From the Ravalli Republic, by Rod Daniel
Two forest experts from western Montana are preaching a new kind of forest management. And they're hoping their sermon spreads like wildfire.
Steve Arno and Carl Fiedler recently released a collaborative book - "Mimicking Nature's Fire: Restoring Fire-prone Forests in the West" - in which they advocate changing direction in the management of western forests and adopting what they call "restoration forestry." The new management approach involves drawing on the history and ecology of tree communities that were, in the past, shaped by distinctive patterns of fire.
According to Fiedler, a silviculturist and forestry professor at the University of Montana, restoration ecology looks at ecosystems over thousands of years and focuses on the trees that will be left behind after treatments.
"The fundamental difference in restoration management is that it focuses on what we leave," Fiedler said. "Highgrading and sustainable timber management, on the other hand, focus on which trees are removed. These are the techniques that have been used in the past, and what we have now is an aberrational forest."
The forests that Lewis and Clark saw were the result of thousands of years of ecological processes, he said. By studying these historical processes and trying to replicate them, foresters can maintain a more dynamic, robust, disease-resistant forest, similar to what was in place before the widespread settlement of the West.
"We're not trying to create an exact museum piece," he said. "We're trying to mimic the historical processes that have shaped these forests."
Inherent in western forests, and in fact in almost all North American forests, Arno said, was the periodic and regular occurrence of fire. And it was the widespread suppression of fire, he said, that led to many of the problems western forests now face - problems like overcrowding, beetle infestations and replacement of entire ecosystems.
"Clearly, fire was the historical 'agent of change' that fostered the wealth of trees, other plants and diverse wildlife in many forest ecosystems," he said. "Removing fire from the regime brought on all kinds of problems."
Arno, a retired research forester with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, said his and Fiedler's goal in writing their new book is to educate forest managers and the public alike in understanding the role of fire and in taking an ecosystem approach to management.
"We've shown dozens of examples of management situations where public and private managers have used restoration forestry with great success," he said. Two such projects in the Bitterroot - Lick Creek demonstration area and Burnt Fork Ranch - figure prominently in the book.
The 243-page book is organized in three sections: Part I examines the "nuts and bolts" underlying restoration forestry as applied to fire-dependent forests - why it's needed, how it developed and how it's applied. Part II looks "under the hood" at restoration projects in different forest types representing each historic fire regime and under contrasting management goals. Part III concludes by placing restoration forestry in a broad perspective and specifying factors critical for its success.
Fiedler hopes the book will help educate the public about restoration forestry, particularly since citizens now play a greater role in shaping forest policy.
"The public has a much greater influence in the process," he said. "By reading this book they might be able to make better decisions."
Perhaps the biggest success cited in the book is the comprehensive forest restoration program happening in the Eagle Lake Ranger District of the Lassen National Forest in northeastern California. Taking advantage of a strong regional market for forest residues and a congressional mandate to reduce hazardous fuels, the committed staff of the ranger district has attempted to restore the historical vegetative conditions of the forest and the processes that produced them.
Two key ingredients in the success of the project is the staff's dedication to developing, testing and improving restoration strategies and the fact that five energy plants exist in the region which purchase chips from small trees and logging slash to generate power.
As early as the mid-1980s, the ranger district provided 5,000 semitrailers of chips annually to keep the biomass plants running. And the same thinning treatments that produce the chips also provide 10 million board feet of small sawlogs annually. By 2003, the district had removed excess trees on about 40,000 acres of forest in conjunction with the biomass program.
Arno and Fiedler spent a week in the Lassen National Forest to observe the district's restoration forestry practices and reported that the attitude of the staff there was a welcome change to what they've witnessed in other Forest Service districts.
"Their passion for restoration just radiated," Arno said. "You can go other places where people are paralyzed by bureaucracy."
Such administrative lethargy is not uncommon in the Forest Service, he said, and the book cites that as one of the obstacles for employing the new techniques.
"It's understandable that an organization like the Forest Service, with its paramilitary structure, might experience paralysis," he said, "but the consequences are tragic. We're in the midst of a colossal mistake, but we're hamstrung by our bureaucratic system. We're almost afraid to do the right thing."
After witnessing the successes over the last 30 years in the Lassen National Forest, Fiedler said he sees great promise for a similar comprehensive project in the Bitterroot.
"There's huge potential for the Bitterroot National Forest," he said.
"Unlike other parts of the country, we have lots of local concern here. It's a matter of the people being brought together by effective leadership in which the Forest Service is involved."
Arno agreed, saying the Fuels-for-Schools programs in Darby and Victor are good beginnings.
"Fuels-for-Schools is a win-win situation, and there's no reason we couldn't expand that beyond schools," he said. "There's a huge potential for restoration forestry here and it could involve a lot of local contractors."
Craig Thomas, a private forester in the Bitterroot, is equally excited about the potential for restoration forestry and recommends the book to anyone interested in the forest.
"I found the information very solid," he said. "And being a forester, I've seen this work in the real world. This gives us a solid scientific basis for what we've been doing as practitioners for years."
Thomas, who did almost all of the thinning work on the Burnt Fork Ranch cited in the book, said the Fiedler and Arno produced the book for all the right reasons.
"They're trying to do what's right for the forest," he said. "This is a critical piece of information coming at a critical point in time."
Arno said the purpose of the book is to bring the science and the people together on the fact that the forests need to be drastically thinned in order to remain healthy, and the biggest constraint now is the fear of the unknown.
"We're afraid to do anything because we don't want to do anything wrong," he said. "But we've got enough successes that we can move on. We need to take out what we don't need."
