MILL CREEK RECOMMENDATIONS FROM BARK

 

Before outlining Bark’s recommendations for the Mill Creek area, I felt it would be helpful to provide more information on Bark’s mission, vision, and goals. These principles direct our position on any form of management proposed for Mt. Hood National Forest, including the Mill Creek Area. Given the directive of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act to undertake restoration projects, I have been hopeful that we would be able to work with the group to find common ground. Ultimately, it comes down to how the group defines restoration, and what the group determines the management needs to be in the Mill Creek area to achieve restoration objectives, how effective management could be towards that end, and how management practices weigh against the known risks and adverse impacts.

 

Bark mission: to preserve the forests, waters and wildlife of Mt. Hood National Forest.

 

Bark’s vision: to bring about a transformation of Mt. Hood National Forest into a place where natural processes prevail, where wildlife thrives and where local communities have a social, cultural, and economic investment in its restoration and preservation.

 

BARK’S RESTORATION VISION FOR MT. HOOD

 

Context for Restoration:

On the Mt. Hood National Forest, there is a pressing need to preserve and restore robust populations of native aquatic and terrestrial species and their habitats.  The forest encompasses over 1 million acres, most of which are capable of supporting a variety of plant and animal life.  Currently, the natural systems are in decline, marked by diminishing numbers of salmon, bull trout and the elimination of critical natural predators. Decades of logging, unsound silviculture practices and road building have fragmented the Forest and resulted in a significant overall degradation of forest ecosystem processes.  Prior to European settlement, large-scale disturbances such as wind, fire, and volcanism occurred regularly.  While natural disturbance processes created openings in the forest canopy, modern resource extraction has acted to degrade the Forest’s ability to recover from the shocks created by disturbance events: in the past, the surrounding forest and waterways acted as natural preserves that would restock and restore the plant and animal species that had been displaced or removed.  Currently, surrounding federal and nonfederal lands are not functioning and are in dire need of restoration.

 

Bark’s Restoration Principles

While Bark recognizes that site-specific resources will always provide the proper context for restorative activities on the Mt. Hood National Forest, our restoration vision can be articulated in the following maxims:

 

·        Protect existing wildlands;

·         

·        Protect mature and old growth stands, naturally regenerated stands regardless of age, and any structural characteristics associated with these forests regardless of where they are found;

 

·        Sustain and restore natural processes and disturbance events in frequency, magnitude, and duration;

 

·        Protect and restore aquatic and streamside ecosystems across the Mt. Hood National Forest in order to ensure high quality drinking water and biological, physical, and chemical health of those ecosystems;

 

·        Respect cultural and historical sites;

 

·        Support recreation compatible with ecological health;

 

·        Protect and restore scenic qualities viewed from any location on public lands;

 

·        Support community access for all, regardless of income to use and enjoy public lands.

 

MILL CREEK RECOMMENDATIONS

 

Our recommendations are very simple, and are as follows:

 

1) Manual brush removal in areas that are truly determined to be a high risk, addressing fine fuels and targeted ladder fuels

2) Reintroduce controlled fire through underburning, in tandem with brush management

3) No new roads, temporary or otherwise to be constructed or reconstructed to carry out 1 and 2

4) No entry into the Late Successional Reserve

 

Context for Our Perspective:

 

  • Treating a small area does not affect fire behavior. One needs to treat an extensive area to get benefit and the impacts would not outweigh a very uncertain and unproven benefit.

 

  • Furthermore, there are no funds to treat an extensive area, nor to do follow up treatments that would be required to get benefit.

 

  • There is lack of clarity and agreement about which areas are low severity, mixed severity and stand replacing regimes. Bark would like to have the opportunity to have its own fire expert do a field visit to analyze the findings.

 

  • For Mixed conifer ecosystem, both weather (long and short term cycles) and fuels are variables that have significant influence on fire severity, but particularly weather. Largest fires happen during weather that is conducive to high severity fire. Evidence shows that occasional treatments will not have any impact; that for this ecosystem, it is necessary to significantly alter ecological make-up of forest in order to affect fire pattern and severity. Therefore, there is no benefit in treating mixed conifer ecosystem. There is lack of agreement about forest types visited.

 

  • Mechanical treatments alone are not sufficient to address fire risk issue, they must be accompanied by an underburn.

 

  • For fuels reduction to be effective, it needs to be conducted repeatedly in an ongoing manner, in 10-12 year cycles. Otherwise, treatment has no affect or could make things worse (ie/when canopy is opened up and vegetation re-grows, this new growth tends to be a class of vegetation that is more flammable

 

  • There are complex, interacting variables that impact whether an area should be treated, including short term and long term weather cycles that are out of our control. Most severe and widespread fires take place during long periods of drought and have not proven to be affected by human management.