By Tim King
The Land Correspondent
MELROSE
May 23, 2008 03:19 am
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Forests are big. In 2005 the U.S. Forest Service reported that Minnesota’s total forest area was estimated to be 16.3 million acres or 32 percent of the state’s land area.
The services provided by a forest that large are also large. But paper, lumber, clean water, wildlife diversity and recreational opportunities for large populations don’t just come from big public forests and scattered wood lots. They come from private and public forests that are spread over entire regions, or landscapes, interspersed with towns, roads, farms, lakes and rivers.
In Minnesota those landscapes — those tens and hundreds of thousands of acres of forestland — are owned by a patchwork of small and large private landowners, county governments, various agencies of the state and federal governments and Indian tribes.
Historically forests have been managed to the property line of a particular owner. Step across the property line and you’ll step into a different forest management scheme. Usually, each landowner managed for a specific result such as timber production or recreation. If the goal of forest management is to preserve forests, and the services and products they provide, that piecemeal approach is largely a failure.
“We’ve lost over half of the forest land in west central Minnesota in the last 100 years,” said Chuck Erickson, a retired Otter Tail County dairyman.
A nine-county area in east central Minnesota has lost over a million acres of forest during that same period. At the same time forest acreage is declining, demands for paper, lumber and recreation are increasing.
One of the big risks to forests that aren’t disappearing is the breaking up of forestland into ever-smaller parcels of land. The principle value of small land parcels is development.
“We have 250 acres here and we have received many offers to buy a part of it,” said Jim Ballenthin, a forestland owner in southern Cass County. “People want their 10-, 20- or 40-acre tracts and they want to divide up the land. The person who sold the land to us probably could have doubled his money if he broke it up. Somebody even wanted to buy it for a golf course once.”
Concerned landowners like Ballenthin and Erickson are partnering with a small state agency, the Minnesota Forest Resources Council, in an attempt to not only preserve Minnesota’s remaining forests but to improve and, in some areas, expand them.
“In the past, the forest was viewed as providing multiple uses, each of which could be managed independent from each other,” said Lindberg Ekola, MFRC’s landscape program manager. “Forest managers generally managed for specific uses within the boundaries of one owner’s land. Now we are moving toward the forest being viewed as an ecosystem, with many interacting and interdependent functions and uses. Forest managers consider the whole system of forest functions and uses in planning and management. We are also working to coordinate management across ownership boundaries and entire landscapes. Landscape-level planning is essential to good planning at the local or site level.”
The Minnesota legislature established the Forest Resources Council in 1995 and gave it the task of creating large regional forest landscape plans. The idea for landscape-sized plans rose out of the Environmental Impact Statement for all of Minnesota’s forests that had been completed a few years earlier. It was the first time anybody had ever looked at the entirety of Minnesota’s complex and diverse forest.
Within 10 years of its creation, the five-person staff of the MFRC had worked with hundreds of citizens and local officials to create six regional Forest Resource Management Plans. The plans largely follow county lines in the west central, southeast, northeast, north central, northern and the east central regions of Minnesota.
As an example, the East Central Landscape plan was completed in March of 2005 following a series of 10 meetings throughout Wright, Benton, Chisago, Isanti, Morrison, Mille Lacs, Kanabec, Pine and Sherburne counties.
At those meetings citizens learned that two of the counties, Wright and Benton, had each lost more than 80 percent of their forestland in the last 100 years. They also learned that the region’s remaining 1.6 million acres of forest were much younger and less diverse than the 1905 forest. As they listened, researched and learned they came to some key conclusions about what they would like the east central region’s forest landscape to look like 100 years from now.
Among other things they wanted a forest that is larger, more diverse, has greater capacity to protect water quality, contributes to a high quality of life for the regions residents and provides economic opportunities for those residents.
The 100-year ideas in the East Central Forest Landscape Plan are known as Desired Future Conditions. They are broad and bold. How could a handful of citizens reverse a 100-year trend of decreasing forests? Why didn’t they just put their plan on a dusty shelf and leave it there with all the other old plans?
“Long-range planning for forests is nothing new, Ekola said. “Countries in Europe, such as Germany and Finland, have been planning and managing their forests for several generations. We are looking not only at the longer timeframes involved with managing our forests but also developing both short- and medium-range objectives.
“We are getting better at how we do planning, slowly, Ekola said. “A big part of this is our growing awareness that we can’t just plan in a vacuum. We must be more comprehensive and cooperative in how we think about the future and then go about doing the work of coordination and implementation.”
The East Central Landscape Plan, like the other five landscape plans, includes an implementation section. Inspired by the planning process and the vision of improving the forest that they have created together the landscape committees across the state have continued to meet. In the east central part of the state the committee has held workshops, forest field days and worked to educate public officials.
In the northern region surveyed representatives from forest industries and economic development agencies identify new opportunities to promote the forest economy and they’ve collaborated with Soil and Water Conservation Districts to hold forestry workshops. You can’t grow a forest in a few years but the members of the Landscape Planning Committees, with support from the Minnesota Forest Resources Council, are committed to preparing the ground for that forest.
“Plans are not meant to last 100 years but rather to guide efforts over a shorter period of time,” Ekola said. “They need to be updated regularly so they are kept current fresh and meaningful.”
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