FORKS — Environmental advocates and timber industry officials are finding common ground on the Olympic Peninsula.
U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer on Friday hosted the first of five public meetings featuring the Olympic Peninsula Forest Collaborative, a new panel of industry leaders and conservation groups working to increase timber harvests while helping the environment in Olympic National Forest.
Kilmer, a Port Angeles native, spearheaded the collaborative after being elected in 2012.
The idea is to bring together the once diametrically opposed logging and environmental interests to create a “win-win” for the forest, the environment and the communities that rely on timber sales.
“Growing up around here, I’m conscious of how these issues can divide us,” Kilmer told an audience of about 50 at the Olympic Natural Resources Center in Forks.
“That conflict has been a pretty good method for employing attorneys, but it hasn’t really done much for the health of our local economies, and it hasn’t done much for the health of our forests, for that matter.”
Kilmer represents the 6th Congressional District, which includes Clallam and Jefferson counties.
“When I first got this job, I made a decision to try to turn down the volume a little bit and try to move us past some of the old debates,” Kilmer said.
“It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and throw rocks at each other, but it really hasn’t gotten us very far.”
The public meeting was co-hosted by Olympic National Forest Supervisor Reta Laford.
Four more public meetings of the collaborative will be held next year in Mason, Grays Harbor, Jefferson and Clallam counties.
No dates for those meetings have been set.
Kilmer introduced the collaborative in a public meeting at Port Angeles City Hall last May.
‘Forests mean jobs’
“On one hand, forests mean jobs,” Kilmer said Friday.
“When managed right, they support mills, they support middle-class jobs and they support our local economy.
“And on the other hand, healthy forests . . . are part of what makes this such a glorious place for people to come and visit and vacation and recreate and just check out the awesomeness that we have in the natural resources here.”
The collaborative’s first pilot project is a 70-acre commercial harvest along the Sol Duc River.
The experimental harvest will include patch cuts of varying sizes and forest thinnings in which slower-growing trees are removed to make room for healthier trees.
“We’re shooting for next spring, next summer, to actually have it on the street,” Derek Churchill of Stewardship Forestry Consulting said of the Collaborative’s “H to Z” project.
Churchill, who has worked with similar groups around the state, said the collaborative approach works.
“This idea of a win-win is real,” he said.
“There are still challenges, like anything, but the improvement is tangible and real.”
Jill Silver, an Olympic Forest Coalition board member, said forest thinnings are effective in creating an old-growth forest structure.
Not a money maker
But logger Jim Bower said skip-and-gap logging like the collaborative envisions for the pilot project is “not a money-making thing.”
“Who considers the economics of doing a 69-acre job?” Bower asked the panel in the question-and-answer period.
“All of us,” one panelist said.
“Well, then, I’d like to know what your expertise is,” Bower said.
Churchill said the pilot project is just the start. The collaborative will do larger, more cost-effective projects in the future, he said.
“We’re there with you,” Churchill told Bower, citing federal rules.
“There’s a lot of stuff that could be made more efficient and easier, and that’s certainly one of our goals is to try to work on that stuff.”
Said Silver: “The skips and gaps that we’re doing are designed to achieve some ecological outcomes, leaving particular species in clumps that exist already to grow bigger and provide biodiversity, but also to create operational efficiencies.”
‘Actually got along’
Some groups of trees will be harvested, Silver said, while others will be left to “provide habitat in places that topographically and hydrologically and geologically make sense.”
Collaborative member David Marshall of Sierra Pacific Industries said he was encouraged on a recent site visit with Olympic Forest Coalition board members Silver and Toby Thaler.
“We went out there and we actually got along and agreed on things,” Marshall said.
“We came up with things together. That’s what I’m excited about.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
