From Courtroom Foes to Forest Partners
A conversation with Mark Webb, executive director of the Blue Mountain Forest Partners, about how a forest collaborative brought together opposing interests to preserve the natural landscape.
I started a new morning ritual of reading essays or poetry with my morning coffee. For the past week, I have been working my way through Wendell Berry’s selected poems. While I sit on my couch in Brooklyn, I’m transported to the Kentucky forest, with its rambling creeks and sycamore trees. One poem I came across, To a Siberian Woodsman, resonated so deeply with this week’s interview that I could not resist including a few stanzas here.
Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us
hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other
with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger
that I should desire the burning of your house or the
destruction of your children?
Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the
thought
that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and rivers, and the silence of birds?
Our conversation today is with Mark Webb, the executive director of Blue Mountain Forest Partners (BMFP) in Grant County, Oregon. BMFP is a forest collaborative that brings together seemingly opposing forces—loggers and environmentalists, national and local public servants—to make joint decisions about how to manage the Malheur National Forest. With matter-of-fact wisdom, Webb shares with us how these parties went from “oppos(ing) each other with the ruin of forests” to true collaborators.
- Lia
The Interview: Mark Webb
Can you tell me about the context out of which Blue Mountain Forest Partners was born?
Grant County is over 60% federally owned and managed. The biggest town in the county has 1,900 people. And so what happens or doesn't happen on public lands really impacts our socioeconomic opportunities.
The Forest Service is tasked with managing federal lands for multiple use. For decades, however, the Malheur National Forest focused primarily on timber harvest and cutting old growth trees, both for the socioeconomic benefits this provided and the belief this was healthy forest management. Because of this, we were a county that did fairly well in terms of jobs and income.
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the environmental community increasingly opposed that approach because growth is a significant part of ecosystem health. The environmental community argued that the Forest Service was maximizing timber production over other important values like recreation, wildlife habitat, and ecosystem health.
So we began to have a value conflict based on different understandings of what the agency should be doing or shouldn't be doing. When I came into office as a county judge in January of 2007, the environmental community had effectively shut down logging and timber harvest in the county through multiple lawsuits. As a result, the Forest Service wasn't harvesting much timber, which caused a downward spiral, economically speaking, for area communities. But in the midst of this, some members of the environmental community were beginning to realize that while they had successfully stopped logging of old growth trees, they were increasingly losing those old growth trees to wildfire.
The only reason we ever got to talking is because the status quo wasn't acceptable to any of the people or interest groups.
It finally got bad enough that everybody acknowledged: this isn't going to work. We have to do something different. Neither side trusted the other , but there was no real option but to figure out how to work together. Which meant we had to start taking some risks. And that's when we started to have conversations. It involved many of us acknowledging or exhibiting a bit of humility and admitting to making mistakes in the past.
We had third party neutral facilitation because we didn't trust one another, but we were willing to listen to somebody else come in and try to facilitate those conversations. And it took several years of pretty hard conversations before we started to make some movement.
What did it take for things to change?
You had the industry and the environmentalists arguing with one another.
“I want this.”
“I want this.”
“I don't trust you.”
“I don't trust you.”
It took that vulnerable atmosphere, and being able to say, “I don't know that I trust you, but this is what I would like to see happen,” and having people be able to step into other people's positions and say, “I disagree with you. But this is what I hear you saying. And if you're really concerned about that, is there a way that we can develop this project to address your concern?”
So it involves addressing other people's concerns.
I believe it’s when we started to ask, what does the landscape need, that we really began to make progress. When you start asking what the landscape needs, you introduce a third party. And so instead of just you and me arguing, somebody else comes online. And our focus shifts to them, to include them and address the relevant needs.
We both thought we were take care of the landscape. But we were both mistaken to some extent. That's where science was useful, because there was an emerging scientific consensus about what a fire-adapted landscape like ours should look like to be healthy. We were fortunate because the science also provided an opportunity for the timber industry to keep working and for the environmental community to support land management that increased landscape resilience.
So you benefitted from a win-win scenario. What do you do when a decision is not so clear cut?
At the beginning of BMFP, we required a hundred percent consensus before we would move forward. I think it was needed at the time to help people feel safe and comfortable enough to support projects.
But the problem with 100% consensus is that if one individual didn't support something, then it didn't go forward, even if the evidence says we need to move forward if we want healthy forests.
It became increasingly obvious that there were things that were worth doing that not everybody supported. And so we transitioned that decision-making model to something more like consensus minus one or two. A majority was required to move a project forward, but that majority had to include at least one member of every participating interest group present to support the project.
This model allowed us to take more risk and pursue more controversial actions.
You’re talking about making decisions that include trade-offs. How do you get to yes, even with the knowledge that a more optimal outcome could come from operating alone?
There were a whole host of things that would lend you to think this is going to be a dysfunctional effort.
But it wasn’t that way because we began looking out after other people's interests, despite what we have and might prefer individually. For this to really work for the people and the landscape, we all have to be involved.
What was always striking to me is that we're all English speakers. But we often mean quite different things by the words we're using. Take the word “healthy,” for example. During our early conversations, you had people getting mad because one would say, “This is healthy,” and the other would say, “No, it's not healthy.” They weren't contradicting each other, or even disagreeing, because they weren't using the same meaning of healthy. We were English speakers, using the same words with different connotations, arguing away.
What we actually do around disagreements like this is we go out in the field. Go out into the forest. And, for example, you might have two people that disagree vehemently about what the treatment should look like. So we would go out, and we would let them use ribbons and say, “Why don't you go over here and mark the trees you think should be cut, and then we'll look at it and talk about it.” Frequently people who disagreed strongly with each other across a table in a conference room actually agreed quite a lot when we did this exercise in the woods. Changing the conversational context can be important.
It was also important to have a social component. At the time there was one bar, one restaurant, maybe, and so after the meetings we'd all go out. There were only so many seats and so as much as you didn't like somebody, you might invite them over because there was no place left for them. In that non-confrontational or decision-making context, you might learn that they like to hunt elk or fish, or that they're soccer coaches—they’re not so different from you. That's how you humanize the situation. You still have deep disagreements with them. But there's some common ground and it just makes it harder to demonize them. So we talk about how it's really important to drink a lot.
There are different ways, different processes to use to better align people. If not in terms of what they agree about, at least in terms of how they understand each other. When you start to do that, then the conversations can be more constructive.
What needs to change in our society so that the model that BMFP follows becomes more widespread?
People have to handle disagreements differently. The bureaucratic structures have to change. A lot of state agencies and federal agencies were made for a different time. The structures made a ton of sense then for the issues they addressed. And at least for my part, when I see more laws coming in, I just think, we need to quit editing the existing laws at some point and just start over again. Our world is so different from what it used to be in a lot of important ways.
For our work I would look at landscape health and community health. I don't think you can separate them. At least nationally or globally, I don't think you can have healthy communities and economies long term apart from healthy landscapes and ecosystems, and I don't think that you can have healthy landscapes and ecosystems apart from healthy economies and communities. But what that's gonna look like is quite different, probably, than what we thought it would be in the past.
Adaptive management is a key concept for managing public lands. You do certain treatments. You monitor. You get feedback from monitoring, and that tells you whether it's working or not. And you modify management actions accordingly. There's a lot you don't know ahead of time. But as you go along, you should be adapting. And it's only recently that I realized that's what we were doing with BMFP. We were adaptively managing through our conversations and relationships.
Bureaucracy itself makes sense as a management tool, particularly as responsibilities or policy issues become broader. But to date there hasn't been a useful mechanism that enables adaptive management to percolate up, at least within the U.S. Forest Service.
Just as we now have a good sense of what a healthy, fire adapted landscape should look like, I believe we have a good sense of what a healthy community should look like, or and what changes are needed in order to make communities better. But too many of us are unwilling to have that conversation, because we're afraid we're gonna lose too much.
The Prompt: Take a Conflict Field Trip
Mark Webb shares that BMFP members take field trips to the forest to break stalemates and generate mutual understanding. Next time you’re in a conflict, what is a way that you can move the conversation to a different field?