Club Update

Last Tuesday was the second in a series of presentations about employing different methods of forest management to mitigate the impacts of wild fires in our region. Our speaker was Darren Borgias, who has worked for 30 years with the Nature Conservancy and is currently the Southwest Oregon Forest Project Director for the Conservancy. He also serves on the board of the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative.

With longer and hotter summers, and growing wildfire risk, the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative and local partners have teamed up with the Oregon Department of Forestry and federal land managers in a strategy to thin out overly dense dry forest of the Rogue Basin, and return mild fire through controlled burns to restore healthy forests.  This proactive forest work promotes safe and effective wildfire response, reduces wildfire risks to people and nature, and provides an opportunity to safely return beneficial fire to the forests.

Today, our forests are overcrowded with small trees and brush, which lead to catastrophic fires. Fuels reduction, thinning, and controlled burns are viewed as critical to adapting forests to climate change. The work sustains skilled jobs in the woods and mills, and selling the byproduct small logs can return millions of dollars to help defray costs while avoiding future costs associated with fighting and recovering from severe fires of the future.

The goal of the program is to provide a balanced approach to forest management, which retains old timber, maintains natural habitat and riparian buffers, with a 20 year outcome to reduce fires overall by 70%. At the same time, thinning, controlled burns and logging of small trees supports the timber industry while minimizing the risk of catastrophic wild fires. So far, the program has thinned 3,500 log loads and sold 14 million board feet of timber for $5.5 million. This money helps support the program’s ongoing efforts. The challenge, of course, is that there are millions of acres either off limits or inaccessible.

The last in the series is this coming Tuesday, November 20. Our speaker will be Merv George, Jr., Forest Supervisor of the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest.

Club Meeting: “Riding The Rocket To My Dreams”: – NASA Propulsion Engineer, Norman Chaffee at the NASA Johnson Space Center will talk about growing up in rural Oklahoma to putting a man on the moon, mars and beyond.

Norman Chaffee shared parts of his illustrious NASA career with our Rotary Club including visual aids such as his early computer (slide rule) which he used in his engineering to put the Apollos into space as well as a small rocket used to help steer the spaceships. Pursing the Passion that gives you most joy in life.  If it did, but doesn’t any longer than don’t be afraid to change.  Norman started working as a Chemical Engineer with NASA in 1962 after the useless Soviet Sputniks were launched starting the Space Race.  He enjoys blowing up rockets, meeting astronauts such as Buzz Allred and now works with Space Museum.  Requested donations to: JPLMuseum.org which helps his youth program in robotics working with teams of 14-15 high school students competing for a “Space Settlement Design Competition”.  Norman reminds us how” curiosity is the mother of ingenuity”.

Respectfully submitted,

Ray Kistler

A little bit about guest speaker, David Schott.  David graduated High School in 1965 with Sandy Darland, Ron McUne and Dick Fosbury.  He used to manage a “pack station” at Lake of the Woods.   He was Ex. Director of the Southern Oregon Timber Assoc. and he has is an advocate for putting out forest fires.

David states that we now can say our forests are the sickest they have been in last 70 years he has been here.    Fire ravaged areas, beetle infestations, and brushy ground cover all hinder the health of our forests.  To have a healthy forest, we should have 75 trees per acre, but instead we have 500-700 trees.  It cost USFS $900M this year to fight forest fires; it costs Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) about $40M, and ODF put the fire out; USFS let them burn out (maybe, if the wind doesn’t kick up).   Most fires start on USFS lands and then spread to other lands.

Burned forests don’t produce trees.  So what is the solution?  Thinning our forests is not possible; the project is now too large.  Could we harvest more timber?  Yes, but what would we do with it.  We do not have the infrastructure to handle increased harvests.  Could we salvage burned trees?  Yes, but only if we can do that quickly.  If we wait 2-3 months, the bugs will attack the trees and they lose their value.   The timber industry began its decline in the early 1980s with the Spotted Owl and today, lawsuits continue to plague timber sales. (Note:  if there is any modification to the lawsuit, the suing environmental agency gets paid attorney fees).  The result of decreased timber sales is fewer passable roads through the forests, overgrowth of brush, overgrowth of trees, beetle infestations and fire!

In the future, FEMA will takeover funding fire fighting.

Dave’s ideas include.

1. USFS need to stop letting fires burn out (put them out)
2. Defensible space needs to be created
3. Clear roads
4. Maybe use herbicides to curb dangerous vegetation growth
5. Clear brush
6. Ridgetops need to be cleared (more difficult for a fire to jump over top of ridge if the ridge is clear)
7. ODF fights right 24 hours a day (USFS only fights during daylight hours)
8. In about 20 years, we will start to notice that the fires of 2018 are impacting our health.  Tiny particles from breathing smoke carry carcinogens, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

Write or call your Congressman.  Emails don’t work.  Now is the time to speak up.