Will Harling had a rustic upbringing in the hills of northern California.  His family lived in a log cabin on the North Fork of the Salmon River, a tributary to the Klamath.  He used to fish salmon for their dinners.  It was a subsistence culture that fed thousands of families.

But since 1911, over 85% of the Salmon River’s 480,000 acre watershed has been seared by mega-wildfires.  And it is mostly due to humans’ mismanagement.

The magnitude of the fires over the past century in the Klamath is the result of fuels built up from a culture of total fire suppression, aggressive forestry, and climatic conditions in the region.

(Klamath National Forest.  Photo:  U.S. Forest Service)

 

February 2010, at the Klamath Basin Science Conference in Medford, Oregon, Harling joined with other environmental advocates and scientists to pool ideas for restoring the ecologies of the greater Klamath River Basin. 

A project by Will Harling and Nancy Bailey assessed nine Klamath tributaries that had been affected by fires in 2007-2008.  They found that the fires had loaded sediments into streams and scorched away their vegetation, causing unstable conditions which threaten anadromous (fresh water breeding, ocean inhabiting) fish like Coho salmon.

(Cold water refuge.  Photo:  MKWC)

Harling’s group, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council of Orleans, California, examined ways to restore the riparian vegetation, prevent further erosion and sedimentation, improve fish mobility, and generally look for ways to repair fire-damage fisheries in the future.

Formed in 2001, MKWC is a non-profit which focuses on improving anadromous fish resources on nearly 150 miles of the Klamath, between Iron Gate Dam and the Trinity River confluence.  

Since its inception, MKWC has led restoration projects such as forest fuels reduction, riparian planting, cold water refugial area enhancement, elementary education, and encouraging home fire-safety measures.  It employs “adaptive management” strategies such as building log jams (for fish habitat) and prescribed burning.

(Photo:  MKWC)

These practices are critically important in the Klamath River Basin, where wildfire is a natural and regular component of the forest ecosystem.  The Salmon River Fire Safe Council said in its 2007 community wildfire protection plan,

“The Salmon River is the highest wildfire risk watershed in the Klamath Basin.”

As a youngster in 1977, Will Harling saw the Hog fire eat up 58,000 acres near his home, and he grew up seeing more of the same.  In 1987, fires burned on much of the same land.  The Specimen fire in 1994 burned 3,045 acres in the LSR.  The Forks fire in 2002 burned 1400 acres nearby.  Fires in 2008 burned about 80,000 acres in the Salmon River. 

Harling reflected on the state of his home land, “Everything we know is being taken away because of our relationship with fire.”

(Photos:  Will Harling, from presentation Burning for a Fire Safe Community and Forest in the Klamath Mountains)

After witnessing decades of poor forest management, exacerbated wildfire, and degraded fish stocks, Harling is now working to reestablish a balance of naturally-occurring moderate forest fires, as well as people’s attitudes toward them.

“Prescribed burning gets a bad rap,” said Harling, meaning that the general public has an irrational fear of anything burning, intentional or incidental, and they resist the idea.  This is particularly true in areas that are especially fire-prone, or that have been bitten by prescribed burns that got out of control. 

Los Alamos, New Mexico, was traumatized by the Cerra Grande fire in May 2000.  When the National Park Service lost control of a p-burn, it ripped through 48,000 acres and destroyed 400 homes. 

When I spoke to NPS Ranger Chris Judson at Bandelier National Monument in 2007, she told me that the community was just beginning to warm up to the idea of another prescribed burn.

Many land managers agree that it is a wiser management strategy to burn regularly at low intensity, mimicking a natural fire regime, rather than to pour billions of tax dollars every year into kicking and screaming at the wildfire monster.

“Pay me now, or pay me later,” says Harling.

That was the objective of the Glaze Forest Restoration Project near Sisters, Oregon.  Managers used prescriptive thinning and burning to recreate a natural fire regime and mitigate large wildfires.

Congress has recently passed a new appropriations act, H.R. 2996, assigning funds to various land management agencies, including wildland fire programs of the U.S. Forest Service.  The law includes $413 million for the FLAME Wildfire Suppression Reserve Fund, $350 million for hazardous fuel reductions, $32 million for “forest health activities,” and a mere $11.6 million for rehabilitation and restoration.

(Firefighters dig hand line.  Photo:  US Forest Service)

Our government’s solution appears to be: “Combat big scary wildfires”.  It continues to spend much more of our money treating symptoms than on preventative measures.  It’s a fiscal drain rather than an investment. Fires grow larger and more dangerous over the years, under this scheme, and the terrifying carnivale perpetuates. 

This “fire industrial complex” is what Will Harling and MKWC are trying to reform.

Other groups working in the Klamath River Basin are hoping that their restoration work will snag the attention of policy makers.  Leslie Gordon, the USGS Public Affairs Specialist at the Klamath Basin Science Conference, said, “Ken Salazar is our boss.  Our job is to provide him with the science, and he’ll make the decision.”

The Salmon River on the Klamath is a place of deep roots for many people like Will Harling.  His father settled there in 1968, “hunting for Big Foot,” and his mother partook of the local commune.  It was a place of great diversity, he said, a place where hippies, loggers, miners, and Native Americans coexisted. 

“The land itself is a filter,” he said, “people who are meant to stay there do.” 

His work of maintaining fisheries is as much a contribution to his culture as it is to greater ecology.