This southern Oregon town is buying the forest around it to confront wildfires

New vision

With a population of just 400 people, Butte Falls is a speck in an ocean of remote timberland, much of it burned.

The community is tucked into a vast forest of pine and fir about 35 miles from the California border. Outside town, snow-capped Mt. McLoughlin towers above a vast burn scar, where blackened trees from the South Obenchain Fire stand crookedly across miles of the Cascade Range’s foothills.

In September 2020, logger Don Hamann watched with awe as that blaze cast embers over his head in the middle of the night.

Hamann, 70, ignored an evacuation notice to protect his property and that of his neighbors on a woody rise above Butte Falls.

In the light of day, Hamann could see the smoke from a separate fire burning thousands of homes in nearby Ashland and Talent, and further to the north, yet another blaze leveled the mountain community of Blue River.

The Obenchain would burn 33,000 acres and skirted Butte Falls by just a quarter of a mile.

“You can’t stop it,” Hamann recalls. “It was amazing.”

Butte Falls residents disproportionately live with disabilities or in mobile homes, risk factors that make it difficult to prepare and evacuate from wildfires that have become increasingly destructive.

The hamlet itself, once a logging powerhouse, is still struggling to provide residents with good-paying jobs more than 40 years after the local timber industry began its long decline. Almost 10% of Butte Falls residents left town between 2010 and 2021.

Conventional wisdom in the region would have Butte Falls try to reclaim its former glory as a logging hub.

But community leaders have hatched an ambitious plan to protect their future by looking to the forest itself as a source of protection as much as prosperity.

The town government recently purchased a ring of privately owned timberland surrounding Butte Falls.

Instead of harvesting the land—which could provide an immediate, short-term boon to the town economy—locals want to grow an older and biodiverse forest that they say will better protect the town from wildfires, while attracting outdoor tourism.

Conservationists and the state’s top politicos say the small project playing out in a remote corner of Pacific Northwest forest can teach other communities how to adapt to climate disasters and hard times.

New climate, new perspective

Destinies in Butte Falls were always linked to the forest.

The Butte Falls Sugar Pine Company built a sawmill and platted the town in 1906, according to historian Jeff LaLande. The firm took its name from the giant conifer of high cultural and religious value for the Achomawi people.

Loggers prized sugar pines for their smooth, straight timber.

In the 1980s, a Texas millionaire gutted the company that for decades had provided steady employment in Butte Falls. Almost all prized timber was cut and the mill sold, LaLande writes.

Smeltz, 68, moved to Butte Falls in the 1970s and watched the company’s liquidation plunge the town into a deep economic decline that it never truly recovered from, the forester said.

It’s a familiar story across the Pacific Northwest.

“People didn’t have good jobs anymore,” he said. “When I came to town, the tavern was rockin’, alcohol was the drug of choice. Now, heroin is the drug of choice. Now it’s fentanyl.”

Smeltz embarked on a 40-year career in forestry, including 28 years with the U.S. Forest Service.

While Butte Falls changed, Smeltz watched the forests change around him. The climate in southern Oregon turned dry and hot, consistent with projections of human-caused climate change.

Firs in the region are dying en masse due to drought and insects, pock-marking the green forests of the Cascades with brown sores that easily burn, Columbia Insight reported. Douglas firs, the state tree, which is high-value timber, are being replaced by species that are more resilient to drought.

Climate science is unpopular in Butte Falls, which is staunchly conservative, Smeltz says. But when a group of locals visited the new community forest on a recent Saturday, there was broad agreement that the climate is less hospitable for certain conifers than it once was.

Hamann had convened the meeting with a handful of residents as part of his weekly “forest chats,” where he describes his vision and seeks community buy-in over the roar of the falls.

On the warm afternoon, Hamann drew the group’s attention to a grove of century-old firs and pines. It’s the only mature forest remaining in the town-owned parcels and the first portion that would age enough to provide the biodiversity and wildfire resilience he envisions.

But much of the forest encircling Butte Falls is made up of young “ladder fuels,” a term in fire ecology for mid-sized foliage and low limbs that spread fire from the forest floor up to the canopy, where it is impossible to smother.

The town wouldn’t stand much of a chance if the forest around it burned in its current state, Stan Moore, another local retired from a career in forestry, told the others, who nodded grimly.

If Butte Falls can weather this fire season, Smeltz will lead efforts to thin the forest by cutting down young trees and deadlimbs, which will be piled and burned. That will help the largest trees, including mighty ponderosa pines towering above the thicket, to continue flourishing. The town already secured $450,000 from the Oregon Department of Forestry and another $450,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for this work, according to Smeltz.

The community has

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. SDGs Addressed or Connected to the Issues Highlighted in the Article:

• SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
• SDG 13: Climate Action
• SDG 15: Life on Land

2. Specific Targets Under Those SDGs Based on the Article’s Content:

• SDG 11.5: By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations.
• SDG 13.1: Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries.
• SDG 15.2: By 2020, promote the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests and substantially increase afforestation and reforestation globally.

3. Indicators Mentioned or Implied in the Article:

• Number of deaths and number of people affected by disasters
• Economic losses caused by disasters
• Resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters
• Implementation of sustainable forest management
• Extent of deforestation and forest restoration
• Afforestation and reforestation efforts

Table: SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

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Source: hereisoregon.com

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