After the Wars, Common Ground in Oregon's Forests

In the town of Dufur, Oregon, local residents have been acting as firefighters to protect their fields and homes, using farming equipment to bury dry vegetation and tanks of water to put out the flames. While this has been the norm for years – because of the length of time it takes professional firefighters to arrive – the recent increase in wildfires is calling into question the safety of this informal fire fighting and figuring out how to work together with professionals.

A collaborative experiment between Indigenous community activists, tribal officials, loggers, nonprofits, and the U.S. Forest Service is delivering firewood to residents who need it for heating and cooking. The program, called Wood for Life, also doubles as a forest management initiative to thin out Arizona’s forests to prevent deadly wildfires. The shuttering of a local coal mine and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this home heating crisis and group members in 2020 delivered a total of 650 cords of wood to several Indigenous nations.

Kittitas County is leading the way in Washington state in efforts to distribute the coronavirus vaccine thanks to having a strong disaster management system in place. The county is accustomed to responding to disasters, such as wildfires, and tapped the deputy fire chief of Kittitas Valley Fire and Rescue to lead the incident response team. He explains, "The infrastructure that we have with everybody communicating, everybody willing to be flexible and play whatever role's necessary and an understanding of (incident command system) and emergency operation centers gives us the framework to do it."

Friends of Trees, a nonprofit organization in the Portland area, are not just planting trees because they help combat climate change and improve air quality, but because they also help stop major flooding and avoid erosion. While it can be expensive to maintain the trees and clean up the leaves from storm drains, these trees could prevent millions of gallons of rainfall from flooding neighborhoods as extreme weather events are expected to increase in the future.

In the western United States, a couple nonprofits are working to kill two birds with one stone: reducing catastrophic wildfires while creating a profitable (yet sustainable) market for harvested wood. Yet these management techniques have yet to prove economically viable.

A collaboration between former adversaries over forest management and preservation in the Sierra National Forest led to a $9 million investment into making 154,000 acres healthier, and able to withstand destruction in one of the largest wildfires in California history. The Creek Fire largely spared land in the Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project, despite severe damage in hundreds of thousands of adjacent acres. Years of strategic tree-thinning and intentionally set small fires proved effective.

A collective of timber companies, conservationists, and forestry professionals has made the adjacent national forest more resilient to wildfires by focusing on small-diameter trees while preserving old growth. In 2019, the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition allowed for the harvesting of 87.1 million board-feet from the forest and 16,561 acres underwent controlled burns and mechanical thinning to mitigate the risk of wildfires. The group’s record of compromise and innovation could offer a blueprint for other areas looking to boost the resilience of fire-prone forests and rural economies.

As communities work to contain the coronavirus outbreak, the risk for emergency responders to contract the illness is high; but in Massachusetts, departments are putting new practices and plans into place to address this. From changing the way police respond to calls, to creating a backfill system if or when officers are quarantined, the departments are working to keep both their responders and their communities healthy.

In Madagascar, insect researchers, regional conservationists, and humanitarian organizations have teamed up to promote the farming of crickets as a way to help preserve forests, save animals, and fight malnutrition. Although the pilot project is still fairly new, it has been well-received my communities and studies have already shown that consuming cricket powder has substantial benefits for children who are underweight.

California’s Sonoma and Butte counties have been taking new approaches to wildfires – rather than preventing them, they’re hoping to support the ecosystem to withstand them and bounce back. This resilience-centered approach includes controlled burns, fuel breaks, cross-organizational collaboration, and educating the public – especially homeowners – about how they can help.