The skies in Ashland are clear now, but in summer the town experienced nearly four straight weeks of unhealthy air quality due to wildfire smoke.
Jes Burns / OPB
When you think of the town of Ashland, you may think of a liberal bastion of Shakespeare performances with a postcard-pretty downtown. But it’s also a model of compromise: a community, which put aside its political differences to manage its forests and mitigate its risk from wildfires. Nathanael Johnson, a former journalist with Grist, joins us to share how this unlikely collaboration between loggers, environmentalists and the U.S. Forest Service unfolded in Ashland and serves as a roadmap for other towns and communities in the West threatened by wildfires.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In the 1980s and 90s environmentalists and loggers all across the Northwest were locked in a seemingly never ending battle over forest management. That was true in Ashland as well. But then something surprising happened there. The inescapable reality of worsening wildfires changed the calculus, and the groups started working together. Nathanael Johnson wrote about this in an article that was recently published by InvestigateWest. He joins us now to talk about the lessons other areas can learn from this collaborative. Nathanael Johnson, welcome.
Nathanael Johnson: Hey, it’s great to be here.
Miller: So, you started your story in Ashland and a 1996 confrontation between anti-logging protesters and Forest Service staff. What was happening at the time?
Johnson: In Ashland, the Forest Service had gone up to the forest around the town. The forest sweeps right down into the center of Ashland. The Forest Service was looking up there and saying, ‘gosh there’s a lot of densely packed trees up here and a lot of tinder, a lot of undergrowth that’s really fire prone.’ They started to get really worried about the potential for a fire to burn up a lot of trees, but also to sweep down into town. So, they proposed this plan to reduce some of the density of the trees, which would mean cutting down trees. That led to this really tense confrontation, where these environmental protestors showed up in black ski masks and faced down with the district ranger, Linda Duffy, in this sort of yelling match. They delivered this note – this sort of ransom note type of demand – saying, look if you touch a single tree, there will be consequences. So, that was the atmosphere going into this.
Miller: As you know, a number of members of environmental groups saw the Forest Service’s plan to reduce fire risk as one more excuse to cut down a bunch of big trees.
Johnson: Absolutely.
Miller: And as you know, it took years, but eventually the city of Ashland, the Forest Service, environmental groups, timber industry groups were eventually able to get together and find a compromise. How did they do it?
Johnson: Well, they took a lot of time, as you say. They started meeting around the time of that confrontation. And there was a real destabilization that had happened. The old order was finished. It was clear that the Forest Service could no longer just do what it wanted. The courts had soundly rejected the Forest Service’s attempts to simply do what it wanted, several times. The timber industry was basically demolished. It no longer had the same kind of clout and power. The timber mills in Ashland, one by one, had dried up and blown away. So there was this room for a new order to come about. The environmentalists were able to come out of their defensive crouch and actually build something new. That’s sort of the remarkable thing about this story. It wasn’t simply, ‘we’ve stopped something and we’ve won and that’s the end of it.’ It’s, ‘we’ve stopped something and now we’re going to replace it with something better.’
Miller: You report a memory of folks there in town who said that, at one point after this deal was struck – which basically lead to what we now call thinning, and a bunch of smaller diameter trees being harvested – that log trucks rolled through Ashland, and people who were driving them were greeted with not just the middle finger, but all of people’s hands. They weren’t being treated negatively. What was that like for the people to experience?
Johnson: I think that, as you say, there was this memory of the old days, the bad old days, where it was clear that everybody was on opposite sides. There would be protesters, and there would be the good guys and the bad guys, and they’d yell at each other. Then there was this really remarkable shift, where people on both sides were able to see each other as humans, were able to reassess their own goals and find a new goal that they could work toward in common, which was improving habitat, protecting against fire – trying to make sure that the habitat that was there would stay there and not simply be destroyed by a really big fire. So it was a really positive thing. You found these people that had been on opposite sides of the fence really working together. You had environmentalists celebrating the fact that there were log truck after log truck rolling through town. It was really a remarkable moment.
Miller: But you note a really important piece of this, the economic piece, that this was not a commercially viable logging operation, in the traditional sense. It cost more to do this work, a lot more, than was coming back from the timber revenues from those smaller logs. But that’s just one way to think about the financial piece of an operation like this. The others are more intangible, because it’s not clear to me – certainly not as clear as a timber sale – to say, ‘this is how much the drinking water quality not suffering is worth,’ or ‘this is how much acreage that doesn’t burn is worth.’ So what does this mean in terms of how we should think about, and pay for, forest management going forward?
Johnson: That’s the next real problem. We’re starting to see some movement where, certainly in California and to a large extent in Washington and Oregon as well, the fires have been so big and so crazy and so frightening to so many people that government is starting to throw money at it and do something, which is very unusual to government not simply be reactive and say, ‘okay after a fire we’ll rebuild,’ but look for the other places where the fire is going to come next and say, ‘how do we harden these areas against what’s going to come? How do we turn this wall of flame, this giant forge of BTUs, that’s going to sweep through here on 100 years of brush that’s been deferred.’ All the fires for 100 years that we’ve been putting out and in some areas there were logging operations that were then planted very densely, all of that adds up to intense, intense fires that leave blackened sticks pointing to the sky. Well, if we go into those places and we can thin them down and use fire in the manner of the Native people, which they were doing for hundreds of years before the colonists showed up, we can turn that wall of flame into a gentler cooler flame that creeps along the ground and enriches the forest rather than replaces it with this barren ecosystem. That is actually happening. I think people realize that that is worth a lot of money. You see the costs mounting up from simply the fire suppression efforts. If you look at the Bootleg Fire or the Caldor Fire in California, these big fires, you’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of dollars – billions of dollars in total in the U.S. every year – not to mention the costs of breathing the air laden with smoke, the cost to water systems as you mentioned, the cost to species that have their habitats destroyed. It really makes sense, and at least for the moment when the problem is so intense and in front of our nose, government seems to be paying attention.
Miller: Before we say goodbye, I just want to ask you about a career switch that you recently wrote about on Twitter – going from being an environmental journalist to the electrician trade. You wrote, “Over the last few years I’ve found myself feeling increasingly jealous of the people I interview - foresters, power plant workers, farmers - in short people who interact with physical atoms rather than bits.” But there are a lot of jobs out there you could have sought out. Why become an electrician?
Johnson: I’m not sure I understand what’s going on entirely myself. I need to take some time to reflect and write about this and figure out what’s going on in my head. But I can tell you what happened is that I was taking some time on the weekends to do some DIY stuff around the house, and I was just loving it so much. Then I would go back to my desk, and I would be in misery staring at that blank page. An electrician, especially, is a job that I think it’s suited for someone that has the mind of a journalist. You’re figuring out puzzles; you’re working a lot with your brain as well as your hands. And electricians are really well paid. So it’s one of those moments where it’s like, here’s this hobby I have where I could make more money if I did that full time than my current job. And I’m loving it. So what’s stopping me?
Miller: And work on the electrification of society, which is a piece – a huge piece – of solving climate change. Well, Nathanael Johnson, thanks so much for joining us, and best of luck on your new career.
Johnson: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
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