2. FIRE: Saving the trees but not the forests -- the struggle of the Quincy Library Group (ClimateWire, 09/18/2008)

John J. Fialka, ClimateWire reporter

This story is the second part of a two-part series about forest fires and climate change. Click here to read the first part.

QUINCY, Calif. -- One night in 1984, a group of loggers grabbed Michael Jackson and threw him out of a bar. Jackson, a stocky, bearded lawyer who represented the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, didn't realize it at the time, but his flight through the swinging doors and out into the street was the beginning of a long learning curve that may someday change the nation's forestry practices.

He had been bragging about California's new wilderness laws and how he might use them to shut down the state's logging industry. "The more I drank, the more I thought they needed to know," he recalls. Nine years later, in 1993, Jackson put this little Sierra Nevada logging town on the map by forming the Quincy Library Group.

It was his effort to reach a compromise between environmental groups, some of which wanted to destroy the commercial logging industry for its practice of clear-cutting forests, and local businessmen, loggers, retirees and city officials. The group's members believe loggers could play a role in preserving the health of the region's forests -- and also help reduce the huge amounts of greenhouse gases that scientists say are being released by increasingly large and destructive wildfires.

Linda Blum and Michael Jackson. Photos courtesy of Linda Blum.

Jackson and some of the others in this tiny Northern California town (population 1,879), tucked in the wooded Sierras, had learned from local Maidu Indian tribes about their centuries-long practice of setting small forest fires to clear small trees and brush from the woods. The fires created more space for hunting and helped preserve the big oak trees which provided acorns that the tribes ground up to make a form of bread. The group found Forest Service studies and old pictures that showed older forests were thinner, producing bigger trees that tended to survive fires.

"I always liked loggers," recalled Jackson. "At one time I thought they were a tool of destruction," but he had begun to realize that they would have to play a role in any forest thinning process that replicated the Indians' practice of removing the brush and saving the bigger trees. If they could find a way to make money out of the thinning process, loggers would be helpful, he concluded. "Otherwise it [the thinning effort] would become more like a gigantic federal welfare project."

Jackson's first efforts at reaching a compromise triggered table-thumping shouting matches between local loggers and environmental activists, but he had the wisdom to move the meetings to the local library. There his wife, Quincy's librarian, gave them a warning: If they made too much noise, she would throw them out. They worked out an agreement to develop a network of thinning zones in the forest. The deal would limit the destruction of wildfires. It would also restrict logging, but still leave enough business for the local timber companies to survive.

A resounding endorsement from Congress, but greens are unimpressed

In 1998, the Quincy group took its plan to Congress, where legislators, eager to end the shrill disputes over the plight of the spotted owl, an endangered species, agreed to devote $26 million a year to create "defense fuel profile zones." They would form a network of relatively narrow strips of thinned areas designed to protect 1.5 million acres of forest from catastrophic fires. The idea was to run them along roads and ridgelines so that fires could be compartmentalized and stopped before becoming large enough to threaten whole forests. The House approved the measure 429-1.

That seemed like a great success, but environmental groups remained opposed. Linda Blum, a former staff member of California's Audubon Society who joined Jackson in forming the library group, recalls that national environmental groups warned her in Washington that they would continue to fight the plan. She describes the opposition as a "mentality" that she once shared: "Anybody who wants to cut a tree and use it commercially is a bad guy. Many of my former friends still believe that if only we could kill the timber industry, everything would be okay and we could just go backpacking every weekend and everybody would be happy."

Jackson soon discovered that everyone wasn't happy. Deals that were initially hammered together in the woods had a tendency to come apart in Washington. The Quincy group's plan envisioned removing trees up to 30 inches in diameter, to create the necessary space and to provide a living for the timber companies, which prized the larger trees. But in 2001, at the behest of environmental groups, the Clinton Administration ordered the Forest Service to restrict the tree removal to 12-inch trees.

In 2004, after Forest Service rangers complained the limit was too tight to attract much help from loggers, the Bush Administration restored the 30-inch limit. The Sierra Club, Sierra Forest Legacy and other environmental groups sued. The result has been a court battle that has lumbered on through four summers of record fires in California. Last October, a California District Court Judge, Morrison England Jr., got fed up with it and threw out a request for an injunction to stop the enlarged thinning.

Spotted owls are torched

Noting that just two recent fires in Northern California had torched 88,000 acres, including 27 known nesting areas of spotted owls, the judge concluded that "the greater danger" was not the thinning, but the failure to confront "the overforested conditions" that feed large wildfires.

In May, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected Judge England's view of the woods and reinstated a preliminary injunction against three thinning projects. The judges asserted that that the danger of extinction of the spotted owl "cannot be dismissed" and suggested that the Forest Service -- which has already spent its $1.2 billion budget for fighting fires this year -- should look to Congress for more money to pay for the thinning.

Thinning works: On July 29th a wildfire started that destroyed 6,012 acres of woodland just 20 miles west of Quincy, Calif., but the old trees in this section survived because work crews had earlier removed the smaller trees and brush that would have made the fire hotter and more destructive. Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service.

Craig Thomas, executive director of Sierra Forest Legacy, which represents many of the environmental litigants, saw this decision as an important victory. "The court has made it clear that we don't have to choose between community safety and environmental protection. We can have both," he said. During an interview last year, Thomas dismissed the environmental credentials of Jackson and his legal aide, Blum, calling them "two individuals who pose as environmentalists."

The Quincy Library Group and the Bush Administration are appealing the decision. California Attorney General Jerry Brown has lined up with the environmental groups. Both sides claim that science supports their position. Mark Rey, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, claims it is politics, not science, that has whipsawed the Quincy Library Group's proposal for a decade.

"I don't sense that they've appreciated the reality of the fire situation in that part of the world," said Rey. "California is a place where if you're going to cut a tree, first you have to hug it, then get six pallbearers and give it a good Christian burial." He asserts that no solution that depends on continually increasing federal funding is likely to happen. "If you have a non-economic solution, you don't have a solution."

Lynn Jungwirth runs a nonprofit forest-thinning project in Hayfork, Calif. It clears the brush and small trees out of forest land and uses the wood to make small pellets that are used in wood-burning stoves and chips destined for the few remaining wood-burning power plants in the area. The approach helps protect forests and creates jobs, but California's Democrat-led Legislature, which she claims is dominated by "urban environmentalists" on forestry issues, hasn't shown much interest in providing incentives for such projects.

Credits for biofuels from wood chips get truncated

She had hoped for more economic support from Washington in 2007, when Congress was creating renewable fuel credits for biofuels made from wood chips, but environmental groups persuaded Democratic leaders in the House to restrict the program. "I think the environmental community likes greenhouse gases," she said, referring to the massive CO2 emissions from large forest fires.

Franz Matzner, a forest advocate in Washington for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said his group and others moved to limit the credits to projects in which underbrush is removed from around homes. Large-scale thinning projects on public lands to make wood chips into ethanol, he said, are viewed as "problematic." "Science," he argued, "shows we don't know whether or not thinning could make fires worse."

Just whose "science" is applied to the Quincy Library Group's 15-year-old forest-thinning proposal may be litigated in the courts for months, if not years, to come. Because of the Forest Service's chronic funding problems and prolonged administrative appeals by environmental groups, the Quincy group's initial five-year thinning goal, blessed by Congress, remains about half accomplished after a decade.

Meanwhile, though, scientists are finding plenty to study in the drought-parched forests of northern California. On June 20, the largest dry lightning storm ever seen in the region spawned more than 1,200 wildfires. It took 25,000 local, state and federal firefighters over a month to contain them. The fire consumed 1.2 million acres of trees, killed 15 people and cost $85 million to put out. The little town of Concow, Calif., was incinerated, losing 110 houses.

Just 70 miles away, one of the other fires roared through the Lassen National Forest, jumping roads and creating the same cyclonic winds that destroyed Concow. But then part of it hit an area that the Forest Service had thinned as part of the Quincy group's program. "It did what it was designed to do," explained Kit Mullen, one of the forest's district rangers. The raging fire dropped out of the treetops and "just went right to ground."

That allowed an elite Forest Service firefighting team, summoned from the East Coast, to quickly snuff it out and then focus on the remaining hot parts of the fire in neighboring, unthinned forests. What was estimated as a blaze that should have cost $8.2 million yielded a $2.8 million firefighting bill. "We not only saved the cost of doing the fire suppression, we saved the values of the forest that wasn't burned," Mullen pointed out.

"Whether you think of those values in terms of economic values for timber or personal values for enjoyment and wildlife habitat, those values remain," she added.

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