to issues like staff recalcitrance and budget disincentives resulting in a general resistance to input by collaboratives. Moreover, since the problems manifest early in the planning process, even success in outsourcing NEPA would fall short.
Details:
1. The five-year planning process (5YPP) has not adopted the coalition's landscape approach to forest restoration, leading to projects that are disconnected from the larger landscape.
2. Our successes are not scaled up because each time we cause a misconceived project (or unit) to be modified, National Forest leaders isolate it to that specific instance. Each point must be refought every time, undermining the value of developing protocols.
3. Districts and Forests handle issues (plant associations, management indicator species, old growth, prescription definitions, road construction, use of prescribed fire, etc) differently.
4. National Forest Research Stations, such as those at Moscow and Corvalis, should play an important role in ensuring best science is used, but this research is often ignored by Forest staff.
5. Agency job descriptions and budgets (competitive within ID teams) are structured such that collaborative signals are perceived as a threat encroaching on turf or resources.
6. The agency lacks the ability to track costs on per project or within project bases, so there's no means by which to control or refocus investment to address inefficiencies.
7. There remains an irrational fear of appeals, even as they fade into distant memory.
8. The forest lacks expertise due to open positions.
Remedial options:
1. Partner with the Regional Forester to test institutional changes based on collaboration.
• Bring the coalition into the 5YPP process.
• Have coalition members sit formally on project ID teams, so collaboration partners can bring diverse interests to the table.
• Test use of iterative EA's for landscape scale (multi phase) projects, perhaps per the process laid out in the Forest Restoration Strategy.
• Provide incentives for adopting non-controversial through staff awards, abbreviated NEPA, budget signals, etc.
2. Explore whether engaging the national USFS office (so-called National Collaborative Cadre) to put training or other resources into the Forest would help.
3. Explore opportunities for alternative modes of funding projects. Perhaps state funds conditioned on improved process could get some results.
4. Change the policy that causes quality staff to leave, by creating performance based incentives.

Changing the way the Forest Service works is not going to be easy. But the first step is identifying the problems and exploring solutions. We can only do this if we work together.

Mike Petersen
Executive Director
The Lands Council