(birds chirping)
- [Narrator] After a forest fire,
a succession of creatures flux into the woods.
First come the beetles, to eat the trees,
and then the woodpeckers follow to eat the beetles.
Then in many forests,
the loggers come to cut down the trees
and the environmentalists follow to stop them.
But not in this stretch of Eastern Oregon.
- Get lower! - Here, the loggers
and environmentalists come into the woods together.
- Hold on, hold on. - Stop there.
Okay, now go.
- There's a Lewis's flying over there.
- Lewis alert! (laughs)
- [Narrator] This is the Blue Mountains Forest Partners.
They're a type of group called a forest collaborative,
and they've been so successful at finding common ground
that environmentalists haven't filed a single anti-logging
lawsuit in the Malheur National Forest since 2003.
- So did this pencil out? - Yeah.
This is about as easy as logging gets.
I don't hesitate to say that this was the best sale
we've had in years.
- It might not seem like a big deal
to see environmentalists and loggers walking together
in the woods, but in the Northwest, it is.
- If you enter this area, you may be subject to arrest.
- [Narrator] In the 1980s, environmentalists protested
timber sales across the region,
sparking what was called the Timber Wars.
(man yells)
- [Reporter] Buried to their waist,
chained at the neck and encased in concrete,
environmentalists blockaded this logging road,
leading to valuable old growth timber.
- [Narrator] By the late nineties,
they had managed to severely limit logging
in federal forests,
which crushed timber dependent towns like John Day.
- I can't even name the amount of kids I grew up with
that family's lost jobs at the mill,
lost whole logging companies and businesses started
to close down.
Slowly but surely you start to wonder if you're gonna
be a ghost town at some point.
- [Narrator] Zach Williams' family goes back
five generations in the area.
He watched his father close their saw mill,
and he says locals blamed environmentalists
for locking up the trees.
- So there is logging that will not be completed.
It's important to note that we did challenge all
of the area.
- [Narrator] Susan Jane Brown is an environmental lawyer
based in Portland who kept blocking logging
on the Malheur National Forest.
- At that point in our lives, you know,
Susan Jane Brown were extremely dirty words
to say around here.
- I certainly was concerned about my safety at times.
I had been run out of town before,
I'd been tailgated by pickup trucks.
I've had air let out of my tires, you know,
that sort of thing.
- Follow me. - So how did these two groups
go from enemies, - Chickens are gonna cross
the road. - To tromping through
the woods together?
What it took was a few locals realizing
that they couldn't beat Susan Jane in the courtroom,
so they invited her to Grant County to see if they could
find some way to manage the forest
that would meet both their goals.
- [Mark] Let's get started. Why don't we sit down, please?
Some of those early meetings were in a large room.
Industry and community members are on one side of it,
environmental communities on the other.
And we have a third party facilitator.
that's walking back and forth between us
because we couldn't talk to one another.
It was that bad, almost that poisonous.
- [Narrator] They couldn't agree on much,
but they could agree on one thing.
They were going to follow the science,
even if that meant questioning their core beliefs.
Mallory Davies gave us a tour of one
of several studies initiated by the collaborative.
- This is the very edge of our research unit, a large area,
high intensity burn fire.
It's called the Canyon Creek complex.
- [Narrator] Loggers historically rush in
to harvest burned timber like this
in what's called salvage logging.
To them, leaving wood to decay is like watching money
rot on trees.
To say nothing of providing fuel for future wildfires.
But to environmentalists and scientists,
these dead trees are essential habitat for many animals,
especially woodpeckers.
- This is our peeper cam,
so we can peep nests that we can't reach with our hand.
- [Narrator] So the Blue Mountains Forest Partners worked
with the forest service to create this study.
They logged test sites at different levels,
ranging from cutting no trees to cutting most of them.
And then they tracked how the woodpeckers fared.
- So on my monitor, I can see that there are six white,
tiny eggs on top of a little bit of wood chips.
So there's a possibility that they're still laying.
- [Narrator] The goal is to find a level of salvage logging
that provides an economic benefit to the local community
without compromising woodpecker habitat.
And preliminary results suggest that selective logging
has minimal negative impact on Lewis's woodpeckers
and White Headed woodpeckers,
but that it appears the cause a slow decline
in the nesting numbers of Black Back woodpeckers.
- We all took risks on this type of project.
So I'm curious what folks think
and it's okay if you hate it.
- [Narrator] But nobody seemed to hate it.
- I mean, Susan Jane, detests salvage logging.
And if I'm being honest, you know,
I look at this burn, 110,000 acres, and look at salvaging
5,000 of it and think,
how is that really gonna harm habitat?
And I'm not gonna say that I think any differently
necessarily about that,
but that's the point of collaboration.
And if this is a kind of process we have to go through,
then it works.
- I agree, and I don't want this to be a one off.
And we can do salvage and we can take logs to the mill
and people can earn a living wage.
And we also don't have to
kill a bunch of birds in the process.
- [Narrator] If the first ingredient
of the Blue Mountains Forest Partners success
was following the science.
- Oh my god, that's amazing. - Everyone agrees there was
a second ingredient to their secret mix.
- Oh, alcohol.
That's, I mean, it's partially a joke.
- Sharing a beer or bourbon or having a meal together
is a really great way to break down barriers
and to get rid of all of that baggage that we come
to these conversations with.
And it allows us to have some fun together.
- [Narrator] And like many trusted friends,
that fun now includes being able to laugh at themselves,
case in point.
It was Mallory and the field crew who made this pinata
to celebrate the end of the study.
- [Man] A little higher, go!
(groups cheers)
- [Narrator] Perhaps the greatest test
of this partnership came in 2012
when Grant County's last saw mill announced it was closing
for a lack of timber.
By then, science had convinced the environmentalists
that selective logging was necessary
to manage the overgrown forest.
So they joined with the timber industry
to support a longterm logging and restoration project
to keep the mill open, create new jobs,
and to make the forest more resilient
to wildfire and climate change.
- Well in 2003, had you asked me if I ever would have felt
this way about any of these people?
No way, man.
There's just no way, these people are crazy,
but now they're my crazy.
They're my friends. I care about them.
And just like any friendship,
you want your friends to be happy
and healthy and successful.
And now that these folks are my friends,
that's what I want for them.
(birds chirping)