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Applegate Partnership
BY JANE BRAXTON LITTLE
UPDATED: SEPTEMBER 2005
"You can accomplish a lot of things with understanding," says Connie Young, third-generation Applegate Valley rancher. "People really listen to each other. That's the magic of this partnership."
Location: Applegate River Watershed, Josephine and Jackson counties, Oregon.
Objective: To encourage and facilitate the use of natural resource principles that promote ecosystem health and diversity. Through community involvement and education, this partnership supports management of all land within the watershed in a manner that sustains natural resources and that will, in turn, contribute to economic and community well-being and resilience.
History: Nearly 70 percent of the Applegate watershed is publicly owned and has been subjected to intensive logging, road building, mining, and fire suppression. The rest of the watershed land is rural and includes many small farms. The decline of the timber industry in the early 1990s created a local economic slump. It also left overstocked and degraded forests, the result of years under a management system that favored sawlogs over ecosystem health.
In 1992, Jack Shipley, an environmentalist, and Jack Neal, a logger, got together to discuss collaborative land management. The two men were tired of the gridlock and antagonism that existed between special-interest communities in Southwest Oregon, and they shared a goal of improving forest management in the Applegate watershed that would contribute to the local economy, which was driven historically by timber.
Shipley and Neal launched a series of weekly roundtable discussions to address forest management issues. They invited farmers, ranchers, agency officials, environmentalists, loggers, and local residents. Their emphasis was cooperation among people who shared the watershed, but may have thought they had very little else in common. Participants were encouraged to identify themselves on the basis of goals and ideas, rather than professional or ideological affiliation. The group developed ground rules for communication and brought in volunteer facilitators to assist with resolving conflicts.
These early meetings evolved into the Applegate Partnership. The partnership established clear goals: natural-resource management through consensus and a stable local economy.
Photo courtesy of the Applegate Partnership
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Accomplishments: As one of the oldest collaborative groups in the West, the Applegate Partnership has worked with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on numerous projects aimed at watershed-scale planning for forest and land management. Early activities focused on innovative timber sales that offered bids to companies demonstrating the best management practices for reducing fire hazards and enhancing healthier forests.
When the Northwest Forest Plan required 10 Adaptive Management Areas, the Applegate served as a model. These 10 areas, which had all been impacted by the agency's reduction in timber harvests, were designated for experiments designed to allow flexibility in on-the-ground activities and innovations in contracting methods. The Applegate River Partnership Council was recently awarded a $100,000 USFS grant to establish long-term monitoring plots for quantifying forest response to different management treatments across 40,000 acres of land.
In 2001, the partnership completed a community-based Fire Protection Strategy designed to address fuels reduction, fire protection, and emergency response for private and public lands in the entire watershed. The first comprehensive fire plan in the nation developed by citizens, it offers a chart of options for reducing forest fuels that includes costs and impact on riparian zones. The Western Governor's Association adopted the landmark plan as a model for communities throughout the West.
The partnership's most ambitious project on private land involves restructuring the ditch system that has provided irrigation water for approximately 40 ranches on nearly 800 acres in the Applegate Valley. The plan focuses on removing several small dams, allowing steelhead trout, silver salmon, and coho salmon better access to spawning grounds. Farmers will lose their historic rights to the surface water, but will replace irrigation water with groundwater and pumps funded, in part, by a donation from the World Wildlife Fund.
On public land, the partnership is working with the Forest Service and BLM to develop a plan to protect a box-canyon community from fire. It is also helping two Oregon counties measure the risks of structures and buildings on private land.
The partnership's various land management projects have greatly enhanced a sense of community oneness throughout the rural valley, symbolized in a widely distributed button displaying the word "They" slashed by a prominent red line. Private landowners cooperating with one another and with public agencies were once rare, but are now the norm. The most upbeat manifestation of the relationships fostered by the partnership is The Applegator, the group's bimonthly newspaper. Published in color, it celebrates birthdays, offers opinion columns, and brings $2,000 in advertisements to the partnership.
Challenges/constraints: In the years since Shipley and Neal created the Applegate Partnership, timber harvests on federal land have continued to decline. This has affected participation in the group and the projects it has developed. Timber industry representatives have dropped out. The partners have taken their land management objectives and expertise to private lands, which have presented new and equally taxing challenges.
The partnership has also seen changes in its relationships with federal land management agencies. The atmosphere of its meetings went from "anyone is welcome" to a testy period, during which both federal officials and environmentalist members felt victimized. To cope with these issues, the partnership restructured and formalized the board, limiting it to 10 members who meet in private and hold specific responsibilities for set periods of time. The board also replaced its strict policy of consensus-based decisions with a two-vote minimum requirement to block a decision.
Federal agency activities continue to be a challenge and do not always reflect an understanding of the community. The community is generally frustrated by the scale of BLM projects and, specifically, by its proposals for off-road vehicle usage.
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