Autumn 2009 | Volume 89, Number 1

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Listening to Their Songs | Puzzle Pieces | Cross-Training | The Romance of Salmon

CREATIVE COMMONS PHOTO BY NEITHERFANBOY

Puzzle Pieces
Oregon land trusts use practical means to reclaim and preserve chunks of wild lands.
By Bonnie Henderson

At the end of a gravel road a mile southwest of McKenzie Bridge, Ryan Ruggiero ’02, M.L.A. ’03, and Chris Vogel of McKenzie River Trust (MRT) pull on hip waders and take off down a steep elk trail, stopping where the terrain flattens out and forest gives way to an open wetland: Drury Meadow. Invasive reed canary grass—pale green and calf-high—seems to fill the valley floor. They pick their way across the meadow and step down into a silty, slow-moving stream to take a closer look. Some of the green blades turn out to be small-fruited bulrush, its tender tips nipped by elk. Then Ruggiero and Vogel spot more plant species in the mix: narrow-leaf cattail, soft rush, Veronica americana, and a sedge of some kind: “Oh, yeah, I see some nice native species in here,” Ruggiero says, smiling. He pulls up a single slender sedge plant, roots dripping creek mud, and tucks it in a pocket of his orange safety vest to identify later. Then the pair turns west and follows the stream to its confluence with Taylor Creek. Here they find more native plants: burr reed, watercress, water parsley, another sedge (Ruggiero tucks another sample into his pocket), and Watson’s willow-herb. “You have to kind of train your eye to see what’s here,” he says, scanning the waves of green. “This is actually way better than I expected.” The canary grass had moved in after the valley floor was logged of its native Douglas fir years earlier, he explains. “But it looks like it’s maybe 60 percent reed canary grass and 30 percent bulrush and 10 or 20 percent other stuff.” He bends to pluck a sample of yet a third sedge species, tucking it in with the others flopping out of his vest pocket. By the time he and Vogel turn to walk back to the car, Ruggiero looks like he himself might be starting to sprout.


By itself, Drury Meadow, so named after the MRT acquired the twenty-two-acre property in late 2006, isn’t much to shake a stick at. But restoration of side streams like Taylor Creek will be essential to recovery of spring Chinook salmon and bull trout in the McKenzie River basin, according to fish biologists. Ponds in Drury Meadow already host such sensitive species as western pond turtles and red-legged frogs. Living details like these help make this little wetland, just a few miles outside Three Sisters Wilderness, a potentially significant piece of the McKenzie River watershed puzzle—just the kind of thing a conservation group such as MRT keeps its eyes, and its pocketbook, open to.

The land trust itself is a piece of a larger puzzle: one of more than a dozen private, nonprofit, locally focused land trusts that have emerged in every corner of Oregon in recent years—particularly the past decade—collectively championing a new strategy within the environmental movement that combines pragmatism and idealism. Government regulation of public and private land clearly has its limitations, and it’s never a permanent fix. Human needs aren’t going to go away; we all eat food raised by farmers (and, often, by ranchers), and we all live on land that was once wild and is now developed, most of us in wooden houses. And if we don’t get really busy preserving Oregon’s special places that have not yet lost all their wildness, those places will be lost, many of them within the next generation. Forever.

***

Just buy it: That’s the concept that got the Nature Conservancy (TNC) rolling almost sixty years ago. Alarmed at the accelerating disappearance of natural areas in the United States, the scientists at the core of what was originally called the Ecologists Union resolved to take “direct action” back in the late 1940s, beginning with buying a sixty-acre piece of the Mianus River Gorge on the New York–Connecticut border. The conservancy bought the land with its own resources, raised funds to reimburse itself, then went out and bought more land with the money they’d raised. It was a brand-new approach; rather than wait and hope for the government to preserve threatened wild lands, do it yourself and get fellow citizens to help. The Nature Conservancy now operates in thirty countries, identifying and prioritizing those threatened places most critical to preserving the world’s biological diversity.

To an organization with that wide a lens, Drury Meadow might not even show up in the frame. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important—to Oregon, anyway. That’s where local land trusts can play a role—“mom and pop land trusts,” as Neal Maine, founder and currently conservation director of North Coast Land Conservancy, calls them. Operating more or less on TNC’s model, Oregon’s local land trusts sometimes collaborate with and often complement the work of the big conservancy with their knowledge of local ecosystems and local players.

From the beaches and Sitka spruce swamps of Clatsop County to the glacial moraines of Wallowa County, each land trust in Oregon has its own local priorities and its preferred modus operandi. Staff members from trusts throughout the state usually meet once a year to compare notes, and they’re in the process of creating a formal statewide coalition. Otherwise they operate independently. But they all share a particular philosophy and use the same tool kit. Stated simply, they work with willing landowners toward the goal of preserving valuable wild lands, in perpetuity. The most straightforward way they do that is by accepting gifts of land such as Drury Meadow. More often they buy land outright (at below-market rates, if the landowner is willing) and keep it, managing the land to preserve and restore native vegetation and habitats. That sometimes means undertaking major restoration projects. Some preserves are open to the public; others aren’t.

Green Island, McKenzie River Trust’s crown jewel, is an example. In 2003 the trust bought the 1,000-acre island at the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers from the Green family, which had owned and farmed it for more than seventy years. The Greens wanted the land to be protected for the benefit of wildlife, and they sold it to the trust at a bargain-basement price. The trust has begun a massive restoration project that is slowly phasing out farming, managing the land to prevent weed infestation, and planting native species.

Green Island is one of only a handful of properties McKenzie River Trust actually owns outright. MRT does most of its work in the McKenzie, Willamette, Umpqua, and Siuslaw River watersheds through conservation easements: voluntary agreements with landowners to preserve certain conservation values of the property—a grove of old growth trees, say, or the fish habitat in a stream—again, in perpetuity. The easement stays with the land, regardless of who inherits or purchases it in the future. Such easements can take years to negotiate, may be sold to the trust or given as a gift (in exchange for significant tax breaks), may apply to all the property or just part of it, and may or may not include a provision for public access.

A third way land trusts help keep wild land wild is by helping negotiate deals between private landowners and one or more—sometimes many more—government entities, from county parks departments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bonneville Power Administration. The North Coast Land Conservancy (NCLC), headquartered in Seaside, specializes in these kinds of negotiations. Its staff recently helped broker a deal between a conservation-minded private landowner on Little Whale Cove, south of Depoe Bay, and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, using funds from both state and federal sources and dealing with a half-dozen government agencies. Now fourteen acres of prime ocean-view property that had been slated for development will remain wild and undeveloped, from the parcel’s Sitka spruce forest to its steep cliffs where seabirds nest. Plans call for the area to be managed by state parks, which already owns adjacent Rocky Creek State Scenic Viewpoint. “It’s complicated work,” says NCLC executive director Katie Voelke, “and it’s what we do well.”

What land trusts also do well is form alliances with what might seem strange bedfellows for an environmental group, including such traditional adversaries as property developers, timber companies, and ranchers. But these are desperate times. Rural landscapes are under constant development pressure. Salmon habitat is in crisis. Invasive species encroach everywhere. Certain habitat types found in Oregon are particularly imperiled, such as seasonally wet prairie and river floodplains. And an unprecedented percentage of Oregon land ownership is expected to turn over in the next fifteen or so years. Wild land, and the time in which to save it, is running out, and polarization has given way to pragmatism, at least within the land trust community.

“That’s what separates our work from other kinds of environmental groups,” says Ryan Ruggiero, who negotiates deals as McKenzie River Trust’s land protection manager. Ruggiero pursued a degree in landscape architecture at the UO with the specific goal of working for a land trust. “The approach we take to our work is inherently nonconfrontational. We accept the notion that people who live on the land, and off the land, do have a very strong connection with the land, even if they engage in activities that a mainstream environmentalist might consider troublesome. We try to see from a more holistic view.”

“The way I thought in high school and college and the way I think now: I had to go through an entire flip-flop in my thinking,” admits Voelke, who spent years as a biologist for state and federal agencies before joining the NCLC. “Especially in the coastal setting, history shows us what can happen if we don’t try to work together. Development is going to happen. But there might be a way it can happen that, for instance, can allow a whole stream system to remain connected rather than fragmented. If you can make that happen, then you’re really serving the whole of your community.”

***

“We’re not going where I thought we’d go, because the bulls are out,” volunteer guide Mary Crow tells the small group gathered near the barn at Rimrock Ranch, northeast of Sisters. But there is still plenty to see in a four-hour ramble around the 1,120-acre ranch tucked between Crooked River National Grassland and tracts of Bureau of Land Management land. Three years ago, Deschutes Land Trust acquired a conservation easement on the ranch and began restoration of 1.5 miles of Whychus (rhymes with “righteous”) Creek running through the ranch, beginning with moving grazing cattle off the creek’s banks. On another ranch, where reopening wildlife migration corridors was the priority, removal of barbed wire fencing might have been the first step in a conservation strategy, but here the immediate focus is on fish habitat. The tour group, led by Crow, troops down a dirt road to the creek-level floodplain—no longer flooding since the Army Corps of Engineers built berms and straightened the creek’s meanders back in the mid-1960s. Scattered over the floodplain, thickly in places, are tall spikes of mullein and shrubby tassel-headed knapweed, two aggressive invasive species on the land trust’s eradication list. The hikers spread out for a half-mile walk through the weeds, then reassemble at the ranch’s summer kitchen—a gray canvas tent, some wooden tables and benches, a fire pit and propane stove clustered in the shade of tall ponderosa pines—to examine the riparian restoration work begun here. Whole dead juniper trees have been thrown into the creek and secured to metal fence stakes, encouraging the cold water rushing down the artificially channelized stream to slow and warm and eddy into little oases of rest for the salmon and steelhead that the land trust hopes will, within a few years, return to Whychus Creek. And holding those gray tree skeletons in place is the very tool that, more than a century ago, helped to tame this wild country: silvery strands of twisted barbed wire.


Perpetuity is a word you might see in writing now and then, but it’s not something you commonly hear in everyday conversation. But it’s a word that pops up even in casual chit-chat among staff and volunteers in land trust offices. It’s a concept they take very seriously. “Policy can change,” the NCLC’s Voelke says of environmental regulation, “but conservation easements are forever. In perpetuity.”

Working landscapes is another phrase land trusts use more these days, some more than others. Rimrock Ranch is an example. Here, rather than seeking to kick out all the cattle, Deschutes Land Trust (DLT) entered into a conservation easement that allows the owners, current and future, to continue to run cattle on portions of the ranch while the trust restores the stream and its floodplain to lure back migrating fish.

Timberlands are another type of working landscape, one with which DLT has become intimately familiar. “The topic of forest land turnover really started coming to the fore seven or eight years ago,” says DLT conservation director Brad Nye ’86. Half of all private timberlands in the United States changed hands from 1995 to 2005, and another 44 million acres—an area nearly two-thirds the size of Oregon—are expected to be sold within the next twenty years, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Why? Many small forests are family-owned, and some of the now fourth- or fifth-generation owners want out of the timber business. And with poor shareholder returns, big timber companies have been cashing out as well, often to investment companies with no interest or expertise in growing and harvesting trees but a keen interest in making money. Often the quickest way to do that is to sell the land to a housing developer.

Since when did environmentalists start making friends with timber companies? Since they realized that a managed forest can be better than no forest at all.

For more than four years, DLT has been working on strategies to preserve what they’ve dubbed Skyline Forest, a 33,000-acre former tree farm owned, since 2006, by one of the country’s largest insurance companies. It’s the broad belt of green you see at the foot of the snow-clad Three Sisters when you look west from Tumalo or Bend. The “community forest” DLT proposes to establish there would be managed to enhance wildlife habitat and provide the public with scenic views and recreation opportunities. And it would be purchased with tax-exempt bonds that would be repaid with revenues from the sustainable harvest of timber from the forest. In June the Oregon legislature approved a bill that will allow intensive development of a small portion of the forest in exchange for conservation of the rest, assuming the land trust can raise $12 million to close the deal.

 “We would never compromise the land just to acquire it or to keep it going; that’s an absolute truth you can rely on,” Nye says of the land trust. “That being said, we are not a lock-it-up type outfit.” The land trust has harvested trees on other properties in the interest of good forest management and wildlife enhancement, he explains. “We are just not going to chain ourselves to every tree.”

A cold fog has blown off the ocean and settled over the Reserve at Gearhart, a gated community with neat lawns and a few scattered houses on what were once seaside dunes. The grass slopes down to a meadow edging a long, narrow band of forest beside Neacoxie Creek. No houses down here: just brooding Sitka spruce and ancient native crabapple overshadowing clumps of salal and huckleberry. Fifty yards to the north, a dozen or more Roosevelt elk mill on the meadow, a congregation of dark brown manes and white rumps. Neal Maine, in muddy rubber boots and a damp parka, squats down and begins describing the early blue violet, a native species that had been all but eradicated in this meadow by invasive Scotch broom. “It’s not a rare plant,” he says; “I have them growing in the gravel of my driveway.” What makes it special, he explains, is its role in the life cycle of the Oregon silverspot butterfly, a species threatened because of destruction of its habitat. Female butterflies lay their eggs among the violet’s dried stems, and the larvae feed on the plant. Adult butterflies forage meadows like this one for nectar from goldenrod and black knotweed; when the northwest winds kick up, they flee into the trees, seeking refuge deep among the Sitka spruce. Just a few years ago, the owner of all this land—eighty acres, all zoned for housing—had attempted to sell it to a developer, but the sale had been blocked by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Enter North Coast Land Conservancy, which proposed a solution: set aside twenty-five acres of the most critical butterfly habitat—the meadow and forest adjacent to the creek—to be managed for its natural values by the likes of NCLC, allowing the rest to be developed, subject to certain open space requirements. It was a tradeoff, Maine readily admits. The stalemate could have gone on for years, but to no one’s benefit, certainly not the butterfly’s; while the parties argued, invasive Scotch broom would have taken over, eating up precious habitat and effectively ending the debate.

“Developers aren’t going to go away,” Maine says. “Developers are going to develop. But what percentage, and where?” He stands up, warming to his subject and triggering a nervous stirring among the elk. “So we can wait five years and have 100 percent Scotch broom coverage, or we can do something now, while there’s still a population of violets and we can still cut a deal.” He gazes at the belt of green-black spruce and turns reflective. “Remember those bumper stickers, ‘Earth First—We’ll Log the Other Planets Later,’ or ‘Spotted Owl Tastes Just Like Chicken’?” He chuckles quietly, shakes his head. “That kind of polarization: nobody cares about that anymore.”  

Bonnie Henderson ’79, M.A. ’85, is a writer who lives in Eugene. An excerpt from her most recent book, Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris, appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Oregon Quarterly.

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