Community forests: Can a town save its nearby trees?

This follow-up story on the Williams Community Forest Project ran in the Eugene Weekly's Earth Day 2012 special edition, published on April 18, 2012.

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The idea of a community forest has been kicking around the Siskiyou Mountain hamlet of Williams, Ore., for a while. But it took an out-of-state landowner’s plan to slash forests safeguarding the town’s water supply to turn ideas into action.

This spring, loggers are razing diverse groves of second-growth trees on a 320-acre plot above Williams. Meanwhile locals are raising money to buy the land in hopes of establishing an economically productive, sustainably managed public forest.

Local kids Jade Butterfly and Asa Mountain play in a patch of BLM timberland while WCFP videographer Ben Day documents the ongoing clearcutting of the W320.

In 2000 locals first pressured then-owner Boise Cascade to shelve logging plans for the groves, known as the W320, a wildlife corridor that is home to the red tree vole, Pacific fisher, mariposa lily and northern spotted owl, as well as the site of a well-used hiking and horse riding trail. In February 2011, Idaho timberman Michael Riggs bought the W320 for $900,000, according to Williams Community Forest Project (WCFP) President Cheryl Bruner, whose group tried unsuccessfully to buy the land from Riggs before cutting started.

“It was well known that this property was of interest to the community,” says Bruner. “Riggs knew about the protest when he bought it.”

Buying a Forest to Save It

This news brief first appeared in the Eugene Weekly on March 15, 2012. I learned about the efforts of the Williams Community to protect its watershed and forests thanks to a social media outreach undertaken by local teenagers. I was able to publish a lengthier followup story in the EW's Earth Day special edition.

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A southern Oregon community’s effort to protect forestland has become a race against the chainsaw. The Williams Community Forest Project (WCFP) is working to purchase a locally vital 320-acre tract of forestland where clearcutting has started, in order to preserve it as a “community forest.”

As loggers raze a hillside forest shadowing the Siskiyou Mountain hamlet of Williams, community members have secured $116,000 in cash and pledges towards $500,000 they need to secure an estimated $1.5 million low-interest loan to purchase the land, know as the W320. According to the WCFP, logging plans call for 250 acres of clearcuts in buffered 120-acre blocks.

Concerned Williams residents taking a look at the damage to a popular hiking trail bordering the W320 logging project.

 WCFP wants to buy the tract as soon as possible or facilitate a benefactor’s purchase of the land under a conservation easement. Enterprise Cascadia of Portland has committed to lend 65 percent of the assessed value of the property, but that leaves much of fundraising to be done.

OCF fire crew hopes to educate elders and reduce fire danger

This piece  first ran in the Eugene Weekly on July 6, 2006. It resulted from academic research I was doing at the time on Traditional Ecological Knowledge  (TEK) and the use of fire as a landscape management tool. It was also my first paid piece; I still have the check stub somewhere in my records.

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The Oregon Country Fair springs to life every summer on park-like 350-acre property next to the Long Tom River, 15 miles from Eugene. The land, a mixture of grassy fields with islands of shrubs and oak trees, is flooded for part of the winter by the river and its tributary creeks. Dense thickets of scraggly, 70-year-old Douglas fir dominate the uplands above the floodplain. For years, fire suppression has allowed dry wood and other fuels to build up, creating a potentially dangerous situation.

The site is usually still green in early June. But in drought years it dries out by fair time, usually the first weekend in July. According to fair fire crew co-coordinator Bill Pack, fire danger has been extreme for the last five years and was especially high during 2002 and 2003. "I think it's just a matter of time before we have a situation," says Pack, a 30-year U.S. Forest Service veteran. "We've been pretty fortunate."
The fair, in its publicity material, expresses a respect for Native American culture. Pack and others would like to see its community, known as the Fair Family, learn to use fire to help manage the landscape, much as former inhabitants, the Kalapuya Indians, did.