Oregon nonprofit Sustainable Northwest will be getting $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to work on reforesting land burned in the 2020 Labor Day fires. The organization has partnered with small landowners to try to understand the challenges they face replanting their forests after big wildfires. Dylan Kruse, the Vice President of Sustainable Northwest, joins us with the details.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. The Oregon nonprofit Sustainable Northwest is getting a $5 million grant from the US Department of Agriculture. It’ll go towards reforestation and wildfire resilience and recovery in land burned in the 2020 Labor Day fires. The organization is working with small landowners to try to understand the unique challenges that they face. Dylan Kruse is a Vice President of Sustainable Northwest and he joins us with more. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Dylan Kruse: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me on. How’s it going?
Miller: Doing very well. Thanks for joining us. You have already been working with people who are affected by the 2020 fires. Can you give us a sense for the projects that are already underway?
Kruse: The Labor Day fires were coming up about a two year anniversary here, this week on just what happened and you know, a million acres burned, 4,000 structures destroyed. Two years goes by, but frankly a lot of folks are still digging out from this right now. I think a lot of recovery has happened around structures and housing and insurance and working with homeowners and people that faced a lot of those material damages. But we are really now just starting to pivot a lot of our attention and energy to that million acres that did burn and thinking about reforestation strategies to recover from wildfire to help restore the resiliency of those landscapes that were hit really,
really hard over that week period.
Miller: Your focus, if I’m not mistaken, at least for this grant is on smaller landowners, is that right?
Kruse: That’s correct. So this grant is actually part of a larger effort that we started with a number of organizations, it’s called the Western Oregon Cascades Recovery Effort. And we’re working with Bonneville Environmental Foundation, American Forests, the state, landowners, Watershed Councils and what we’re trying to do is really focus on a lot of these small landowners that don’t have the resources, financial resources, contracting, technical support that they need to be able to replant their landscapes and their properties that burned during those days. And so a lot of the industrial landowners and the federal landowners that had wildfire on their properties have already gone through this process. But because we don’t have enough things like seedlings for small landowners to plant, they don’t have the access to contractors that they need and they don’t have a lot of the financing, they haven’t actually gone through the process of replanting and it’s turning to into a crisis in a lot of these areas.
Miller: What do you mean? What exactly are they facing? Can you give us an example of what this means without naming names, but for say, an average smaller landowner who lost trees in the fire?
Kruse: I think about it like this: If you did a major home improvement project sometime in the last two years, you know how hard it was to get it done. You have to go out and get materials and supplies. They might be on back order because of supply chain shortages. They might have gone up in price because of demand. You gotta go out and find contractors to do the work and there might not be enough people available, you might have to pay for permitting and there’s delays all along the process. It’s the same way for landowners that own forests. Right now, we literally don’t have enough seedlings available to do the amount of reforestation that’s necessary. And what is out there has already been bought up by a lot of the large industrial landowners. And so there’s nothing left. And so what we’re trying to do is actually do outreach to groups of these landowners almost in a Co-op type model, to pull them together and to do a streamlined process where we determine their needs. We connect them with the forester, we connect them with the contractors that they need and then we do batch orders of seedlings so that they can get these materials to replant their properties and by doing this, we can get more work done, we can get done more cheap or cheaply and we’re able to stretch these dollars further. And that’s where these grant dollars are going – is that process of engaging with these landowners and then getting on the materials they need to recover.
Miller: Is that the full extent of recovery? Let’s say that everything you’ve just been talking about, that you are able to do that for some number of smaller landowners, that they can get seedlings and get workers, contractors to put them in the ground. Is that recovery? And is that Fire Resilience Recovery in Western Oregon – that’s going to have more severe fires going forward?
Kruse: That’s a great question. And you hit the nail on the head there. We’re anticipating that the Western Cascades of Oregon are going to experience a 400% increase in wildfire over the next twenty years. So you think about the Labor Day events and they were huge and they were unprecedented but it’s going to happen again and it’s going to keep happening. And so we have to think about how we recover from fire and think about systems change. And so a lot of what we’re doing with this project is not just replanting. We’re thinking about climate smart and climate resilient species, different species of trees that can withstand fire. And we’re not just replanting and walking away. We’re going to keep working with these landowners to talk about wildfire mitigation strategies. So a lot of that discussion that you just had with the LCD, working with landowners to think about fuels reduction, managing their properties and trying to prevent the damaging impacts of wildfire in the future. So we’re living in a very different era with climate change and drought and insects and disease, and we need to prepare for that and think differently about how we manage these resources. So this is a moment in time. But really it’s about what happens for the next 10, 20 and 30 years.
Miller: Does that mean difficult conversations with landowners who for the last say three or four decades may have been used to planting plantation style? Really just tree farms with trees pretty close together, because that’s the way to maximize the number of board feet they can get from their private land, but it’s also something that makes land more likely where you could lose all the trees. I mean, how do you navigate that with somebody who says, ‘No, you’re going to make me lose money?’
Kruse: I think this is a conversation that’s happening regardless of the size of your ownership. I think large industrial landowners and plantation owners are thinking the same thing about these changing climate impacts and what we’re growing and what we’re managing for. Part of why we’re really focusing on those small landowners is because we see that they manage for a wide variety of issues. It’s not just about timber production and the economics. Some of the best wildlife habitat and biodiversity in Oregon is on these properties. It’s critical for drinking water quality, a lot of the water that we use for industry and for Ag[riculture] and for municipal use is moving across their properties. And then carbon sequestration is a big piece of this. And so when we lose these landscapes, if they don’t replant, we’re risking conversion, we’re risking damaging impacts like erosion and these landscapes might be eventually abandoned. We’re losing all those great public benefits associated with them. So we’re reaching out to those landowners that are managing for a wide variety of natural resource goals, especially those public benefits, and then meeting them where they are to give them those resources so we can keep these lands working as forests in perpetuity.
Miller: Do I understand you correctly that the grants that you’re working, that you’re going to be distributing, you’re more likely to give them out if landowners want to actually change their practices potentially or pursue more sustainable forestry practices going forward. You’re not, you’re not going to be giving out a million seedlings to people who want to do things in a kind of business as usual way?
Kruse: We’re not going to dictate, necessarily the management policies that these landowners do. It’s their property and as long as they’re following laws and rules, they’re welcome to do that, but these dollars are really focused on trying to raise that bar, to talk about these needs, think about climate change, to think about different species and we want to work with those landowners that have a long term management plan in place to maintain those public benefits. And so that’s really who we’re prioritizing with this work. And Senator Merkley and Wyden actually were instrumental in some of this. They helped us secure an earmark last year as well for this project. But that was a big sticking point, was to say we can’t just be living in the status quo here. We have to think about change, we have to think about systems change, and we got to start approaching this work differently and we want to provide resources for landowners that are willing to do that so they can still produce timber, they can still manage their property, but we want to make sure that they can do that and avoid future disasters.
Miller: You have a sizable pot of money to distribute right now. I mean, not unlimited, but $5 million is something to work with. What are the challenges that you’re thinking about right now, going forward? You have this money, what are the difficulties going to be?
Kruse: The difficulties are going to be about scaling this up. This project, it’s great; It’s $5 million, 90% of this is going out the door to partners on the ground into those landowners, but really it’s a pilot, it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of the full scale of demand. I mean, we’ll probably be able to do around 3,000 acres of reforestation. You look across the state of Oregon and across all lands. I mean there are hundreds of thousands of acres to the tune of billions of dollars of need. Now, fortunately because of legislation at the federal level like the infrastructure bill or the inflation reduction act, we also have billions of dollars coming in for wildfire risk reduction, for forest restoration and for reforestation. And so this project is going to be a real testing case for us to determine, you know, what do we need to do to change our systems? Can we effectively bring these landowners together for scaled impact, and then can we capture a lot more of those federal dollars to actually scale this work up and get a lot more work done beyond this small footprint.
Miller: We’ve been talking about recovery from fires. But what about private forest land that didn’t burn in 2020? What efforts should be undertaken now or in the near future to prevent that land from burning in the next fire?
Kruse: You got a lot of changes happening right now at the state level as it relates to private forest management. You mentioned the Private Forest Accords earlier, which is going to dictate changes around harvest and steep slope logging, you know, impacts to waterways and, and pesticide use. But yeah, you’re, you’re exactly right. These industrial landowners are also feeling the impacts from wildfire as well. Ultimately, that’s going to be up to them to take the necessary mitigation actions that they need to prevent their resources from burning, as well as prevent those fires from spreading to other geographies. That is something like I said across all land ownerships, people are reckoning with now, and saying, ‘We have to take a more aggressive approach to resource management. We have to talk about active fuels reduction. We have to talk about a future living with wildfire and how we’re managing these resources to not just suppress it anymore, but to prepare to survive it.’ And I’m seeing a lot of those industrial landowners think about changing their management plans just for those exact impacts.
Miller: Dylan Kruse. Thanks for joining us today.
Kruse: Thanks very much, appreciate your time.
Miller: That’s Dylan Kruse, Vice President of Sustainable Northwest.
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