Find out how to support YSS

A decade later, lessons from Rim Fire

Mike Albrecht said, “Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions continues to emphasize proactive forest management policies and practices to get ahead of the problem, including “thin the forests before they burn; after thinning, reintroduce prescribed fire into the forest; continue to develop strategic fuel breaks; and when the forest does burn, salvage the burned timber while it retains value and then replant the burned areas as quickly as possible.”

John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in Twain Harte, is also active with Yosemite Stanislaus Solutions. An immediate lesson learned was that doing scattered piecemeal fuel reduction projects, timber sales, mastication of brush, and isolated prescribed burns simply wasn’t going to be enough to prevent more Rim Fire type catastrophes. “That led the YSS forest stakeholder group to come together stronger than ever before to work to get tens of millions of dollars in grants to supplement the work that the Forest Service was already planning to accomplish,” Buckley said.

A second key lesson from the Rim Fire is that sincere collaboration and a willingness to work for middle ground can result in win-win benefits for nearly every stakeholder. Environmentalists and the local timber industry negotiated separately from the Forest Service and came up with a strong fire salvage logging plan that produced roughly 200 million board feet of dead trees off national forest land to supplement the huge amount of dead trees that were also salvage logged on private forest lands.

“Because all the YSS stakeholder interests supported the compromise salvage logging plan, it managed to gain Forest Service approval and got implemented without any legal delays that would have meant a lot of the wood could have rotted,” Buckley said. “By working for consensus middle ground on the issue of salvage logging and then the following debate over how to do national forest reforestation, YSS set a national example — showing the benefits of diverse stakeholders working together in a spirit of compromise and cooperation.” Read more here:  https://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/article_f00782c2-3d5e-11ee-a213-0f43cd2b81ba.html?utm_source=uniondemocrat.com&utm_campaign=%2Fnewsletters%2Flists%2Fheadlines%2F%3F-dc%3D1692370820&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headline