By Jes Burns When Timothy Ingalsbee thinks back on his days in the 1980s and ‘90s fighting wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, he remembers the adventure of jumping out of a helicopter into the wilderness. “Ideally we’d have at least one skid touching the steep slope,” he recalled. There was the camaraderie of sleeping with his crew out under the stars or …
Proposal Would Stabilize Payments for Forest-Dependent Counties – 1/2/2019
By Bryce Oates The program that was supposed to help rural counties weather declining timber sales revenue was fraught with uncertainty. A bipartisan bill would replace the Secure Rural Schools and Self Determination Act with a predictable and sustainable funding stream, proponents say. U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle are proposing a bill to establish a forest trust fund that would …
Post-fire forest policies should focus on watershed health – 1/27/18
By Tim Palmer | Posted Jan 27, 2018 at 12:01 AM A drumbeat of misinformation after the wildfires of 2017 calls for abandoning well-established safeguards for the forests, wildlife and watersheds of the West. One of my county commissioners blamed the Forest Service for “absolute devastations” and, chiming in, my state legislator called for “changes in forest policy … across the Pacific Northwest.” Statements such as …
Rebirth of a forest: The Columbia River Gorge after the Eagle Creek fire – 1/3/2018
By Cory Eldridge, Jonathan Soll and Katy Weil When the first images of the Eagle Creek fire reached social media, the bereaved lovers of the Columbia River Gorge wrote post after post eulogizing the places that, from the awful photographs, seemed lost forever. Nearly all included words like “destroyed,” “death,” or “memory.” The fire caused significant economic and emotional damage. But …