It’s a pleasure to be here to discuss future opportunities for forestry. Thank you for inviting me.
It can’t be said enough: The State Foresters are more than partners with the Forest Service. We’ve been working together for more than a hundred years, and I want to thank you for many generations of collaboration. Wildland fire management is one model for collaboration, and this fire season again proves how close we are as partners. I would like to thank the State Foresters for all their support.
Cross-Boundary Collaboration
The good news is this: People get it. People from all over the country, representing all different interests … people get the connection between declining forest health and things they value, like water, wildlife, outdoor recreation, fire protection, and the health and well-being of their own communities. People get the connection between ecological degradation and the need for treatments to make the nation’s forests more resilient, and they are willing to invest their precious time and their hard-earned money in restoration treatments. Restoration—call it resilience—is forward-thinking, and it has the power to bring everyone together behind shared goals.
Whatever you call it, restoration is most effective and sustainable if people work together through cross-boundary efforts across shared landscapes. In that connection, I want to thank you for all your support on the Farm Bill. That includes the Farm Bill provision for Good Neighbor Authority, which allows us to work together to restore watersheds and landscapes across state/federal boundaries. For example, we have already used the authority on four of the seven national forests in Colorado, mainly to reduce hazardous fuels in the WUI.
So the challenges are huge, but so are the opportunities for working together across shared landscapes to reach mutual goals for healthy, resilient forests. The opportunities for collaboration are greater than ever before, because our landscape-scale goals are increasingly shared by so many partner organizations—the National Wild Turkey Federation, The Nature Conservancy, the American Forest Foundation, and many others, including many private landowners.
The challenge is pulling our partners together around a set of common priorities, and I think the state forest action plans help. The state forest action plans help us match up on what is needed to achieve the outcomes we all agree on for the landscapes we all share. So as we look to the future, I would ask everyone here to think about the way our landscapes are changing and the ways we can better work together, for the benefit of generations to come.
Ecological Restoration
By restoration, we mean restoring the functions and processes characteristic of healthier, more resistant, more resilient ecosystems. Using prescribed fire and other vegetation treatments, we can restore overgrown forests and other degraded ecosystems, making them more resilient.
The Forest Service is taking a series of steps to accelerate restoration. A prime example is our Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. We have identified 23 large-scale long-term projects across the country, and we have dedicated funding to restore over 50,000 acres through each project, on average. That includes not only national forest lands, but also adjoining lands under state, private, and other federal jurisdiction, lands that are part of larger landscapes and watersheds.
A good example is the Four Forest Restoration Initiative in Arizona, or 4FRI. It involves restoration treatments across nearly a million acres of dry pine forest on four national forests. These areas have been identified in Arizona’s forest action plan as high-priority landscapes from a variety of perspectives, including people, fire, air, water, ecosystem, and economics.
The partners include local communities, environmentalists, and the forest products industry. Through 4FRI, traditional adversaries have come together to create jobs and economic opportunities, including the integration of traditional timber harvesting with biomass utilization.
4FRI is a great example of working through partnerships to broaden our reach through restoration on a landscape scale. The key is to identify the highest priority landscapes and to focus our mutual resources there. To that end, we are drawing on the state forest action plans, and we are also working with the states and other partners to develop common analytical tools and data sets so we can agree on the landscapes most in need of treatment.
Restoration also means jobs and economic opportunities. A study in Oregon has shown that every million dollars spent on restoration activities generates 12 to 28 jobs. That compares favorably to most other economic activities.
Cohesive Strategy
Extreme fire behavior has become the new norm. Remember the Cerro Grande Fire in New Mexico in 2000? That fire spread across 40,000 acres in just 7 days, and I remember thinking at the time how extreme that was. But that was nothing: In 2011, the Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico spread across an area the same size in just 12 hours!
To make matters worse, homes and communities have been shooting up in the wildland/urban interface. By 2030 we expect to see housing density grow on about 57 million acres, an area the size of Utah. The WUI, deprived of fire, has becoming increasingly prone to burning, making fire protection extremely complex. Almost 70,000 communities are now at risk from wildfire, and less than 15,000 have a community wildfire protection plan or the like.
Add to this volatile mix the impacts of climate change, and you have the recipe for disaster. Scientists have tied climate change to the drier conditions, longer fire seasons, and greater fire severity we are seeing across the West. We have seen prolonged drought across our western and southern tiers of states—although I’m not so sure you can call it drought anymore if we’re going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.
However, challenges also bring opportunities, and we have more opportunities than ever to work together across boundaries for healthier landscapes and thriving communities. We are strengthening our partnerships, in part through our joint long-term National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. We brought together federal, tribal, state, and local governments and nongovernmental organizations to develop a shared national approach—a national blueprint for building synergies in wildland fire management. Our strategy has three main goals:
- The first goal is to restore fire-adapted natural communities. The key is ecological restoration—restoring healthy, resilient ecosystems. Our policy is to restore forests and grasslands that are capable of withstanding stresses and disturbances, including those associated with climate change.
- An equally important goal is to create fire-adapted human communities. We need to treat fuels in the WUI and help the people who live there adopt planning and building practices that make homes and communities safer from wildfire. I cannot stress enough how important this is: people who live in the WUI need to take responsibility for their own properties. We need to learn to live with fire, and making communities firesafe is a big part of it.
- Our third goal is to make safe, effective, risk-based fire management decisions. Most of America’s landscapes evolved with fire; sooner or later, they will burn. Fire protection therefore requires an appropriate response to wildfire. We are absolutely committed to suppressing fire wherever needed, and we will devote every resource to that end. But we are also committed to using fire for management purposes where it is safe and beneficial. Again, we need to learn to live with fire.
Our joint strategy is for cross-boundary collaboration, ecological resilience, and community protection. It is about breaking down stovepipes and coming together. Our strategy is about addressing the challenges we face from a holistic, well-integrated perspective. We have new approaches, new plans, and renewed partnerships for making it all happen. Thank you for helping move us to this place. I am looking forward to everything we can accomplish together.