Across the Great Divide

Explorations In Collaborative Conservation And The American West

Philip Brick, Donald Snow, Sarah F. Bates, Philip Brick, Donald Snow, Sarah F. Bates

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781559638111
  9781559638104
• eBook ISBN:
  9781597262729
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Biological Sciences

Amid the policy gridlock that characterizes most environmental debates, a new conservation movement has emerged. Known as “collaborative conservation,” it emphasizes local participation, sustainability, and inclusion of the disempowered, and focuses on voluntary compliance and consent rather than legal and regulatory enforcement. Encompassing a wide range of local partnerships and initiatives, it is changing the face of resource management throughout the western United States.

Across the Great Divide presents a thoughtful exploration of this new movement, bringing together writing, reporting, and analysis of collaborative conservation from those directly involved in developing and implementing the approach. Contributors examine:

• the failure of traditional policy approaches
• recent economic and demographic changes that serve as a backdrop for the emergence of the movement
• the merits of, and drawbacks to, collaborative decision-making
• the challenges involved with integrating diverse voices and bringing all sectors of society into the movement

In addition, the book offers in-depth stories of eight noteworthy collaborative initiatives -- including the Quincy Library Group, Montana's Clark Fork River, the Applegate Partnership, and the Malpai Borderlands -- that explore how different groups have organized and acted to implement their goals.

Among the contributors are Ed Marston, George Cameron Coggins, David Getches, Andy Stahl, Maria Varela, Luther Propst, Shirley Solomon, William Riebsame, Cassandra Moseley, Lynn Jungwirth, and others. Across the Great Divide is an important work for anyone involved with collaborative conservation or the larger environmental movement, and for all those who care about the future of resource management in the West.

ON THE GROUND: COLLABORATIVE CONSERVATION IN PRACTICE

Skeptics of collaborative conservation (and there are many) complain that the many watershed groups, resource councils, and partnerships add up to little more than the sum of their meetings—in other words, that collaborative conservation has failed to show positive results on the ground.

Our experience is otherwise. Each of us has participated directly in the formation of collaborative groups that accomplished measurable environmental benefits; we have observed and heard about dozens of others in the course of our research. We have also participated in, observed, and heard about many other initiatives that haven’t gone beyond the “getting to know you” stage, or have ended in discord of one sort or another. We believe the lessons from the latter category are equally important as those of the successful examples.

This section tells the stories of eight collaborative initiatives in the West. We lead with the Quincy Library Group, whose legislative end run around the Forest Service has garnered more press about the collaborative conservation movement than any other initiative. Although we believe Quincy may be a poor choice as a poster child for collaboration, it has become a touchstone in almost all discussions of the subject and thus is an important example of the ways such groups have organized and acted to implement their goals.

The subsequent stories in this section are of quieter but equally important 77 initiatives: the farmers and environmentalists who overcame substantial cultural barriers to hammer out a management plan for Montana’s Clark Fork River; the community leaders, timber industry officials, and environmentalists who convinced the Forest Service to embark on innovative experiments in the Applegate Valley in Oregon; the ranchers who banded together in an effort to preserve their open lands and work cooperatively with public agency officials and private land conservation groups in the Malpai Borderlands region of New Mexico and Arizona; and the residents of Routt County, Colorado, who approved a tax increase to finance the purchase of agricultural conservation easements and thus preserve ranchlands around Steamboat Springs.

We also present the story of artists in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula who helped their community celebrate and understand rapidly declining wild salmon runs. Their unconventional methods—with more than a little humor, sentimentality, and adventure thrown in—have strengthened community spirit as well as salmon populations. For its part, the story of Oregon’s ambitious salmon recovery plan offers lessons in the political and legal realities of tackling such problems on a larger scale.

Finally, we offer what can only be described as an unfinished story, an account of a proposed Citizen Management Committee for reintroduced grizzlies in the Selway-Bitterroot mountains of Montana and Idaho. Met with intense opposition from both ends of the political/interest group spectrum, this collaborative group’s experience well illustrates the perils of staking one’s place in the “radical middle.”

The Quincy Library Group: A Divisive Attempt at Peace

Ed Marston

Perhaps the best-known example of a collaborative conservation initiative, the Quincy Library Group (QLG), is made up of timber people from California’s northern Sierra Nevada, local environmentalists, citizens, and representatives of local government. It had been just another consensus-based partnership until 1997, when U.S. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA) introduced a bill ordering the Forest Service to do the group’s bidding. After a contentious House debate in July 1997, the bill passed that body 429 to 1. Western Republicans such as Alaska’s Don Young and Idaho’s Helen Chenoweth joined enthusiastically with green Democrats Vic Fazio of California, Peter DeFazio of Oregon, and Republican environmental leader Sherwood Boehlert of New York to push the bill. Finally, even a very reluctant George Miller (D-CA) threw his support to the bill, bringing a substantial bloc with him. The proposal passed the Senate the following year as a rider to the 1999 spending bill, after facing fiercer opposition, and was signed into law on October 22, 1998.

The bill tells three national forest supervisors in the Sierra Nevada Range to revise their forest plans to incorporate the group’s proposals in over 4,000 square miles (2.5 million acres) of national forest—a land area twice as big as Yellowstone National Park. The project aims to log about 9,000 acres per year of roaded, second-growth forests, and thin another 40,000 to 60,000 roaded acres annually to protect against fire. It will also put 150,000 acres of roadless, old-growth land off-limits to logging, protect all trees over 30 inches in diameter, and provide extrawide buffer zones against streams.

Environmentalists outside of Quincy have reacted negatively. They like parts of the plan, but object to its expense, the money it might pull from other forests, the greatly increased logging, and the geographic scale. Most of all, they object to passing laws to manage individual forests—especially laws written by what they see as a local, narrowly based, special-interest group.

“Working-Class Gorgeous”

There is nothing about Quincy, population 5,000, to tell a casual observer that the environmental movement’s most serious challenge in decades started here. Quincy looks like the logging town it has been since the turn of the century. Trees grow thickly right up to the back of house lots, and although the town is ninety minutes north and west of Lake Tahoe, and four hours north and east of the Bay Area, it still looks rural.

But change is coming, observes the QLG’s lead environmentalist, attorney Michael Jackson, who points to the town’s two coffee shops: “Bob’s Fine Food closes at 9:00 A.M. because their customers have gone to work. It has customers starting at 4:30 A.M., when we newcomers (Jackson has been in Quincy since 1977) are still asleep.” Bob’s serves the kind of coffee that comes in round cans; the other shop, Morning Thunder, opens later in the morning and serves cappuccino and espresso.

Though Quincy has growing numbers of new people, this is not the Sierra Nevada that inspired the creation of the Sierra Club. QLG member Linda Blum calls it “working-class gorgeous.” A climb takes you to the tops of softly rounded mountains covered with trees, rather than into the tundra and peaks that characterize the Sierra Nevada Range south of here. Quincy is not as rough or sprawling as some of its neighboring towns, but neither is it busted. California lost sixty timber mills in the last decade, according to the California Forestry Association. Quincy has one of the sixty-one survivors: a huge Sierra Pacific Industries mill now retooled to cut small timber. From Monday to Friday, Quincy’s two one-way main streets are dominated by logging trucks on their way to and from that mill. But these are not the good old days of the 1980s. Today each truck off public land is likely to carry ten to twenty relatively small logs; before the California spotted owl, trucks would lug their way through town with only one to three logs of mammoth size. In those days, Jackson said in an interview, when a truck carried a particularly large log, the driver might drive around the block that had his office on it, taunting the environmental litigator with the sight of another fallen giant, before stopping for a celebratory beer at a bar on the town’s main street. There’s another difference, Jackson said: “These days, when people wave at me, they use all five fingers.” Jackson and his allies gave as good as they got during the timber wars. “We blamed and ridiculed our neighbors. There was sugar in the tanks of logging equipment.”

Not Conventional Consensus

If “consensus” conveys a smiley-faced image of people sitting around a table making sure everyone is in agreement, the Quincy Library Group isn’t consensus. For starters, not everyone is at the table. At a meeting held after the House victory but before the Senate battle, a few Forest Service people sat silently on chairs against the wall, while the group’s twenty or so members sat at a central table. Also missing were national and regional environmental groups, who had achieved a consensus of their own. One hundred and forty groups—some from as far away as Alabama and North Carolina, as well as thirty-five California groups and western regional groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Pacific Rivers Council—opposed the QLG bill. Finally, the group is very definitely led: by Jackson; by former Plumas County supervisor Bill Coates, who resigned his elected position to become a coach at the local Feather River Community College; and by Tom Nelson, chief forester at Sierra Pacific Industries, which owns the Quincy mill and other California mills.

Jackson, the group’s tactician and its major representative to the outside world, describes himself as practicing “catch and release” law. He sues environmental agencies for breaking environmental laws, collects his fees from them, and then lets them go, to bring him another fee at some later time. The other half of his time, he says, goes to the Quincy Library Group, for which he does not get paid: “It’s the most expensive project I’ve ever been involved with.”

As Plumas County supervisor, Coates used to spend a fair amount of time flying to Washington, D.C., to plead for bigger cuts off the local national forest—his county of 20,000 has depended on federal timber receipts as well as on local taxes paid by the timber industry. Since founding the QLG, though, he began flying to D.C. with his former opponents to lobby on behalf of the group’s positions.

Initially, the relationships were uneasy. The spouse of one environmental member of the group recalls that she used to cross the street to avoid Coates. The third leader, Nelson, works for the largest private landowner in California. Sierra Pacific Industries, with 1.4 million acres, is California’s Weyerhaeuser or Plum Creek in terms of scale.

Creative Environmentalists . . .

The Quincy Library Group is a direct result of the creativity and foresight of a relatively small number of local environmentalists, banded together as the Friends of the Plumas Wilderness. In the mid-1980s, when huge logs were pouring off the local forests, the beleaguered greens designed an alternative to cutting old-growth trees. According to Jackson, the approach was put together with research help from The Wilderness Society and forest economist Randal O’Toole, legal help from the Natural Resources Defense Council, and, in the appeals and litigation stage, with the Sierra Club as plaintiff.

The 1986 proposal called for putting all remaining roadless areas into a preserve, with logging restricted to roaded, second-growth land. Mike Yost, a forestry professor at the local Feather River College, recalls the computer and map work that led to the plan: “We basically protected all the land we could—streams, roadless area, old growth—and then told the computer to thin the remaining [roaded] forest heavily. We were trying to show there was volume out there.”

They proposed doing the thinning with group selection, which Yost describes as “clear-cuts from a tenth of an acre to a couple of acres.” These are small enough to be reseeded by the surrounding older trees, leading eventually to an uneven-aged forest. At the time, Yost said, the Forest Service was using “40-acre clear-cuts followed by herbicide spraying.” The Plumas National Forest considered the alternative as part of its forest plan revision, then rejected it in favor of business as usual. But the agency’s adopted plan did not get very far. Even though George Bush was in the White House, timber sales began to decline in the late 1980s. Jackson says the forest plans were frauds, written as if Congress were going to pour money on the forests even though the agency knew it wouldn’t.

When federal timber stopped coming off the forests, and mills in the surrounding area began to close, Quincy got hot. Sierra Pacific Industries closed its mill during public hearings so that angry workers could attend, storeowners put up yellow ribbons in their windows as a sign of solidarity with timber, and “things got scary,” says Yost.

Jackson says, “The environmental community wasn’t going to be intimidated, so we were filing appeals on every timber sale.”

Then came the owl. In 1993, the Forest Service imposed regulations to protect the California spotted owl, a relative of the northern spotted owl. Linda Blum says the California spotted owl regulations (CASPO, in the jargon) meant the end of business as usual on the local forests: no clear-cuts, no even-aged management of forests, no cutting trees over 30 inches in diameter (old-growth trees can be 7 feet in diameter), and no cuts that opened up too much of the forest canopy. Even before CASPO, some in the Sierra Nevada timber industry could see that the old game was over, and that maybe the environmentalists’ 1986 proposal hadn’t been so bad. In fall 1992, Plumas County supervisor Bill Coates put in a call to his political archenemy, Michael Jackson.

As Jackson tells it, “Mr. Coates said, ‘All right, we’re through. We’ve got to do something new. Will you meet with the mill owners?’”

That wasn’t an easy question. After twelve years of Reagan-Bush policy that had wreaked havoc on the forests, logging was nearly shut down. Moreover, national politics had just taken a sharp turn: Clinton was president-elect and the future looked green. But healing wounds in the community was also attractive, especially if industry was willing to agree to the 1986 alternative. Jackson and his allies signed on for at least a short ride. The ride started with “three meetings in the back room of my office,” says Jackson. They were supposed to be secret. But, Jackson says, “it was clear to everyone that something was going on, and [secrecy] wasn’t acceptable to anyone.”

So the next meeting, he says, was a six-hour one in the Quincy Library, where everyone could see it and listen in. (One myth says they met in the library so that no one could shout; another says they met there because local timber people were fearful of being seen going into Jackson’s office; a third says the library had a room available.)

In the spring of 1993, the conspirators called a meeting for the public and 250 people came to the Town Hall Theatre. After explaining what was afoot, the leaders asked for a straw vote. Jackson says, “Five wanted to stay the way we were; the rest wanted to move ahead.” Two of the opponents were Jackson’s, Blum’s, and Yost’s old allies at the Friends of the Plumas Wilderness; three were with the timber industry.

Jackson, who is not always gentle with his rhetoric, calls the people on the fringe “wing nuts,” and says they play the role of keeping the center together. With what it took as a public imprimatur, the QLG went to work, and in June 1993 published its Community Stability Proposal, based on the environmentalists’ 1986 plan. Its most important act was implicit: It laid claim to 2.5 million acres of Sierra Nevada public land—all of the Plumas and Lassen National Forests and the Sierraville Ranger District of the Tahoe National Forest. The plan had something for everybody. Industry would get wood from 1.6 million acres of managed land (another 1 million acres were in various reserves, including wilderness), and communities would get jobs and fire protection. Environmentalists would get preservation of 148,000 acres of roadless, old-growth land that was, and still is, part of the three forests’ timber base. They would also get expanded protection of riparian zones and an end to 40-acre clear-cuts in favor of small openings, less than 2 acres in size, in the forest. The plan also had aesthetic and landscape goals. QLG members argue that small-patch logging and thinning will eventually return at least the drier parts of the forests to the open, brush-free state, dominated by large trees, that the ...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• About the Northern Lights Research and Education Institute
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Coming Home: An Introduction to Collaborative Conservation
• FROM TROUBLED WATERS: THE EMERGENCE OF COLLABORATIVE CONSERVATION
• DEFINING THE TERRITORY: THE CHANGING FACE OF THE AMERICAN WEST
• ON THE GROUND: COLLABORATIVE CONSERVATION IN PRACTICE
• EVALUATING COLLABORATIVE CONSERVATION: A CHAUTAUQUA
• BROADENING ENVIRONMENTAL HORIZONS
• Appendix: Selected Resources in Collaborative Conservation
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors