It’s a pleasure to be back in Idaho. Thank you for inviting me. This is where I grew up and where my family roots are. This is where I started my Forest Service career.

I also came back here later on in my career. As some of you might remember, I served as regional forester for the Forest Service’s Northern Region, which includes part of Idaho. So I have a good understanding of the forestry issues here and how to deal with them effectively.

As regional forester, I focused on community-based collaboration—on finding solutions based on mutual goals. I see some familiar faces today who were in the room in meetings in northern Idaho a few years ago. Community-based collaboration is what I want to focus on today.

Purpose

The need for community-based collaboration is based on a clear understanding of what the national forests are for. The purpose of the national forests was outlined more than a hundred years ago by Gifford Pinchot, the first Forest Service Chief. As Pinchot said, the national forests are not there for individual profit but for the benefit of society as a whole. Accordingly, our management has always been designed to deliver what people want.

For the first 70 years of our history, the Forest Service focused on helping our nation develop its natural resources. We envisioned a future of prosperity for all Americans, and we contributed to that future by helping Americans develop such resources as timber, water, forage, and minerals—and the jobs needed to produce them.

In the last 30 years, our focus has broadened to include a full range of the values and benefits that people get from their forests and grasslands, including jobs. Today, Americans understand that forests provide clean air and water, carbon sequestration, habitat for native fish and wildlife, erosion control and soil renewal, opportunities for outdoor recreation, and more. What Americans want from their national forests has expanded to include a broader variety of things.

In response, our mission focus has shifted. We still have a multiple-use mission, but our focus is on sustaining the ability of America’s forests and grasslands, both public and private, to deliver a full range of benefits—the full range of multiple uses—for generations to come.

Challenges

That ability is now at risk. Drought, invasive species, loss of open space, uncharacteristically severe wildfires, severe outbreaks of insects and disease—all these stresses and disturbances are affecting America’s forests and grasslands on an unprecedented scale. Partly, they are driven by the overarching challenge of climate change.

Much of our country has been in prolonged drought. For the last three years, severe drought has affected our western tier of states. The current outlook is for persistent drought across most of the West, from Texas to California, including southern Idaho. In fact, California is facing one of its worst droughts in a hundred years.

Research has shown that our growing fire seasons are partly due to warmer and drier conditions associated with a changing climate. Warming temperatures mean more energy in the atmosphere, which is consistent with severe fire seasons—and with severe weather events, such as tornadoes, blizzards, and hurricanes.

Many of our forests here in the West are overly dense and homogeneous. Coupled with climate change, this has created conditions for severe outbreaks of pests and disease. Mountain pine beetle is the main problem, but other bark beetles as well as western spruce budworm have contributed to forest mortality. On the national forests alone, the area affected has reached over 32 million acres. That’s more than 50 percent more than all the national forest lands in Idaho, where we have 20.5 million acres.

In the past, an exotic disease wiped out an entire forest type, the American chestnut in the East. Emerald ash borer is now threatening the ash components of our forests in the Upper Midwest. A couple generations ago, we experienced something similar in Idaho, with blister rust wiping out much of our western white pine.

Other challenges are associated with population growth and urban expansion. By 2060, our population is expected to grow to somewhere between 400 and 500 million, and we could see a net forest loss of up to 37 million acres. By 2030, we also expect to see housing density grow on about 57 million acres.

Growing drought and wildfires … growing land use conversion … the spread of invasive species … the spread of native forest pests and disease … how will all this affect natural resources in the United States?

Take the impacts on water, for example. Our water resources are increasingly at risk, especially here in the arid West, and the past century is not a reasonable guide to the future for water management. Over the past hundred years, we developed water resources during a period that was much wetter than the long-term average. Now we could be entering a much drier period in the West, more in line with the long-term average over the past 1,200 years. We need to be prepared for the impacts on both forests and water resources.

Or take the impacts on wildlife. Twenty-seven percent of all forest-associated plants and animals in the United States, about 4,000 species are at risk of extinction. Habitat degradation affects 85 percent of all imperiled species, and loss of open space means habitat loss and fragmentation, as do climate-related stresses and disturbances.

Or take the implications for carbon storage. America’s forests are a vital carbon sink. Forests in the United States absorb roughly 12 percent of the carbon dioxide that our citizens emit each year. However, climate-related stresses and disturbances adversely affect the ability of forests to take up and store carbon. According to a recent study by the Forest Service, America’s forests are expected to become a net carbon source by 2060.

The risks are on both private and public land. The Forest Service manages 20 percent of our nation’s forests, and research has shown that the National Forest System is one of the nation’s most important sources of water … one of its most important stores of carbon … one of its most important refuges for threatened and endangered species. Yet somewhere between 64 and 82 million acres of national forest land are in need of restoration treatments—up to 42 percent of the entire National Forest System.

So we have our work cut out for us. Idaho has more than 20 million of the 193 million acres in the National Forest System, about 1 acre in 10, so Idaho is vitally important. I will now describe some of what we at the Forest Service are doing to meet these challenges—and what some of the opportunities might be. And many of the things we are doing is because of your influence and participation in managing the National Forest System.

Restoration

The answer to ecological degradation is ecological restoration. Using prescribed fire and other vegetation treatments, we can restore overgrown forests and other degraded ecosystems. By restoration, we mean restoring the functions and processes characteristic of healthier, more resistant, more resilient ecosystems. We are striving to sustain and restore ecosystems that can deliver all the services that Americans want and need, including resistance to catastrophic fire.

That’s why I’ve come to Boise. Here we have gathered in one room the leaders of local forest collaborative efforts from around this state.  We also have the supervisor or deputy from every Idaho national forest here. Together, we can chart a continued path of forest restoration.

The Forest Service is taking a series of steps to accelerate restoration, this at a time of flat or declining budgets. To help address the rising need for mechanical restoration treatments, we are prepared to raise timber harvest levels by 20 percent, from 2.4 billion board feet in 2011 to 3.0 billion board feet in fiscal year 2014—provided that we get the needed funding.

So how are we doing all this with declining budgets?

• We are expanding collaborative landscape-scale partnerships. We have identified 23 of these 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 three projects here in Idaho—the Selway–Middle Fork Clearwater Project, begun in 2010; and the Weiser–Little Salmon Headwaters Project as well as the Kootenai Valley Resource Initiative, both begun in 2012.  
• We are also implementing the new planning rule through a number of forest plan revisions. That includes the forest plan for the Nez Perce and Clearwater National Forests, an “early adopter” of the new planning rule. The new rule will reduce our planning costs, shorten our planning time, and lead to more restoration.
• In addition, we developed a Watershed Condition Framework to track the condition of 15,000 watersheds on the National Forest System. Using the framework, we have chosen 285 watersheds for high-priority restoration work, including 27 here in Idaho. For example, the Boise National Forest has a partnership to restore the South Fork of the Salmon River. Many of us know the Stolle Creek and Stolle Meadows area along the upper South Fork of the Salmon River. Partners include the Nez Perce Tribe and Bonneville Power. By 2017, we aim to complete all kinds of restoration work, including road decommissioning, motorized trail reconstruction, and postfire reforestation.
• We are also using the Watershed Condition Framework as a foundation for pilot testing a new budget line item for integrated resource restoration in three regions, including both regions that cover Idaho. This will let us get more restoration work done on a larger scale by using Forest Service funds that were previously stovepiped by functional area—fire, wildlife, engineering, and so forth.
• We are also gaining NEPA efficiencies across large landscapes, such as the Weiser–Little Salmon Headwaters Project area here in Idaho. A more flexible EIS process will allow us to move quickly to address insect and disease outbreaks, wind damage, and other events without additional reviews.
• We are implementing a national Bark Beetle Strategy, targeting high-priority areas affected by the western bark beetle epidemic. The epidemic has affected more than 5 million acres here in Idaho alone. Our first priority is to protect the public from falling trees and wildfires, especially in the wildland/urban interface, followed by actions to help damaged forests recover and to restore their resiliency. In the Northern Rockies and the Intermountain West, including Idaho, we expect to treat almost 1.4 million acres by 2016.
• In addition, we are expanding our stewardship contracting authority and improving the efficiency of our timber sales. Idaho and Montana have led the way in stewardship contracting, with other regions looking to the national forests here as models. We now have permanent stewardship contracting authority through the recently enacted Farm Bill.
• We are also expanding markets for woody biomass and facilitating green building on the National Forest System. This region has led the way, for example through the Woody Biomass Utilization Partnership in Idaho, which includes the Payette National Forest, where funding made possible a new dry kiln that kept the Evergreen mill at Tamarack in operation and Fuels for Schools projects in Garden Valley and Council.

Partnerships and Collaboration

And that brings me to the key point I want to make here today: Restoration works through partnerships and collaboration, and Idaho is leading the way. The Idaho Forest Restoration Partnership report in November 2013 showcases nine restoration partnerships across Idaho, well represented here today. Your membership is very diverse, and you are all involved in our restoration work on the national forests here in Idaho.

As you know, a restoration opportunity can bring stakeholders together to find common ground and agree on the actions needed to reach shared goals. I am happy to hear that there is a zone of agreement in Idaho on restoring forest resilience in light of historical forest conditions and on restoration in dry forests and hazardous fuels reduction in the wildland-urban interface. I am also pleased to learn that there is emerging agreement on restoration objectives in forests with mixed-severity fire regimes. And I am very glad to hear that the Idaho Roadless Rule is helping groups avoid past controversies, because I was personally involved in establishing the Idaho Roadless Rule when I was regional forester in the Forest Service’s Northern Region.

So the good news is this: People get it. People from all over the country … people from all walks of life, representing all different interests … people get the connection between declining forest health and things they value, like water, wildlife, and outdoor recreation. They get the connection between ecological degradation and the need for restoration treatments, and they are willing to invest their precious time and hard-earned money in restoration treatments. You are in the lead in Idaho with these local forest collaboration efforts across the state.

Collaboration means working together—creating an opportunity for people with diverse interests to come together for conservation. It means creating a space where values are not questioned, where individuals do not have to defend their values and views, where people seek to understand one another and to work together to find solutions.

This is what we’re seeing in the numerous collaborative efforts around the country, and especially here in Idaho. Idaho has led the way, and I thank you for your leadership.