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Environmentalists and loggers have agreed on a groundbreaking plan to
use a reinvented timber industry to restore forest health by thinning
750,000 acres of dangerously overgrown central Arizona forests.
The
unprecedented cooperative effort has resulted in completion of a final
outline of the plan after nearly a decade of effort, said Bonnie
Stevens, with Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration
Institute.
“We are
very hopeful and we are very enthusiastic,” said Taylor McKinnon, public
lands campaign director for the Centers for Biological Diversity.
“What this
means is we’re all focused on the same goal,” said Etan Aumack, of the
Grand Canyon Trust.”
“These
efforts will set forests and local economies on a path of recovery and
will leave future generations with forested landscapes that will become
assets, not liabilities,” said Molly Pitts, who works for the Northern
Arizona Wood Products Association and serves as co-chair of the
Governor’s Forest Health Council.
The
coalition of local officials known as the 4 Forest Restoration
Initiative (4FRI) includes timber industry representatives and forest
experts. The group has now finalized the plan to use a revitalized
timber industry capable of making a profit on small trees to thin some
50,000 acres annually for the next 20 years.
The target
area represents nearly one-third of the 2.4 million forested acres in
four national forests — the Kaibab, Coconino, Tonto and
Apache-Sitgreaves.
The group
now hopes to convince the U.S. Forest Service to adopt the plan, which
would provide a national model. The pioneering approach would protect
forest communities from wildfires, restore tattered forest ecosystems
and create thousands of jobs — all at a dramatically lower cost to the
taxpayers than the current approach.
The key to
the plan lies in the agreement between the timber industry and
environmentalists that promises to avoid the snarl of lawsuits and
protests that have all but paralyzed forest policy for the past decade —
both in Arizona and nationally.
Studies
suggest the project could yield some 850-million board feet of timber
and 8 million tons of brush and wood, without touching the largest
trees. That could produce as many as 13,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in
wood products, according to NAU researchers.
The
breakthrough agreement between loggers and environmentalists enshrined
in the 4FRI’s just completed Path Forward, represents the first such
comprehensive consensus after decades of lawsuits and controversy.
The
deteriorating condition of the forest itself made the agreement vital. A
century ago, tree densities averaged around 50 trees per acre. But as a
result of cattle grazing, fire suppression and logging — densities have
now grown to perhaps 1,000 trees per acre. Many areas have not
experienced a normal fire in 100 years.
As a
result, communities like Payson, Pine, Strawberry, Christopher Creek,
Show Low and Flagstaff face a grave threat from forest fires fueled by
vast tree thickets. Moreover, dense, “doghair” thickets of saplings
support a much less diverse set of plants and animals than the broad,
grassy, old-growth forests dominated by giant, 200- to 800-year-old
ponderosa pines.
Both sides
now agree they must revive a profitable timber industry without touching
the big trees — anything over 16 inches in diameter or old enough to
develop the distinctive, yellow-red, vanilla-scented bark of a ponderosa
that sprouted before about 1880, said McKinnon, representing the Centers
for Biological Diversity.
McKinnon
estimated that such big, old-growth trees represent less than about 3
percent of the hundreds of millions of trees in the study area, which
stretches from the Grand Canyon to New Mexico and includes all of the
Rim Country.
“The big
thing is that we’ve come up with a tree-retention strategy,” said
McKinnon.
The plan
would leave most of the 16-inch trees untouched, unless a site-specific
study demonstrated that cutting the larger trees on that particular site
would benefit wildlife or protect homes from the threat of wildfire.
All sides
hope that the Forest Service will embrace the plan and work with timber
companies to provide long-term contracts to harvest the trees less than
16 inches in diameter. Studies suggest that money-making sawmills could
use that small diameter wood to make particle board and new varieties of
composite lumber as well as provide fuel for power generation plants.
The
Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest has pioneered that approach with a
long-term contract with loggers known as the White Mountains Stewardship
Contract. Timber companies have thinned some 38,000 acres in the past
five years. Congress authorized the long-term contract as a pilot
program after the 2002, 500,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which cost $50
million to fight.
That
long-term contract helped develop interest in small-diameter tree mills
and wood products, but the Forest Service has had to kick in millions of
dollars in taxpayer funds to subsidize the thinning operations — which
have focused on not only restoring forest health but protecting
communities like Show Low from wildfires.
Backers of
the 4FRI approach hope that the timber companies can make enough money
from the small trees that taxpayers will pay little or nothing to thin
some 750,000 acres.
The
environmentalist hope that once the forest has been thinned, forest
managers can once again rely on the natural, low-intensity ground fires
to keep the forest healthy.
Studies
show that in the pre-settlement forests, ground fires burned through
every five to seven years, consuming the small trees and downed wood,
returning nutrients to the soil and nurturing a lush growth of grass
without hurting the big, thick-barked, high-branched trees. Such
pre-settlement forests had mostly big trees — but a patchwork of meadows
and denser forests.
In this
view of the forest’s long-term future, the Forest Service would let
natural fires burn across millions of acres and focus its harvest and
thinning efforts on those buffer zones on the outskirts of forest
communities too close to buildings to risk natural wildfires.
On the
other hand, many advocates for the timber industry hope that a
re-invented timber industry will have a permanent job as a substitute
for natural fires across great expanses of forest.
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