Sculpted By Fire

A Radio Documentary by Barbara Bernstein

Judy McHugh I was actually swimming in Rough and Ready Creek the day the fire started with some friends and we saw the lightning and I remember joking, oh my mother would be so upset if she knew I was swimming while lightning was occurring.

Linc Phillippi I’m Linc Phillippi, I’m president of Rough and Ready Lumber Company. We’re a small family-owned sawmill lumber manufacturing business in Cave Junction, Oregon, approximately three miles from the heart of the Biscuit
Fire. We were here everyday watching the fire start from a relatively small lighting caused fire that we thought could have been put out early on.

In mid July of 2002 a series of lightning strikes ignited a number of small fires in some very remote mountainous areas of SW Oregon. Over the next few weeks the fires merged into what became known as the Biscuit Fire, the largest fire that year in North America, burning across an area the size of Rhode Island.

You’re listening to Sculpted By Fire, a journey into a landscape that has been shaped by fires like the Biscuit. But unlike the fires that once sculpted this terrain, the Biscuit Fire turned into a political conflagration.

George W. Bush: You know when you’re in pretty good country when you see a lot of cowboy hats in the crowd.

While the fire was still burning George W. Bush came to Southern Oregon to campaign for Oregon Republican candidates in that year’s congressional election. He used the Biscuit Fire as a backdrop to promote his Healthy Forest Initiative, which loosened restrictions on post-fire logging in roadless areas.

GWB: We are speeding up the process of environmental assessments and consultations required by law so that disputes over thinning projects are resolved more quickly. We want to hear people. We want them to have a point of view. We want to save our forests, too. That's what we want to do here in America.

Bush’s Biscuit photo op foreshadowed the political turmoil that got stirred up as the fire died down. But in the weeks before Bush arrived, the main debate revolved around how much money and resources ought to be allocated to put the fire out.

Jack Willams This was a fire that struck in the middle of July in a very hot time when there were lots of other fires going on,

Jack Williams was the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest supervisor before the Biscuit Fire. He is now the senior scientist for Trout Unlimited, in Medford, Oregon.

JW: so you knew that the fire fighting resources of the federal agency were already stretched very thin.

LP: For days it smoldered down in the wilderness down in the Illinois River canyon. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and eventually became this huge blowup into one of the biggest wildfires in the western United States.

Over the past couple decades, the intensity and frequency of wildfires in the North American West has escalated. Dramatic media coverage ignites public fears and rekindles political controversies about how to control fires on our public lands. But for millennia fire has been the primary agent of change here. That was until 100 years ago when the United States Forest Service took on a new mission: eradicate wildfire and save the trees for a higher purpose – timber harvesting.

Smokey Bear: I’m Smokey Bear. Please don’t be careless. Remember only you can prevent forest fires, only you.

The conversation is changing now and many forest service scientists would like to retire Smokey the Bear. They talk about the need to allow some wildfires to burn naturally in remote areas, such as the Siskiyou Wildlands, where the Biscuit Fire began. But years of fire suppression have created conditions in the woods that liken the chances that when fires like the Biscuit ignite, they will rage out of control. So why did it take so long for suppression efforts to kick into gear?

JM: Fire suppression resources are allocated on a national basis.

Judy McHugh, a forest service employee when the fire started, became the spokesperson for the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project.

JM: The first thing that we protect is human life, the second is property and the third thing are all other resources and all of these fires started in remote areas where the only threats at that time were to resources. We did put hand crews out there, they did the best they could. In some cases the terrain was too difficult and the fire had already grown to such size that it was not safe for them to be there.

JW: There were large patches within the biscuit that were unburned

Jack Williams with Trout Unlimited

JW: and then there were other areas that burned at very high intensities and basically killed all the plant material there and having that mixture is a very normal thing for the Biscuit area.

Dominick Della Salla: The whole landscape has been responding to fire for thousands of years and everywhere you walk on this landscape the plant communities are coming back from the most recent fire event that has shaped them.

Dominick Della Salla founded the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy in Ashland, Oregon.

DD: Fire’s got a bad rap. It’s considered by the public and the media as the grim reaper of death. But in reality fire is a natural process just like floods are natural, volcanic eruptions are natural processes. Fire comes in and it rejuvenates a forest and what fire will do is create these dead trees which are the most vital components of a forest ecosystem. Those dead trees are the future soils, they’re the food for the new forest. They are the anchors for the soils. In fact in the dry regions of the west fire is as essential to forest health as rain is to the temperate rain forests.

Lesley Adams: The Klamath-Siskiyou forests are the most diverse conifer forests in the world.

Lesley Adams is with Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center in Ashland, Oregon.

LA: A lot of this diversity is due to geologic complexity of the region. You hike up onto a mountaintop in some Siskiyou ranges and you’ll find yourself on rocks that were once at the bottom of the ocean.

RS: It’s almost as if someone had sculpted the landscape, creating particular kinds of habitat in different areas for different wildlife, for different plants. And without fires here in the Siskiyou it wouldn’t be one of the most diverse national forests in our entire country. It’s simply the agent of change.

Rolf Skar, with the Siskiyou Project, a conservation group in Southern Oregon, is taking me on a tour of Mike’s Gulch, a heavily burned part of the South Kalmiopsis roadless area.

RS: See a little manzanita growing from seed here. Sometimes these plants will resprout and sometimes they’re spread by berries that a bird has eaten maybe further down in the valley and then deposited up here. Oh there’s a hummingbird right there, perched on the top of that snag and it’s flying around no doubt just full of nectar today. More of that yerba santa growing up, this is all stuff that seems to have resprouted after the fire and it’s up to my waste already.

It’s early summer of 2006, nearly four years since the fire, and the forest floor is bursting in a kaleidoscope of colorful wildflowers. We trek to the end of an overgrown trail and peer down the steep canyon walls at huge old growth snags, slated to be salvage logged in the coming weeks.

RS: I was actually hiking in the Kalmiopsis the week before the Biscuit Fire started. I’ve seen it before and after and I think after is more exciting because it’s an extremely dynamic landscape. It’s changing all the time so if I come back two weeks from now I’m going to see something else blooming, I’m going to see something else growing up and I guarantee I’m going to be surprised by something. This is a land of surprises now.

Jerry Franklin: Simply a disturbance is an event that frees up existing resources to be utilized by other organisms.

Jerry Franklin is a professor at the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources.

JF: So it typically involves the death of some organisms and in that process light and nutrients and water become available to other organisms.

RS: Natural disturbances are simply the engines that keep the cycle of life turning in our forests.

Rolf Skar with the Siskiyou Project

RS: In the Biscuit Fire, for example, the fire doesn’t just move through the landscape as a uniform force, it skips, it jumps, it creates almost a quilt, a patchwork pattern on the forest landscape. And what that does over time is actually create diversity and resiliency in our forests.

JW: Following a fire you’ll see plants and you’ll see species come back that would be very rare other times.

Jack Williams with Trout Unlimited

JW: It’s that complexity and diversity that’s so important to natural systems.

RS: We’re standing on the edge of the Biscuit Fire perimeter. We’re looking into a botanical area that’s comprised of Jeffrey Pine, Incense Cedar and a host of wildflowers that exist nowhere else on the planet. As you can see there’s an under burn here. In other words, the fire just moved along the forest floor and that’s a lot of what the Biscuit Fire actually did in the wildlands of the Siskiyou.

A year and a half after the fire I visited some of the burn areas with Romain Cooper who was then with the Siskiyou Project, working to prevent huge salvage logging operations from taking place in roadless parts of the burn.

Romain Cooper: We’re on the banks of the Illinois River. It’s the largest tributary of the Rogue and the Illinois is a stronghold for Coho salmon, an endangered species, and these runs are all dependent upon the incredible water quality you see here and that water quality is at risk if the government gets carried away and logs this area on a massive scale as they are intending.

Scott Conroy: While the fire was still actively burning, we had a team of resource professionals and scientists that went out and did an assessment of what impacts the fire had to give us information so that we could decide what we wanted to do next if we felt we needed to do anything.

Scott Conroy, who become the new chief of the Rogue River-Siskiyou national forest soon after the fire started, led this process. The forest service came up with a series of initial alternatives for how to manage the burned areas. These options did include some post-fire logging of dead trees, with the largest projected yield being around 100 million board feet. That’s about five times what the annual cut in the Siskiyou National Forest was in previous years. While some environmental groups objected to any timber harvesting at all, others like Dominick Della Salla supported some of the forest service’s initial options, so long as there was no cutting in old growth reserves and roadless areas.

DD: There were some alternatives that the environmental community could have supported and could have backed. They were consulting with us. They were consulting with industry. We thought we were close to the same page on the proposed action.

But then Douglas County, about 30 miles to the north of the fire, commissioned what came to be known as the Sessions Report and the forest service put off making a decision for a couple months until the study was released. The study was led by John Sessions, an Oregon State University professor of forestry.

LA: He spent several months using satellite imagery and computer data to determine the maximum allowable timber cut out of the biscuit burn.

Lesley Adams with Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center.

LA: So he spent very little, if any, time on the ground. And he used computer modeling systems to determine that we could theoretically log up to 2 billion board feet out of this forest after the burn.

According to Jack Williams with Trout Unlimited, political pressure to increase post-fire logging harvests in the Biscuit Burn was not just coming from Southern Oregon.

JW: I think there was quite a bit of concern in Washington that the local forest service should develop alternatives that were much larger and would cut a lot more wood than something like a hundred million board feet.

JM: 94% of the burn will not be salvaged.

Judy McHugh, Biscuit Fire Recovery Project spokesperson

JM: It’s in wilderness, it’s in areas that are too remote, it’s in places that don’t have economic viability in terms of harvest What the agency was seeking with Alternative 7 is to find that best balance between ecological recovery and some economic recovery.

RC: The preferred alternative that the forest service has offered for the Biscuit area constitutes the largest timber sale that they have attempted in modern times. That’s 500 million board feet.

We’re standing below the Green Bridge at the edge of a proposed timber sale with Siskiyou Project’s Romain Cooper

RC: If all the logs were carted out on trucks and those trucks were lined up we have enough logging trucks to stretch from Baja to the Canadian border.

More than two years later I am standing at the same spot with Rolf Skar, my guide this summer through the Biscuit Burn.

RS: We’re just right up the road from where a bridge crosses the Illinois River. It’s known by locals as the Green Bridge and on March 7 of 2005 that was the site of the first resistance to logging old growth reserves in the Fiddler Timber sales and over the course of 2005 there were dozens and dozens of arrests, mostly local folks including grandmothers, who captured great media attention and really helped give a voice to the wildlands here in the Siskiyou.

One of these grandmothers is Agnes Baker Pilgrim, an elder from the Takilma tribe in Southern Oregon.

Agnes Pilgrim: All of us were given this volume called a voice and I think we’re supposed to use it to fight for the animal kingdom who doesn’t have a voice, the swimmers in the water and the green on our mother earth and our water doesn’t have a voice. Everything that we have and was created before us needs a voice and so I wanted to become that voice for the voiceless.

Protests continued in the forest throughout the spring, until the Forest Service closed public access to the woods. So protests sprang up on the streets of Portland and in front of the Forest Service office in Medford.

Laurel: Behind that plate glass window is a man named Scott Conroy. He’s the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest supervisor. This is the man whose signature is on the final decision for one of the largest most controversial timber projects the Forest Service has ever put forth. [booooo[ This is also the man whose signature is on a federal closure order that’s locking out everybody in the public including the media except the timber companies from the Fiddler Mountain timber sale area. [booooo!] We have seen a systematic undermining of the public process by the man in that building and by the people he answers to in Washington, D.C. And so the reason that we are here is because they’ve taken away all of our avenues to us and when we raise our voices they’re not listening to what we have to say. So we’re here today to ask Scott Conroy to throw us a bone and let us at least go into the timber sale to see the on the ground effects. People want to know what all this fuss is about. The logging is done, it’s our public lands, it’s our taxpayer money being spent to log it in the first place and we’re going to be left with the mess that’s left afterwards.

chanting: We’re not done!

Laurel: If they think they’ve seen something with the 70 plus arrests and peaceful civil disobedience that have taken place in these last months, if they think they’ve seen something now, if they keep coming for these old growth reserves and if they come for the roadless wildlands, they ain’t seen nothing yet!

LP: Salvage logging doesn’t mean that we’re going to devastate the environment.

Linc Phillippi with Rough and Ready Lumber Company in Cave Junction, OR.

LP: This is a science. It’s not just a bunch of Neanderthals doing crazy things. The Forest Service isn’t going to threaten the environment. They’re going to do something that they feel is right and the right thing to do is to re-establish a forest

RC: What we’re worried about is that in fact the sale will be administered poorly and many, many green trees will be logged, units will be marked carelessly, environmental safeguards and precautions will go by the wayside in the rush to get trees out.

RS: We’re walking on the Baby Foot Lake trail and we’re standing right on the dividing line between the area that was logged last summer and the area that was protected from logging in the Baby Foot Lake Botanical area. To my left where there’s the unlogged area, I see a lot of shade, a lot of big trees and bear grass that’s blooming making it look like the 4^th of July really. To my right where the logging happened it just looks like a barren stump field. Down below us where there’s a lot more logging there’s a road and there’s a steep ridge and that’s the marker for the Baby Foot Lake Botanical Area as it continues downhill. Last summer there was a large scandal that erupted when the Siskiyou Project discovered that 17 acres of that important Botanical area was clearcut illegally through the Fiddler timber sale.

SC: The botanical area at Baby Foot Lake was a forest service mistake, not a contractor mistake

Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest Supervisor Scott Conroy

SC: where the boundary was put down next to a riparian reserve when it should have been up on the ridgeline a few hundred feet up the hill and so an area got logged there that we would not have wanted to get logged.

LA: The timber sale unit was on one side of the ridge and the botanical area was on the other side of the ridge

Lesley Adams with Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center

LA: and so you’d think the timber sale unit boundary being the ridge top would be clear and yet they walked over the ridge top and logged the botanical area.

RS: We’re standing right across the line of the first Mike’s Gulch logging unit and we’re standing in a field of flowers. All around me is just buzzing of honey bees and pollinators getting busy making sure these flowers make seeds for more natural regeneration and we’re standing on the edge of a rather steep slope overlooking the wild and scenic Illinois River.

This is one of two timber sales being proposed in roadless areas. In 2000 President Clinton set aside millions of acres of roadless land, where commercial logging projects were prohibited. However the Bush administration helped remove the roadless rule, opening the door for these timber sales to go forward. Several environmental groups as well as four states challenged the Bush administration’s action, but while the case worked its way through the courts the Forest Service proceeded with these controversial timber sales. That pleased Rough and Ready Lumber Company president Linc Phillippi.

LP: It makes sense for us that if there’s all this dead timber out there that wouldn’t public prefer to have the forest service log dead timber that’s already dead, that’s not going to come back, it’s just going to rot? It’s just shameful to see all the waste out there.

JS: The Biscuit area was prized for its mature forest characteristics, for its habitat, for its recreation.

John Sessions, Oregon State University

JS: It was not a timber producing area. If that forest was prized for its large trees, how can we bring back those large trees as quickly as possible? We can more reliably grow a large conifer tree if we plant it and if we provide growing space for it, we can double or triple the growth rates and really arrive at a cut perhaps one third or even one half of the time it would take to become a mature tree again.

LP: If you don’t salvage and you don’t manage the vegetation, you’ll end up with a brushy mess out there, it’s a pretty harsh sight, and if you don’t restore and plant conifers they’re not going to come back naturally because the seed source is gone.

DD: There are tons of seeds that remain dormant in the soils and wait for the next fire and when you get a fire passing through that area the plants will sprout, you’ll get a lot of natural revegetation.

Dominick Della Salla, National Center for Conservation Science and Policy

DD: When you look at the reason behind salvage logging, it’s based on this assumption that forests can’t come back as quickly on their own unless you log them.

RS: Below us we have logging from last year, the Fiddler timber sale and you can see earth scarred out from where the logs were hauled up these steep slopes. You can see the damage that that logging did even though it was sold to us with promises of restoring the forest.

JW: One of the unfortunate things about the salvage logging is that it’s an additional disturbance.

Jack Williams, Trout Unlimited

JW: These natural systems do surprisingly well at recovering from very intense but short duration disturbances. When we go back and log these areas after a fire we’re adding additional disturbances just at the time when the system’s trying to recover.

RS: Well, this is a telling sight. What we have here is a sugar pine stump, a big tree that was logged in the fiddler timber sale and there was reburning obviously, the charred soil all around us is testament to that and in the shadow of that one sugar pine stump is a lonely pine seedling trying to regrow after all that. It’s found the one bit of shade that’s left in this clearcut here and it’s struggling to survive. As a matter of fact this time of year it should be green and growing up towards the sky and appropriately enough it’s turning brown right where the top of the tree escapes from the protective shade of the stump.

JF: Most of the salvage was directed where it was totally inappropriate because these are areas where we’ve set aside the landscape for ecological goals, not just old growth but also other aspects of forest biodiversity.

Jerry Franklin, University of Washington

JF: The last thing you should do if you want a structurally complex mature forest is salvage it. You need the wood legacy and some of that wood is still going to be there 200 years from now.

JS: If a forest has had a severe fire, how long will those dead trees stand and will that be adequate to bridge the gap between now and when the new forest arrives.

John Sessions, Oregon State University

JS: There have been a number studies now which have documented that in many cases the standing dead trees will be long down on the ground before the new forest can provide trees of equal size and so you might say, what was the point of leaving those trees standing if they can’t bridge the gap? If there’s going to be a gap, what can you do to close the gap. It’s to bring back the forest more quickly.

JF: The fact the trees fall down, they’re still being used as habitat. Pileated woodpeckers are still getting at them. Amphibians are still using them. In fact, as they decay, a whole different set of organisms begins to use them. And so that legacy of woody debris is absolutely critical to the development of a complete new forest community.

LP: You wouldn’t need it all. There’s too much of it out there, you end up with just a pile of logs out there, it just doesn’t. Certainly our mill could use the wood.

JF: The legacy of dead trees, standing dead and down, is all of the dead wood that that ecosystem is going to get. It will be 80 or 100 years before it’s beginning to generate big wood on its own. And 100 years from now a lot of that wood is still going to be there, still going to be functioning as habitat, still going to be a source of nutrients and energy and so that pulse of dead wood that comes with that stand replacement disturbance is extremely important not just for the next decade but for the next hundred years and in fact, beyond that.

DD: They logged inside of areas that were supposed to be set aside for maintaining conditions for old growth associated species like the Northern

Spotted Owl. We’ve lost almost all of the biological legacies that were the really big trees on the forest. Given the steepness of the slopes and the fragility of the soils and the severity of the burns I’m questioning whether or not they’re even going to get a plantation back on some of those soils.

Near the Fiddler timber sale are scars from clearcutting that goes back to the 1970s. Many unsuccessful attempts have been made to reforest those steep slopes, but according to Oregon State University’s John Sessions, new methods of reforestation have significantly improved the success rate of replanting after timber harvests.

JS: In the Biscuit area the main challenge to growing a tree rapidly is competition from other vegetation. Much of the area is moisture limited and the shrubs and hardwoods can just be very competitive and can slow down the growth rates of these conifers extraordinarily.

JF: Some of the most important tree species in the Klamath-Siskiyou region are hardwoods. They’re tan oak, they’re madrone, they’re canyon live oak, they’re black oak. From an ecological perspective they’re very valuable as a part of those systems.

JS: If you wanted to grow these trees rapidly, planting a seedling just jump-starts the process and then you would want to keep the other vegetation back so that the conifers can have the growing space they need to rapidly grow in height and diameter.

RS: Here’s a place where there’s a cluster of young Douglas fir growing back. It’s where there were once roots from a large tree, that seems like that the whole thing got burned down into the soil. What I think that does is that it makes an area where seeds naturally catch when they’ve been blown in the wind. They stop there, they get caught and then these areas are also places where moisture kind of collects. So it’s a perfect place for young seedlings to grow up. [footsteps…] Well, this one’s just a few inches tall, probably born maybe last year, but if we continue down the trail you’ll see some that are maybe up to my knee. There’s a diversity of ages as well. That’s the other thing that’s different when it comes to natural regeneration and artificial planting. Scientists will explain that natural selection is kind of what powers evolution and what makes trees or different species specialize in different places and that’s what you’re skipping over if you just clearcut and do artificial planting, you’re gutting that very process that has led to diversity of life on earth.

FS: Fire is a keystone process in many of our western conifer forests so it seems important to retain fire in the ecosystem.

Fred Swanson is a research geologist with the Pacific Northwest research station in Corvallis, Oregon.

FS. There are many adaptations of organisms to fire and some of those organism may have crucial roles in the forest such as snow brush is a major nitrogen fixing species and its place in the forest and its fertilization function may key closely with the occurrence of fire.

JW: The forest service does face a very difficult time in knowing when to let fires burn and when not to,

Jack Williams, Trout Unlimited

JW: But we do in the long run need to allow fires to burn in these environments and we need to bring to fire back as the natural agent it is, because the fire really is helping to control the ecology and structure of those forests, and the best way to do that is actually by allowing wildfires to burn under certain conditions. So when fires naturally start very early in the season or in the fall or where we have rains predicted in the near future, those are the times are the times when we need to allow the fires to burn.

For several years after the Biscuit, each fire season produced intense wildfires that raged across scattered parts of Oregon. But the 2006 fire season, which followed a particularly wet winter, yielded much smaller blazes. According to Bill Robbins, a history professor at Oregon State University, these fires provided an opportunity to study fire’s beneficial side.

Bill Robbins: One of the fires that was near Sisters burned over what six, seven thousand acres but then fire ecologists went in and they looked over the area afterwards and mostly what it did was burn dead and down stuff like a forest fire should to remove the conditions for catastrophic fire.

JW: Right now we still tend to suppress virtually all fires that start

Jack Williams, Trout Unlimited

JW: and when you do that you’re just going to have continually building fuel loads and so that’s going to lend to bigger and broader fires and those are going to break out at the very worst possible conditions in the middle of summers and that’s exactly what happened with Biscuit.

FS: I do think we need to learn to how to live with fire.

Fred Swanson, Pacific Northwest Research Station

FS: We have many stories about fire as enemy but we need to learn better to see fire as both a friend but also a threat and we need to adjust our own behaviors in accordance with the threat.

Agnes Pilgrim: My people lived here for 22,000 years and they used all the peaks for prayers, for lookouts.

Takilma elder Agnes Baker Pilgrim

AP: They were no doubt a curious people also and those that could went on top of these mountains and do vision quests and all these sort of things. And this is what our people knew since time out of mind what a benefit fire was.

Frank Lake: We saw fire burn through an area and that facilitated the resprouting of certain shrubs that we saw the wildlife, like the deer and elk browse on, we would think, hey okay, well, we learned that’s a good kind of relationship there, we can start burning off in areas on our own.

Frank Lake grew up in the Karuk tribal community in Northern California and received a doctorate in forestry from Oregon State University in 2004.

FL: Through time you gain this body of knowledge that encompasses a lot of the life histories and how the plants and animals respond to fire severities or intensity of fire. Having learned from nature then how can we begin to emulate that to provide for ourselves as well as for the other animals that are of value and concern to us.

AP: They did it in increments. They knew to do it two years, three years, five years and rotated it and the Takilma women in my tribe did the lighting and the men watched and guarded the flame that it wouldn’t jump into the forest and all this and they would do it in sections.

BR: Before any Euro Americans were present Indians used fire as a purposeful tool

Bill Robbins, Oregon State University historian

BR: to enhance their food gathering, hunting and for other strategic purposes and they not only burned here in the Willamette Valley but they burned in the Oregon high desert as well, they burned certain areas in the Cascade Mountains to enhance the growth of huckleberries for instance.

Russell Jim: Fire is a very healthy thing for many reasons. It loosens up the earth and puts everything back and you can always see how the animals become very happy whenever there was a burn, knowing new stronger food is coming.

According to Russell Jim, a member of the Yakama Nation, his ancestors burned the forests east of the Cascade Mountains every 13 years.

RJ: When a camp area was starting to get overgrown and the compaction by the people and the animals were then obvious a little group of the camp would get together and say, time to burn, and they would designate one individual who they knew likes to stay there the longest and tell him, we want you to burn this area this year. After he checks that everybody’s gone, he’d wait until about a week or two before the rains came and he’d set the fire and what would come back then would be nurtured stronger huckleberry bushes with stronger genes to give me stronger genes.

Oshana Catranides: When fire returns nutrients to the soil, then the plants that grow are also more nutritious for the wild life.

Oshana Catrinides has worked with Lomakatsi Forest Restoration, a group in Ashland that teaches and practices how to use fire and other tools to restore forests and provide community fire safety.

OC: The browse coming up each spring or fall after burning was far more nutritional for the deer and the elk and therefore as the animals thrived then the people thrived as well.

BR: The three major river valleys in Western Oregon, the Willamette, the Umpqua and the Rogue River Valley, were all fire-managed landscapes during the Indian period. The Willamette Valley was an open grassland savannah because Indians burned to maintain that quality.

OC: In the pine oak savannah type of ecosystem, fire was used by the native people not only to nurse the soil, but to cleanse the soils of insects and weevils that might harm the first acorn crop and provide the good seed stock for the future of the oak forest.

BR: We do know from recorded evidence that when Indian burning ceased by 1840 and white immigrants begin to occupy farmsteads on the Willamette landscape, that brush and trees begin to creep back down onto the valley floor. The areas of open savannah, especially on hilltops began to disappear by the 1850s, 1860s.

AP: The wild blackberries used to be burned regularly by our people and only would thrive in places where you burned. Nowadays about all extinct to where I used to pick them because there’s been no burnings and what little there is, the leaves are big and the berries are just really little and it’s just really difficult to even get half a bucket full.

FL: My name is Frank Kanawha Lake. I was born and raised down in NW California. My father is part Karuk, Seneca and Cherokee.

Frank is leading a group around a Lomakatsi management site in the Siskiyou Mountain Park in Ashland, Oregon.

FL: The native people that lived here didn’t have pottery, didn’t have cast iron and so everything they needed either had to be basically produced in the place that they live. Let’s think about this as our hardware store, our supermarket, our pharmacy and our church.

Frank explains how his people used fire to manage this place where they lived.

FL: We see sugar pines here. Well, the sugar pine tree has thick platy bark that is kind of an insulator against fire. When it burned at the base exuded the sugar pine sap that you could then use as sugar. That was across the landscape a very important tree culturally. Sugar pine pitch or nuts were traded to the coast to help fight shellfish poisoning.

Marko Bey: We’ve inherited a fire-suppressed landscape. It’s missed 1 – 4 cycles of natural fire coming through.

Marko Bey works with Lomakatsi.

MB: In order to reintroduce fire to this landscape we look back to the pre-industrial landscape and how indigenous people managed the oak woodlands and forest stands of the area.

FL: Grandma taught us, well, we better burn every fall. We see that when we burn the oaks it reduces the vegetation around them that maybe compete for water or for light if the Douglas fir get over top of them. That then produces mass acorn crops, important for jays, for deer, for bears, but also too it’s our main carbohydrate resource for us to get through our many winters.

MB: The work Lomakatsi does is we’re implementing restoration forestry prescriptions and treatments, which for this region involve the reintroduction of fire. So it’s kind of a combining of the old knowledge and the new practices, invigorating plant communities, diversifying understory plants for wildlife browse.

AP: Before you can do a cool burning there’s 150 years of impactment on the ground floor. That has to be scraped up and burned just before the rainy season. Then later when you get enough of that off of the ground floor then you could some, it’s not a hot burn, it just runs along on the ground floor and burns what’s left. A cool burning fire needs to come back and Marko and them at Lomakatsi know that and that’s why I commend those guys. Each one of us talking out there maybe we’ll get to somebody one of these days.

Agnes was happy to learn that cool burning was recently prescribed for a natural area in my neighborhood in Portland along the Willamette River. In September 2006 I accompanied Richard Haney, a senior fire inspector with Portland Fire and Rescue, into the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. Firemen walked along fire lines with drip torches, igniting the dry grasses and shrubs that grow at the edge of this wetland along the southern edge of the Willamette Escarpment.

Richard Haney: We’re doing a prescribed burn at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. We’ve got all the hoses on the ground, all the firefighters in place, in gear and we’re burning this off a small section at a time.

Mark Wilson: What we’re doing here is really implementing the first field project on a very large three year program to reduce hazardous wildfire conditions in some of our natural areas.

Mark Wilson is the staff ecologist for Portland Parks’ City Nature.

MW: There was a study by the fire bureau that actually identified that many of our natural areas were in hazardous shape in terms of wildfire. We’ve had a policy both nationally and regionally for fire exclusion and it’s come at great cost I think to the landscape.

On August 8, 2001, a wild fire raged out of control in the North Portland neighborhood of Mock’s Crest, along the north end of the Willamette escarpment. Sparks from a train ignited grass growing along the tracks at the bottom of the escarpment and fire raced up the slope into a residential neighborhood.

MW: One of the biggest concerns when I heard about the Mock’s Crest fire was what it burned. It burned close to 35 acres of just about entirely Himalayan blackberry, an invasive plant that’s quite flammable, that vaporized and that sent a shower of sparks into the entire neighborhood. I think that was the wake up call both for fire bureau and for parks that we needed to do something.

Chris Barney, a firefighter with Portland Fire Bureau, is one of the people in charge of today’s burn.

Chris Barney: Right now we finished the burning and they’re in mop up so they’re just going through and making sure the fire is extinguished and they’re going to try and get out the smoke, the lingering smoke and make sure that’s extinguished as well.

Barney: Is there anything that you want us to do? At this point fire’s gone through those two stands and it’s not going to get much of the bigger stuff.

Wilson: Right, I don’t think we’re going to get it any cleaner than it is, do you?

Barney: No, the edge on that eastern side is still a little damp so it didn’t take as well. Same in that corner.

Wilson: Great work.

Barney: Good.

Back in Southern Oregon the Forest Service also talks about returning fire to the landscapes of the Siskiyou wildlands. Here’s what Biscuit Fire Recovery Project spokesperson Judy McHugh was saying in 2004.

JM: The single most important concern that the wildlife biologist has about this area and the protection of late successional habitat is another wildfire going through and burning up the little that’s left and what we want to do is get out there and put in place these fuels management zones and prescribed fire to try to return fire as a process on the landscape but we have not had any success in engaging the public in that discussion. Everyone focuses on salvage.

FS Auctioneer: The Blackberry Fire Salvage Auction is now open for oral bids. . . Silver Creek Timber

It’s the first week in August 2006 and the Blackberry Timber sale is being auctioned. After the auction Rolf Skar takes me to a waterfall along the Illinois River, in a part of the Biscuit Burn that has never been logged.

RS: Well, today unfortunately in Medford, Oregon at the headquarters of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest the federal government was having what they call a timber sale auction. So this is where they take public lands and they sell off the right to log those lands to a private timber company.

Auctioneer: The time to submit further bids has elapsed. The auction is now closed. Silver Creek Timber Company is the apparent high bidder at $213.05 per thousand board feet.

Patty Burrell: Today was the auction of the Blackberry fire salvage sale.

Patty Burrell is the public affairs officer for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.

PB: It’s part of the Biscuit timber sales that have been occurring since the Biscuit Fire and it’s one of two inventoried roadless area sales so it has a lot of attention towards it.

RS: The Blackberry timber sale’s focused extraordinarily large trees, the last best big trees that were affected by Biscuit, and that’s what they’re cherry-picking out of the North Kalmiopsis Roadless area.

PB: We have successfully generated over 7.6 million dollars to the U.S. treasury. I think this is a case that we’ve been saying with these two sales, Mike’s Gulch and Blackberry is that they’re economically viable. Meaning that somebody can come in and be able to remove the dead trees and provide for wood products to the local economy.

The Blackberry Timber Sale sold for much more money than any of the previous sale units. But according to Dominick Della Salla, with the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, that didn’t make up for how much money the Forest Service lost on theses other sales, especially Mike’s Gulch.

DD: There was enough rot that had set in, in the trees that they had to only take the lower third of the tree and they left a lot of material on the ground. So, I think when the final numbers come in on that sale, we’re going to see that the forest service has lost tax payer money on selling the trees below what it’s going to cost them now to clean up the damage from the logging operations.

According to Siskiyou Project’s Rolf Skar, however, the Blackberry Sale was a different story.

RS: This was sort of a legendary grove of trees for the timber sale planners. They knew that this was huge old growth with tight straight grain and as a matter of fact right before the snows came we uncovered a bunch of green tree logging that was happening on roads outside of logging units where live green old growth trees were just being logged apparently under the cover of road safety, which is strange because large green old growth generally don’t fall over onto roads.

At the same time that the Blackberry sale was being auctioned, logging began in Mike’s Gulch in the South Kalmiopsis roadless area. Again forest activists blocked logging roads in the woods and streets around the National Forest Headquarters in Medford. But unlike the protests that greeted the Fiddler Sale more than a year earlier, these protests were soon extinguished. To the relief of scientists and forest activists, the logging was less extensive than they had expected, probably because many of the snags had begun to rot. However Rolf Skar suspects another possible motivation.

RS: Mike’s Gulch which is much more accessible and is actually visible from Highway 199, might be the, hey look, see roadless area logging ain’t all that bad project, that the forest put together and the one that’s two hours from a major highway, Blackberry, way in the back country is really where they got the cut out.

SC: You gotta recognize that of the area that burned by the fire, our harvest activities were on less than 1% of the area,

Rogue River-Siskiyou Forest Supervisor Scott Conroy

SC: so that means 99% of the area had no salvage harvest on it. And even within the units we harvested, we left the biggest trees for wildlife habitat and soils protection and we left wide riparian reserves where we didn’t harvest any trees along all of the stream courses.

JF: They salvaged the areas that had the highest concentrations of dead wood in them.

Jerry Franklin, University of Washington.

JF: Yeah, they didn’t salvage much of it, but they salvaged the area that would potentially become the best late successional forests.

SC: The logging project did go according to plan and we recovered 64 million board feet. That generated an estimated 42 million dollars in the local economy. It covered all the costs for planning and preparation and administration of the salvage sales, slash clean up and road maintenance work and still produced 4.5 million dollars to invest in fire restoration activities.

DD: I worked with about a dozen scientists and we released a report that said, it looked like the forest service was losing millions of dollars of tax payer money by selling the logs below what they thought they were worth.

Dominick Della Salla, National Center for Conservation Science and Policy

DD: They were paying more to repair the damage from logging than what they were getting back. And in the meantime the Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress, started an investigation into this question. They wanted to know what was the cause of the delays on the Biscuit logging project and whether or not the forest service was in the black or in the red. They reaffirmed what we had seen last October. The forest service did indeed lose 2 million dollars.

SC: They drew no conclusion about profitability or no profit in the GAO report. Others have taken the figures that GAO produced and done some additional math with them and claimed that there’s been a loss but that’s not reality, that’s not accurate, that’s not what GAO reported.

RS: Some of the key findings were that the more controversial and more remote the logging project, the more money it lost for taxpayers.

Rolf Skar, Siskiyou Project

RS: The only logging that returned money to the federal treasury was logging alongside roads, the most accessible stuff that was done for safety reasons and that was something that no conservation group challenged in court. The GAO found that the forest service rewriting plans dramatically expanding its logging project from its original proposal, meaning the politics that got involved, that that was the primary delay factor in implementing logging projects.

SC: We were delayed by a year in actually being able to harvest because of legal action that was taken, not because of the extended analysis.

LA: It’s my understanding that the only lawsuit that slowed things down was from Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Lesley Adams with Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center.

LA: The Forest Service had given authority to the timber companies to do the marking of the timber sale and the court agreed that the timber companies can’t go out and mark the timber sale themselves. That slowed down the process for a few months because the Forest Service had to go out and mark the sales themselves.

DD: The Forest Service had been cut in staff by about a third in the last six years. They could not deal with the sheer volume of timber sales that were proposed under the Biscuit logging plan. So it wasn’t lawsuits. It was the agency got overshot.

While the Blackberry timber sale was still in progress, a district judge in San Francisco re-instated the Clinton administration’s roadless rule. If the Bush administration had not tried to weaken the rule, none of the controversial timber sales in the Biscuit Burn would have been allowed. While the ruling didn’t stop the logging that was happening, it effectively put an end to any more Biscuit salvage logging.

RS: That’s really good news for about 58 million acres of roadless forests across the country on federal lands.

Rolf Skar with the Siskiyou Project

RS: The bad news of course is that places in the North and South Kalmiopsis that were logged by the Mike’s Gulch and Blackberry logging project are no longer roadless. True, they didn’t build new roads into these areas but when you create clearcuts in what’s essentially de facto wilderness, those areas no longer have what’s called wilderness quality and the inventory that the forest service uses to categorize which areas are sort of wildlands will probably drop several thousand acres of the South Kalmiopsis and the North Kalmiopsis. The North Kalmiopsis was at one point by far the largest roadless forest in Oregon and now it’s a distant third. We just can’t afford to keep losing acres of roadless forest that way. It’s simply not fair to future generations.

LA: I feel vindicated by the roadless rule but it’s also deeply painful that that’s the way that our system works. That our federal government can push through its agenda for special interests before a judge can determine the legality of these actions. It’s so painful to go out to this area and realize that we were right all along and it didn’t matter. They came in, they did their thing and they left and our communities are totally polarized and I really think that we could have chose a different path and been in a better place than we are now.

RS: Well, there are some special places that are no more and there’s no way to feel good about that for me. But I do know that some good things have come out of this fight. I think that Americans have learned a lot about the importance of forest fires for forest ecology. I think they’ve learned that fire affected forests aren’t simply moonscapes that require taxpayer dollars and government intervention in order to survive. I think they’ve also been reminded of the importance of protecting roadless forests and other reserves like old growth reserves because when politics gets into the mix we can’t always trust our government to manage our public lands properly.

AP: All our people believed we have an umbilical cord, we are not an orphan as long as we have our earth mother. I have my fifth generation granddaughter and great great great granddaughter. I want her to walk in the beauty that I walk in here today.