There’s nothing like inviting company over to make you look around and realize that your house is a mess. That’s not unlike the ripples emanating from the Oregon State Forestry Board’s visit to Grant County last month. Most local folks already were aware of the messy condition of our region’s forests. Still, the gathering of state, federal and local officials served to clarify a few issues about the way we’re cleaning up the mess.

Issue one: The planning and preparation of timber sales in Eastern Oregon is underfunded, and at times fails to take into account economic feasibility. It’s become understood that our mills and timber industry must survive if we are to accomplish the clean-up required in our forests. Yet, the testimony before the Forestry Board suggested that some of the timber projects offered up these days don’t always reflect that economic need.

Participants in the November meeting cited some examples. One project on the Malheur wasn’t economically viable for the simple lack of two trees at least 17-inch- diameter per acre. Just two trees per acre. Does that make sense?

Further, does it make sense to have agency staff laboring to prepare timber sales that go unsold because the volume, quality or type of timber simply doesn’t pencil out for the commercial market?

Issue two: The current emphasis on collaboration, while well meaning, may not be vast enough or fast enough to do the job.

Collaborative efforts in the past couple of years have brought unprecedented cooperation between former foes. Ochoco Lumber’s John Shelk quipped that it hasn’t been that long since he and Tim Lillebo, of the Oregon Wild conservation group, would have come to blows over timber issues. Today they are able to find points of agreement on the forest floor and at the conference table through the collaboration process.

Both spoke of their willingness to push ahead with collaborative efforts. “Collaboration allows a project to go forward,” Shelk noted.

However, they and others also acknowledge the drawbacks – that collaboration is cumbersome and time-consuming. Additional concerns voiced at the meeting: The parties in our local collaboration have been working without a firm deadline, raising the specter that the talks could go on forever, and they have allowed the most litigious folks in the group to control the schedule. Forestry Board members suggested that both of those practices should end, and they are right.

However, an even greater challenge to collaboration has no easy solution. The problem is that the projects in the works are dwarfed by the need – and the participants know it.

“I believe we have hundreds of thousands of acres out there that could use active restoration management,” Lillebo noted.

State Sen. Ted Ferrioli worries that, with high fuel loads and a warming climate, the overstocked forests of Eastern Oregon’s Iron Triangle will burn to the ground during the next several decades. He said we aren’t treating enough land, fast enough.

Advocates of collaboration acknowledge that they are working against the clock. They hope that each smaller project – like Dads Creek or Damon Scotty – will build a workable base for larger, landscape-scale restoration work.

We hope so, too. Otherwise, these small projects may evoke the old saw: The surgery was a success but the patient died. The participants should push on with the collaboration process, fine-tuning it as they go, watching the clock and keeping the focus on dual goals: restoring the health of our forests and our communities.