Business interests and environmental interests can work together sometimes… and hopefully, this will be the wave of the future.

In the woods near Bend, Oregon, the conservation group Oregon Wild is working with lumber companies, the forest district and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to meet the combined goals of healthy forests and responsible commerce.
The Bend Bulletin reports,

Work started on the Glaze Meadow Forest Restoration Project this week, five years after a conservation group first started pitching the idea of bringing different groups and interests together to collaborate on a timber project. It’s a project that organizers hope will become an example for forest restoration and timber production in the coming years — and one that demonstrates many principles from legislation U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., recently proposed to guide forestry work on the east side of the Cascades.
...The idea is for the project to “be most agreeable to most of the people,” [Oregon Wild’s Tim] Lillebo said. “If we can get buy-in from these different groups, we won’t have appeals and litigation.”

What made a difference here was collaboration. Proposals were made based on science reviews, not balance sheets; and it turned out there was enough lumber in the project for businesses like Melcher Loggingto make money, too.

In the end, no one filed an appeal against the Glaze project — making it the first project involving commercial timber to avoid appeals since 1996.
“I think this is the way we’re headed,” said Maret Pajutee, an ecologist with the Sisters Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service.
The goal is to make “Glaze” a kind of shorthand, she said, so foresters could say a project is “like Glaze” and conservationists, community members and those in the timber industry will get a sense of the objectives and methods involved.

The operation is more labor-intensive than traditional logging, and can only be done when the ground is frozen (so the machines don’t tear up the soil). But the result will be a healthier forest stand. And the smaller material that’s pulled out will both prevent catastrophic fires (the stand is near several enclaves of housing), but will be used for biomass, to be burned instead of fossil fuels.

For more on Glaze, see the article by TENTHMIL’s Johnny Kilroy’s here. There was also a good write-up in The Oregonian.