Sustainable Northwest Delivers Congressional Testimony in Support of Forest Landscape Restoration Act

For more information, contact

Maia Enzer 503-221-6911 x111 | menzer@sustainablenorthwest.org

Washington, DC Jul 10, 2008

Martin Goebel, executive director of Sustainable Northwest, testified today before the Committee on Natural Resources’ Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands in the United States House of Representatives. Sustainable Northwest supports the Forest Landscape Restoration Act, H.R. 5263, a bill to encourage the collaborative, science-based ecosystem restoration of priority forest landscapes on Federal lands under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service through a joint Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program.

"The Forest Landscape Restoration Act is correct to focus on landscape scale restoration and to recognize the importance of implementing solutions that emerge from robust collaborative process. This integrated approach will help find solutions to the ecological and economic problems facing the rural West. The time is now. We cannot wait any longer. We must move ahead to usher in the new local landscape-scale restoration economies." said Goebel.

The Forest Landscape Restoration Act proposes a comprehensive approach to forest restoration that promotes rural well-being and goes beyond a limited focus on wildland fuels reduction. For example, the Act's eligibility criteria require projects funded through the Act:

take a collaborative approach
use woody biomass and small-diameter trees from restoration efforts to offset treatment costs,
benefit rural communities by developing small business incubators and providing training opportunities,
address a wide range of forest values including wildlife habitat, water quality, and invasive and exotic species.

The confluence of a number of factors – particularly a century of land use and management practices, including fire suppression, and a warmer climate and drought over recent decades – have helped make western forests prone to larger and more extreme fires, causing profound changes to timber economies and forested ecosystems.

“All Bills can be improved, of course. This one is no exception,” noted Goebel. “But community collaboratives are ready to take advantage of this. A few that have been around for some time are already pursuing landscape-scale initiatives like those suggested in this Bill. Their early success is leading them to articulate visions of the doable that are nothing short of inspiring. With this Bill, si se puede, a phrase borrowed from our southern neighbor, yes we can.”

Suggestions Goebel provided to the Committee included: improving the bill's collaborative requirements; ensuring the Program is an open and competitive process; more tightly linking the bill's eligibility and evaluation criteria; improving the bill's Advisory Panel; clarifying the use of funding for monitoring, and; considering delivery mechanisms for technical assistance to projects.

Sustainable Northwest is a regional community-based natural resource organization whose mission is to partner with communities and enterprises to achieve economic, ecological, and community vitality and resilience. Sustainable Northwest coordinates the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, a coalition of western rural and local, regional, and national organizations that have joined together to promote balanced conservation-based approaches to the ecological and economic problems facing the West. Other RVCC partner organizations that endorse this testimony include The Forest Guild, American Forests, Watershed Research and Training Center, Wallowa Resources, Northwest Connections, and Lake County Resources Initiative.