Photo: Irina Iriser | Unsplash
Ashland, Ore., an historic hotbed of both the logging industry and environmental activism, has become an unlikely success story. A moment in 1996 when environmentalists stormed a US Forest Service facility and demanded to be listened to was a catalyst for a protracted series of community meetings, patience-stretching failures of communication, multiple compromises and finally the crystallization of trust and understanding between groups that long thought they would never be able to work together. The result: the Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project, which required the removal of many understory trees and annual prescribed burns to create a forest that hopefully proves resilient to fire. There has been a sea change in society's readiness to figure out and do the right thing to make forests more resilient and safer. We are on the cusp, and I believe the Ashland Forest Resiliency Project has defined the way forward for this restoration, said Darren Borgias, a conservationist with The Nature Conservancy.
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