Forest Interests Find Common Ground Regional Roundtable Part Of Preparation For 7th Forest Congress

People who usually can’t agree on an evergreen’s color spent Tuesday trying to find common ground on the future of the region’s forests.

Wood-products industry representatives joined environmentalists, small-scale loggers, forest scientists and land-management officials in a daylong roundtable at the Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute.

Colville sawmill and lumber company owner Duane Vaagen talked timber with environmentalists.

Gretchen Piper of the Nature Conservancy rubbed shoulders with tree farmers and loggers.

“We’re concerned about the worker who’s trying to put food on the table,” said Vaagen, whose company has fallen on hard times. “We’re concerned about taxes, about policy, and about the things that have our workers worrying about how they’ll get presents under the tree this year.”

Each of the 60 participants brought different priorities to the roundtable. But at the end of the day, the group endorsed a set of values for leaders to pursue and a vision for the forests’ future.

Those conclusions will be folded into a larger report from the seventh Forest Congress, set to convene in February in Washington, D.C. It has been more than 20 years since the last Forest Congress.

More than 2,000 people are expected to craft a national vision of forestry from the more than 50 regional roundtable discussions, said Rebecca Mack of the Northwest Natural Resources Institute in Spokane, the event organizer.

The Spokane group’s goals include:

Increased public and consumer education about forest products.

Greater local control of forest management and policy decisions.

Plugging all viewpoints - including those of the wood-products industry and environmental concerns - into long-range forest plans.

Participants said those values need to be harnessed in order to achieve a common vision: healthy forests that sustain themselves for use by industry and the public without harming the environment.

“I think this showed that a widely different group of people can sit down and find some commonality,” said Grover Payne, a retired forester from Wenatchee.

Bringing sharply divergent viewpoints together fits with the Northwest Natural Resources Institute’s mission, Mack said.

“We’re all about getting a meaningful dialogue between different interests,” she said.

, DataTimes