By Mark Matthews
Dawn breaks. Loggers fan out across a low-elevation, dry Western forest, avoiding the healthiest, biggest timber to cut brush and small-diameter trees from the crowded understory. Lightweight skidders drag downed trees to a loading deck where a machine shaves off the branches. As the thin trunks are piled onto trucks, other workers throw branches into a chipper, which sprays thumb-sized pieces of wood into a dump truck.

The trucks deliver the logs to a local mill, where some become furniture, others paneling, flooring, posts, poles, or logs for small buildings. On the other side of town, the wood chips are delivered to a co-generation plant where they're burned into a gas that powers a motor that turns an electric turbine. The electricity passes to the woodworking plant and throughout the neighborhood of well-kept homes.

That's the dream of many Westerners living near public forests, but these hopes hinge on an innovative federal land-management project with a twofold mission: to restore forest health and make rural communities safer from catastrophic wildfires.

But the National Fire Plan (NFP) has a third agenda. ''The NFP has a great opportunity to benefit the local community,'' says Diane Snyder, executive director of Wallowa Resources, located on the eastern front of Washington's Cascade Mountains. ''It's the first time there's been a written edict from Congress to benefit local economies from restoration work and to get some commercial return from public lands.''

Overstocked Forests

In 1999 the General Accounting Office warned Congress that 45 million acres of low-elevation, dry forests were primed to fry in catastrophic crown fires, putting western communities in jeopardy. The reason for the risky situation can be traced to 70 years of aggressive fire suppression. Historically, every five to 17 years low-intensity ground fires cleared debris and small trees from these forests, most dominated by fire-resistant Ponderosa pine. But since the 1920s public foresters have tried to put out every fire-before they could do their janitorial work.

Now, with broken branches littering the ground and small understory trees growing thickly together, allowing fire to easily climb into the crowns of mature trees, simply reintroducing fire into the ecosystem is not an option. For now, much of nature's work must be done by human hands.

The 2000 fire season was a wake-up call for many Americans, including politicians. Nationwide, fires scorched 7.4 million acres, almost twice the 10-year average. As the charred western hillsides smoldered under last autumn's rains, Congress allocated $1.9 billion to a National Fire Plan (NFP). Some of that money bolstered firefighting resources, but a large percentage was earmarked for making communities safer from the wildfire threat.

''The aim (of the restoration work) is to put the right kind of fire back in these woods: low-intensity, cool fire,'' says Jerry Williams, director of fire and aviation for the U.S. Forest Service.

Tall Timber, Small Timber The easiest way to reintroduce cool fire would be to thin the ladder fuels, then set prescribed burns. But a lot of wood fiber would either be left rotting on the forest floor or burned in slash piles. Driven by desperation, some western communities used to cutting tall timber are now recognizing small-diameter trees as a valuable commercial resource.

In central Oregon, when the surrounding forests were shut down in the early 1990s because of threats to endangered Chinook salmon, the community-based group Wallowa Resources began looking for ways to bolster the county's economy while diversifying the wood-products industry.

''By 1994 there was no timber harvest,'' Snyder says. ''Three sawmills shut down. The level of fear and frustration in the community was very high.''

The next year Snyder's group raised money for a fuels-reduction project and in the process discovered some value for Douglas-fir. Wallowa Resources, which eventually invested money in the nearby Joseph Timber Co., started making 2x4s and 2x6s out of Doug-fir. Then, after consultations with the Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, other products followed: flooring, paneling, teepee poles, posts and poles, round wood for log homes, and temporary telephone poles. The group is currently expanding its research in small-diameter wood products with a $176,000 grant through the NFP. They hope NFP thinning projects, manned by local loggers, will provide a steady supply of wood in the future.

The scenario is being mirrored in communities throughout the West.

In California's Trinity County, where 75 percent of the landscape is made up of public land, the Watershed Research and Training Center brokered an agreement with the Forest Service, timber industry, and environmentalists to get workers back into the woods in the mid-1990s.

''Everything was way out of whack,'' says executive director Lynn Jungwirth. ''We thought that maybe if we could create a use and put a value on submerchantible timber material, we can create an economic incentive to clean up the forests.''

The project now employs 12 people cutting logs in the woods, and three at the sorting yard. A subsidiary of the project, the for-profit Jefferson State Forest Products, employs 12 people making furniture from the small-diameter trees.

''With a logging operation, we would project employing 10 people to log 20 million board-feet,'' Jungwirth says. "'With this project we figured out how to employ 15 people to harvest a million board-feet a year.''

Many mills in Idaho and western Montana have geared up to handle small-diameter logs, according to Stefany Bales with the Intermountain Forest Association, which represents more than 30 mills and private forest owners in the Northern Rockies.

Many loggers are also retooling mentally to new methods of harvesting trees.

In Okanogan County, Oregon, Partnerships for Sustainable Methow is hoping to train 100 workers "to understand the ecology of the forest," says Nancy Farr.

''They have learned to recognize the needs of the soil, to minimize the spread of noxious weeds, maximize the land's hydrological functions, and recognize features that affect fire behavior.'' The loggers use this knowledge to ''determine which trees to cut and which to leave-from a holistic perspective.''

Farr's group received two grants so far from the NFP, one to buy small-scale, low-impact logging equipment, the other to oversee and monitor restoration projects over the long term.

''If there are work opportunities, there are all sorts of different people in the logging industry who are willing to do the work,'' says Patrick Heffernan of the Montana Loggers Association.

Playing Politicss

Harry Croft, assistant to the National Fire Plan coordinator, thinks fuels reduction work ''will generate a lot of jobs locally'' and that there will ''also be a dramatic increase in contracting work out.''

But Congress and the public should cut the agency some slack during the projects infancy, he says. The main reason: Environmental assessments take time, says Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. ''I believe you can write an environmental analysis to death and not end up improving the quality of a decision,'' he says.

By the end of summer the agency had treated only about 1 million acres nationwide, well short of its goal of 1.8 million acres. Plus, only about 25 percent of the work was located in the wildland/urban interface area-the area that Congress told the agency to focus on.

''Before we got the money, all the planned treatment acres were based on high-priority (ecological) needs in the forests,'' Croft says. ''Plus, we're not going to begin treating the interface until local communities agree on what we can and what we can't do,'' he says. That's why Croft and his boss Lyle Laverty have been crisscrossing the country talking to state foresters and local politicians about how best to implement the fire plan.

''We're never going to make any headway until the local communities, the governors, and federal officials sit down at the table and concur on what they want to happen in those communities,'' Croft says.

Laying the Groundwork

Some communities have been able to get work done. Funded with a $50,000-grant provided by the NFP, the rural fire district in Frenchtown, Montana, hired a 10-person crew to help residents in the foothills surrounding the valley thin dog-hair thick trees from around 100 homes. Participating homeowners donated $100 to the project and agreed to burn slash piles this fall.

''We want them to be part of this work, not just have someone doing the work for them,'' says Fire Chief Scott Waldron.

Outside the Arapaho/Roosevelt Forest, near Boulder Colorado, officials consulted closely with county officials before making plans to cut a fire break along a ridgeline sporting a forest of lodgepole pine. Their concern: protecting a community of homes.

Things are also gearing up in New Mexico's Catron County, home of the Gila National Forest. A few years ago the Catron County Citizens Group began working with the Forest Service on a blueprint to thin ponderosa pine across the entire county. To process the logs, the county bought the Stone Container mill in Reserve, New Mexico.

Director Bob Moore envisions local workers thinning 2,000 acres a year county-wide, which would generate 5 million to 10 million board-feet of lumber annually. At that rate, he predicts it will take ''more than 50 years for loggers to work their way across the county for a first thinning.''

Snyder hopes that ''Congress will realize that people are struggling to get results with the NFP and not get discouraged with this year's results. I fear the Forest Service is not going to have the level of accomplishment that Congress wants to see. It takes more than one year.''

Others, like Jungwirth, have already gotten discouraged. ''I'm afraid the economic benefits from the fuels reduction work may or may not be forthcoming. There's no money to do the planning. Costs are too onerous. The forest had a whole year to plan but they don't have any NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act)-ready projects. The analyses have driven up planning costs beyond reach. The system is totally broken.''

Jungwirth says the Forest Service can't even guarantee to deliver the 1 million board-feet she needs to keep her operation going for a year.

And there are other concerns. Farr thinks there ''hasn't been any focus on the types of treatments and ecological impacts. You shouldn't be thinking restoration if you're not paying attention to the effects of the work itself. The projects need to be monitored, with follow-up studies. That's not really on the table right now.''

Keeping the Lights On

Traditionally, loggers burned slash left in the woods. Many early NFP thinning projects have followed the same route. But what if that waste product could be used to produce power-especially in the West where deregulation of the electricity industry sent prices soaring last spring?

To promote the potential of cogeneration, the Forest Service has teamed up with Community Power Corporation of Littleton, Colorado, which has developed a portable, trailer-mounted cogeneration plant called the BioMax-15.

''It's a very good project for the Forest Service because the BioMax-15 can operate on wood chips,'' says Susan Levan of the Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory.

''We recognize that there's lots of applications for the BioMax-15 in rural communities at the end of the grid line. ''

The BioMax-15 is ''designed for small operations that have access to woody residues and need electricity, heat, or shaft power,'' says Robb Walt, co-founder and president of CPC.

Farr's group is looking into building larger cogeneration plants that would power homes and businesses throughout their three-county area. "You could only imagine this kind of thing catching on,'' Croft says. ''It will probably be a piece-at-a-time deal. Imagine how it would work in California; what a market that would be.''

Of course, whether these visions of healthy forests, safe rural communities, and healthy local economies transform into reality depends on the perseverance of Congress and the will of the public. Croft is optimistic for the economic short-term. President Bush has budgeted $1.2 billion for continuing the fire plan, while the House and Senate are close to the same figure.

But, "money is not the only limiting factor,'' adds Williams. ''It's people recognizing that there is a threat of fire out there and agreeing to act on it.'' AF

Mark Matthews writes for The Washington Post and other publications from his home in Missoula, Montana. [TOP]