Opinion: Jim’s Creek Restoration Project needs to move forward

Trump’s E.O. instructs both the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior Department to work to streamline rules and regulations and seek legal ways and legislative proposals to improve timber production and sound forest management. 

 

The Middle Fork Ranger District has a perfect opportunity to demonstrate a very sound forest management and forest restoration project with the Jim’s Creek Restoration and Demonstration Project. 

 

This project is a huge opportunity for USFS Chief Shultz to seize upon and to get the ball rolling with active management of our forests. As much as I disdain the phrase “Shovel Ready project,” this project is essentially shovel ready to revive. Reviving this project will help not only the forest, but the local community, schools, county tax base and the federal treasury. It will also contribute American made products to meet the estimated 5000 truckloads of lumber needed to rebuild the homes destroyed by the Pacific Palisades fire and the well-known need for affordable housing across America.

 

The project began back in 2002 when career forester Tim Bailey and Fire Ecologist Jane Curtis proposed the “Jim’s Creek Savanah Restoration Project.” A 630-acre demonstration project that highlights forest conditions from the 1850s and prior within a 28,000 acres area along the Upper Middle Fork of the Willamette River above Hills Creek Reservoir. Bailey recognized the potential to return the area to the condition that indigenous people maintained using fire prior to expansion and settlement of the western United States.

 

It’s worth noting that the city of Oakridge was originally called Big Prairie in the late 1800s. In fact, it’s mentioned in the book written by Lawrence and Mary Rakestraw in 1989 titled: History of the Willamette National Forest.

 

On page 75, it describes the early Oakridge as a long-established incorporated village located on what had originally been an open prairie with groves of oak trees. Remnants of these oak groves remain all around the Oakridge/Westfir area; what is known as a Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). These are similar to the open oak savannah that the Jim’s Creek Project restored as a demonstration forest model. This model could be expanded to restore those conditions of an oak savannah immediately around many areas within the Oakridge/Westfir WUI. Enhancing fire resiliency just as the Jim’s Creek demonstration project has done.

 

Unfortunately, like so many forest projects in recent years, litigation was an obstacle. In this case, the Red Tree Vole was used to stop or slow the small 630-acre project. Bailey successfully managed to avoid lawsuits from ending the project and it was completed. However, maintaining the project using periodic burning hasn’t been used due to more potential litigation concerning, supposedly, a rare plant the serial litigators discovered in the area.

 

Coincidently, it was another supposedly rare flower or weed (Braun’s Milkvetch) in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles that has been speculated as stopping a new power pole replacement project and brush clearing. Perhaps it was also a contributing factor too in the Palisades Fire that killed 8 people and destroyed a 25,000-acre area and thousands of the homes in the area. 

 

These two examples of supposedly rare plants or species are examples of how the Endangered Species Act can and often is used as a tool to stop any and all forests projects. Even the projects intended to reduce fuels for fires, and projects that have taken literally years to prepare in order to avoid such litigation as Bailey encountered with the Red Tree Vole. Concurrently, USFS staff are dealing with yet another supposed rare plant. These are examples of what the President’s E.O. are attempting to avoid by streamlining rules and regulations.

 

It’s not an effort to clear-cut entire forest. It an effort to restore common sense forestry rather than to continue seeing 100,000-acre fires as normal.

 

Dr. Bob Zybach, who holds a PhD in the study of Western Oregon Fire History from OSU, has known Tim Bailey for around 20 years. Dr. Zybach has written several articles about the Jim’s Creek Project over the years and fully supports the project and the potential to greatly expand it. Zybach recently wrote an article for the Oregon Fish & Wildlife Journal titled: “Jim’s Creek Revisited: A Burning Opportunity.” 

 

He highlights not only the great work of the restoration project and its benefit, if maintained properly, to create fire resilience and economic benefits. The 630-acre project removed 9.6 million board feet of commercial timber, resulting in $660,000 in stumpage receipts, $300,000 was earmarked for subsequent restoration projects by using the Stewardship Contracting Authority granted by the Region 6 Office along with the Middle Fork Willamette Watershed Council. Do the math of the receipts that would be generated when this project is expanded to a landscape scale restoration project of 28,000 acres.

 

Dr. Zybach and USFS retired Planner Bailey both lament that the project hasn’t been maintained or expanded.

 

I have a friend and former co-worker who went on from our days of working together years ago in the beverage industry, to obtain a degree in forestry from OSU. He also had a career with Oregon Tribes as a forester for the Grande Ronde Tribes and the Coquille Tribes. From there he became the Bureau of Indian Affairs Chief Forester. 

 

I called Pete recently to catch up after several years. I expected him to be in Washington, I was surprised to learn that he had been working recently from Coos Bay. During our chat, I asked if he was familiar with the Jim’s Creek Project. He shared with me that he had actually visited the project several years ago when Bailey and the USFS had finished the initial demonstration project of 630 acres. Pete was impressed with the project.

 

I mention my old friend and co-worker simply to add to the fact that the Jim’s Creek Project is widely recognized as a great project that needs to be expanded. It should be replicated and used as a model project. It’s recognized, not only by many veteran USFS employees and retirees, but experts in forest history such as Dr. Zybach and the Chief Forester of the BIA.

 

 

The fact that the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) Committee designated to amend the NWFP, visited Oakridge within the past year and identified the area as an area in need of more fire resiliency. Also, it’s worth noting that Norm Johnson, a key player when the NWFP was being crafted during President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan study, recently stated:

 

  “I still go through Sweet Home and Oakridge, and I say ‘Oh, what did we do to these people? They didn’t deserve this.”

 

 

He also recognized that: ” Despite net increases in NSO (Northern Spotted Owl) forests on federal lands during the monitoring period, the population of territorial owls on federal lands decreased by 61.8%, ” said one Forest Service study. A lot of the decline is attributed to the Barred Owl, which outcompetes the NSO for habitat. 

 

The Cedar Creek Fire in 2022 destroyed 10,000 acres of NSO habitat, including 2500 acres of Critical Spotted Owl Habitat. Of course, those figures follow even more job losses and mill closures that began in the 1980s and through the 1990s as our National Forest became managed more as museums than working, multiple use forests. 

 

And the timber industry suffered too. Employment in the timber industry dropped 40% between 2001 and 2013. 

 

 

President Trump’s forest Executive Orders combined with USFS Chief Shultz’ comments about returning to active forest management could be both the economic boost rural communities have needed for far too long. This may also be the signal that “let it burn” policies have failed our forest, wildlife and recreational opportunities and have been a terrible way to manage our national forests. The Jim’s Creek Project expansion is simply a project that is needed and perfect at this time as we transition back towards common sense forest policies. 

 

The proof forest policy failures are everywhere across the western states; from massive blackened and snag filled fire scars to communities that the NWFP has forgotten and that languish economically and have become dependent almost solely on recreation and tourism. Meanwhile, the very areas that should attract tourist are destroyed by fire. These same areas were set aside by the NWFP to protect owl, fish habitat and old growth forests. Now is the time to reverse these failures and create models of successful forestry. The Jim’s Creek Project is ready and waiting.