KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segment: Paula Swedeen and Joe Kane

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matters and katie x the seattle ninety twenty fm and on the lab k e x speech audio orgy i guess this morning our policy dean forest policy specialist for the washington environmental council and joe cain executive director of a nice quality land trust pollan joe are here today to tell us about forest protection in washington state and the squabbling community forest welcome to you both do you would you like to begin by telling us about the washington environmental council and then a squirrel a land trust the washington by mel council is a venerable organization in washington state we have been around since the late nineteen sixties and have worked on a variety of environmental issues that are important to the people of the state but not in some on the council has been working on forest and force protection issues for most of that time and i've been involved in creating and it's improving our states forced practices regulations and in recent years we have come to realize that our regulatory environment provides a very good foundation for force protection on private lands

however there's a lot more that can be done in a forested environment so we have been more recently looking to and incentives type program and weighs two idiots force protection beyond just using regulations that joe is you know i to speak about the holy land trust ms queller just isn't but once you three nonprofit land conservancy we're celebrating our twenty fifth anniversary we're a fundamentally benign and we work in this one watershed so from our new national park kansas well a national wildlife refuge well we do mainly as we acquire habitat specifically for the threatened species such as chinook salmon and steelhead trout mr elmer lets a northern spotted owls we started out really around the same issue who worked very closely with the small indian tribe which is the lead in a teacher's and recovery in a watershed for our first fifteen years we concentrated on protecting salmon habitat on in the swan river and to have done a good job of that and we we use big we are highly corporate and clambered watershed know deep pockets and wash

into lots of people with good intentions and we protected now about seventy eight percent of the main stem the school a river which is a lot over the last ten years we start to move into a call the upper watersheds which is really the timber and commercial timber so on because we realized that for all the work we're doing to protect salmon habitat them below mice we can influence how trees are managed to forster managed to cross a very harsh landscape the work we're doing on salmon habitats not to be enough there so much influence coming down from the mountains in terms of rainfall soil runoff water temperature things like that we have to start to change the way we look at the landscape we've already started alluding to destabilize an important to protect washington state's forests i can speak for every local perspective our forests do a lot of work on conservation issues they are absolutely critical to survival of species like chinook salmon steelhead trout northern spotted owl small moments and many many others we have some of the best timber growing land in the world in the west of the cascades we evans called a watershed in what we

call the upper watersheds the upper half the watershed something close a hundred thousand acres of privately owned commercial forced the nature of that land ownership has changed over the last ten years as global economies have emerged land ownership in russian state in terms of commercial timber now is mostly globalized which is a change they think a lot of people are only just now beginning to understand has happened so the ownership or forces incrementally larger groups sort of been removed from local involvement commercial timber land small watershed are owned by investment groups on the east coast who manages to ruins for investors around the world for us that has changed the way those forests are integrated with our local needs somebody ways can we re localize summer that ownership so the air force are more closely aligned with needs for communities or for our species or a wildlife habitat so first a white perspective i wanna start answering this question by making the distinction between lance at our own and managed by the federal government sued for service and park service land for the most part and there've been lots of groups over the years who have

worked on protecting those forests and since about the early to mid nineteen nineties their heyday of old growth lugging ended and we've entered into a period of frustration and protection of remaining old forest habitats and said daddy risi has for the most part been focusing on for signs that are owned and managed by private landowners and the state of washington and that chunk of forest service as joe said they work very hard for the benefits of the people of washington so in addition to providing force products and employment those forests are also very very important for crime a stabilization force sequestering carbon we have some of the most ana prager basis productive forest in terms of holding carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere are forests especially in the management skipper really important for water quality and also for maintenance of flows and by that i mean in the summertime we tend to have sort of a natural dry period but over the years our streams have gained wider deficits which make it hard for growing communities in the lower part of the

watershed to have adequate water and then in dough wintertime we see more peak storm flows which leads to flooding and it leads to landslides and it leads to lots of debris and scouring out of the streams which is bad for sam habitat so by protecting the forests in and for the most part when i say that i mean trying to maintain more mature forest cover and tbilisi is vision is to eventually take a portion of our private ownership and transition back to longer rotations in by rotational mean the length of time between a cutting cycle so typical cutting cycle on industrial force and right now is anywhere between thirty and forty years old he used to be say between fifty and sixty and those shorter cutting cycles don't optimize carbon sequestration they certainly don't provide any habitat for some of these species that need large structurally complex for centuries and for that you need more like eighty to ninety rotations and then we also think there's the science to show that there are some water quality and quantity issues with rotation forestry how well overall or washington

state for is currently being managed i can only speak to our watershed in its relative that again speak in terms of both the absolute what we would like to see is the ideal management system and how forests are managed in other places washington state has a reputation for having compared to other parts of the country some fairly strict force regulations that said we think the jury is still out on whether the regulations are having all of the impacts that they were set up to have we can see in our watersheds some places where the regulations intended them to recovery work with they follow the rules when a robber barons are not doing stuff in the dark night are any guide that we work with them very closely but we are starting to see places where we think the regulations aren't strong enough for the conditions that exist we have very steep slopes unstable soils very sensitive areas well for full disclosure first i would like to state that i serve on the state's fourth practices board which is the entity

that develops an overseas implementation of regulations and i would say that we have one of the best regulatory programs in the country and we have kind of a unique setup where private landowners timber companies try and environmental groups and state and federal agencies work very closely together to make sure that these rules are following the danger species act and the clean water act and then also by law rolls need to ensure a viable timber industry and nobody would deny that that's a difficult balancing act and you know my sense from sitting on that board is that people try very hard to do the best they can and i do think that we have a good set of rules but i also think that the times demand a review big picture look and again that's why washington vermont house was looking into incentive programs and ways to really fundamentally change the economic drivers because right now for senators get compensated for timber products for timber land sales like some elite international management organizations or for converting to real estate and those things tend to under produce a few minutes because an economist under produced public goods such

as habitat and carbon sequestration and clean water so if you wanna keep landowners own the land and provide them to the just compensation you can't just expect them to all of a sudden start harvesting timber nor can you expect them to not take advantage of financial opportunities that they're perfectly legal for them however if we can figure out ways to essentially make the trees more valuable standing then cut down and i'm not talking about ending harvest or not having all wood products industry but slowly transitioning back to a place where we have higher timber stalking on operator basis and that's what margaret haitian does see you actually once you're equalizing a landscape santa at retention you've got more board feet to get are available for timber harvests in addition to having a landscape that's got more habitat for species at require older forests more carbon per acre and like i said better water quality so while from regulatory perspective i think washington's land to be managed just fine we can do a lot more and i think paul was just talking that really strikes at the heart of why we

came up with this committee forced concept as a land conservancy we by habitat that's principally what we do and we had no powers of condemnation we can only operate with happy sellers you know we raise the money somebody wants to sell property to us and it's probably did strategical by to change the way commercial forestry is happening and to change it at this scale at the pace that we think he needs to change in our watersheds were down with the steelhead trout were done to maybe two hundred and fifty is spawning adult slot so we cant wait ten years for regulatory transformation we need to find the money go in and buy these properties from the current landowners that market price that works for them and then on around for ways to both manage for conservation and four commercial timber production we think we have some advantages in the wings we need to generate quite the prophet then a commercial operation desert wouldn't have underlying investors that had to be paid at a high rate or smothered and just like that but that's the model we're looking at i'm diane warren and my guests us policy dean forest policy specialist

for the washington environmental council and joe came executive director of the squabbling land trust republicans force protection and washington state and the squalor community forest and you're tuned to the sustainability segment of mind over matters and most important caveat speech ninety point three of them and on the web add x p that archie but still focus in on than the squall a community forest which you say more about them as quell a watershed alliance special will you not to dwell on myself but in a previous life as a lot of time working in the amazon river and was on an expedition made the first source to see navigation river when i wrote about it says are the biggest force in the world top to bottom and then i wound up appear in the northwest and to be able to be in the squalid watershed which of course is a much smaller portion let's say small watershed with big ideas and to be able to work in that landscape and to see the work that i

do all of our many partners and actually see the impact as we say put a quarter in the top much a gumball commit the bottom that makes an escalator special gimlet is located between two metropolitan areas to come an olympian it's an unbelievably shallowly developed landscape shall we say we still have listed a moment but a lot of the watershed is not very developed a lover habitat is in pretty good shape so it makes it fun to work there we still have a lot of wildlife and we work with a drive in small indian tribes are major partner really considered a matter of greed good luck for me to be able to work with an indian tribes just a very special about that and we have highly corporate worship the bold decision which many people be familiar with that grew out of and the squad a watershed and squalling was the forefront for the salmon wars twenty five thirty years ago and we've now evolved into an international model for aquatic conservation we have delegations come from all the world to see how we do things that makes it very special plus values the top puget sound the doctors at the bottom it's a lucky place to be before we talk

about your specific community forest what our community for us and what is their history in general community forests are a flexible model and the ownership can be in a variety of forms but in general keeney forests are where people in the local area get together and exert a direct influence on how the forests in their area are managed and that influences for the benefit of the entire community so the most common model is that some ownership entity is formed from members of the community and they get together and they purchase you know maybe it's a few hundred acres or maybe it's a few thousand acres and they get together they purchase the forests of a hormone management board and they make decisions either directly and consultation with local community members or with a community interest in mind and the goals are often to protect the scenic values to protect local access for traditional hunting and fishing and recreation a lot of times there is a habitat protection component and also quite often there's local employment so

from wood products and or from gathering on timber harvest products in the area to any forest have a pretty long tradition in the northeastern part of the country in fact one of the ie if not dealers can the forests in the country is in maine and it's a place that our community forest team went to visit to learn is called the down east lake's community forest and it's run by a local land trust there and it was formed in order to prevent a proliferation of second home development and also an ownership change in which the new owners which were a timber investments reorganization would have excluded a lot of the traditional community access and most people know the story and i think it's a truce that does paul said any force or an alternation in the northeast henry david thoreau walden pond was actually kind of egg sarkozy had burned down the concord community forced couple years earlier and there's a passage i think so mormons one of his other writings really goes back to look at a couple years later he said well does look any worse than if it had been struck by lightning that we don't have a tradition in the northwest and we have a defense of the circumstances in the

northeast you don't see a lot of public land i suppose what we have out west we did a big public lands and we also have a scale here going to visit the three fourths of maine it was a great project as big as fifty thousand acres but they said you're going to get your health section with ourselves walking through the saplings stephens said i was your growth listen we're in it and as well as what we call we have a bigger scale the bigger challenge here and a different model we're working on in this golly we have groups all over oregon washington all working toward creation of a community forest everybody's got a slightly different approach we've come together we had a big meeting last year to compare it is treated as everybody knows this is coming or just learning how to put the pieces together on it for us we have incorporated we started with a watershed y discussion of the squabbling about what would committee force be what would it look like we convened an advisory group before the core planning team to saute the national park service by

mount rainier national park and they we form the twenty six member advisory group of stakeholders and over the course of two years we met we discussed we brought in experts from outside say here's a finance these things hairs which might want to consider in terms of land management center in central and you know that process came out with a recommendation to form a kind of ownership entity we incorporated ownership entity last summer paul are both on the board of the newness well we can be forcibly having her first retreat next week starter really began in the weeds so how do you find that you know how the eu operated a commercial level and for us we have to use the advantages we have as a nonprofit which is how are incorporated which means there's certain kinds of conservation funding available but we also have to learn how to operate in a commercial way as well because you can't raise enough conservation money to work at the scale that we need to work to really perfect habitat and it really took effect you're going to do twenty thousand or three thousand acre project you're going to have

some conservation money every trick you need to be in the commercial timber market as well so that we learned to do that as a community in world that is highly competitive where there's big demand in a lot of our west look to grier's going to asian will continue to go in asia that will be better than they were playing in a very high level game which underscores the goals of that risk law like forrest we define it right now a committee forces of force that managed to benefit of the community which to natural part so the forest's edges around where people are on the committee forced is managed typically police force isn't will be unique but typically manage for a sweeter benefits to provide forestry jobs dried forestry products force products typically to provide recreation provide education and to provide benefits such as clean water clean air protected wildlife habitat the charge for the forest is to put together this mix it is not simply to return profit your profit in fact is often returned not in dollars but in more salmon

streams more jobs in your community more kids out in the forest and seeing in a growing up as part of a forest at the same time and our money you can generate money pay those loans to see you do have to be able to work as a business it can any forest service quality forest is a working forest this is not a plan that is taken out of production but it's a working forest as paul was saying earlier where we can change the rotations we know the ferry certainty that about fifty years a tree is starting to perform a whole lot of functions that are necessary to help the system if we can lengthen out those are patients we think we'll see a lot of other benefits in terms of our habitat our water our air and ultimately in terms of timbre we can produce as well how large an area wilderness for a scan or do we have a big week sir sir we're core committee we've talked in terms of twenty thousand to thirty thousand acres being a desirable end goal we we're right now in negotiations for the first two thousand acres ever fingers crossed a lot it will this will

be with the conservation funding is before the legislature now but long term we think twenty thousand or three thousand acres is what we're aiming for you are ten to the sustainability segment of mind over matter some caveats the seattle ninety point three of them and on the web add k e x teachout orgy i'm diane warren and my guests are joe cain executive director up in the squalid land trust and forest policy specialist for the washington environmental council our topic is forest protection in washington state and the squabbling community forest what are the challenges in establishing the forest what's a money it's also trying to i would say exactly create something that hasn't been done before but to really take existing models that are out there and adapt them to quite new uses for example just learning about what an ownership and it would look like when you go from conservation to mix of conservation commercial production in terms of tax structure what is your ship and see have to look like what are your

liabilities if the land trust as it has been because of just our history is the lead how do we minimize risk to the land trust so it can continue to do its work while also giving the committee forced the freedom to grow in the way it needs to grow and take the risks needs to take so it's a level of expertise and experience and skills that we have to build and then its money good example just over year ago a hundred thousand acres on the west slope owned by t mobile one up on the market for auction everybody who's paying attention to this that look at that wow someone hitting those guns that ended up a high dollar for this record i really see forestry accelerate even more on this property and when the dust settled the model she tried bought it it doesn't exist for three hundred and thirty million dollars which was really inspiring in many ways because it was a real causation timberland ownership and it was a very visceral lesson notes are like real estate in san francisco and seattle

year for five years you risk is high if you're here for a hundred years no matter what you pay now scofield cheap and it was a lesson to a lot of folks including other tribes that we can all think like to know what you'd have extraordinary economic resources but it was that first step toward here is a re localization on a large scale of the commercial forest and that is valued not just for its commercial timber production but for many other things is what's cultural value its environmental value attempting it's all of those things on the financing side it's not just having enough money but having enough money in time so when one of her challenges that we're going to be dealing with in that the lancet are currently owned by timber investments reorganization in a watershed is that they have underlying investors needs they need to meet and parts of the watershed will go up for sale possibly on short notice and without us having adequate financing it can very likely be sold

to somebody else and we would have to wait another period of time in order to be able to acquire it so trying to get an mba and crossover a little bit into washington on the council's policy interest in working with the us ali committee forest as a model for other parts of the state and then how were thinking about funding forest conservation in general many other states in the country have either curly or in the recent past stable pools of funding for the acquisition of working forest conservation easement or other conservation lands and washington state has had a different model we've been very very good at financing through just regular state funding mechanisms of the acquisition of high conservation value lance said taking lands where there's really sensitive habitat orders old growth left or you know there's a patch of something for a rare species or the support from recreation perspective and taking their land from the private sphere and turning it into public land has been very popular thing for residences to washington and it's been very important to me as is accomplished quite a bit but there's a whole bunch of

land that it least at the moment may not be identified as having a very unique or special conservation value but it's important for accomplishing these larger goals and in the absence of having money that can be spent and allowing that forced to stay in the private sector entity manage four combination of conservation and some are products we're not gonna be able to meet the kinds of challenges that this was a watershed is facing and that many other watersheds that feed into puget sound boring in other parts of the state are facing so one of the things that we're looking into is how can we create that pool of funding so you're the governor's climate bill provides a potential opportunity to create a pool of funding and it makes sense if you're going out manage prayer for science to increase carbon sequestration that meets the halls of the state to reduce our emissions and increase livability and increase resilience to challenges of climate change and in the future and there's many other ways it can be financed but in the absence of being able to know that there's this pool of funding out there that mean force can apply

to the land trust can apply to that private landowners can use in cooperation with lynne truss or other entities to be able to change the management i don't think we're gonna be able to keep up with the pace of turnover that were to have in our timberlands property market so back then to the squad cleared the forest we are fortunate to be able to have some say to base funding for our first acquisition but you know as joe said that money isn't gonna pay for everything and it's just not big enough so our next acquisition is gonna have to be something where we're either financing and two timber harvested corn markets or if in the next two or three years we can create these stable funding paulson will be in a better spot what's the message you'd like to leave our listeners let states that i think part of what are job is is to educate and to make sure the folks understand how our commercial force or private forest lands largely are now owned and what

globalization of our forest lands means you know and that's not to put a value on it like most books don't think understand that that's what happened a lot of folks have used talk about it the sink oh your warehouse runs all that land that they're right and notices no longer the current ownership that we have in that is globalization of our timberlands very quick step that most cat most people by surprise is that about twenty percent of pierce county the entire land mass of pure scary is owned by two investment firms on the east coast most folks don't understand that the wheel turns and having our job is to create the end make possible the next step the post globalization of our force plans which is the re localization and that ownership and that's part of our job isn't as courtney forces to do the actual work on the ground it's also the global market they can go out into the world i would like listeners to take a step back and just to understand the enormous importance of protecting and restoring force plans to our collective quality of life and that's true in washington state is true in anyplace were four

slams exists but without them were in world of hurt so it makes a whole lot of sense to spend time and money making sure that we maintain an even restore this resource because without it we don't have a chance of dealing with climate change we have a much better chance of improving and local employment and we have a much better chance of preventing a whole lot of critters from going extinct if we pay attention to and protect our force to stay and then who could number one we think about every day is we now have less care we have about two hundred and seventy the school is do a drought laughed that it that's on the planet and they swim farther to higher than any other some wanted in puget sound they depend on that commercial timber zone if timmer practice continues as it has and that nothing illegal about it you know and when we work with our birds by the rags to clean that way but we now know that that's not enough we will lose that species we were sick within a matter of years this is how species go extinct it's not all at once it incrementally and then

they're gone and we're right in the middle of it now and that's where community forestry can play a pivotal role that we can just make that change in forest practice will thanks so much for being here that you think you are you're just listening to paul a sweeping forest policy specialist for the washington environmental council and joe cain executive director of the sprawling land trust for more information check on the web at the squalling land trust dot org and get the easy protects dot org i'm diane warren thanks for listening and he should've turned into the sustainability segment again next week and listener part ninety point three of them and katie x p double it