Meet Our Speakers: Travis Bruner

As the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, it was Travis Bruner’s job to close grazing allotments through litigation in federal court. From an ecological standpoint, western states should not be grazed, however the delay in seeing the change he fought for on the ground left him unsatisfied with his work. Leaving his job to become the Arizona Forest Program Director for the Grand Canyon Trust forced him to alter his political mission while maintaining his own ecological goals. Bruner is now tasked with fostering consensus in collaborations with the Forest Service. Consensus collaborations, which require unanimous agreement, arise from issues including fire, uranium, and grazing. As Bruner sees it, grazing on public land is driven at an enormous loss to tax payers and the environment. His goal of changing the grazing culture is now realized not through federal courts but through collaborations that generate changing mindsets in diverse stakeholders.

By: Griffin Cronk

Better Know an Educator: Roger Clark

“Hello Mr. Raven,” Roger Clark, of the Grand Canyon Trust, interrupts himself to greet a raven whirling above him on the west rim of Marble Canyon in Arizona. Roger has poised himself here because of his belief that a person should intimately know the places they work for. As the Grand Canyon Program Director this is the landscape he has dedicated his work, and impressive education, towards. Roger received his Master’s degree and PhD from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and quickly took up a position at Berkley as an assistant professor of Forest Sociology. His love of academia and his students kept him in the job until he was convinced, at the suggestion of one of his students, to become a river guide at 30 years old. For the next ten years Roger’s love of the natural world and education blended together on western rivers. His work for the Grand Canyon Trust, which began in 1989, consists of the promotion of renewable energy, the fight against uranium mining around the Grand Canyon, and work to stop a proposed tramway that would run into the bottom of the canyon. Meeting Roger, it is clear why his classes at Berkley were stock full of 300 students. Everything he says is wrapped in a laugh and it is as easy to ask questions of him as it is to joke with him. Roger Clark’s devotion, humor and knowledge stand as a powerful force in his Northern Arizonan community.

By: Grace Butler

Meet Our Speakers: Nils Christofferson

Nils Christoffersen is the executive director of Wallowa Resources, an organization that seeks to wed local economic stability and the sustainable management of natural resources.  Nils spent his early career farming on an Israeli kibbutz, working aboard a fishing boat, ranching in Australia, and exploring community land management in Southern Africa.  Seventeen years ago Nils moved to Oregon and began his work with Wallowa Resources.  Today, his feet planted broadly beneath a stand of mixed conifers, Nils gestures animatedly and asks us what kind of ecosystem we see.

The Westies spent the morning touring a series of forest sites in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest with Nils, stopping to analyze and discuss the management history at each stand.  During our last hour together Nils led us through the Integrated Biomass Energy Campus, an entrepreneurial sawmill that processes unmarketable timber.  This facility has created a market for understory timber and secondary growth, thereby reducing the amount of forest ground fuel and adding value to an underutilized resource.  The business serves as a model of innovative stewardship.  Is Nils stated: “Instead of being overwhelmed by change from the outside as things collapse and have others decide that we should be a destination resort or a prison …we could all work together on a new and different model that would advance this vision of socioeconomic revitalization and align it with land stewardship.”  

By Maya Aurichio

Meet Our Speakers: Jim Zacharias

“Somewhere between a hippie and a cowboy.” That’s how Jim Zacharias describes himself. Dressed in his ripped logging attire you wouldn’t guess that he’s on the Wallowa Resource Board—or any board for that matter. There’s a large hole in the right shoulder of his collared white and baby blue stripped shirt. A shock of greyed hair reaches for his neck from underneath a Jay Zee Lumber ball cap that might once have been black.

As a high schooler, Zacharias contemplated being a wildlife biologist, but like many of his classmates he decided to become a logger which allowed him to stay in the county. After losing his mill job in the 90’s timber bust, he started the Joseph Timber Company, the first mechanical thinning operation on public land in the county. Now he owns a custom logging company which has a contract with a private ranch to extract $50,000 worth of timber annually. As a small-scale logger, Zacharias made a point of showing us the line between the property he selectively cuts and the property the Hancock Investment Group recently clearcut. In contrast to the outsider group, his company elects to leave snags for wildlife habitat. Hoping to dispel misconceptions about loggers, he told us, “Even the biggest, roughest, toughest logger, if he sees a birds nest in that tree, he kind of cringes.” 

By: Griffin Cronk

Meet Our Speakers: John Rohrer

John Rohrer began working for the U.S. Forest Service in 1991 as a wildlife biologist, but his current position is Program Manager for Biology, Weeds, Range, and Wildlife; a title which betrays the decreasing budget that has been allocated to the agency in recent years. After growing up and attending college in the Southwest, Rohrer worked as a seasonal biologist near the Grand Canyon before moving north to work in the Methow Valley District of the Wenatchee-Okanogan National Forest. During his career with the Forest Service, Rohrer has trapped wolverines and conducted wildlife surveys, but a large portion of his work these days revolves around dealing with conflicting interest groups and land users in the forest. For instance, when the cattle grazing on forest land need a drink, they often plod into the clear waters of nearby creeks, inadvertently trampling salmon spawning habitat in the stream bed. In deciding how to respond, Rohrer balances his responsibility to protect salmon under the Endangered Species Act with the agency’s mandate to facilitate multiple uses of the national forests and the significant pressure from local ranchers trying to preserve their livelihood. When asked about his drive to continue taking on issues like these after 25 years on the job, Rohrer referenced Aldo Leopold, saying, “Some people can live without wild things, some people can’t. For me, personally…I can’t live without wild places.”

By: Evan Romasco-Kelly

Meet Our Speakers: Doug McDaniel

As his truck bumps along the road through a meadow of pine trees, Doug McDaniel smiles and says deliberately, “I’m pumped about what’s going on in my life.” Thinking back, he recalls his two-month stint in dental school, which ended when he decided that it was a waste to be inside on a beautiful day, particularly when elk season was about to open.  Doug has lived his whole life in Wallowa County, working as a forester before moving into timber management and industrial engineering.  Currently, he works on restoring a length of the Wallow River that cuts through his land. Channeled by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, Doug has taken the initiative to excavate the section and return it to its meandering state.  The river now winds through his property, providing habitat for fish, tall grasses, birds, and swaying cottonwoods.  He adamantly solicits participation from the community on this project in the form of opinions, suggestions, scrutiny, and criticism. When asked what he likes most about working in the forest, he responds “[my] life is outside…it’s just home.”

By Hannah Trettenero

Meet Our Speakers: Mike Borowski

Since 2014, Mike Borowski has worked for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, Methow Valley District in northwestern Washington as a forester and timber sale administrator. The National Forest Service’s goal is to leave each acre better than when they found it, using methods of treatment such as fire attenuation through tree felling and prescribed burns. Mike specializes in the administration of timber sales to private logging companies, a large source of revenue for the forest. Each contract for a timber sale takes into account both the proper trees to cut for fire attenuation and stewardship of the landscape whole, not to mention profit for the logging company. Because of the rigorous standards of these contracts and lack of funding, the acreage of treated forest is much less than needed to accommodate for a changing climate: a fact not lost on Mike and his coworkers in the Service. The Forest Service strives to service many times more area in the face of the hotter and bigger fires of this century and stewards like Mike Borowski are dedicating their time and energy to better the forest, one acre at a time.  

By: Amanda Champion

Meet Our Speakers: Kent Woodruff

Kent Woodruff believes that a freight train is coming, and it’s coming fast. Climate change is altering our world to a point beyond precedent, and Kent need not look far past the front door of his Methow Valley home to see the consequences. As he guided us through a whirlwind tour of the Methow Valley’s public land, Kent brought the impacts of an increasingly warm and dry climate here into focus. Moreover, he urged us to take the lead on softening these effects.

Kent Woodruff is a wildlife biologist for the Okanogan District of the U.S. Forest Service, based in the Methow Valley on the eastern slopes of the North Cascade Mountains. A man of unabating energy and resolute enthusiasm for conservation and restoration of the forest, Kent’s enterprises are diverse and his vigor palpable. With great reverence for the forest he loves, Kent’s work is driven by his mantra that “ecosystems are not more complex than we think- they are more complex than we can think”. To bring focus to the complexity of his vocation, Kent views dealing with climate change as twofold; climate mitigation refers to taking actions to slow the rate of climate change, and climate adaption is the softening of the inevitable impacts of climate change.

Kent devotes himself everyday to achieving the latter in the Okanogan National Forest by advocating for wildlife as part of an interdisciplinary Forest Service decision-making team. He also runs a beaver relocation program, bring them back to their natural habitat, works with recreators to minimize impacts on the land, and helps to spot forest fires before they become calamitous, among other endeavors. In order to effectively undertake climate adaptation, though, Kent needs help, and lots of it. Climate change is having such a great impact on this area, he says, that we can no longer look to the past to forecast the ecology of this landscape in the future. We must form a team of writers, storytellers, and climate adaptation specialists to convey that the climate change freight train is coming, and while the rumble can already be felt in the Okanogan National Forest, it will not be long before places across the country find that they too are standing on the tracks. When it comes to climate adaptation, Kent says, we cannot be too bold.

By: Abby Popenoe