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The forest
wars are officially over, declared a blue ribbon panel gathered to greet
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in Christopher Creek Saturday
as he toured a groundbreaking effort to restore forest health and
protect fire-threatened communities.
“This is
great work, great work,” said Vilsack of the years of effort that have
forged a consensus on the need to restore forest health by reinventing
the timber industry to thin millions of acres in four national forests
between Williams and Alpine — including all of Rim Country.
Local
officials led by Payson Mayor Kenny Evans and First District
Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick triggered the rare visit by the head of a
major federal agency. Vilsack, the former Iowa governor, now heads the
federal agency that administers the Forest Service, which owns most of
the land in Gila County.
Vilsack
said the collaboration between environmentalists, Forest Service
administrators, and both state and local officials will serve as a
national model.
“I’m
hoping to look back on this day as the official end of the forest wars,”
said Todd Schulke, an analyst for the Center for Biological Diversity,
one of the most aggressive environmental groups in blocking logging in
old growth forests. In a nod to Gila County Supervisor Tommie Martin,
also on the panel, Schulke quipped, “Maybe Tommie can put up an
historical marker.”
Kirkpatrick, a first-term congresswoman and former Flagstaff prosecutor
and state lawmaker, pushed hard to get Vilsack to make the trip, hoping
to win high-level backing for the ambitious effort and for federal
funding for thinning projects to protect fire-menaced communities.
“We all
know a healthy forest means a healthy economy and healthy families and
we’ve all seen what wildfires can do. So this is the end of the timber
wars and it’s been years and years in the making,” Kirkpatrick said.
Vilsack,
who admitted he grew up in Pittsburgh, said he’d had a crash course in
the importance of the nation’s forests, which get some 260 million
visits annually.
“When I
got this job, I realized that for far too long, the Forest Service has
been a kind of stepchild and I wanted to figure out what we could do to
change the dynamic.”
He said
the local efforts to figure out a way to use the timber industry to
restore the forest provides just such a dramatic shift.
“I’m going
to tell President Obama that we really do need to figure out how to
leverage this resource — as you all have figured out. We do believe you
are onto something.”
The
so-called Four Forests initiative involved a years-long series of
studies to forge an agreement on how much wood a refocused timber
industry could take out of the region’s forests. In that vast area, tree
densities have risen from perhaps 50 per acre to more than 1,000 per
acre after a century of grazing, logging and fire suppression.
Now, with
the remaining big trees beset by debilitating thickets of saplings and
forest communities menaced by the threat of monster wildfires, the
formerly warring factions have agreed on ground rules that could
guarantee timber companies millions of trees annually if they can build
mills and biofuel plants than can make money on little trees.
Only such
a reinvention of the timber industry can offset the otherwise ruinous
cost of hand-thinning — a cost of more than $1,000 per acre.
“The
answer’s in the economy, not the treasury,” said Martin.
Corbin
Newman, regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service, said his agency
has invested $2 million in this effort to “rewrite the rule book because
there’s not enough money to do this the way we have in the past.”
The new
approach is already on display in the form of the White Mountain
Stewardship Contract, a long-term contract with a timber company that
has built a mill to handle small trees.
The Forest
Service has guaranteed the right to harvest 5,000 to 15,000 acres
annually, in return for a focus on thinning buffers around forest
communities at dramatically reduced cost.
A study
that brought together forest managers, environmentalists and timber
industry representatives reached remarkable agreement on the wood that
could be harvested on some 2.4 million acres in the Coconino, Tonto and
Apache-Sitgreaves forests.
Only about
40,000 big trees greater than 16 inches in diameter remain. Such big,
fire-resistant trees were long the mainstay of the timber industry, but
also vital to forest ecology. By contrast, that area now has some 850
million board feet of wood in the form of smaller diameter trees and 8
million tons of brush and wood that could be burned in energy-producing
power plants, the study concluded.
That would
provide more than enough wood to supply power plants and the timber
industry for the next 20 years.
Researchers from Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration
Institute have estimated that using the timber industry to thin just
half of the overgrown land in the study area would produce 13,000 jobs
and forest products worth $1.1 billion.
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