December 31, 2008
When the Mattole Restoration Council was founded in 1983, it grew out of the founders' realization that salmon don't just live in rivers, they live in watersheds. What's more, those watersheds aren't just made up of forests, prairies, and wildlife--they are home to people, too, the only species able to make a conscious effort on the salmon's behalf. For any restoration effort to gain traction and staying power, it would need to be rooted in an approach that invited all landowners and residents to participate in whatever way they could: a community-wide approach to restoration.
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Back in the 1980s, our region was in the final throes of the post-World-War-Two timber boom. The watershed was reeling from unregulated lumbering in the 1950s and 1960s, which pre-dated the state requirement that logged forests be re-stocked with seedlings. As a result, our efforts focused in two arenas: seeking permanent protection for the remaining old-growth forests, and restoring forest cover to the lands that had been cut and, in effect, abandoned--often subdivided and sold to newcomers from the city who saw beauty in what they later recognized as barely recovering clear-cuts.
To protect the old growth, we first needed to map it. The Council's research debunked the conventional wisdom that there was plenty more old-growth timber over the next ridge. By 1988, according to our study of aerial photos and timber maps, 91 percent of the Mattole's primeval coniferous forests had been cut--forests that had once covered two-thirds of our watershed. We joined in campaigns with numerous other groups to secure protection for the groves already in public ownership, and to purchase from willing sellers those that were privately held. Those efforts have borne fruit: two-thirds of the ancient forests the MRC identified in 1988 have been conserved in perpetuity--in the process also safeguarding the headwaters of the mainstem and several key tributaries for salmon and wildlife habitat.
Where the forest had already been cut, we were confronted with land that often did not respond as planned to the "seed trees" left standing to bear the entire burden of reforestation. In some places, thick carpets of young fir were indeed coming back; on other tracts, the unsaleable tanoak left behind by loggers had overwhelmed what fir seedlings had sprung up. Finally, there were "stump meadows"--lands where grass surrounded the hefty stumps that spoke of the forest that had stood there before.
So we raised money from private sponsors and public agencies to plant Douglas-fir seedlings in stump meadows where landowners wanted to see the forest rise again. On some tracts, we aimed to stabilize the soil, where bare ground was bleeding mud into streams. Others were an attempt to bring trees back to harsh, south-facing slopes where native seedlings hadn't gained a toe-hold without human help. Those efforts extended for about a decade and a half, from the early 1980s through the late `90s.
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Recognizing these natural trends, and the dwindling area of stump meadow to plant, was the hinge of the Mattole Restoration Council's forestry program. Most of our initial goals were accomplished, but we realized that three new challenges lay ahead.
First, we realized it mattered more than ever to plant Douglas-fir on one kind of site: alongside streams. Douglas-fir (and, in the fog-prone headwaters of our river, redwood) grow tall enough to cast deep shade that will in time cool the river and creeks so that they are again hospitable to salmon through the summer. Eventually, streamside trees will topple into the channel, creating the kind of complex habitat that fingerlings need for shelter from predators when water levels drop in the dry season. This large fallen wood also helps break up long, shallow, gravelly stretches into a sequence of pools and riffles that salmon prefer. So with an eye to the next century, we refocused our tree-planting efforts on riparian (streamside) areas. This was harder work, requiring longer hikes to the remote stretches of barren creek banks, carrying heavy bags of trees, but this was the place where the trees could do the most ecological good.
Our second new focus was fire. Across most of the Mattole, the young saplings--be they tanoak or Douglas-fir--had grown in so thickly that they were poised to burn catastrophically if a fire ever got started. Fire is a natural factor in our ecosystem, but there was nothing natural about the build-up of fuel across the landscape. We teamed up with local residents and volunteer fire companies to create fire plans for the upper and lower Mattole watersheds, proposing ways to reduce fire hazard and prepare for the eventuality of wildfire. We launched the Fire-Safe Forests and Homes Program, to help landowners deal with the accumulation of fire-prone trees on their land, by thinning them and removing their lower branches, which would be apt to carry a ground fire into the canopy. Where the terrain and trees allowed, we have helped landowners figure out how the sale of these forest thinnings could help defray the cost of making their property safer from catastrophic fire. Coincidentally, all of this work has ecological value as well. Reducing the risk of severe fire makes it more likely that our forests will continue to recover in the decades ahead, instead of being set back to an earlier stage of ecological succession by a widespread conflagration. Even in the absence of fire, that thinning hastens the day when these second-growth forests can provide older-forest habitat for creatures that have found such habitat scarce in recent decades.
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Our initiative responds to the twists and turns of regional environmental history. Timber harvest rules had evolved to corral the worst instincts of industrial timber companies that attempts to wring as much profit from the land as quickly as possible. Caught in the cross-fire were the private landowners, with five to 5,000 acres, who wanted to manage their land carefully for the long term. The law treated both alike, requiring the same detailed analysis for a light harvest as for a massive clearcut.
What's more, the forest was losing out. These modest harvests could help restore forests to an older, more mature structure--a development that would also benefit the many wildlife species that depend on these scarce habitats. And yet the law had created a set of incentives that pointed in the wrong direction, toward more widespread logging. A timber harvest plan had become so complex and costly--thirty to forty thousand dollars--that landowners had to log more heavily in order to meet the same financial goals. Cutting the cost of a plan in half would spare the trees that would otherwise go to pay for the extra paperwork--about fifteen truckloads, at the prices that prevailed before the Douglas-fir log market crashed with the current economic downturn. For family ranch owners, that would also improve the financial viability of their holdings, relieving the economic pressure to subdivide.
The Council's approach is to craft a Program Timberland Environmental Impact Report (PTEIR), which will undertake most of the environmental analysis for light-touch timber harvests. Written with input gathered at community meetings and from local environmental advocates, the PTEIR will offer landowners a new alternative to more costly permits. Landowners will have to undertake some site-specific surveys--for spotted owls, archeological sites, and rare plants--but will be relieved of the burden of "cumulative watershed effects" analysis. In exchange, they will have to confine themselves to light-touch timber practices, including a ban on clear-cutting and other even-aged forest management practices, no-cut buffers alongside streams and an agreement not to use synthetic herbicides. In addition, old-growth trees cannot be cut, and loggers will have to keep tractors off steep slopes and build less than a thousand feet of new road. In crafting the details of this approach, we have benefitted from the ongoing participation of long-time forest activist Richard Gienger, and the counsel of a broad spectrum of the region's forestry mavens, ranging from the Institute for Sustainable Forestry's John Rogers, to UC Cooperative Extension Forester Yana Valachovic and representatives of the Buckeye Conservancy.
With the PTEIR, the Council's approach to forestry has entered a new stage, foreshadowed by the Council's founders in 1983 when they dedicated the group in part to "encouraging the development of land-use techniques and cultural and economic activities which further the sustained productivity of the resource base in the Mattole watershed" and "undertaking the education of watershed residents and landholders in ... sustainable harvest techniques." As the forest--and the Council--mature, we are entering a new phase, where we can make use of the steering wheel as well as the brakes. With the ongoing guidance of the Mattole community, we hope that next year, landowners will be able to plan their logging under the auspices of our EZ-form logging plan for light-touch harvests.
For more info: www.mattole.org
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TOC for Forest & River News, Winter 2008