Forest communities become partners in management.

Lynn Jungwirth should be fuming. It's snowing on the second day of spring and her town's sole sawmill is about to close.

Instead, Jungwirth has rolled up the sleeves of her gray hooded sweatshirt and is planning a local industrial center to process logs hauled into Hayfork, California, from nearby Trinity National Forest. The industrial center will generate jobs and electricity, improve the forest health, and, she says, create more well-being than the town of 2,500 residents has known since the first load of lumber was shipped out of the valley in 1943.

"If the community takes care of the forest, the forest can take care of the community. This will work," says Jungwirth, a member of a third-generation logging family.

Across the country, local leaders in scores of forest-dependent towns are gathering up the tatters left by decades of national timber politics and knitting their communities back together. It's more than a mending. The process evolving in tiny rural towns is creating new ways to manage forests using new players and familiar players in new roles. It is restructuring the economic relationship between public lands and their neighboring communities.

"It's a new way of doing business across a landscape and a real test of how we recognize and engage public participation," says James R. Lyons, U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for natural resources and the environment.

In southwestern Oregon, private landowners and public agencies are collaborating to manage the 500,000-acre Applegate Valley watershed. They have prepared 40 million board-feet of timber for sale, protected streams with over a mile of fencing, installed fish screens, and reduced erosion from roads.

The Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership in southwest Colorado is a coalition of county, college, and San Juan National Forest officials who are developing a market for small-diameter timber. The partners are using local companies to harvest trees that are nine inches and less for use as house logs, specialty furniture, erosion mats, and power plant fuel.

In northern Vermont, farmers, loggers, retirees, and business owners comprise the Vermont Natural Resource Council's "living room coalition." Their discussions about sustainable forest practices contributed to the recommendations of the Northern Forest Lands Council for 26 million acres of forest stretching across four states from Maine to New York. The group's current focus on Vermont's two million-acre northern forest has affected statewide policies on clearcutting, herbicide use, and taxation.

In northwest Montana, the Flathead Forestry Project developed federal legislation to encourage stewardship in timber sales on the 2.4 million-acre Flathead National Forest. The coalition launched by loggers has completed two timber sales - one on federal land, one on state - to demonstrate how woods work can be separated from timber sales to focus on forest health rather than volume.

Diverse as they are, the community partnerships share the common goal of managing forests on a large scale for the long-term. They work closely with state and public bureaus and make their decisions by consensus. No agency, legislation, or political official authorized these groups.

"We all simply gave ourselves power," says Jack Shipley, a community activist and member of the Applegate Partnership. "We authorized ourselves to do whatever we can to create healthy ecosystems and healthy communities."

Cooperation Spawned by Gridlock 

The community forest movement was born out of gridlock. After decades of free-wheeling timber harvests on forests throughout the West, the public, spurred by environmentalists, said "enough!" Court orders and policy changes forced U.S. Forest Service and private timber officials to reign in the logging. Federal timber harvests plummeted from nearly 14 billion board-feet in 1960 to just over 4 billion in 1994 while national lobbyists for industry and the environment continued to duke it out in law offices and conference rooms.

Their battle over forest resources coupled with the usually unpredictable corporate and economic factors wreaked havoc on timber-dependent communities. Sawmills closed - one out of every three between 1989 and 1995 - leaving entire towns reeling in tragic cycles of jobs lost, businesses failed, arguments, alcohol, and abuse. In the Trinity Mountains of northern California, the town of Hayfork declined from 14 active sawmills in the 1950s to just one in 1995.

The hour that changed Jungwirth's life was spent with the Hayfork High School Class of '93 before their graduation. The seniors, especially boys, looked at their futures and saw nothing: no work in the woods or at the mill, no retail jobs, no hope. The livelihoods of these children of logging families had been lost in the national political deadlock.

"The SOBs of industry and the SOBs of the environmental movement had shot bullets in their wars that passed through the bodies of these kids. They didn't hit each other but they were killing our town," says Jungwirth.

A Local Solution

Instead of jumping on the "save our jobs" bandwagon and blaring Hayfork's sad story to state and federal policymakers, Jungwirth stayed home. She turned to the local shop owners, teachers, and mill workers. Her goal was to link people with government agencies, including the Forest Service, to share in making the decisions so critical to Hayfork residents.

She wasn't alone. At his 1993 forest summit in Portland, President Clinton urged rural Americans to sit down with their neighbors - friend and foe - and fashion compromise plans for healthy management of their own backyards. Work with state and federal agencies and work with each other, Clinton said. Those who took his message to heart were soon outpacing the bureaucracies with creative proposals for sustained resource management that would keep jobs and dollars at home.

Jungwirth opened the Watershed Research and Training Center late in 1993 in a vacant variety store. Along the wall that displayed Hallmark cards and gift wrap, Roger Jaegel, a retired U.S. Forest Service engineer, now coordinates training programs on watershed restoration, forest thinning, and fuel breaks. A bank of computers, loaded with economic, resource and geographic data, lines a wall at the rear of the center.

Last year the Hayfork training center graduated 17 local workers to jobs in the woods. Their skills ranged from stabilizing eroded stream banks to gathering geographic information fed into a computer for state and federal environmental studies. This year's class has 20 students selected from 60 applicants.

Not everything the partnership groups have tried has worked. In Applegate Valley, 150 miles north of Hayfork, the carpenters, farmers, artists, and foresters who make up the coalition were euphoric about Partnership One, a Forest Service timber sale and their first on-the-ground project. Partnership One didn't sell - twice.

"It was a loser," says Shipley. "We tried to do too many things in one sale."

But that didn't stop them from other projects in the Applegate watershed. Their successes include federal timber sales, forest-fuel reduction, and catchment dams on the creeks winding through their picturesque valley. They've worked hard on better communication among people who have spent years fighting. Agency officials need to understand the public's frustrations and the public to understand regulations that hobble the agencies, says Shipley.

It's this new level of trust that has made the biggest difference for Steve Armitage, a Bureau of Land Management forest manager in Medford, Oregon. The exchange of ideas stimulated by the Applegate partners has not only been a relief from past bickering, it has created better projects on the ground, Armitage says.

"We know we'll be working with them over the long haul, not just dragging out timber sales for the public to react to. It's an attitude thing."

Economies Changing Too

Along with changing attitudes, the forest community partnerships are working to change fundamental economic structures. As long as revenues leave town on the same haul-route as the resources - and as long as outside experts are brought in to perform the work - rural towns will continue to ride the boom-and-bust roller coaster of economies controlled by outside forces.

"Mountain communities have been treated like colonies," says Jungwirth. "We have to create opportunities to begin reinvesting money and resources back into our forest communities."

When Sierra Pacific Industries President Red Emmerson announced in January that he would move the one remaining Hayfork sawmill to a Sacramento Valley town 200 miles away, no one welcomed the news. But the Watershed Research and Training Center was ready.

Jungwirth and others asked the Trinity County Board of Supervisors to buy the 60-acre mill site and co-generation plant. They plan to use the grounds as a sort yard for logs, biomass, and other materials cut on the surrounding Trinity National Forest. The 400,000-acre area, named an Adaptive Management Area following Clinton's forest summit, is designated for closely watched experiments in forest management. That makes it ideal for testing plans developed by the local community, she says.

Instead of selling timber to companies for processing anywhere, the Hayfork plan uses local operators to remove materials under service contracts issued by the Forest Service. The federal agency will own the wood until it gets to the sort yard at the former sawmill site. There it will be sold by the Forest Service for any end use to any interested buyer: local mill owners or companies from Timbuktu; ranchers who need cedar fence posts; home owners seeking sugar pine for shakes. The mill site will also be available to nontimber forest industries. Yarrow and mullein gathered for sale could be dried in the kilns alongside pine and Douglas-fir boards, says Jungwirth.

Woody waste materials will go into the co-generation plant to produce steam for on-site drying kilns and electricity to power the equipment. Excess electricity will be sold on the grid, says Jungwirth. Money from the wood's sale will return to the local Forest Service unit for reinvestment in the forest - one of several changes in federal regulations that will require legislation.

The Hayfork sort yard proposal is a first step toward revamping an economic system that has historically drawn dollars away from communities and the forests generating them, Jungwirth says. "We have to invest in ourselves, in our own human and social capital, if we're going be more than just victims of the economic forces hitting on our towns."

Federal, National Reaction

The innovations being tested in forest communities have the support of Clinton's key cabinet officials. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman calls them "laboratory experiments to see if we can talk to each other rather than kill each other."

Out in the woods, however, projects have often been stalled or quashed by agency administrators. The Forest Service is trying to respond to the new demands, says Chief Jack Ward Thomas, but they are often in conflict with federal regulations.

"It's not a matter of being greedy about power. It's the law," Thomas says. "We're the responsible agency. We're the ones who get audited. We're the ones who get sued."

Community forestry has also met with resistance from national environmental organizations. Michael McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club, calls the goals of the partnerships "a new dogma emerging to challenge us." While he supports cooperation among forest users as a planning tool, McCloskey fears a shift of power from national to local organizations.

When the land being managed is federal, all Americans are equally entitled to participate in the decisions, he says. The impact of local groups on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management decisions may be depriving the rest of the national stakeholders.

Local communities have a special status in forest management, says Jon Roush, former president of the Wilderness Society. But they also have a responsibility to develop economies that require sustained use of the forest.

"The downside of community forestry is when communities take a position that national forests belong to their towns. It's not only stupid but anti-democratic," Roush says.

Other environmental leaders worry that Clinton's consensus process, embraced by community partnerships, will limit the debate to watered-down areas of agreement.

Some of the national fear of the community forest movement may be based on its goal to solve problems, says Doug Crandall, a vice president of the American Forest & Paper Association. "In Washington we have a conflict industry. It's become more important than accomplishing anything," he says.

The timber industry has embraced the partnerships as a way out of "the disaster of gridlock," says Crandall. That also concerns the Sierra Club's McCloskey.

"Industry thinks its odds are better in (community) forums. It has ways to generate pressures in communities where it is strong that it doesn't have at the national level," he says.

It is too early to know whether community partnerships can return health to their forests and local economies. Each group can count its false steps: projects that died in the woods, trusted members who left in a huff. Changing forest management and local communities is simply slow, hard work, says Jungwirth.

"How do you get people to work together when they're clinging to a lifeboat as it's heading toward a waterfall? They're frustrated, scared, and mad."

But few would trade the mistakes of today for those of the past. "We know how to conflict. We have a hard time making peace," says the Applegate Partnership's Shipley. "But what are our choices - more of the same? Appeals, battles, courts, threats, violence? We'll never go back. That's a no-brainer."

RELATED ARTICLE: Forest Communities Play Increasing Role in Policy Debates

The idea of linking communities and forests has gotten increased attention lately, and community-based forestry groups and others interested in these issues increasingly are recognized as key players in the forest policy arena. This rising interest in community-based forestry is helped by local and regional initiatives, particularly in the West and Pacific Northwest; expanding communication channels such as the National Network of Forest Practitioners; and focused energy at the recent Seventh American Forest Congress in Washington, DC.

A critical development in bringing the interests of communities into the mainstream of forest policy discussions nationally was the formation of the Communities Committee of the Seventh American Forest Congress. The Committee is a national group that spans environmental and industry, urban and rural, and national and local concerns. Chaired by Lynn Jungwirth, a community leader from Hayfork, California, the Committee includes academics, scientists, state and federal agencies, and practitioners. Jungwirth, who directs a Watershed Research and Training Center, has played a prominent role in bringing these interests to the forefront of national policy discussions.

The Communities Committee has met several times, both before and after the February Congress. The Committee's mission statement sets out the goal and key concerns of its members: "to focus attention on the interdependence between American forests and the vitality of rural and urban communities" and to promote policies and actions that enhance local community well-being and sustain forest ecosystem integrity.

At the Congress, members of the Committee worked to ensure these concerns were discussed and brought to the attention of the broad range of participants. The Congress' final report indicates they were successful: One vision statement and a number of principles approved by attendees recognize the importance of community issues. As one principle stated: "Interdependence of people and forests is recognized and respected, including the important contribution forests make to social, economic, and community well-being, and responsibility to support balanced stewardship of all forests' values."

AMERICAN FORESTS' Forest Policy Center is a member of the Communities Committee and is partnering with a number of the community-based groups around the country. Our objective is to help these community-based initiatives find ways to sustain this spirit of collaboration and build ways to respond locally to ever-changing forest policy and management issues that directly affect the people in these communities and adjacent public and private forests. Our ultimate goal is to help these "communities of place" define models of sustainable development in their specific local and regional contexts, models that demonstrate the interdependence between forests and human communities. - Gerry Gray