THE JACKSON DEMONSTRATION State Forest was controversial from the day it was purchased in 1947 from the old Caspar Lumber Company. The government taking over private property can create suspicion, especially in those red scare days.

At the time, big lumber corporations from the Deep South and Pacific Northwest were clearcutting newly purchased lands in California. The old-growth timber resource of Mendocino County was almost entirely harvested. Replantings were either not done or were done in a nonscientific way, threatening the ecological and economic forest and causing alarm in universities, science and government.

Caspar Lumber remained one of the few large operators that was locally owned, with a famous annual family picnic. It was relatively responsible, practicing some selective logging in an age of bulldozer clearcutting.

Then came the creation of California’s demonstration forest system with four big land purchases by the state in the late 1940s. The Caspar Forest as it was known was sold to the state and renamed the Jacob Green Jackson State Forest to honor Caspar Lumber’s founder and later renamed again to Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF).

Jackson Forest came with the promise to be a nursery to millions of trees for all lumber companies to plant. Under government ownership, logging continued with an open bidding process that was new to local timber companies.

The public expected access to the new public lands, which was often difficult because of ongoing timber harvests. Old newspaper accounts reveal disputes among timber companies, off-road enthusiasts, and adjacent property owners. Walking the forest, ghosts of these grudges are still visible, with huge rocks placed to block a road or a fence wire entangled in a wall of trees to stop a rival user from going too far.

Oceanfront property acquired through a trade

In 1972, State Parks gave up one of the best stretches of timberland in the JDSF in a trade with timber company Boise Cascade. Boise got 978 acres of 20 million harvestable board feet of timber in exchange for 658 acres of oceanfront real estate, most of that being the north end of MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg. The trade also gave the public agency 70 acres that comprise the Mendocino Headlands, the entire oceanfront area west and north of the town of Mendocino.

It’s hard to envision the coast now without the long beaches and dunes of MacKerricher or the spectacular headlands. Even today, environmentalists think the planet got the best of that deal despite the big redwoods that were lost. The dunes and the bird nesting and breeding and resting rocks on the headlands are considered critical environmental reserves.

But clearcutting elsewhere in the county had dire environmental consequences. The Coho or Silver Salmon was the prime fish of the Mendocino and Sonoma County coasts until intense logging silted the rivers and streams. The ferocious fish was put on protected lists, and all fishing of it has been banned in California. In some cases, environmental agencies hastened the Coho’s decline, with misguided policies like attempts to clear streams of mud, when in fact stream clutter was needed that would allow spawning areas to develop naturally.

“Scientific” logging continued largely unquestioned in the JDSF through the ’80s until the dramatic rise of the local environmental protest movement, precipitated by what they saw as the excesses of timber cutting by many companies, including Charles Hurwitz and his Maxxam Inc. in Humboldt County.

With the old growth almost entirely gone in Mendocino County, the last stands in Humboldt County became much more valuable and suddenly passionately defended. This culminated in Redwood Summer in 1990, when protests all over the region grew to international notoriety, with environmentalists doing tree sits and chaining themselves to trees. Some were accused of employing sabotage like filling tractor engines with sand and even imbedding tree spikes in trunks. Leading environmental activists Daryl Cherney and the late Judi Bari were injured by a car bomb in a still-unsolved case. It all boiled over with a showdown between loggers and environmentalists in the middle of downtown Fort Bragg that was featured in a famous photo in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, showing waves of people coming at each other from opposite directions in a loud and angry standoff.

Environmentalists flex legal muscle

Environmentalists began disputing timber harvest plans all over, especially on public lands like the JDSF, where they claimed the California Department of Forestry (CDF) was a mere servant of timber companies. Legal actions that started in the late 1990s challenged laws that allowed CDF-Cal Fire to skip environmental impact reports and use their own Timber Harvest Plans to get through the revered and feared CEQA process (California Environmental Quality Act).

Opponents managed to stop all logging in the JDSF during most of the first nine years of the 21st century. A compromise created the Jackson Advisory Group in 2008, and the JAG was allowed to review and modify timber harvest plans.

But a few years later, the State Board of Forestry, which oversees Cal Fire and state forest lands, nixed much of the authority the JAG had. Critics said the board stripped the JAG of authority to regulate the harvest plans. Demonstration Forest Program head Kevin Conway and JAG members say many changes continued to be made voluntarily with JAG input. But the JAG never said no after 2011 to a timber harvest plan, and it was composed mostly of people from logging backgrounds.

Over time, the term “Indians” was replaced by “Native Americans” and Indigenous; CDF became Cal Fire; and climate change became a major question with forest carbon sequestration as a possible answer. A $100 million-plus carbon credit industry emerged in Mendocino County, with at least one Tribe among those taking the lead on this new way of using the forest. The biggest timberland owners became nonprofits like The Conservation Fund and the Redwood Forest Foundation Inc. (RFFI), which both also log the forests they preserve. Environmentalists pushed to broaden the JAG to include more community members. That compromise was made but local environmentalists like Bill Heil and Anna Marie Stenberg continued to view the JAG as a “rubber stamp” for Cal Fire.

Then in the second decade of the 21st century, big fires raged and killed many people in Santa Rosa, inland Mendocino County, Paradise, and more, drawing more eyes to the JDSF, especially piles of slash left behind by “scientific” logging. Cal Fire became more communicative. On a recent forest tour, a Cal Fire forester described all the measures to make slash more environmentally friendly and less fire-friendly, like removing invasives and cutting slash into small pieces. At least one longtime critic on that tour said they hadn’t known the extent of the work Cal Fire did to make the slash safer.

From 1900 to 2020, tribes that had historic claims to the land were not offered a hand in the actual management of the forest. They were invited to participate in various initiatives over the decades but found the rules often changed with each state governor. Big initiatives were announced with little follow-through. For First Nations, government promises needed to move beyond press releases to have any meaning.

Involving the Indigenous community

The fires made many people talk about the need for Indigenous input. Many people concluded that if First Nations had been given a role, forests might not be as cluttered and dangerous. Although the practice varies widely, Indigenous people worldwide, including in the JDSF, used brush control and other effective fire prevention methods, which had been pushed aside in the modern rush for the cash flow from logging.

In 2020, Cal Fire proposed one of the most ambitious Timber Harvest Plans ever, just after the pandemic started. No opposition came, and Cal Fire proceeded to bid the timber on a “Caspar 500” plan, which proposed cutting big redwoods close to sprawling rural properties in the unincorporated community of Caspar, long known as a retreat for hippies and musicians famous and otherwise. Also in 2020, Newsom issued his directive that the state find a way to co-manage with tribes, Statement of Administration Policy Native American Ancestral Lands.

When Cal Fire started marking the trees to be cut in the Caspar 500, a protest movement not seen since Redwood Summer came bursting into the forest. And this time, Native people and leaders of one prominent tribe were involved. People chained themselves to trees again. They went out into the forest where timber fallers were working, risking trees falling onto them and causing logging companies to stop work. Security guards were posted and patrolled 24/7.

As quickly as the saws started up, protests interrupted the work and cutting was halted.

Today, there is no timber harvesting. A co-management process is underway that gives new authority to Native Tribes, but which is also criticized as an effort to restart timber harvests.

Cal Fire and the JAG have moved meetings out of the boardroom and into the forest more often, where they are hashing out how logging, climate change and co-management can work.

The post A look inside the history and the politics of the Jackson Demonstration State Forest appeared first on Local News Matters.

East of the towns of Mendocino, Fort Bragg and Caspar lies the Jackson Demonstration State Forest, a 48,000-acre tract filled with redwood, douglas fir and other trees common to California’s North Coast.

Created in 1947 to allow sustainable harvesting, the area has been logged repeatedly but currently grows more new trees than are harvested.

On Friday, the forest will be the site of an unusual meeting for the volunteer panel that helps advise management of the forest.

For what is apparently the first time in the group’s 15-year history, the Jackson Advisory Group will hold its meeting entirely outside, traveling in the forest itself, rather than in a conference room. The meeting will focus on the impact of climate change and how it affects forest ecology and, importantly, wildfires and fire prevention.

Typically, the group’s meetings include many constituencies with different points of view — Native Americans, environmentalists, Cal Fire foresters, timber landowners, scientists and curious residents.

The results are often contentious, and after a particularly chaotic meeting last year, the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection reset the JAG, drafting a new charter with stricter rules on participation.

The forest itself becomes the loudest voice at the meeting, without speaking a word.

While no one expects any sudden resolution among the different points of view, the hope now is that a meeting under the forest canopy will further a more productive conversation.

Kevin Conway, state director of the state’s Demonstration Forest Program that oversees Jackson and 13 other demonstration forests, said meeting in the living resource allows people from sharply different points of view to see how policies they have defended and attacked are unfolding in nature. The forest itself becomes the loudest voice at the meeting, without speaking a word.

“I think our time in the woods is always very well spent,” Conway said. “It’s great to have the backdrop of what we’re doing. The conversations are different when everybody is in the forest and can actually see the forest, versus having them in a conference room where people can put forward any kind of concept that they want.” 

The impetus for the all-outdoor meeting came in May when the JAG took a field tour through the forest to examine logging and reforestation practices.

Environmentalists who had leveled virulent criticisms indoors against Cal Fire’s management asked curious questions during the outdoors tour about a wide range of forest topics, ranging from pesticide use to invasive species management to fire.

Cal Fire personnel who often sat stony-faced when asked tough questions indoors, or dodged the queries, were surprisingly frank.

Keith Wyner, a retired teacher who photographs community events for social media, was i​​ntrigued by much of what he saw and said he learned a lot.

“I see a lot of slash. Is that a fire hazard?” Wyner asked during the tour, pointing to a hillside. 

“That is a challenge,” said Cal Fire’s Jeremiah Steuterman, who described mitigation measures, including where the slash had been cut into smaller pieces to make it less of a burn pile in case of fire. 

When someone mentioned CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, a woman asked: “What do sequins have to do with anything?” 

A JAG member recognized that the acronym had never been explained and sounded like the clothing decoration.

But the crowd laughed and state employees acknowledged they sometimes speak in acronym soup. 

On leadership and management

The Friday meeting will also feature some management changes.

It will be led for the first time in memory by a person not involved in logging, Amy Wynn, a Fort Bragg business owner who runs a firm helping landowners with issues like mitigation and planning.

Other news to be announced at the JAG meeting includes the promotion of Cal Fire Assistant Chief Emily Smith out of the area. She had been assigned to the Jackson forest in charge of communication.

With Smith gone, Conway steps back into a familiar role. He started his career working in the Jackson forest more than 20 years ago. He said Cal Fire plans to replace Smith and the vacant forest manager position at the demonstration forest. Conway said none of the other 13 demonstration forests has had controversy like Jackson, which is by far the largest of the 14.

Right: Kirk O’Dwyer, a CAL FIRE Registered Professional Forester in charge of a ‘New Vision’ timber harvest plan that uses fire both before and after harvest, displays a map during a tour in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF) in Mendocino County, Calif., after the November 2023 Jackson Advisory Group (JAG) meeting. Left: (L-R) Amy Wynn, the Jackson Advisory Group (JAG) chair, listens to Kevin Conway, CAL FIRE State Forest Program Manager, during a tour in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest (JDSF)in Mendocino County, Calif., in an undated photo.

Another item on the agenda is the announcement that Cal Fire intends to select Clifton Environmental LLC to manage the public input process for all of those ongoing processes in the Jackson forest.

The meeting starts at 9 a.m. Friday at Camp 20, roughly halfway between Willits and Fort Bragg on state Highway 20.

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