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Forest Guild Pacific West Region Program |
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The principal geographic focus of the Guild’s Pacific West program is currently the state of California, but the Guild seeks to build its presence in Oregon and Washington as well. The Guild’s Pacific West program goal in California is to reform forest policy to create incentives for excellent forestry and to expand the application of excellent forestry across the private and public forest landscape. In addition, the Guild is active in providing technical advice and assistance to community forestry practitioners.
| | Major Challenges in the Pacific West - Globalization of forest products supply:
- The importation of low cost logs and forest products from sources with fewer or no restrictions on forest operations.
- Offshore flight of mills to countries with lower conversion costs and fewer restrictions on supply.
- Consolidation of mills into fewer ownerships at fewer locations.
- Conversion of late successional forests to second growth forests with greater per stem handling costs and greater susceptibility to damage from wildfire.
- Increases in fuel, equipment, insurance, and other logging costs
- Domination of forest workforce by undocumented and migrant workers who are politically, socially, and economically vulnerable.
- Inadequate funding and single year funding of public agency forestry programs.
- Lack of trust by the public of forest managers, leading to project appeals and delays, especially of projects on public lands.
- A regulatory and litigation climate, particularly in California, that substantially increases forest management costs and hampers landowners’ abilities to justify stand improvements and harvests, or to respond to favorable log markets.
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Forest Wisdom Issue 14
Forest Wisdom #14 (fall 2009) explores issues related to managing forests for wildlife and biodiversity. Articles range from restoring meadows to maintain rare butterfly habitats in the forests of western Oregon, to safely returning fire to highly fire-dependent forest ecosystems in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, to identifying forest management objectives for a small group of “focus species” whose habitat needs are representative of a wide range of other wildlife in the forests of Maine. Though focusing on a wide variety of wildlife, all of the articles share a common goal of restoring and maintaining forest ecosystem health in order to provide a natural habitat for native species.
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