Logging plans for some Eastern Oregon forests may now prioritize wildlife

Some loggers headed in to cut down trees in the Blue Mountains may soon be prioritizing habitat over board feet. That’s because Blue Mountains Forest Partners, a group of stakeholders including loggers, environmentalists, ranchers, landowners, timber industry representatives, elected officials and federal land managers, has just finalized a new draft of what’s called a wildlife habitat zone of agreement. The plan takes a wildlife-centric perspective to forest management, trying to address habitat needs of species when considering which trees to cut. Mark Webb, the executive director of Blue Mountains Forest Partners, takes us on a tour of forest lands that have been managed with woodpeckers in mind.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Some loggers heading in to cut trees in the Blue Mountains may soon be prioritizing habitat over board feet. That’s because of Blue Mountains Forest Partners - a group of stakeholders including loggers, environmentalists, ranchers, landowners, timber industry representatives, elected officials and federal land managers - they’ve just finalized a new draft of what’s called a wildlife habitat zone of agreement. The plan takes a wildlife-centric perspective to forest management, trying to address habitat needs of species when considering which trees to cut.

Mark Webb is the executive director of Blue Mountains Forest Partners. He took us yesterday to a spot in the Malheur National Forest that was burned in the massive Canyon Creek Complex Fire of 2015. I asked him how Blue Mountains Forest Partners came to be.

Mark Webb: Well, essentially, there’s two aspects to that: One is that the environmental community, environmental attorneys, had been successfully litigating timber projects on the Malheur…

Miller: Meaning stopping logging.

Webb: Yeah, stopping logging. For us, active management on the Malheur was essentially equated with logging and then any associated service work. A former commissioner, Boyd Britton, when he was in office was at one of the lawsuits, the federal courts in Portland [and] asked some people, who was successfully shutting us down. Somebody pointed him to Susan Jane Brown, and he went over and said, ‘You know, we’ve really got to do something different. This isn’t working for our community. There’s got to be a way to work through this, and I want to invite you to Grant County.’ And, as Boyd would do, he teased her. He says, ‘I want to take you out and I’ll bring you back.’

Miller: And then there were meetings. Folks may have actually seen a story in Oregon Field Guide about this, about the partnership. But what do you remember from the first meetings, when these really opposing sides sat together in rooms?

Webb: What I recall is an incredible amount of distrust and anger and frustration… No good vibes whatsoever. At the time, the first meeting, we were at The Outpost. That room is no longer what it was, but it was a big conference room.

Miller: It’s a restaurant and bar in town?

Webb: Yeah. So the community members and industry were essentially on one side of the room, and the environmental and conservation community members were on the other. We simply couldn’t talk with one another without getting fighting mad and spitting. It’s easy to understand: If somebody threatens your livelihood, you get upset. And if, in terms of the livelihood threatening something you value in the woods, you get upset. So it was really pretty challenging. But we had a third party, neutral facilitator that would go back and forth between us, talking for us. It was kind of like labor negotiations and mediation where management and the union reps either couldn’t, or wouldn’t talk with one another and somebody was going back and forth because it was so toxic. So that’s essentially how it started.

Miller: Was there a point when you thought, ‘Oh, this actually might work.’ Because it seems like, at the beginning, there maybe was little reason to believe that you all would find common ground. Was there a point when you thought, ‘No, maybe we can each give a little, or maybe that talking will accomplish something?’

Webb: Well, for my part, what was clear to me after a few meetings is that everybody agreed that status quo wasn’t working. So, while the environmental community had effectively shut down active management on the Malheur, they were doing it because of the ecological values they held dearly like saving old growth and the like. And they were beginning to appreciate that the old growth trees and other ecosystem services that they had saved from logging were being increasingly lost to wildfires that were higher severity, larger and more frequent than anything they were used to. So, in that regard, I did feel like, early on, the only hope is that both sides agree that this can’t go on.

Miller: And fire, the increasing severity of fire because of a lot of things – because of fire suppression and some forestry practices – that helped bring people together in some ways.

Webb: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that, at least for my part, I wasn’t aware of the way in which what we now call or describe this as a fire-adapted landscape and 100 years of management had changed that. The conservation environmental community members we worked with might have been familiar with that. Some of them were more into the science. I wasn’t aware of that; I just knew that more fires were happening and that this mattered to them because they were losing the old growth. So I think for both of us it was just a point at which there was no option but to try to work together. Beyond that, I can’t say that at that time I felt hopeful about it.

In terms of my academic background, philosophically, academically, a big part of what I did was talk through really challenging things to tease apart misunderstandings, to tease out assumptions, to get clear about what you’re actually saying because it really became clear in some of our conversations later, we’re speaking the same language, English, and using the same words, but we have oftentimes really radically different connotations associated with it. Same vocabulary but saying really radically different things and so clarifying, that took quite a bit of time. But there were some moves. I mean, it took two or three years before we had our first project that we could agree on. I think, when you ask anybody now, they feel like the project itself was a failure. In fact, it did not treat the landscape in the way that would make a difference for landscape health long term. But it was a real success in the sense that we finally agreed on something.

Miller: And did everybody agree that it wasn’t a success?

Webb: Everybody that I’ve talked to since then, that’s still a part of the group, would agree that it’s not a success.

Miller: Well, let’s fast forward. Maybe you could start by describing where you’ve taken us and why?

Webb: OK, I’m gonna provide a little bit of context. This is a few years post where we just left. Not that we would have viewed it this way to begin with, but we have essentially developed what I would consider a landscape-centric perspective or approach. This is in contrast to a timber-centric [perspective], where timber is the value and the primary value, where passive management or other things are the primary values. In a landscape-centric approach, we really ask, ‘What does the landscape need to be healthy?’ And just remember we were arguing with one another all the time, lots of deep disagreements. It was only when we began understanding what science had to say about what a fire-adapted landscape needs to look like, the kind of treatments that would move it back to that healthier state, that we began to turn away from arguing with one another to figuring out, ‘Well, what does this need, and how can I accommodate my values – whether it’s industry or conservation or whatever – to what science is telling us this landscape actually needs?’

From that landscape perspective, we’ve developed quite a bit of agreement around what the vegetation treatments should look like on the Malheur for the upland forest that we deal with. So we get to 2015, and the Canyon Creek Fire erupts. Let me back up just a bit. Salvage logging has always been important for timber communities like ours. When it’s burned like this, they feel like that’s lost money. Economic recovery is key, and you try to get the most out of it that you can, re-forest it so in 100 or 150 years, you have a natural resource that you can utilize again.

Miller: Just so I understand, meaning chopping down and then milling and selling lumber from the trees that are dead but still standing and still have wood that can be sold?

Webb: Right. Yeah, so all of these in the past would have been taken down for the most part and gone to the mill.

Miller: Okay.

Webb: And then that would have funded additional restoration or tree planting and other things.

Miller: You say ‘all of this’ because, in front of us… I mean, we are standing in part of the 110,000-plus acres that burned in the Canyon Creek Fire. Standing all around here are some living trees but a lot of dead ones, thousands of them, all in front of us.

Webb: Yeah. To understand why that’s the case and why there’s no trees immediately in front of us for a couple 100 feet and then why there are trees behind us, beyond that, we started to approach the conservation community about salvage logging – post fire recovery, post fire management. It’s pretty challenging for them, but we went and visited some old salvage logging sites, 15 or 20 years old, to see what the ground was like, how the plant community had responded, what wildlife might be like. So we were having those conversations when this blew up.

I remember at the time, the conservation community was still really uncomfortable with any kind of salvage logging, but they knew how important it was to the BMFP members and to our community. Particularly a fire of this size, not to get any kind of economic recovery would have been really challenging from a public relations perspective for the Malheur. And so we had conversations about, how do we actually address that? I mean, there’s a lot of big trees here that would have made a big difference for the mill industry and timber industry. A burn like this creates an enormous amount of new habitat for disturbance-associated species like woodpeckers. To simplify it a bit, the conservation community said, ‘These are our concerns: soil impacts and habitat impacts to woodpecker species and other species of conservation concern.’ So we’re asking, ‘How can we address that so that we can try this?’ Because what we’re looking at right next to us off of this road is roadside salvage, and that’s for safety. They take all the snags that have any chance of falling on the road at any time. A lot of that provides economic recovery, but it’s also for safety. But what do you do about the rest of that?

So we had conversations, and we decided to do a research salvage, which I think does sound like an oxymoron if not outright contradiction for the conservation/environmental community. But that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to develop a salvage that actually addressed the questions that our conservation community members had about whether we could minimize the impacts to species like woodpeckers. That salvage logging, traditionally practiced, just devastated the environment. It didn’t take account of those at all.

We invited Vicki Saab and her team from Rocky Mountain Research Station to develop three different prescriptions to look at how black-backed woodpeckers, white-headed woodpeckers and Lewis’s woodpeckers would respond. Those are all disturbance-associated species. They come into these areas, although at different times and in different ways. So, we had three treatment levels. We left more-large snags to less-large snags. We left higher densities of medium and small snags or less to see how they would respond. And then, after the roadside salvage was done, we did the salvage logging per those treatment prescriptions in these units, with control units in places to see how the woodpeckers were doing there relative to these. And then we did four years of monitoring to see what that response would be over time.

Miller: My guess is that you got tons of data from that. But, if you could boil it down, what did you find? I mean, to me, the most basic question is: Can some amount of salvage logging, to provide some economic benefit and activity for mill workers or timber companies, can that happen without disturbing the habitat too much?

Webb: I’m gonna say yes with a caveat or two. We’re in a fire-adapted landscape, so I don’t know in other places what it might be like. But, for Eastern Oregon, the answer is yes. Not every species is going to respond the same way black-backs responded negatively. These are just preliminary results. We’re still waiting for the final report. They typically want unlogged areas, higher densities of snags and so on. So their numbers, they came in quick as usual, but they declined – in terms of how many birds were using this area and nesting – relatively quick as well. But for the white-headed woodpecker and the Lewis’s woodpecker, which tend to be more open canopy favoring species, two of the three treatment units, they responded positively to them. And the timber company did well on the salvage logging, even though you can see how much they left. In the past, they wouldn’t have left any of those big trees except for maybe two or three per acre. They would have just hit all of that.

Miller: And now there are hundreds still.

Webb: Oh, there’s lots. Yeah.

Miller: I guess that’s a compromise you’re talking about.

Webb: Yeah.

Miller: Not as good for at least one species of woodpecker and not as much economic impact recovery for the timber industry. I want to turn to…

Webb: Let me put that just in a bit of context.

Miller: Yeah.

Webb: This is a 110,000-acre fire. The treatment units between the roadside and the research salvage occurred on less than 10,000 acres and certainly not all 10,000 were touched. So, when you talk about the black-backed, they responded negatively to this, but they had well over 100,000 acres elsewhere to go to. And there are tools that people like Vicki Saab and her team are developing that identify the suitable habitats on fire-adapted landscapes and can track that and can tell you whether you’re deficit in that kind of habitat or not.

Miller: I want to turn to the biggest picture here. What do you see are the biggest lessons that the partnership and the give and take that you’ve been a part of for more than 15 years now, what do you see as the generalizable lessons for – whether it’s forest policy in the West or water policy or other – often intractable, often angry, debates?

Webb: For my part, and I think for the collaborative, there’s an incredible amount of opportunity to restore landscape resilience that provides a lot of work for the timber industry and for the mills, particularly if they retool a little bit to take smaller diameter stuff. If you start to target landscape resilience and resistance to what would have been historical disturbance processes like fire, drought, insects and so on so that you really make that landscape more healthy, you, in a sense, start to address the habitat needs of the species that were on that landscape historically speaking, as well. So right now, the Forest Service has kind of a bifurcated system, and it’s a holdover. But you treat these areas, and if you’re concerned about wildlife, you don’t treat these areas. You separate those.

Whereas what we’ve seen, is that [if] you treat the landscape in an appropriate way, that’s ecologically informed, you’re going to begin to mitigate wildfire risk, drought damage or drought impacts and insect impacts. You’re not gonna get away from it, but they’re gonna occur in a more natural pattern, at more natural sorts of scales, that the forest can withstand.

Miller: And now, the different members of the collaborative, the partnership, that could barely even talk to each other at the beginning, what’s the relationship like?

Webb: Oh, a lot of good friendships. Yeah. We had to develop trust over time. Without that, you’re not going to take risks. When you understand people you disagree with – where understanding doesn’t mean you agree with them, but you understand where they’re coming from, and you want to address their needs and concerns – that develops the kind of productive relationships that enable us to take these kinds of chances and to work on behalf of the Forest Service to enable them to be successful, even when we might be frustrated with certain things. So it’s that really productive, healthy relationship building that’s really made this collaborative process successful and moved us on.

Miller: And it starts with sitting down.

Webb: Or standing up and getting somebody going between two walls because you can’t talk to one another, but…

Miller: [laughs] Right, I forgot where it literally started.

Webb: For my part, it starts with acknowledging there’s a problem we cannot resolve unless we work with somebody else. Unless you acknowledge that, the landscape’s gonna suffer, and whether you’re in social circumstances, social services, people are gonna suffer it. People need to be willing to admit that they could be wrong about things and take some responsibility for that and listen to others. If you put those things together over time, I think you can go some distance on a number of issues.

Miller: Mark Webb, thanks very much.

Webb: My pleasure.

Miller: Mark Webb is the executive director of Blue Mountains Forest Partners. We talked in the Malheur National Forest.

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