How to Increase Biological Diversity In Grizzly Bear Habitat

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Recently, Jim Petersen was invited to speak at the early morning meeting of the Sunrise Rotary Club in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He recived a standing ovation...

How to Increase Biological Diversity in Grizzly Bear Habitat

The title of my remarks this morning is How to Increase Biological Diversity in Grizzly Bear Habitat. Now there’s an early morning stem winder if there ever was one! I promise to liven it up for you.

We aren’t well known outside forestry circles, so I’ll start by explaining what we’ve been doing for the last 40 years.

If any of you have questions, Julia and I will try to answer them.

We have samples of our recent work up here. You are welcome to them.

My business card says that I am the founder and president of the non-profit Evergreen Foundation.

I prefer to think of myself as the editor-janitor but it’s probably more accurate for me to say that I’ve been a working journalist for 62 years.

I worked for newspapers in Idaho, Montana, Illinois and Oregon for about six years after my 1966 graduation from the University of Idaho.

Since I was about 15 years old my goal has been to figure out how to make a living writing and fly fishing on the same days.

I am now nearly 82 years old and I think I’ve finally cracked the code!

I started the non-profit Evergreen Foundation in Medford, Oregon in 1985 at the invitation of some local lumbermen and loggers that I knew.

I wrote our 13-word mission statement in October of 1985. Forty years ago this month. We seek to advance public understanding support for science-based forestry and forest policy. That’s the sum total of who we are and what we do.

By mid-1985, the U.S. Forest Service’s first decadal forest plans were done and with these plans came public comment periods mandated by the 1976 National Forest Management Act.

My lumbermen and logger friends weren’t sure what to do but they sensed the need to explain the timber industry’s economic importance to the citizens of southern Oregon and northern California

I was hired to do the explaining which meant that I needed to read every Forest Plan that covered the region.  

There were six of them. Each copy of each plan came in its own cardboard box and each box weighed about 14 pounds. Thousands of pages.

Rotarians in 30-some communities were on my target list. So were Chambers of Commerce, Lions clubs and other civic orgnizations.

There was no Internet in 1985 and cell phones were in their infancy so I used road maps to find small towns I’d never been to before.

I bought a Motorola bag phone. Remember those? If I even looked at the bag U.S. West sent me a bill for about $600.

The short story about those 14-pound planning documents is that 40 years later I’m still trying to explain what’s in them.

The slightly longer story is that my journey into enlightenment has taken me to all 50 states and all of Canada’s forested provinces.

Cell phones are much smaller now and the Internet is free and moves at the speed of light so most non-profits limit their outreach to their websites.

We still publish our periodic print journal, but our work is mostly web focused.

The “we” here is Julia and me.

We’ve been posting fresh content on our website for about 30 years, so it holds more forestry essays than any other site on Earth.

In the web world, you are golden if you can hold someone on your site for 60-90 seconds.

Many of our visitors spend 15-20 minutes trolling our pages. Clearly they are looking for information they can use.

Julia is the social media maven in our house. She understands technology far better than me.

She uses several Internet platforms that allow us to reach about 80,000 people globally.

That’s chump change in the Internet world but huge in the forestry world.

Although we started in southern Oregon, I saw opportunity in visiting other parts of our nation, so in 1995 I sold my home in southern Oregon, bought a 42-foot fifth wheel and spent three years traveling the backroads of the United States and Canada.

I lived and worked much as Charles Kuralt did during the years he was doing his On The Road series for CBS Television.

Kuralt owned a cabin in Fly Fishing Heaven on Western Montana’s Big Hole River.

On learning this, I concluded that if he could figure out how to combine flyfishing with writing, so could I.

Today, Julia and I live in Dalton Gardens. We park a 32-foot travel trailer in a driveway behind the house.

We bought the trailer several years ago and completely remodeled its interior to create work space.

Julia has a great eye for art and color so when you step inside you see what looks more like a gypsy wagon than a conventional travel trailer.

We added an awning with its own wind gauge. If it gets too windy, the awning rolls itself up, even if we aren’t there.

We also added self-leveling 10-ton jacks.

If you’ve ever leveled a big trailer with hand crank jacks in the dark and mud in a rainstorm you know what I mean when I say that pushing one button inside a warm trailer while sipping on a vodka tonic is a lot more fun.

Most of our fishing is on the Kootenai River between Libby Dam and Troy, Montana.

Happily, our largest Evergreen project is centered in the Bull River Valley between Libby and Troy so, yes, Julia and I often fish and work and work and fish in the same days.

Our new project is easily the most interesting we’ve taken on in 40 years. Using a variety of science-based thinning and fuels management techniques we are removing small diameter trees from forests that are so dense it is difficult to walk through them.

In doing so, we are creating secluded travel routes and new food sources for grizzly bears.

Grizzlies were added to the federal Endangered Species list as a threatened species in 1975.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees all T&E species.

Our goal is to assist them in meeting their goals for managing grizzly bear habitat.

Our direct interface is with Wayne Kassworm, the grizzly biologist responsible for bear research and monitoring programs in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem in Northwest Montana and the Selkirk Mountains Ecosystem in Northern Idaho.

Wayne lives in Libby and helped us lay out our first thinning project on Lake Creek south of Troy at the north end of the Bull River Valley.

The land is owned by the Hecla Mining Company which is based here in Coeur d’Alene.

We recently moved our project to the south end of Bull Lake to a large tract of forestland owned by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Our Evergreen job is to document and record what is happening in photographs, video and booklets that explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and the results we expect.

We have about 20 partners representing federal and state agencies. Among them USF&WS, the U.S. Forest Service, the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, Montana, Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, the Salish and Kootenai Tribe at Pablo, Montana, the Kootenai Tribe at Bonners Ferry and my friend Chad Oliver, a PhD professor emeritus from the Yale University School of Forestry and the Environment and the world’s leading authority on forest stand dynamics.

Julia and I are having the time of our lives working with this crew and all of the federal, state and local elected officials who are anxious to see us succeed.

And succeed we will because we are dotting every “I” and crossing every “T.”

There are no shortcuts in this kind of work. The final product – about 4 years hence – will be a peer-reviewed report prepared by a PhD wildlife research biologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station.

This report will surely be tested in federal district courts by groups for whom the grizzly bear’s threatened species listing has become a very lucrative fundraising tool.

Our project paves the way for the U.S. Forest Service to manage habitat in at-risk National Forests in ways that protect both bears and people living in forested communities that have become firetraps because the Forest Service did not dot all of its “I’s” and cross all of its “T’s”.

The agency may soon be doing what we are doing in the Bull River Valley because what we are doing replicates what tribes and Nature did for eons before white settlement began here in the West: creating meadows that hold many clumps of trees of different species and ages.

Among the results:

·       More grizzlies and more food for them.

·       Travel routes through thinned forests that keep bears out of garbage cans in Libby and Troy and away from school playgrounds on the Rocky Mountain Front that are currently protected by 12-foot tall chain link fences topped with concertina wire.

·       Also, a deeper and more diverse grizzly bear gene pool, the key to de-listing the bear.

·       Less destructive wildfires and safer communities.

·       New jobs processing trees removed from forests that are unsustainably dense.

Our project protects all wildlife habitat including riparian zones vital to fish health.  

We thus support the economies of rural towns like Libby and Troy that, in turn, support tourism and outdoor recreation. 

None of this is rocket science. We are all part of Earth’s ecosystems.

We are simply using adaptive forest management techniques to increase biological diversity in grizzly bear habitat.

In two words: Common sense.

Thanks for inviting us to join you this morning. If you have time Julia and I will be happy to stay and visit with you.