How one Oregon town put politics aside to save itself from fire

Things had started to change in Ashland in the ’60s and ’70s: A new generation of residents saw the forests of the Pacific Northwest not as an industrial resource for exploitation, but a place for recreation and serenity. Throughout the 1980s, activists set up camps to block logging roads, gave speeches outside ranger stations, filed lawsuits, and lobbied politicians — a period known as the Timber Wars. Then, in 1990, environmentalists got the spotted owl on the endangered species list, and shortly thereafter a judge stopped all logging on state and federal land in southeastern Oregon.

The Forest Service — no longer able to conduct the business of managing timber sales as usual — focused instead on building access roads for firefighters and thinning trees deemed a wildfire threat. “It was almost presto-chango,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “All of a sudden the Forest Service, instead of doing timber extraction, was all about tinder reduction.”