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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Residents of rural logging communities like Hayfork, Calif., hoped the Bush administration's fuel-reduction plan would help them escape poverty. But as Bush slashes economic assistance programs and turns to Big Timber to do the work, their dreams are going up in smoke.
Jul 27, 2004 | In the Hayfork Watershed Research and Training Center a wall is devoted to monitoring the socioeconomic health of the town's 1,800 residents. The numbers are not pretty: 80 percent of the town's kids use the free breakfast and lunch programs at school; 24 percent of the community is unemployed; rising numbers of families are requesting food stamps. The soup kitchen and free showers aren't quantifiable, but everyone knows where to find them.
For generations logging was the economic engine of Hayfork, Calif., but the days of pulling big trees out of the forest are gone. Regular paychecks are few and far between, and people hang on by stringing together odd jobs and piecemeal work. Many members of the younger generation have moved to urban areas to find work. The biggest emerging industry in Hayfork is signaled by a surge in the number of methamphetamine labs. Every year for the past decade the economic news has grown worse: fewer signs for meaningful, long-term work; more kids in poverty.
The town of Hayfork, which sits in the middle of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest 200 miles north of San Francisco, is similar to thousands of other rural communities in the West that have faced economic crisis over the past decade. Like all other communities situated next to the forest, Hayfork also faces the threat of wildfire every summer and fall. But, paradoxically, fire and a planned shift to forest-restoration-based jobs sparked a ray of economic hope for the town. In 1989, in a move to help rural logging communities become self-sufficient, the first Bush administration created the Economic Action Program. New wood-products industries got money for retraining, technical assistance and marketing so that communities could use smaller, historically "lower-value" trees. Furniture, wood floors and biomass energy were among the fledgling cottage industries, with forest conservation and economic stability the prevailing goal. Along with fire-prevention plans such as an effort at comprehensive fuel reduction in forests, the new industry of forest restoration promised the chance of a livelihood.
But the second Bush administration has undone the work of the first. Even as it has touted its Healthy Forests Restoration Act, billed as a way to reduce wildfires by returning forests to their natural, healthy state, Bush has been wielding a budget-cutting ax. In 2001, the Bush administration slashed EAP funding to the bone. In the three years since, Congress returned some EAP money to the budget, but in 2004 rural communities lost all EAP funding. Hayfork struggled even when it had grants; without them it is teetering on disaster.
Rural forest communities in the West have long held to conservative principles, and Bush has counted them as one of his key constituencies. But that base, estimated by the Western Governors' Association to number over 11,000 communities, is eroding as he cold-shoulders small towns in favor of big business in the growing debate over how to save our national forests. Communities like Hayfork expected to be included in the planning for forest restoration and to receive economic benefits resulting from legislation like the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. But so far the promises of the bill, like the winds that blow ahead of forest fires, have amounted to little more than hot air.
