A light in the forest: an experiment to prove a point instead spawns a partnership that's returning health to Colorado's woods - Communities

American Forests, Wntr, 2003 by Jane Braxton Little

At first, Tom Colbert says, all he wanted to do was prove a simple point: "You can cut tree s and strn do the forest some good." What began as an almost desperate experiment in Montezuma County, Colorado, has gone far beyond breathing life into the moribund local timber industry and restoring 7,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest. It has also provided on-the-ground verification that rebuilding forest health can support a commercially self-sufficient timber program without subsidies.

At a time when the nation is wrangling over how to restore western forests and pay for the work, the Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership is a beacon illuminating how rural communities can work with ecologists and economists as well as government agencies. Eight years after the first restoration project on the San Juan National Forest, the bid price for the trees is up and so is the number of bidders. Yet none of the projects has been litigated, and environmentalists agree that the forest itself is healthier than it has been in decades.

"You never know when you plant a seed. You just hope it will grow," says Colbert, 63.

A former Montezuma County commissioner first elected in 1984, he watched the life drain out of the timber industry in southwest Colorado. One by one the county's 20 sawmills began closing as federal land managers responded to a shift in public values and slashed the volume of timber they made available to loggers. Colbert knew the U.S. Forest Service's new focus on ecosystem management would forever change how people conduct business in Montezuma County, where 66 percent of the land is federally owned.

Instead of joining "wise use" and "county supremacy" movements, the Montezuma commissioners in 1992 created a county federal lands office. If local residents were going to get any economic benefits from the federal land, they were all going to have to work together, Colbert says.

"We didn't go into the Forest Service and say 'We're going to bust your face in.' We went in and asked how we could help," he says.

The Forest Service welcomed their involvement, says Cal Joyner, then-San Juan Forest supervisor. "If local officials have a vision, why wouldn't we jump on board?

"It was the economically correct thing to do. It turned Out to be the politically correct thing as well," says Joyner, now Forest Service director of natural resources for the Pacific Northwest.

That began a give-and-take process that entailed meeting after gut-wrenching meeting of local, state, and federal leaders, as well as endless tromps through ponderosa pine forests. The group found what many scientists had been saying for years: The woods were crowded with small trees and brush, a result of nearly a century of high-grade logging, grazing, and exclusion of the fires that naturally occur every 10 to 15 years. Instead of open forests with around 120 trees an acre, the San Juan Forest had up to 390 trees per acre. The average diameter had dropped from 25 inches to eight. The entire forest was vulnerable to insect infestation and catastrophic fire.

The need to restore the forests was as obvious to Colbert as it was to Joyner. For the rancher-turned-politician, the combination of poor forest health and the county's lack of jobs was a golden opportunity. "Nothing happens if you don't try," he says. "That's all we did back then--try to work together so everybody got something good out of it."

The result is the Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership, an affiance of county, national forest, and timber industry officials joined by university scientists and local citizens. They came together with the mutual goal of demonstrating that healthy ecosystems and healthy economies are compatible--not contradictory--objectives.

PILOT PROJECT

Three years after forming their affiance, the partners launched a pilot project on 500 acres of the San Juan Forest. The Pines Project offered five timber sales under administrative use regulations, which allowed the Forest Service to offset the price per board-foot with the project's research value. Montezuma County bought the sales for $9,999, then resold them to loggers for around $30,000. The county planned to use the difference to fund ecological and economic research.

But loggers brave enough to bid on the experimental sales lost their shirts, says Carla Harper, Partnership coordinator. They knew how to cut and haul the trees but had little use and no markets for the small-diameter materials they harvested. The pilot project was an eye-opener for other participants, too. Bill Romme, then a Fort Lewis College ecologist, and Denny Lynch, a forest scientist at Colorado State University, were not satisfied with their harvest guidelines. The changes they wanted to try, combined with the losses for the local operators, convinced the Partnership to put up another l00-acre sale. This time the loggers made a profit.

Later, Montezuma County refunded some of the money it collected from them.

"We promised them they wouldn't get hurt. They trusted us, and we wanted to make sure they stayed in business," Harper says.