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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of Epic. And joining me is climate attorney Matt Simmons of EPIC.

So we are talking about a really cool partnership between the Wiyot Tribe today and the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, Headwaters Forest. And we have guests from both the Wiyot Tribe and the BLM. So we have Zane and Marissa from the BLM. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Tom. And we also have another Marisa and Zach from the Wiyot tribe. Hey, gang.

MARISA MCGREW:

Hey, Tom. Hey, Matt.

ZACH ERICKSON:

Thanks for having us.

WHEELER:

All right, well, let's, let's learn a little bit about what you do at your respective nations and organizations or, or agencies, Zane, how about you lead us off, you work for the Bureau of Land Management, tell us about yourself.

ZANE RUDDY:

I work for the Bureau of Land Management, the Arcata Field Office, which is kind of the Mendocino, Trinity, Humboldt kind of chunk of the agency. I'm a fish biologist, which means I focus on monitoring mostly salmonids, so steelhead, coho, chinook populations, and try to make their habitat better. So putting forth habitat restoration projects and trying to get them implemented.

WHEELER:

Very cool. Marissa, tell us about yourself and what you do at the BLM.

MARISSA VOSSMER:

Yeah, so I am one of the foresters for the BLM Arcata office and I, as a forester, I am responsible for managing BLM forests and that generally takes the form of forest restoration projects including headwaters.

WHEELER:

Wonderful. Zach, tell us about yourself and your work for the Wiyot Tribe.

ERICKSON:

Yeah, my name is Zach Erickson. I'm a registered professional forester and the Forest Resources Specialist with the Wiyot Tribe, for the Natural Resources Department. And what I do here is, well, we're actively building the Forestry Department here to engage with the ancestral forests of the Wiyot Tribe. And I'm also helping restore forested land currently under the ownership of the Wiyot Tribe.

WHEELER:

Very cool. And Marissa, last but not least.

MCGREW:

Yeah, I'm a fish biologist with the Wiyot Tribe, which yeah can mean a lot of things. I think one thing that I largely focus on is like the Eel River right now and like pikeminnow management and monitoring, which was a previous episode and also just working in monitoring salmonid populations as well as other culturally important fishes that may not be listed like Pacific lamprey and green sturgeon and snout species amongst others. Yeah.

WHEELER:

Cool. Well, so as I said at the top of the show, we're, we're here to talk about a cool partnership between the Wiyot Tribe and the BLM to help the BLM manage the lands that are within the ancestral territory of the Wiyot Tribe. So this is a cool, a cool partnership. Maybe we could start with our friends from the Wiyot Tribe. Zach, can you talk about the ancestral territory of the Wiyot Tribe and, and why this partnership with the BLM is really meaningful with respect to the types of lands within your ancestral territory.

ERICKSON:

Yeah, definitely. So, the Wiyot Tribe ancestral lands, well, I'll give the classic, it's up, reaches up north to Little River, down to Bear River, to the south, and then pretty far out east. And this encompasses an extremely dynamic range of ecosystems that stretch from the ocean all the way up to high prairies, oak woodlands. And what's really important about this, this partnership is the majority of this land, the Wiyot Tribe's ancestral land, is essentially locked up behind gates because it's privately owned. And this opportunity with the Bureau of Land Management of Headwaters Forest Reserve is one of the few places that the tribe can lean into the trust responsibility that the federal government has towards Native American tribes and support capacity building and also have the tribe's input on what type of management activities take place and what objectives are being sought.

WHEELER:

So this is a unique opportunity, right? So we have a tribal nation that is going to be involved in the management of a federal agency, Marissa from the BLM. Do you, do you want to talk about this ability, this good part, good neighbor partnership, good neighbor authority, good neighbor authority. Thank you, Matt, between the, these two sovereign governments and how this relationship developed.

VOSSMER:

Yeah, so the Good Neighbor Authority allows the BLM to work with tribal entities to manage federal lands and so it was a really good way for us to be able to partner with Wiyot Tribe and collaboratively work on these restoration projects out at Headwaters. And the way it kind of came together was through the bipartisan infrastructure law funding when we received some of that funding for a project at Headwaters that Zane applied for. We needed a way to be able to work with Wiyot on this and so the Good Neighbor Authority allowed us to really seamlessly kind of enter into this agreement to collaboratively manage the land.

WHEELER:

Headwaters. All right. So Headwaters is this great jewel of Humboldt Bay. It has old growth forests that are readily accessible for folks who live in the city of Eureka. It's right in our backyard. It has a unique history to former cut over industrial forest lands. Marissa, from the BLM, can you talk about the condition of Headwaters and the needs for restoration from a forester's perspective, given this unique history of these lands?

VOSSMER:

Yeah, so Headwaters obviously has a lot of really amazing old growth redwood forests, but because of its history with timber and clear cuts, there are a lot of second growth stands that are in need of restoration. So we have a lot of really dense forests that need help getting towards those old growth characteristics that we see in some of the old growth redwood stands. And I think it's about 3,000 acres of Headwaters forests that are these second growth that really don't represent a healthy, a fully healthy forest. There's a lot of trees, there's not a lot of species diversity in the understory. We're not seeing as much diversity as we would see in the old growth stands. And so the goal is really to restore these second growth forests to try and speed up the trajectory towards late successional or old growth characteristics.

WHEELER:

All right, Zane, so our forests are in need of restoration in the headwaters because of this history of industrial timber production. Can you talk about the watersheds that exist in headwaters forest and the ecological life, the salmon and whatnot that are impacted from this same kind of industrial forest history?

RUDDY:

Yeah, so Headwaters got its name because it encompasses the headwaters of Salmon Creek and South Fork Elk River, both Humboldt Bay tribs. So it's, there's a logging history and along with that came a lot of destruction, a lot of movement of soil, a lot of roads, and so the creeks paid the price. That sediment moved downhill and really choked the streams and impacted habitat. And not only that, a lot of the large wood, you can imagine old growth redwood being the main component of the in-stream wood. There historically that was removed and so we've got creeks full of fine sediment and devoid of wood, which makes the fish habitat, gives some places a hide, routes sediment, and there's all sorts of good stuff.

So we're starting at this point in a really degraded state to where the fish habitat is, we call it simple, so just not not very diverse, and that's habitat complexity is really our metric. Just messiness, we need messiness for the fish. They need places to hide, escape predation, and find little slow water areas whenever the the water's ripping through in our flashy systems here. And so we have years and years of wood surveys and pretty much we're losing wood over time. In South Fork Elk, which is our focal coho salmon stream in Headwaters, it's kind of one of the better coho streams on the north coast, and so Headwaters Forest Reserve is primarily for the recovery of listed species, salmonids and spotted owls and marble murrelets, and we were seeing it actually not improving over time. The passive restoration strategy was not working, and so we have coho salmon there, steelhead, maybe a few chinook, and they're hanging on.

They kind of have a low but resilient populations there. We do spawner surveys and keep an eye on their populations, but Headwaters should be the place that they're thriving. It should be the place people go and see what streams and forests can look like if managed well. And so this good neighbor authority, this agreement, and this funding that came along with it is allowing us not just to treat the forest but use a lot of that wood to put into the stream.

And that's where it's awesome to have Marisa at the Wiyot Tribe come in on this because that's what she was doing the years before working for the tribe. She was putting wood in streams with CCC crews, and she's been there, she's done that, so we have expertise at the tribe more than I have in doing these types of projects. So we're using on-site wood to bring back that habitat complexity into the streams, and kind of our assumption there is that if we build it, the populations will come down the line.

WHEELER:

Marisa, from the Wiyot Tribe, perhaps you could talk about your thinking in engaging with this project and the role of the Wiyot Tribe in restoring its ancestral homelands.

MCGREW:

Yeah, so I think, I mean, Zane laid it out really well of that streams need complexity. And to create complexity, you need to insert wood and other features like large boulders. And yeah, South Fork Elk and Headwaters is this perfect area where you can use wood on site to install. And yeah, this creates really sweet habitat for salmonids and lamprey and also just helps the stream like reform its complex channel. And that's, yeah, just really important for historic streams.

MATT SIMMONS:

So this seems like a really great place where the BLM's objectives and the Wiyot Tribe's objectives directly overlap, right? Like they both want to see salmonid restoration. I'm curious that there are places either where the objectives are slightly different or if it's a different perspective on a similar work. I'm just, I'm really curious how the tribe and the BLM come at this work differently. Was that not a good question?

WHEELER:

No, that's a great question. I think that everyone is probably struggling for a good political answer. Zach, maybe I'll force this one on to you.

ERICKSON:

I think you're exactly right. There's, there's a ton of overlap with vision and end goal of, right. Like we're, we're, we're focused here. The focus on Headwaters Torest Reserve just by nature is like Zane touched on is the protection of these listed species, which was kind of the impetus for the, the forest actually being protected in the first place. And I would say that we have not had any conversations between us individually. And like, as coming as federal government employees and Native American sovereign nation employees.

But I will say that there, there is one constriction and that's the existing management plan. And this to really understand the restrictions in the management plan, you kind of have to go back to what Marissa Vossmer was talking about. And it was, how did this forest come to be? And it was through turmoil and crisis that it was created. And I, I don't, I don't want to speak for the BLM on their, their management plan, but they're just, there's just some, there's some things in there that are severely restrictive in what we can and cannot do, for instance, certain stands, you cannot remove any biomass.

So that means that we can't pull off any trees to take to the mill to offset some of the operation costs. Or there's difficulties with prescribed fire or pile burning, or any of these ways that we can mitigate the, the ways that we can mitigate the residue that comes from some of these restoration activities, right, because if we don't want to just move fuel around in the forest, we want to try to get it out if we can. And so there's, I think we're all operating within this management plan and doing the best we can to achieve all these objectives that we inherently agree upon and we all see as the future conditions that we would like to see in the forest.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We're talking about a really cool partnership between the Wiyot Tribe and the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, Headwaters Forest. And we have guests from both the Wiyot Tribe and the BLM. So to kind of summarize a little bit of our earlier conversation, we have, we have a forest that is in need of some sort of love, right? That it had this long history of extractive forestry that have simplified conditions, both in the forest and in the watersheds. So in the forest, we have over dense stands that may not have the kind of species diversity that we would think of for an old growth redwood forest. In our watersheds, we have a lot of streams, chock-a-block full of sediment that were the product of poorly constructed forest roads or other sorts of anthropogenic sediment discharges related to that industrial forest past, as well as kind of a lack of complexity in the in-stream channel, whether that is complex debris, which help form pools that salmon can hide in. So, so it sounds like the job that you are engaged in is adding complexity.

Marissa Vossmer, for, for, for four stands, how do we, how do we go back in and add complexity and what are the BLM together with the Wiyot Tribe trying to do in our forest to bring this back to a better, more resilient forest condition?

VOSSMER:

Yeah, so one of the main ways that we add in complexity and do forest restoration is by increasing heterogeneity. And we do that in a lot of different ways. It's increasing the diversity of different sizes of trees to different age classes, different species of trees, but also in the actual structure of the forest itself. So looking at creating like gaps and vertical and horizontal heterogeneity, and that provides a variety of habitat conditions for plant animal species. And that gets us towards some of that complexity that we would see in old growth or more late successional stands. And one of the ways, there's a lot of different ways that we do this with actual on the ground work. And so like through our partnership, we're really looking at trying to use a variety of different tools.

As Zach was mentioning, there are some restrictions within our current management plan on what exactly we can do. But we're looking at trying to use new equipment to really be able to fine tune these treatments on the landscape and create unique microsite conditions and really just get some of that complexity and heterogeneity back into the stands.

WHEELER:

Okay, what is the kind of scale that we're thinking of when the Wiyot Tribe and the BLM are working on forest restoration? How many acres or what is the way that maybe the public can best think about the scale and size of the work that's being attempted?

ERICKSON:

I mean, we're looking at we're looking at all of it, right? Like this is the tribe's really like the force that they can really have their say in what goes on. And I think as you were speaking, I was like, I don't know, like, how much can I get done during my tenure here and how much can Zane and how much can Marissa get done? But I think one of the great things about working for the tribe is that's not really the scale that we think on, right?

Like we're the tribes here to stay and they're going to be here like seeking to restore and heal this land forever. They're not going anywhere. We may come and go like as settlers and people that moved in, we may come and go and go to different positions, but they're going to be here. And so to answer the question, I would love to see us any any part of that forest that looks like it needs a hand, needs a hand, can benefit from some some help to get pushed on the right track towards old growth conditions and old growth conditions. I think, sure, we're talking about big trees, but we're also talking about the whole community, the wildlife, the understory plants, the fish. It's everything.

And so I'll just say that currently we're kind of looking at a, I would say 50 to 200 acres is kind of what's on the the plate right now for us as far as short term management. And the goals there are to just have some successes to build on. And so what we're trying to do now is not go too big that something it gets way too complicated early on, but we really want to have some good successes that we can we use to build on to do more management and increase that pace and kind of scale of management into the future.

WHEELER:

When thinking about species diversity, I imagine something that is of interest to the Wiyot Tribe is increasing culturally important species on the landscape and setting up conditions for basketry materials or medicines or other culturally important materials to exist and to thrive on this landscape so that Wiyot tribal members can have access to them. Can you talk about forest management as a way to help generate those sorts of materials and roughly the species that maybe the Wiyot Tribe would be interested in seeing an increase of on the landscape? I'll push that to Zach again.

ERICKSON:

So, I mean, every one of these native species is important to the tribe, and I think one important idea in what's so great about what this relationship means is that these, and maybe I'll name a few culturally important plants after this, but just broadly speaking, this might be some of the first times that folks have really tried to center these plants as an objective, right? Oftentimes, these are looked upon as hurdles to overcome, or, oh no, we stumbled across this huckleberry patch that was clearly tended, and now this is a problem for our timber harvest plan or whatever sequoia project you might be having.

So now our focus is that we get to get excited about finding these things. So we'll just say maybe we can use our 20-acre, 10-acre pilot project around the hazel that Marisa McGrew was alluding to earlier, and we found the hazel, and this is a basketry, but it's also a food source for not only Wiyot folks and the community, but also the wildlife. And so we have different plants that are used for different purposes, and I can just say that I know that some of the things that we're focusing on out there currently with the pilot project are the hazel, huckleberry, and we're kind of looking, keeping an eye out for tanoak, which is not something that's often managed for from a commercial perspective that kind of encompasses most of the forested land within Wiyot Tribe ancestral territory.

And so, yeah, and I think an important piece is also access, and that's another reason why we chose this location for the pilot project, is not only are we focusing on the, like, enhancing in the populations or the quality and abundance of these culturally important plant species, but finding and identifying places that elders and folks that may not be able to move around as much can access, that kind of adds a layer of importance to this, and that's why we chose this pilot project. It's because it brings all these together as a potential gathering site of huckleberry, hazel, tanoak, you name it, it's all out there. And so, it's not just that we're focusing on these plants, but we're trying to connect the humans, the people back to the forest. It's not just about, like, this goal of restoring forests, but we're also trying to bring that connection of people to place, and this allows that space for that to happen, which is one of the more exciting parts about this partnership.

SIMMONS:

Well, thanks for sharing that. And I guess if I can just pontificate for a second, something that EPIC gets accused of all the time is not being in favor of any kind of land management, right? Like, just sort of wanting to let the land lie unmanaged. And I think what I always say in response to people who accuse us of that is that we're looking for plans and projects like this that are thoughtful and holistic and looking at the land not just as timber, right? Not just as a economic resource, but as something that can benefit humans, animals, everyone altogether.

And so I guess if any other government agencies are listening and want to work on projects like this, EPIC strongly supports this sort of co-management of our public lands, because I think it's the only way we can really move forward in a good way and to heal the wounds of the past. So thank you for all the work that you guys are doing.

WHEELER:

I'll also say it's really cool to be living in this place that we have so many strong tribal natural resource departments that are engaging in this work. And also to feel like we're on kind of the cutting edge of co-management or good neighbor authorities or, or whatever it is, right? There are partnerships between the forest service and the Yurok Tribe. We have this cool good neighbor authority between the BLM and the Wiyot Tribe. I feel like it's neat to be setting an example of how we can kind of respect restore the land and also restore some sort of....

SIMMONS:

National and state parks with the Yurok Tribe as well.

WHEELER:

National and state parks. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but it, it, it's like, it's like a larger restoration to it. It's kind of a healing of the land and healing of peoples in some respect. Marissa, can you talk about the work of trying to heal watershed? So we've spent a good amount of time talking about hazel and forest and, and terrestrial ecosystems. But can you talk about the, the work for, how do we make, how do we make the headwaters of Headwaters whole again?

MCGREW:

Yeah, I think Headwaters is such a special place to do this work because if anyone lives in Arcata or Eureka or even McKinleyville, this is a relatively close place for people to drive or bike out to or whatever. And you can walk through a beautiful forest, you can eventually make it to Old Growth Forest, and you can also walk along a stream that hosts Coho and Steelhead and Lamprey and sometimes Chinook. And I think being able to witness those fish in action and in their place is such a special opportunity. And I think Zane said this one day when we were out there, it's like, you can probably just sit and watch an individual fish or a pair of fish for hours and just learn so much from those couple of hours of watching those couple of fish. And this is a place where you can do that really easily. So yeah, I think in addition to the physical restoration of watersheds, there's also the restoration of reconnecting community and people to these watersheds and to their land, like Zach was saying. Yeah, I don't know if that answered the question, but that's kind of what I immediately thought of.

WHEELER:

Sure. And Matt has something else that he wants to get in before the end.

SIMMONS:

This might be a good sort of final question. I'm curious if there's anything members of the public can do to support this work or to learn more. I think the last time I was in Headwaters, I saw a little informational sign about it, so that's great, but I'm just curious what folks listening who are really excited by this can do.

RUDDY:

This is Zane. I'll just say, I just encourage folks to make this a place that you come check in on and watch things change. After those big storms this winter, things got turned upside down. We put in a couple hundred trees in the last few years along the trail. And after that storm, you got to see how much power, how much wood moves, how dynamic these creeks really are. And so make it a place that you go back and check in on.

And if you see something interesting, let us know. If you have any questions or concerns, reach out to us. We're always happy to meet you out there and go for a walk. We do host some guided tours every once in a while for salmon or forestry. So look out for that. Typically they're posted on Facebook, but a lot of the work that's going to be done is going to be out of sight from the public view up in the tip top and headwaters. So it'll be up to BLM and the tribe to share the good news in the ways that we can.

But I just encourage folks to adopt Headwaters as, your South Fork Elk there, as your stream that you can check in on, just learn from observation. And if you see anything, let us know because we're lean and mean. We don't have eyes out there all the time and the public tips us off all the time about changes, landslides, giant trees falling in. But yeah, just get out there, observe it. The wintertime, sorry, I have to put this in, wintertime is when these creeks come alive. And that's a lot of time when people don't go out there. Summer, foot traffic picks up. But winter is exciting. You see the power of the stream. You see the fish spawning. So after a few days after a storm, get out there and see these awesome salmon spawning. It'll change your life.

WHEELER:

Well, thank you all. And, and an individual, thank you for myself, as Matt said, this is like, this is what we want to see from our, our federal lands, right? This is the sort of cool, cool, cool projects, but also cool partnerships that are inspiring to us as, as individuals and inspiring to us as Epic as well. So I want to thank you for, for all of your work in getting this established and for, for seeing this through. It's very cool. And thank you also for joining the show and talking about the work as well. So thank you. Thank you to Marisa and Marissa and Zach and Zane. It's kind of a weird coincidence in very similar names. And thank you listeners for, for joining us for this episode and join us again next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.