FOC's "Jobs in the Woods" Program

Framing Our Community's "Jobs in the Woods" Program creates educational

opportunities and full-time jobs in the fields of Hazardous Fuels Reduction and

Forest/Watershed Restoration. Natural Resource Professionals, unemployed timber

workers and college students learn how to effect treatments that restore our national

forest to health or how to create defensible space on private lands. Where possible, this

is accomplished with the use of low impact equipment that creates the least amount of

soil and vegetative disturbance in less time and at a low cost per acre. They also learn

turn of the century skills, like dry stone masonry, to effect erosion control on wilderness

trails and methods to improve wildlife and anadromous fish habitat.

In the last century, our surrounding forests - which consist primarily of 80-year-old lodge

pole pine, as well as other softwoods have fallen on hard times. Timber harvests have

been largely curtailed by the elimination of logging in the national forests while our

lodgepole pine has reached its maturity: now, those lodgepole pines are dying of old

age as well as by attacks of the mountain pine beetle. There is increasing fire danger

from dead timber and the forest has become more unhealthy each year. The result of all

this has been a severe decline in the physical and economic health of the region.
Framing Our Community has created an integrated process of vital and innovative

projects that can be shared with other natural resource-based communities. Sustainable

Northwest's "Healthy Forest Healthy Partnership," the University of Idaho's Community

Development Institute, twelve economic development centers funded by the Idaho

Department of Commerce and public forums allow FOC to share lessons learned

throughout the Pacific and Inland Northwest region. Without initiatives like these,

opportunities for rural communities to break the cycle of poverty, their dependence on

outside resources and the depletion of natural capital will be missed.

To conduct projects on federally managed lands, FOC has entered into multi-year

Agreements with the U.S. Forest Service, Nez Perce National Forest and Bureau of

Land Management, Cottonwood Field Office. Together we are developing models for

fuels reduction and restoration of federally managed forest lands that suffer from high

fuel loads, an over-crowded understory, extensive insect infestation and deteriorated

watersheds. Partnering with the Nez Perce Tribe and the Montana Conservation Corps,

an Americorp program, allows tribal members, graduate and undergraduate students

gain practical skills, share knowledge, and acquire scholarship money while working

with FOC on restoration and fuels reduction projects.

We have the opportunity to "Teach New Tools for New Times" while restoring our

national forests to health and creating secondary products that add value to wood that

was once thought to have little or no value. Through our forest restoration retraining

program we expect to restore habitat, mitigate forest and watershed deterioration, train

displaced workers in methods of forestry that create the least disturbance, study new

methods of extraction and develop new equipment. We will monitor and assess projects

to gather data and improve the processes used. This will create jobs and give small

independent business owners the new tools and skills they need to become prosperous

again.

We invite anyone interested in our "JITW"s program to contact us, help develop

projects, collect data or monitor outcomes and even come "get their hands dirty." Our

2005 projects include defensible space projects on federal and private lands, pacific

salmon recovery and a large woody debris, fish habitat enhancement project.