Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Development of the County Planning Process
With the loss of the county's sawmills in the mid-1990s, there was considerable social
disruption, fear, and polarization across the community. In the midst of this crisis, the
local community united under a proactive county government to explore options to
regain hope and influence over its future. A multi-stakeholder board, the Natural Re-
source Advisory Committee (NRAC), was formed in 1994 as a means of providing col-
laborative local leadership on natural resource issues, some of the most pressing of
which surrounded forest management on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest
(WWNF). The WWNF, along with a small section of the Umatilla National Forest,
accounts for nearly 58 percent of the land in Wallowa County as well as a substantial
portion of anadromous fish habitat. In the wake of the ESA listings, nearly all man-
agement activities on these lands ground to a halt, in part due to the influence of re-
gional environmental advocacy organizations that resisted most attempts to intervene
in the trajectory of heavily altered ecosystems. In 1996, local citizens, with assistance
from Sustainable Northwest and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Commu-
nities Assistance program, formed the nonprofit organization Wallowa Resources.
The founding mission was a clear commitment to sustainability—providing equal
weight to forest, watershed, and community health; job and business creation; and in-
creased social understanding of the links between the health of our lands and waters
and the health of our community.
After years of gridlock characterized by legal appeals and lawsuits against proposed
action on the WWNF, county commissioners, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Wal-
lowa Resources, natural resource agencies, environmental advocates, and representa-
tives of the NRAC discussed ways they could “fit together” and enhance their collec-
tive influence over local natural resource issues. There was widespread agreement
that there was good communication, coordination, or collaboration once manage-
ment projects had been initiated by private landowners or management agencies.
However, there was concern about the lack of a shared vision of land stewardship or
restoration priorities across the landscape. The assembled stakeholders also felt a
sense of urgency based on various needs for forest and rangeland restoration and the
employment opportunities that such projects could generate in a county with one of
the highest unemployment rates in Oregon.
By 1999 it was increasingly recognized that the WWNF and the wider Blue
Mountains region in which it is situated would benefit frommore active management
to address forest health issues that were impacting watershed conditions. Critical indi-
cators supporting this consensus included the increased frequency and severity of
wildfire and pest events between 1986 and 1999 and alarming annual tree mortality
rates, which exceeded new tree growth by 30 percent in the WWNF,
1
as established
by the 1993-1998 vegetation surveys. Diverse interest groups recognized that decades
of fire suppression had altered forest stand conditions, reducing the diversity in stand
structure and species distribution, and in turn their resilience to endemic disturbance
events. Inspired by national dialogue on “stewardship contracting” initiated by the
Pinchot Institute for Conservation, among others, these groups also recognized that
