Arguing for accord - creating a consensus among different forest conservation advocates

American Forests, Wntr, 1999 by Jane Braxton Little

What's best for the woods depends on who you ask. So why bring together the people who disagree the most?

High on a hillside in the northern Sierra Nevada, an afternoon debate is raging through the ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir over how to manage a thicket of dying white fir.

Doug Crandall, staff director for the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on forests and forest health, argues for a timber harvest that emulates natural fire patterns - something "economically smart" for a healthy forest in 60 or 70 years.

Chris Bratt, an Applegate, Oregon, environmentalist, urges a landscape approach that includes local knowledge of wildlife, species mix, and weather patterns.

Mike McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club, questions any management at all. "Nature wants to have a lot of white firs around here," he says from where he sits in the patch of golden grasses.

For a growing number of natural resource activists, the future of America's forests lies here, on the ground, with a group like this - passionate polar opposites. They believe that the more people involved and the more diverse their perspectives, the better the forests will fare. This combination of questions and vigilance will produce data sorely needed to manage healthy ecosystems, according to proponents of this innovative approach.

They call it all-party monitoring.

"Nobody knows what that means, but it's not stopping us from trying it out," says Leah Wills, a rural development specialist involved in watershed restoration in northeastern California.

Joining her are dozens of loggers and environmentalists, civic leaders, economists, and business owners, most of them members of small partnership groups scattered in western towns surrounded by federal forests. They are exploring how to collect data, what monitoring methods are most effective, and who needs to be involved.

It's a bootstrap operation driven by citizens who have watched national forests deteriorate and their local economies with them. They have dreams - grand dreams of healthy forests that provide wilderness as well as game, mushrooms, herbs, and enough lumber to sustain their small towns. They are convinced that national forests can be managed to safeguard both ecosystems and local economies. But they have no data to prove it.

Neither does the U.S. Forest Service. Across America's 191 million acres of national forest, logging, grazing, and recreational development have prolific, rated for generations with scant study of the effects on the larger ecosystem or the long term. Forest Service managers have typically moved from one political mandate to another in response to agendas dictated more by the needs of Congress than the forest itself.

The agency's pattern of logging first and evaluating later - if at all - has resulted in a public outraged by the assault on natural resources and the dearth of scientific study. Opposition to Forest Service decisions in recent decades has brought the agency's activities in the West to a near standstill.

It is amid this angry tempest that grassroots groups are emerging to propose all-party monitoring. They don't dispute the lack of past scientific study. But accusations, lawsuits, and the ensuing gridlock will not help guide future forest management decisions, they say. Careful scrutiny of forest activities will. In addition to providing crucial scientific data, they believe on-the-ground monitoring can restore some of the public trust critical to managing sustainable forests.

"We don't know how to do science in the middle of all these politics but someone has to get in there and propose something. We decided to start at a very humble level," says Wills, co-coordinator of a Feather River watershed group.

Five of the country's most active forest community coalitions are in the initial stages of a demonstration project designed to test the possibilities of all-party monitoring.

Two, the Applegate Partnership and the Rogue Institute for Ecology and Economy in southern Oregon, are forming a team comprised of loggers, environmentalists, and representatives from the Forest Service and the federal Bureau of Land Management. Several members already worked together through the Applegate, one of the first of these such groups. Now, however, they are deliberately reaching out to their critics in an effort to work together for the benefit of the forest.

Meeting in the old Star Ranger Station, a oneroom office so enveloped by the branches of an enormous madrone tree that it feels like a tree house, Applegate team members discuss how to word their letter of invitation and who to include on the list. They need a group even more varied than the traditional enemies who came together in 1992 to create the Applegate Partnership.

"We're talking about a real sounding board - something to take us beyond species-by-species monitoring and the spotted owl," says Jack Shipley. a group co-founder.

In the mountains of northeastern California, the anglers, ranchers, agency hydrologists, and wildlife specialists who comprise the Feather River Coordinated Resource Management Group are selecting biological indicators to study the effects of their 13 years of stream restoration work. Although they disagree about where to site temperature control stations and how many sediment gauges to employ, they are unequivocal about their general goal: improving water quality in the Feather River basin.