As a regionally-focused organization, we’ve long recognized watersheds as the underpinning of life—in every sense of the word.
In Northwest Washington, we’re lucky to have a front row seat to the processes shaping where we live, work, and play, from the craggy Cascade headwaters to the shining, silty deltas as our rivers enter the Salish Sea, and every ripple in between. If we think of our watersheds as living, breathing systems, our oceans might be the heart, and our forests almost certainly the lungs.
The essential role of forest ecosystems in supporting the health and function of our watersheds is precisely why we launched the Future Forests initiative in 2022 to enhance the work of our Forests and Watersheds program. We understand better than ever that the legacy impacts of logging and land clearing in the 19th and 20th centuries continue to ripple into the 21st century, despite the necessary but insufficient changes to forest practices enacted at the turn of the century in response. And we know that the compounding effects of climate change will increasingly undermine our efforts to build resilience for communities and landscapes with status quo practices alone.
Listen to an audio version of a recent presentation from Kaia Hayes, RE Sources’ Land and Water Policy Manager, about Ecological Forest Management (EFM) and how we envision our forestry work in the coming years.
Protect the best, restore the rest
We can’t undo the past that’s shaped our current dilemma—but we can absolutely learn from it to prepare better for our future. Something needs to change.
So, that brings us back to our work, and how RE Sources and our broader community of advocates has begun to wrap our heads around the monumental task at hand. The solution can be summed up in a catchy, two-part slogan you may have heard before: “Protect the best, restore the rest.”
- Protect the best: Conserve the remaining acres of old growth and mature, structurally complex forest on public lands—typically naturally regenerated stands that were cut in the late 1800s to early 1900s and never replanted, so they’ve returned to their path to old growth. These are worth more standing!
- Restore the rest: Help forests of all kinds regain some of their vital function through improved forest practices, so they can better contribute to watershed and climate resilience whether they are managed as a park or preserve or ultimately clearcut for commercial timber production.
Here is an incredibly simplified roadmap to help orient us in the work we have done, and the work we’re preparing to do:
While there are two pieces to this framing, it’s important to see them as two sides of the same coin—we strongly believe that both of these elements are necessary to break through the false-binary of “jobs versus the environment,” and usher in a genuine paradigm shift in the way we relate to our forested landscapes.
It’s also crucial that we consider human communities as an equally essential piece of resilient and sustainable landscapes. Tribal and rural communities continue to bear the brunt of landscapes in decline, finding themselves at the frontlines of both economic and climate crises. Our advocacy for forests must include advocacy for the livelihoods, wellbeing, and sovereignty of communities whose futures are intertwined with them.
While we continue the momentum built over the past four years to “Protect the Best,” it’s time to invest even more into the work of “Restoring the Rest.” Ecological Forest Management (which is effectively the modern, academic interpretation of a return to an Indigenous, system-oriented management of landscapes) offers us the opportunity to creatively meet both the environmental and social needs of communities at a watershed scale, while building the climate and economic resilience needed to not only survive, but thrive in a climate-changed future.
For us at RE Sources, the next few years look like a whole lot of:
- Conversations and relationship-building with friends and neighbors county-wide, to better understand the needs, challenges, and opportunities that folks see as we work together to answer some big questions about the future
- Piloting and innovating creative forest management and wood products manufacturing ideas that scale or replicate well, to have positive impact across our region and beyond
- Building power together and using our shared vision to better engage legislators and decision makers at a local and state level, to help facilitate our vision bringing it to life
Key Indigenous forest management perspectives
- UW’s Braiding Sweetgrass Report – Braiding Indigenous and Western Knowledge for Climate-Adapted Forests
- Cascade PBS on PNW Indigenous Fire Management
Timber labor history
- 1935 Timber Strike Summary from the University of Washington
- A Thousand Pines (migrant labor replanting documentary)
Forestry partners and peers mentioned in the recording
- Stewart Mountain Community Forest
- Makah/CRTC partnership Oly Pen
- Jefferson Timber Cooperative
- Firelands United
- Glacier Peak Institute
- Whidbey Camano Land Trust – Trillium Forest restoration
Deep canvassing
- Alberta Talks (Alberta Deep Canvassing)
- Neighbors United (BC Deep Canvassing)
- Deep Canvass Institute (US-based Deep Canvass Training)