What Happens When International Expierience Comes to California

International Experience Comes to California

Given by Lynn Jungwirth

ESPM Colloquium series

September 20, 1999

[Transcribed from a video taped presentation by Kimberly Merin]

Introduction by Louise Fortmann
Today is a very special day because today is also the day of the fall Rudy Grah lecture. Rudy Grah was the head of the forestry department. And was a very beloved man. He made a real influence not only in the United States but also in Latin America. And today we're very lucky that Mary Grah has come to join us. Our speaker today is Lynn Jungwirth, and I'd like to say that Lynn needs no introduction because anyone who knows her, knows that she is one of those people who has their hands on the levers that move the world. She is the founder of the Watershed Center in Hayfork which, in case that you don't know, is the development hadj site of the United States, in the middle of Trinity County, completely surrounded by natural forest. Lynn founded the Watershed Center which is very important in influencing forest policy and getting us the benefits of the community and helping us rethink the way forests were managed in the United States. So, Lynn, we're absolutely delighted to have you here, thank you.

Lecture:
I'd like to thank Louise for inviting me down to visit with you. It is an honor to be here. I don't have a lot new to tell people like you. You do know that the world is changed. That public lands are no longer managed for timber supply for rapacious and greedy timber barons, but indeed are now being managed for biodiversity and species preservation, conservation and the goodness and the wholeness in the future of the world. So our burden is greater than it used to be. I would like to spend a little time today helping you see that from the perspective of someone who lives in a town in the middle of public lands, who has been blessed by being able to share some of the knowledge and experiences that have come out of students who have come out of this institution and have gone to the big world and have come back to California and have brought some of their learnings home. And I have to tell you that that is sort of remarkably different than it used to be in my town, where we sort of thought of UC Berkeley and Davis as strange and exotic places full of strange and exotic people who were little interested in the things we were interested in and cared about. Well, we have found that over the last five years that that's not quite true. Before I start talking about some of the conclusions we have drawn, I would just like to give you some context because, context, as you know, is all.

Beginning of Slide Presentation

And I brought these slides. It's early enough in the afternoon, most of you should not fall asleep. If you feel the need, go ahead and nod off. So let me see what we got here. So, this is something you would see in a typical presentation, this is a representation of reality. This is the North coast, inland a little bit. That's Trinity Lake, there, that big blue splot. Trinity County is the county I'm from. It's up in the northwestern corner of the state. It has about 2.2million acres and about 13 thousand people, so we have more land than people. We have this--this is scary. (shows a map) The green is public land. For those of you who study international development, you might be tempted to call it the commons. It is not the commons. It is federal land. There is quite a different relationship in this country between the people who live in an adjacent to the national forest and people in other countries who live in an adjacent to the commons. But my little town, Hayfork, sits right there. And all those checkerboards, all the white parts of the checkerboards are owned by industrial forestry people, and the rest is owned by federal government people. In 1990, we switched from being driven by timber management to being driven by something they call ecosystem management, and that was the result of the Dwyer Decision that you recall, maybe, that perhaps some of you remember. Our mission changed to saving the spotted owl, and creating late seral habitat, in all of the green areas. That was our job.
This is more of a sort of brain-dead, redneck approach to the other map. (Slide of dog snoozing.) Quite a job. Going through this transition would be quite a job. Something that you wouldn't really want to do in the heat of the day. But when we looked at ecosystem management, we knew that it was going to take a different kind of relationship and a different kind of knowledge than we had prior to this, because prior to this we were foresters, and now we needed to become ecosystem managers. And it was a new word, and we knew it was going to take some time before we got familiar enough and comfortable enough to be able to bring it into our lives.
This is a little picture of Dog Run Springs. Dog Run Springs sits at the top of the divide outside of my little town. And the water runs down into Hayfork Creek and down into the south fork of the Trinity River and down into the main fork of the Trinity River and down into the Plymouth River and out to the ocean. And it's a favorite place of mine, because the springs come out of the beautiful little glade that sits under a big cedar tree. That spring comes out about three inches wide during the summer and maybe about eight inches wide during the winter. And to me it symbolizes what America wanted from us. Instead of timber management, it wanted clean water and it wanted big trees. Because clean water and big trees were the symbol of abundance and the symbol of health. That's my daughter at the bottom of the big tree, because even brain-dead rednecks appreciate the amenities of the forest and we live among it, and we had to learn how to manage for that. The forest of Trinity County is mixed conifer. As you can see it has been cut over in a few places. It's some pretty lush forests, even though we only get thirty inches of rain. The reason there's sort of a gray mass there because the ten years of drought back in the eighties killed off a lot of trees, or at least weakened them and the bugs got them.
This is the kind of forest that people have asked us to help create, or at least help protect, or at least not screw up. They say that this is the kind of forest that was there pre-contact. Not very many trees, grass underneath, lot of brows for the deer. This is the kind of forest we have now. We just did an inventory and we have about 2.7 billion board feet of timber in the seven and a half overstock stand on the trinity National Forest. And you know enough about ecology to know that likes to burn, and sometimes that's good if it thins it out, and sometimes its not so good if it burns it too hot. This is Trinity Alps in the background. This is a fire scar. These are fire scars. It's an ecosystem that likes to burn. The species grew up with it burning.
And that is an incredible shot. Lightning striking. And we live with this in the ecosystem. Right now 42,000 acres in the Trinity Alps and adjacent to the Trinity Alps are burning. You can see the dead snags. Sort of redundant. You can see the snags in this picture, and you can see how tight our forest is and so when the fire gets going it rip snorts. We get a lot of stand replacing fires. You see the fuel ladders here, rip snorts goes up, gets into the crown, scary fires-- they move fast. And this is what you're left with when they move fast, and they burn hot. That's a riparian area, and that's going to be a pretty choked riparian area when that all falls down. That burned in '97. Or [rather] '87. That's part of the '87 burn. We lost 44,000 acres. Some of it burned, was nice, and kind of cleaned out--it burned underneath. Some of it burned on top and burned all the way down. This is my daughter and my dog. And these are trees that were planted in '89. It's hard for trees to grow-it's kind of hot there, and so it's hard for trees to grow in the south side. So if you don't replant them, you tend to get brush fields for a very long time. And that's another shot of that same fire complex. As you can see it burned in '87, this is 11 years later and it's not moving real fast back toward the forest.
So when we decided we needed to change, the first thing you had to do was get the people in the community together and decide what that change should look like. And what we found out is that as long as we ask the timber industry and the environmental community to work that out, we'd end up in a big bru-ha-ha. They went into rooms with no windows, and they tried to make deals. And they didn't really feel comfortable making deals with each other, and so they basically just fought. And we did this for about 20 years. Being quick learners as we are, thanks to Judge Dwyer we decided that maybe we should stop that nonsense and go back out to the forest and talk in the forest. Because when you talk in a place that is real with people who are real, and you're not talking concepts, but you're talking reality, you can actually come to an agreement rather quickly. It's the philosophical positions that get you in trouble. And I'm going to come back to this when I talk about bringing the international lessons home. We decided we needed to learn more about our ecosystem, and we had to think it over. And we promised ourselves that we would learn more about our ecosystem from words on the paper. And we worked with one of the post-docs from Berkeley, and we built a hell of a cirriculum, to help us learn from words on paper. But we also promised ourselves that we would learn from the dirt. And from the plants and from the trees and from the animals, and so we had to learn to listen, not only to the pedagogues, but also to the land. His T-shirt says "you must unlearn what you have learned". And these guys are brain-dead rednecks, loggers, choker setters, tree planters. And they decided that they had to unlearn what they had learned and learn a new way of working with the landscape. Now we even let women learn about it. It's revolutionary! And the people who helped us learn were people who were natural resource professionals. This guy's a fish biologist. And he taught us about how you size-up a stream? How do you tell if it's working good? How do you tell what it's working for? And then we just got neck-deep in it. And we learned plant communities and we learned different habitats for species, and we learned critters, we learned big critters and little critters, and we learned what things go together and what things really don't go together. We learned native plants and we learned invasive plants and we learned a whole lot. And we got up to our knees in the creek. We looked at the creek differently than we had ever looked before. Although, I have to admit, a lot of us were looking for bait, but, you know, you sort of be what you can be.
And we learned how to do measuring. We learned how to measure trees, we learned how to cruise timber . We learned how to, this poor man, we actually learned how to climb 60 feet up in a tree, to make, create bat habitat, because the Bureau of Land Management wants more bats. So you take this poor guy, and you send him up in the tree with a chainsaw, and he cuts the top of the tree off. Now I don't know if any of you have sat at the top of a 60 foot tree when you cut the top off, but what happens is the tree goes like this. (indicates a tree whipping back and forth) I imagine he charged us money for that ride. But you cut the top of the tree off and then you saw little slits in it and it makes the tree decompose, but then you also cut in a little slit for the little bats to go in. Now I don't know what the bats did before the BLM made these, but I'm sure they didn't have these nice apartments. And see you go back in the next 3 years, in the next 5 years, and then find out did we indeed have any bats. And we learned how to do riparian fencing because there's a lot of cattle in the area. This is a little creek and you need a fence to keep the cattle out. But you need for the creek to not wash away the fence when the floods come. So we looked at large woody debris and realized that what it does is float up, and that's why it survives. And so we created a little fence that will float up in the high water and let all the debris slide under it and it won't act like a dam; and we learned how to do that. And we learned how to make fuel breaks. We piled, we piled tons and tons and tons of fuel ladder and cleared area and went back and burned it. Because in 1987 44,000 acres burned and we learned we didn't like it. It was too hot. And we wanted to help. And we learned that you can use chainsaws to do wonderful things, in terms of trying to rehabilitate fires. And we learned that maybe there were some things that we could do with that small diameter of wood that could come off from those fuel brakes. So the first thing that we did was we went out to all the experts and we said what should we use and they said, oh, here's a little thing called a mono-cable, a zig-zag yarder, and you can use it because its very light on the land and you can pull little trees with it. Well, you can, but the problem is, as the guys on the crew told me, you have to pick the little tree up and hook it onto the cable. And that little tree is pine, about 30 years old, and it has a lot of water in it and it probably only weighs, oh, 150 pounds. So I want you to think about doing that on a hillside that is about, oh, that steep. (indicates a steep slope) And there are, like, 300 trees per acre. And you're supposed to send them out and cut them in small enough pieces to pick up and tie to that line.
Well, the crew boss lost 30 pounds in the first 20 days, and he decided there had to be a better way. So, the Forest Service had this little machine called a Bitter Root yarder, and he started using that. We worked with a con. crew, because in America, you want welfare people and convicts taking care of your land. You really don't need a skilled work force, cause they'll [the welfare people and convicts] work for nothing. So he worked with that. He had 36 guys down in a hole, he said, and they pulled up these little trees. And he said that was productive as long as you had 36 guys. But if you needed to make it more cost-effective, that probably wouldn't work. And the first year that we did this, we piled the wood along the road, and let widows and orphans and senior citizens pick it up, 'cause 67% of homes in my town burn wood for heat in the winter.
So our guy said, you know what, we think we can build something better. We think we can build something that can work off of a road system that won't hurt the environment, that will be more productive. And so they built this. We call it the Hayfork Yarder. And it does indeed pull behind a pick-up truck, and it does work off of a road system, and it reaches out and brings in these little tiny trees from these overstocked stands. Trees that average seven and a half inches in diameter, and it costs about $600 to $1000 in acres to do those thinnings, and the Forest Service doesn't have any money to spend doing that. Because we can only suppress fire, we can't try to manage it in the system. And then we had to learn how to load those little tiny sticks on a log truck with a self-loader that was designed for big logs. And the first time we went out and loaded the truck it took us six hours to load. And the last time it took us an hour and a half. But the last time, [when it] took us six hours to an hour and a half, took us three years.
This is a mill site in my town, it used to employ 150 people, used to cut a 100 million feet of saw logs a year, and now these, what you see there, those little logs, our little logs, we employ four people there. And this is from a sale called chop-sticks, happily named by forestry people, they're clever people. As you can see in the background, we are surrounded by forests. And we brought in a small-scale processor, a little economizer. You put the tree in round and it comes out square. It's cheap. You don't have to have a hundred million feet a year to do it. What we're trying to do is put enough value back into the wood, to pay us to do the fuel treatments.
As you can see this is pretty amazing wood. It was wood that most people hadn't seen before because if it was ever extracted, taken off the ground, it was burned up or chopped up. Now what we used to do back in the old days when we were a timber town was then put that wood on a truck and send it out of town. Well this time we sent it out of town and dried it because we didn't have any drying capacity, we didn't have any ? capacity, but we brought it back. And we brought it back because we wanted to see if we could do something with it that would be useful to the people in my town. People in my town, grab this number, in 1990 when the Dwyer Decision shut down the public lands, the poverty rate in inner-city America was 15.3%, and people were concerned about inner-city America because it had a lot of problems with poverty. Poverty in my town was 30.5%. And that was in 1990 when the forest shut down. I'm ashamed to tell you what the poverty rate in my town is now, but to give you some idea, in 1990 the percentage of children on free and reduced lunches, which is sort of an annual figure that you can use to sort of track how well you're doing, and just kind of want people care about, and, you know, if you take care of your kids you kind of feel like you're taking care of your town, and if you can't, you kind of feel like maybe you're blowing it bad. So in 1990 it was 54%of the kids in town were on free and reduced lunches. Since 1990 and the Dwyer Decision and the President's Plan and the closure of the sawmill, that rate was at 84%. So does ecosystem management work for my town?
So we turned the boards into product. This is some shelving. We cut them apart and glued them back together and it makes a beautiful vertical grain shelving, and those of you who study that kind of stuff know that means it's very strong. And we also turned it into flooring, we tongue and grooved it, and we sell it as eco-groovy flooring, the product of forest alp. We can't sell it as certified. Some of you might be familiar with the Forest Stewardship Council and certified wood. And we can't sell it as certified because the national environmental community doesn't want certified wood coming off of public lands. So we can't do that, so we just sell it under our own logo. Its called Healthy Forests, Healthy Communities, and we're not, its not certified wood. But you can make pretty things out of it. That's made out of the small diameter timber, the stuff with the knots, and the big stuff is coal that was left to burn, and it's vertical grain fur, and cedar. So what we found ourselves doing as a community was trying to figure out how do you work with what nobody else wants. Sort of one of those lessons we learned from international development. You know it seems like in India they turned the forests over to the women, once they were to the point of digging the roots out of the ground for fuel wood. Now, I haven't read the stories that says who gets to be in charge of it after it turns back into a lush forest, but I'll bet it's not the same people who were asked to nurse it back to health. But what we decided, is that we would use, we would try to build an economic system that rewarded you for being good forest stewards rather an economic system that caused you to do things that needed to be mitigated. That's a favorite Forest Service word- -do something bad and then try to make up for it. They built furniture out of this wood, cabin furniture. We built chairs, we built tables, this is a table-top out of old cedar that was left to burn. And that's Madrone, and black walnut. So what do you do when you do that? You have a parade. And you do that because America wants big trees and water and it's our job to figure out how to do that (00:26:28:22).

End of slide presentation.

So now you have a little context to kind of set this in. My town sits in the middle of public lands. We're loggers and saw millers and ranchers. We live in the land, we fish, we hunt, we teach our kids to swim in the creek, we go to the forest for picnics, in the wintertime we play in the snow. When you want to do something intimate, you go for a ride in the forest. The best conversations I've had with my children were driving forest roads. You have to drive slow, you get to listen to each other, its just part of our lives. So when the federal government decided that it didn't want that land being managed for timber anymore, but for biodiversity and ecosystem management, we decided that we needed to learn what that was, and we needed to learn it with the the United States forest service so that we could participate in the management. We have been the proud recipients now of two conservation plans, bioregional conservation plans, so we study conservation, you know about, read Noss and all those guys. You know about these plans to look at a huge area and come up with a way to interact with, that will preserve biodiversity. That's sort of the fad we're into right now. We've kind of slipped right past ecosystem management, it's too hard to figure out. So now we're into biodiversity conservation, but, same kind of concept, I guess, with a little difference.
So the meat of my talk, I guess, is going to be to ask you to think about some of these things that we've learned. Continental conservation plans, are a concept. They are usually constructed through negotiations among scientists. That's how the concept is constructed. That's how the federal ecosystem management plan for the spotted owl territory which goes from the Canadian border down to the Mendocino forest, quite a range. They had to come out with some standards and guides for how you would manage that. We have the same standards and guides from the Olympic Penisula to the Mendocino forest. Now why? Well my friend Jeff Romm keeps telling me that the purpose of universities or to do this research is to create generalities, and from those generalities you get policies. Well, when your generality allows you to create a standard and guide that is the same in the Olympic Pennisula, as it is for the Mendocino forest, you also get stupidity. So, help me think about that. Because the research comes out of people being embedded in context, in the specific context of the ecosystem, of the natural system, that includes people. And of a specific social context. Different ways that people know the land, different ways that people interact with the land. So how do you take the richness of the work of a researcher, and prevent that, from turning into policy that is stupid or incomplete or inappropriate when it hits the ground. Well, Reed Noss came up with a way to do that. He said we'll just make this policy, and then we'll have something called adaptive management, where we will test our assumptions. Well, that's a great idea. Reed Noss always leaves out the question of who will do that. And how that will be done. And how what is learned will change the policy. Will change the rules. So, we are in that tension right now. We're in that struggle.
So, you get things like the Quincy Library Group Area. You get things like the Applegate Partnership. You discover that when people come home from international experience, they tend to be a little more humble. They tend to see that there are three levels of reality. The concept-- girl scouts--thought, word and deed. The concept, the words about the concept, and then the implementation, the deeds, the get your hands dirty part. For ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation, in the United States, we are big on concept, and we have lots of people who like to do that. They make huge [?], and then they negotiate with governments to figure out what they'll set aside, and what can be the buffer zone. And, oh yeah, then they got this thing about local people. And so they get into the words, because you have to have the words if you're going to sell the concept. What we haven't figured out in this country, is the deed. What's the actualization of that? Because we are, well, there's a question for you. Because we are afraid of actions, because we believe David Brower that we can never make any headway once we've devastated things. That it's irreversible and so anything we do is wrong. But the message that came home from the people who went to Africa and the people who came home from Sri Lanka, was that, you know what, there are ways people are discovering to live with a conservation ethic. So being brain-dead and a redneck, we said, oh, hell, if they can do it I guess we can figure out what that looks like. As we have done that, we have realized that taking that kind of responsibility is awesome and its scary and it makes you worry a lot about your decisions on the land. And we have come, I think, to the same place as many of the scientists who had the concept came to, which is, OK, you got thought, you got word, you got deed, what are the monitoring and the feedback loops for each one of those? Now you don't want thought police, but the job of the university is to help us police those thoughts, and to make inquiry, into the validity, and the truthfulness, and the usefulness of concept. And you don't want censorship, and you don't want to limit the freedom of the press. But it's the job of the peers to give you feedback when you write an article. Or you publish an article in the newspaper, or you write a letter to the editor. We have in our concepts and in our words a multi-party monitoring system that we have because we're a democracy. We don't have the same kind of system in our deeds. We haven't challenged ourselves to figure that one out yet. I guess, I don't know if it's because we're afraid of deeds, and so it s easier to argue about concepts. Or that we don't trust ourselves to monitor because when you're embedded in context, sometimes your judgement becomes a little cloudy. And you see what you want to see. But I think it is the challenge of all of us, to work for sustainable use, or some sort of blending of man and his environment. Some sort of way to live on the planet but with the planet. Some sort of Leopold ethic. So figure that one out.
My community is in way bad trouble socially. We are not doing a very good job taking care of our children. We live in the middle of public lands. We believe that as people of the forest, we have something to offer. In the United States today, much of the discussion about community-based forestry is about power, about the decision-making, and that's why there is this big [thing] about the Quincy Library Group. The effrontery of those group of those local people to get together and make a plan. How rude! We believe that for the next generation, the focus will be on implementation. Local control and public plans is a [red herring]. Ain't gonna' happen. Never happens. It isn't- the NEPA laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Forest Planning Act that keeps local control from happening. Ain't gonna happen. So you can chase that bull if you want to. But it keeps you from looking at, what for us, is the bigger question. And that is when you implement those plans, when you decide that you, or as, the World Wildlife Fund has these 200 important ecozones in the world. You probably all know about that. They sort of identify 200 or so zones that they are so rich in biodiversity that they really need to be protected. And they have, with all humility, a group of advisors to help scientists, who are eminent scientists, to help them guide that planning and the name of the group, Louise will love this is, the senior advisory group for the environment, or S.A.G.E. You can't imagine how thrilled we were, to have people who had done a gap analysis from GIS from a one to 24,000 resolution, tell us about our ecosystem. We were thrilled. That is the kind of approach that has been taken in the United States for conservation. I can tell you, looking from a satellite at our ecosystem, will tell you pretty much what the cover is and 60% of the time it can tell the difference between mountain hard woods and mixed conifer. But, we do have this lovely $200,000 gap analysis to help us build an ecosystem management plan for the Klamath Province. You've all heard of the Klamath [?], very biodiverse, needs to be protected.
At the planning meeting for that in Springfield, Oregon, about a month ago we learned three things. One-- you don't need local people to do this. They have no political power and this is a political decision. Two--but you should be compassionate toward them because they are going to sacrifice, a lot. And three--we don't make wants public, or our plan for this preservation, because it will just cause opposition. These are eminent scientists who know an awful lot about biology. They know absolutely nothing about people. They know absolutely nothing about the social context. They know absolutely nothing about what we could contribute to their efforts. If they would just bother to respect us enough to talk to us, and if they did that, they might even respect us enough to listen to us. But they're working from a conceptual framework that wants to preserve biodiversity. And they have not built into that conceptual framework the social. They will admit that. But then, as quickly as they admit it, they quickly dismiss it, because you don't need local people to do this. It's a political decision; it will be made in Washington DC. So your challenge, I think, is to become the synthesizer, to become the integrator. Because local people have knowledge, they also have good intentions. But without more knowledge, they're going to be on the outside of this new amenity based lifestyle for the rural west. I don't know if any of you read Chronicles of Community or High Country News, or stuff from the Sonoran Institute, but that's what we're being told, is that, you got such a beautiful area here, what you want to do is just protect it, keep all this green space, and then all these high-tech people will come, and they'll do their little subdivisions and build things like Chardonnay Drive in Carson City, Nevada, which to me is the epitome of the New West. Chardonnay Drive, it just has that Western flavor doesn't it! And then you can build, if you're still lucky enough to live there, a service economy, to meet the needs of the amenity based lifestyle- -it will be groovy. You have nice mountains to look at, and you can find ways to be graphic artists or something and kind of help them out. Well, the lesson that the people from Berkeley whom we worked with, who work internationally, the lesson they brought home to us, is that it doesn't have to be that way. And that when the natives have an intimate knowledge of the forest, and an intimate knowledge of the social system, you have a fighting chance to be able to do conservation.
Our challenge in America is to figure out a mechanism to bring that knowledge of the local people, the good intentions of the local people, the care of the local people, into the arena. Because, trust me, there is never a decision making table that has a worker at it, because a worker is working. We do meetings all the time on collaborative decision making with the forest service. If you're going to do anything with the Forest Service, they tend to like you to do that between, like, Monday and Friday, between, like, 8 and 4, because that's when they work. Well, workers work then, and so they don't get to be at the meetings. So you'll have a representative of workers. But you don't have a worker at the table. To me, that's the dilemma of democracy. There is a responsibility among leaders. And all of you are going to be leaders or you are leaders right now. Leaders have that responsibility to get that other voice to the table. And there are lots of ways to do that, but it doesn't happen accidentally. But the lesson that came home to us, was how essential that is. And actually, how useless it is, to come up with a preservation or conservation plan that doesn't know how to keep people in the landscape. What is that? That is the San Francisco Airport. That is a parking lot. That is not the future that we want to embrace. So I bring you good cheer, the people of Trinity County are figuring this out. We're figuring it on a small scale. We're working with hundreds of communities all over the United States who are figuring it out. And it is working because we have been able to have friends who have had other experiences, and have been able to bring them home.

End of Lecture

Questions (inaudible)

Answer 1:
Yeah, Melanie wants to know if in our working with people in the international community, if there are things that resonated at home. Well, there are a couple of things. We went to the Philippines, and met some folks from Zimbabwe, and Mozambique and some of the folks who were working with CAMPFIRE. One of the things that shocked me, is that in Zimbabwe they have this part of the university that is actually daring to be relevant. And by that I mean that they actually have professors and students who are working in the field trying to figure out how to make CAMPFIRE work better, how to evaluate it. And it's dangerous. It's dangerous for a university to get in that political stuff. Universities always pretend they're not, and they don't even pretend they're not. But they're wrestling with that. And they're wrestling with the social part of it, so you got, so you're preserving game, but what is that doing for the local people? Is it making their lives better? And all that kind of stuff . And that was, that really resonated with me as, oh my God, here people have deliberately set up institutional capacity to go out and do that. The other thing that really resonated with me, is in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, as the people took care of the land, and took care of the animals and became better stewards-- it helped them. There was a reciprocal relationship. And I think that is something we're really lacking in the United States--is that feeling of that reciprocity.

Answer 2
Well, I think that there will be-- there will keep the remnant, it will keep the remnant in place and it will keep the remnant of that culture in place. And it will keep people on the landscape a little longer. Will Hayfork rebound and be like it was in the sixties when the timber boom was there? God, I hope not. A boom bust is not good but it will be a part of the mix.

Answer 3
Well, yeah, to us it's amazing that the most forest dependent communities on the west cost are San Francisco and LA. You know they need clean water and they need clean air and they need forest products. And the conservation ethic has not reached out and sort of addressed that. So we figured out that's what you guys will do next, is sort of say - - OK we got public lands pretty well straightened away, we're not hurting them. We kind of got that, so now let's turn around and look at the cities and look at our consumption patterns. But when we say that, we catch a lot of hell because we say things like, so why is it OK to go to, like, Chile, where they don't have very good environmental laws and bring in their stuff here, where we have the best environmental protection in the world, and we only want two kinds of forestry: One is don't touch it and the other one is the intensive industrial model. Sounds pretty stupid. But that's considered sort of not a nice thing to think.

Answer 4
Well, yeah. One is that just out of necessity. When people said, oh my God, the end is coming, even the people in the environmental community, our town was pretty polarized, but even the people in the environmental community still wanted there to be grocery stores so they could buy milk. So that caused us to findthe common ground. That was the acknowledgement that we still wanted to live there even if the change was coming. And sort of this theory of ecosystem management actually does have a human dimension, and so part of the concept was, that oops, we have to figure out how these people integrate with this. So that was encouraging. People, well, look, it's in the game plan. There's got to be some way to do that. I think the other thing is that when you are in a public lands county, your schools and roads depend on the federal reserve money, coming off the forest, the timber harvest. And so even though the people who live there who aren't directly working in the forest, they still feel that tie, and so they're willing to be part of that conversation. But, increasing poverty will push you to do a lot of things. I think it, a lot of it was the shame of not being able to take care of our kids. It was a shameful thing. And we just said, as a community, you know, that's sort of the heart of the community, so how do we fix that?

Answer 5
Yeah, well, that's really true. It was interesting when this first started happening to us and we were going through this rapid change, our friends in the Native American community kind of went- haha- your turn- and we said, we know we can, we'll work with the federal government. And they went, yeah it took us about 60 years to figure that out, but we got them now, because you know they got some legislation they think gives them some rights. But that's it. We're not considered indigenous and we have no rights. We have no more rights than the guy who lives in Chicago who wants to say don't do anything. So we decided, well, you have no rights so you can't play that card. And you can't say, poor us, this is a bad thing to do to people because quite frankly, American politics don't give a damn about rural America. So you can't play that card. So we said, OK, the card we have left is contribution and knowledge, it they need it. They may not know they need it, but we're going to help them know they need it, and that's what was left.

Answer 6
Well, yeah, and we have. And we try and work on that a little bit at a time. And we try and work on social justice, and environmental justice issues, with urban folks, and we try to make, we decided we need to make visible the urban-rural linkage. It's people in the cities who need the forests and so how can we do that. So yeah, we're trying to work and do that; we're not very good at it. But, I think that we have to do that more and more.

Answer 7
David- Yeah, we work with the Hoopa tribe a lot. We don't work with tribal government per se, we tend to work with tribal members. Awful lot on non timber forest products, they know an awful lot about understory plants. And one of the lessons we learned from Yvonne Everest who worked in Sri Lanka is she helped us see that the management of the understory was probably our next big challenge and that would probably make the overstory management look like kid's play. So, working with the Hoopas, we've been able to share a lot of that knowledge, and in economic development. We've shared some of the technology with them for small diameter processing. Tribal government is very difficult to work with. It has more rapid turnover than our own government, and for the Forest Service, that's saying a lot. So those institutional arrangements are very hard to create. But the government of Trinity County worked with the Hoopa Tribe all the time on issues around the river. But Hoopa Tribe is very poor. They have an awful lot of poverty, they've been there a very long time. And they have some of the most beautiful land in the world, in the Hoopa Valley. So, we just, we try to do peer-to-peer learning with them. We found that to be the most beneficial toward them. It doesn't threaten anybody.

Answer 8
We set up a 501c3 so that we could launder everybody's money. Yeah, if they have a mechanism for doing that. And I have a board of directors and the board of directors come from different parts of the community. Like, people, from the environmental community, people from the timber industry, people from the school, people from public health. So, but you can't be on the board unless you've already demonstrated a care for the community. So if you haven't already been part of Rotary or served on public planning thing or done something for the schools, you don't get to be on my board. I don't care what stakeholder you are. I don't care who you represent. And that's made a very amiable board who is very focused on the long term health of the community and also has a lot of ethical stuff behind it. And we get money from everyone. We get money from the federal government, we get money from Hewlett, from Ford, from Irvine, from, I'll take anybody's money. Which is, and I've never had to beg for a living before, but in the last 5 years I've learned how to do that and I think we've put it to good use.

Answer 9
Well, actually, we are looking at that. Let me give you a little perspective. In the 1930s, Trinity County was used as summer pasture for the herds in the Red Bluff area. It grazed about 30,000 head of cattle. In the 1930s, they started suppressing fire, and by shortly after the war almost all the cattle was gone and we now have grazing permits for about, for less than 2,000 head. And before the cattle we had sheep. So the ground was pretty well trampled. I think because the cattle and the sheep replaced the deer, we no longer have the managers of the understory. So we don't have fire to take down the brush , and we don't have the deer to take down the brush, and so we have way too much brush and not enough grass. So when you talk to the local people about grazing and managing grazing they're very interested in seeing if they could use grazing as a management tool and how one would pay for the labor intensive part of that, to keep them out of the riparian areas and maybe after you reintroduce fire and get some grasses going, how you could use them to help manage that. We're not really very concerned about overgrazing in Trinity County, because we just have the remnants of the culture left. And we really wouldn't like to lose all of it. We really would like to figure out a way to keep some of it on the land.

Answer 10
What we do, we do during the field season starting in April and ending about November--we hire local people to do the management work. And that is our commitment. Any profits that are made, will go back for local people who go out and do ecosystem restoration because that's the kind of reinvestment we want to make. We want to reinvest in the landscape and we want to reinvest in the skills of the local people.

We have 26 people working this year. The Watershed Center put about a million dollars into the local economy last year. The sawmill, just out of its payroll, when it was there, put 5 million. And we are the largest non-governmental employer in the town right now. So, you know, that is good and that is not good.

Answer 11 (cut-off)
The opportunities for tourism are slim in Hayfork because Hayfork sits on highway 3 between the Trinity Alps Wilderness and the ? Wilderness . So if you want to go, if you're an out-of-towner and you want to go have a wilderness experience, you head for either north of us or south of us ...