Decades After The Timber Wars & With No Other Alternative, Ashland Begins To Face Its Climate Future
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When Linda Duffy arrived at her post in Ashland, she had inherited a proposal to cut new firebreaks — or gaps to slow the spread of wildfires — into the ponderosa pine-covered ridgetops above the town. HazRed, they called it. Activists were convinced this was just another logging operation, thinly cloaked in the language of fire safety.
But the fire danger was real. Ashland residents didn’t have to venture farther than the city hall steps to see the ominous potential for wildfire: The Ashland watershed’s forest begins just across the street from the town center. Marty Main, a private forester who has been helping to manage city lands since 1991, said the foreboding signs were everywhere: Mature trees — competing with each other for moisture in the forest’s overly dense stands — were dying, while shade-loving species were crowding up from below, and the ground was thick with dry needles. It was the classic ladder of fuels that a fire might climb to the treetops. “I could see that the watershed was in serious trouble,” Main said.
The situation is the same in hundreds of communities across the American West. Forest Service bigwigs, fire chiefs, and governors are scrambling for ways to better manage forests and allow residents to coexist with worsening fire risk. While the techniques for doing that — retain bigger trees, less tightly packed, and perform more prescribed fire on the ground — are well established and clearly supported by science, long-standing conflicts between environmentalists and loggers have kept town after town paralyzed. But Ashland, a historical hotbed of both the logging industry and environmental activism, has become an unlikely success story. That moment at the ranger station in 1996 was the catalyst for a protracted series of community meetings, patience-stretching failures of communication, multiple compromises, and finally the crystallization of trust and understanding between groups that long thought they would never be able to work together.
In 2004, the city began its first major thinning project. Because the forest runs right into Ashland’s core, there was no way to hide the felling. Dozens of logging trucks, heavy with trees, pulled through the city’s narrow downtown commercial district. Don Boucher, a lifelong Forest Service employee, said he talked with one of the truck drivers who had driven logs through town a decade and a half earlier. “It was amazing to see people waving with all five fingers this time,” Boucher remembers him saying.
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https://grist.org/extreme-weather/how-one-town-put-politics-aside-to-save-itself-from-fire-ashland-oregon/