On October 10, 1991 arsonists ignited the Warner Creek Fire in the Cornpatch Inventoried Roadless Area on the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. This site was part of a large Habitat Conservation Area (HCA) for the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), an area where further commercial logging was supposed to be prohibited. In response to the first large wildfire to burn inside the newly-created HCAs, the Forest Service reacted with a "Fire Recovery Project" that proposed salvage logging 40 million board feet of trees across 1,200 acres. The agency's rationale was that severely burned stands no longer provided suitable habitat for spotted owls; moreover, the numerous fire-created snags and logs posed a threat of spreading another "catastrophic wildfire" into adjacent unburned owl habitat stands.

At that time, a fire salvage timber sale had never been seriously challenged before, but the agency's arson-salvage plan threatened all other HCAs by providing an incentive for copycat light it-and-log it schemes. Thus, the Warner Salvage Sale sparked a firestorm of controversy among conservationists. Part of the resistance included a group of citizen-scientists who proposed the Warner Burn as a fire ecology Research Natural Area (RNA). The RNA proposal effectively subverted the agency's salvage logging EIS, and inspired a year-long road blockade in which nonviolent activists braved the Cascadian winter snows to keep the salvage saws out of marked clearcut units.

In the face of this uncompromising activist opposition and a nationwide outcry over the Salvage Rider, the Warner Salvage Sale was withdrawn by presidential decree in 1996 and relegated to the ash heap of history. Now the Warner Burn stands on the brink of permanent protection as the nation's first RNA devoted to fire disturbance and recovery processes. In reviewing some of the history of the struggle to save the Warner Burn from salvage logging, we offer some valuable lessons and a new strategy for protecting fire-affected roadless wildlands.

THE WARNER CREEK FIRE

Arsonists ignited the Warner Creek Fire at the end of a long drought when fuel moistures were at record-breaking low levels, and not a cloud was in the sky. The fire was set at the end of a logging road at the bottom of the steep, south-facing slope of Bunchgrass Ridge. Over 2,500 firefighters and an armada of tankers, dozers, bombers, and helicopters battled the blaze for ten grueling days, at a total cost of $11,000,000. One afternoon the wildfire surged across 3,000 acres in a tsunami of flame that left towering Douglas-fir and Western hemlock trees charred black from ground to crown. When a heavy snowfall finally put out the flames, the perimeter contained nearly 14 square miles of public wildlands, making the Warner Creek Fire the second largest and costliest wildfire in the history of the Willamette National Forest.

Warner Creek was the first large wildfire to occur inside the newly-created HCAs, and raised important, ongoing issues concerning the need for proper fire management planning and appropriate suppression responses for sensitive areas such as spotted owl nest groves and roadless areas. Even though resource advisors were assigned to flag spotted owl activity centers and offer tips on "light-hand" firefighting, the lack of an adequate pre-fire plan led to crisis-decisionmaking that resulted in significant environmental impacts. For example, planes dropped retardant chemicals in streams, timber fallers dropped dozens of trees along a scenic hiking trail, a mile-long dozerline was plowed deep inside the Roadless Area, and hundreds of gallons of flaming diesal fuel were spilled to light backfires which accounted for an estimated one-third of the total burned acreage. Fortunately, resource advisors talked the fire boss out of running a bulldozer through the Black Creek bog. Years later, university scientists discovered that the bog has a near-perfect record of natural charcoal and pollen deposits going back several millennia, and now represents a vital "anchor point" for paleoecological research to reconstruct the area's fire and vegetation history. This research site would have been ruined had the bulldozer run its course. Consequently, one of the major objectives that prompted the Warner RNA proposal was to develop a fire management plan that would prevent future firefighting impacts by managing most ignitions as prescribed fires. If and when suppression would be necessary, only minimal impact suppression techniques (MIST) would be permitted, and some tactics (e.g. bulldozers in bogs) would be explicitly prohibited.

FIRE EFFECTS ON SPOTTED OWLS AND OWL HABITAT

Although it was ignited and spread by unnatural human sources-- arsonists and firefighters--the effects of the Warner Creek Fire resulted in a classic landscape mosaic pattern that mimicked the natural fire regime of the westside middle Oregon Cascades. Nine spotted owl core habitat activity centers were located within the Burn, and from aerial surveys the agency determined that 2,060 acres of spotted owl habitat was severely burned. The Forest Service described these stands as "not currently considered" suitable habitat, which fueled suspicions among conservationists who wondered whether this definition of unsuitability was a political decision (i.e. refusal to consider), a scientific uncertainty (i.e. not currently known), or an ecological fact. Most troubling for timber managers eager to get the salvage cut out was the fact that all the resident owls continued to inhabit and successfully reproduce in the Warner Burn. The agency was forced to admit that there was little information available on how wildfire affects suitable spotted owl habitat and habitat recovery since the agency had systematically salvage logged nearly all burned owl habitat stands located outside of designated Wilderness.

Beyond the mystery surrounding the spotted owls' continued inhabitation, the vegetative response was truly astounding. Natural tree regeneration ranged from 18,000 to 530,000 seedlings per hectare, and elk herds and woodpeckers flocked to the Burn. In the face of this remarkable natural recovery of native flora and fauna that environmentalists hailed as a "miracle of Nature," the Forest Service had a difficult time justifying to the public their need to do any kind of managed recovery. Indeed, the native biodiversity that continues to thrive in the Warner Creek burn makes a convincing case for selecting the "No Action" alternative in other Forest Service fire recovery projects.

THE WARNER FIRE RECOVERY PROJECT

The agency's stated purpose and need for the fire recovery project was twofold: to recover spotted owl habitat affected by the wildfire, and to increase knowledge about owl habitat and owl habitat recovery. Since all hitherto existing owl habitat was produced by natural processes that took centuries to unfold, and most occupied owl nest sites showed evidence of past fires, a fundamental question was raised as to what--if anything--could (or should) human beings do to "recover" burned owl habitat. The Forest Service opened the door to intensive management by simply defining recovery as "protection from future large-scale fire disturbances." Thus, the agency proposed salvage clearcutting to reduce heavy fuel loads and construct fuelbreaks in order to (and I quote) "lower the Resistance to Control." Historically, the Warner Fire Recovery Project was one of the first timber sales of the 1990s to use the now-prevalent rationale of logging-for-firefighting. Agency managers hardly caught the irony of proposing new commercial logging as a "recovery tool" for a species threatened with extinction by the effects of past commercial logging, or the irony of advocating wildfire protection for a place that had already burned.

ALTERNATIVE EF: ECOLOGY OF FIRE

Conservationists were shocked but not surprised at the agency's 1992 Draft recovery plan to log 40 million board feet of trees from 1,200 acres of the Roadless Area. In response to the Draft EIS, a group of citizen-scientists drafted their own alternative recovery plan which they called "Alternative EF: Ecology of Fire." Alternative EF proposed managing the entire Warner Burn for research and restoration of natural fire recovery processes, with the goal of establishing a fire ecology RNA sometime in the near future. Dubbed the "Know Action" alternative, it had to distinguish itself from the agency's No Action alternative by proposing various management activities to facilitate wildfire protection, owl habitat research, and ecosystem restoration.

Alternative EF strove to subvert the agency's fuelbreak strategy by means of "eco-aikido," redirecting the agency's theme of wildfire protection by steering it into fire restoration rather than fire exclusion. Thus, instead of clearcutting 250 foot wide fuelbreaks to aid standard firefighting operations, Alternative EF proposed creating a ridgeline trail system to provide access for prescribed underburning, natural fire monitoring, ecological field research, and if necessary, firefighters applying MIST. The main strategy of Alternative EF was to research habitat development and restore fire processes as the primary means of recovering and protecting owl habitat.

The authors of Alternative EF solicited input and endorsements from prestigious scientists throughout the Pacific Northwest, many of whom wrote personal letters to the Forest Service encouraging the inclusion of Alternative EF into the Recovery Project. Hundreds of citizens toured the Warner Burn on weekend fire ecology hikes and annual field conferences organized by the Cascadia Fire Ecology Education Project, and sent in a steady stream of supportive letters long after the official comment period had ended. The student governments of Oregon's two largest universities passed official resolutions in favor of Alternative EF and sent these to Forest Service Chief, Jack Ward Thomas. Then, the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station determined that the Warner Burn had high potential as an RNA. Finally, inspired by the Warner Creek Fire and Alternative EF, the Oregon Natural Heritage Advisory Board recommended a new kind of RNA devoted to natural landscape disturbances and dynamic successional processes.

After months of lobbying at different levels of the Forest Service and the Clinton Administration, the Willamette finally relented and allowed Alternative EF to be fully developed, analyzed, and published in the Final EIS. Conservationists took great delight in seeing the letters "EF" (no exclamation point) appear hundreds of times in the Final EIS. Knowing the widespread popularity among the research community (including Forest Service scientists) for Alternative EF's RNA strategy, the Willamette Forest Supervisor included a 4,200 acre "Natural Succession Area" in his final recovery plan. This "NSA" was allegedly set aside for possible future designation as an RNA; however, it was going to be surrounded by salvage clearcuts and sliced up into six sections by fuelbreaks. Fortunately, neither scientists nor conservationists were fooled by the token green blob plopped in the middle of the agency's salvage logging map.

Three separate times over the course of four years the Warner Salvage Sale was thwarted, and in a case of "three strikes and you're out," the Willamette National Forest has recently declared that due to public demand (an understatement) it has no intention of logging inside the Warner Burn in the foreseeable future. The Warner Fire Recovery Project has essentially been abandoned, and into this management void, the citizen-scientists' RNA proposal has been given renewed hope and opportunity.

THE WARNER FIRE PROCESS RNA PROPOSAL

The average size of elemental RNAs is 700 acres, but in the westside Cascades, fire patterns, processes, and frequencies occur at vast spatiotemporal scales; therefore a fire process RNA requires a much larger landbase. Unfettered by the former Recovery Project which restricted management ideas to the area within the wildfire perimeter, a new, expansive RNA proposal was formally submitted to the Pacific Northwest Research Station in fall, 1997. Known as the "W.A.R.N.E.R." proposal, it uses conservation biology principles to link together five Inventoried Roadless Areas and associated wildlands into a 44,000 acre RNA that would directly adjoin two Wilderness Areas comprising 336,00 acres. At the core of the fire process RNA is the Warner Burn. It is one of the rarest forest landscapes in the Cascadia bioregion: a largely unmanaged, roadless, mid-elevation, recently-burned landscape containing both young natural stands and high-mortality old-growth stands. The relatively large area of the Burn (and its larger fire process RNA proposal) includes a diversity of environmental, vegetational, and disturbance intensity gradients, making it conducive to a broad variety of research projects.

As vital as it is to protect the entire 8,900 acre Warner Burn, it is also important to protect an equal or greater amount of adjacent unburned land for comparative studies, and replicated research sites with data sets needed for valid statistical analyses. In addition to the need for a large territory, a fire process RNA must have its boundaries determined by topographic features such as ridgelines, talus slopes, creek beds, or even existing roads, so that future fires may be confined without the need for aggressive suppression. Aggressive firefighting of the sort waged during the Warner Creek Fire could adversely impact research sites. Fortunately, the Wilderness Areas along the Cascade Crest recently developed a natural prescribed fire program, and this should dovetail nicely with the Warner RNA's fire research-restoration management plan. Moreover, the appropriate use of management-ignited prescribed fires to create more defensible boundaries should also be considered in the design of this RNA, since this could serve both research and restoration goals.

TIME TO LEARN FROM THE BURN

The size and scope of the Warner RNA proposal has revealed some paradoxes that could pose challenges to reaching consensus among land managers, fire scientists, and forest conservationists. For example, most of the Warner Burn is now a Late-Successional Reserve (LSR) under the Northwest Forest Plan; however, the Forest Service currently manages all LSRs as total fire exclusion zones. The Warner Fire Process RNA may necessitate a modification of this policy in this LSR. Recurring low-intensity fires may enhance the development of habitat structures and multi-storied canopies favored by spotted owls, but another high-intensity fire may retard spotted owl habitat development. This issue raises the prospect that fire imposes some tradeoffs between scientific and conservation goals for the RNA.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Warner RNA proposal is the fact that the area has been impacted by logging roads and plantations, and an RNA would affect land-use allocations for future timber extraction. The Oregon Natural Heritage Advisory Board determined that if 10% or less of the reserve's landbase has been affected by past management, then the research and ecological values are still valid for a fire process RNA. The 28 plantations that were utterly consumed by the Warner Creek Fire attest to the fact that fire is marvelously effective at rewilding places, but old roads and clearcuts may affect the pattern and process of some fire events, and thus may impact scientific data. An idea worth exploring is whether or not restoration activities such as road obliteration, noncommercial thinning of plantations, and prescribed underburning are suitable "research" activities within an RNA. Another idea intended to make the RNA more politically palatable is whether or not special buffer zones for limited commercial extraction of firewood and special forest products (e.g. mushrooms) would be acceptable.

Conservation objectives for the Warner Burn have evolved beyond the focus on a single endangered species to include protection for a whole array of native flora and fauna and their ecological relationships with fire processes. In the absence of any formal protection, the Burn continues to be a center of research and educational activities. Nearly 100 study plots have already been established by Forest Service ecologists and students from Oregon State University, the Cascade Science School, and the Northwest Youth Corps. Guided fire ecology hikes occur on a monthly basis, with people witnessing with their own eyes the incredible beauty and bounty of life in the Burn. Indeed, numerous first-time visitors often undergo a dramatic "Gestalt switch" whereby they suddenly perceive forest fires as agents of rebirth and renewal rather than simply death and destruction. These research and educational activities continue with the anticipation that formal RNA protection will be forthcoming, allowing future generations an equal or better opportunity to "learn from the Burn".

STRATEGIC RNA PROPOSALS AS TRAILBLAZING CONSERVATION TOOLS

Inspired by the remarkable success of the citizen-scientist RNA proposal for the Warner Fire Recovery Project, there is growing interest among conservationists to use develop RNA proposals in order to protect fire-affected roadless wildlands threatened by massive salvage logging sales. Most RNA proposals have been declared "dead on arrival" at the decisionmaker's desk, with the pat response that they are "outside the scope" of the given fire recovery project. This happened to Alternative EF, too, but a small group of grassroots organizers mobilized an alliance of scientists, educators, students, conservationists, and sympathetic employees from the Forest Service and other land management agencies to push for inclusion of the RNA alternative in the Final EIS. Some scientists nervous about engaging in "lobbying" of the agency or administration were won over by the activists' argument that given the government's attempts to politicize science, it was time for scientists to get political! If anything, scientists need to stand up and speak out for their own interests in scientific research, making themselves a new kind of "user group" (to speak the agency's language) in need of unmanaged landscapes.

Likewise, Earth First! activists who had long careers protesting against the Forest Service were convinced to work collaboratively with agency resource specialists to design fire prescriptions for Alternative EF. In developing and using RNA proposals as a successful rather than merely symbolic conservationist tool, one must be prepared to engage in similar organizing and collaborative work with non-traditional allies. The RNA proposal was the vehicle used to fuse an alliance between the research and conservation communities, and was a major factor in the successful campaign that stopped the salvage sale even during the lawless Salvage Rider.

RNA proposals have much appeal to people because the idea of protecting land in perpetuity as a living learning center for ecological research and ecosystem restoration is a far more compelling, progressive vision than typical run-of-the-mill salvage timber sales. Conservationists can make several valid scientifically-based arguments: RNAs are reservoirs of biological and genetic diversity, refugias for S,T,E species, control areas for comparing with quasi-experimental intensive management treatments elsewhere, and benchmarks for measuring broad environmental change. But there are also vital socioeconomic reasons why RNA proposals are attractive to a wide spectrum of people. Whereas the precise quantity of salvage logging and milling jobs can be fairly predicted, these jobs are finite in number and duration. On the other hand, there is almost no limit to the number and duration of direct employment opportunities for researchers, educators, restorationists, and managers over the next century or two managing the RNA.

Of course, these jobs would not be funded through commodity resource extraction but rather through appropriated funds, grants, endowments, and other similar sources. To the question, "where will this money come from?" the response should be, "where it is going to." Deficit timber sales, wildland fire suppression, military adventurism, and a host of corporate welfare scams waste federal funds that could instead go to research and restoration projects. But it should be understood that RNAs are an investment in knowledge creation that the present generation gives to future generations. The "payoff" of such knowledge may not be quantifiable in dollars, but who can predict what would be the socioeconomic benefits if that elusive secret to forest ecosystem sustainability with natural fire disturbances is discovered?

Finally, the concept of RNAs protecting ecosystem processes more accurately reflects current ecological science, and rectifies the conservationists' dilemma of advocating for "preservation" of dynamic, continually evolving landscapes. Process RNAs provide for the Land's needs following past/present disturbances, and prepares society to welcome rather than fear future natural disturbances. However, the Warner Fire Process RNA alone will not provide all we need to learn about fire disturbance and recovery processes in forest ecosystems; instead, we need a network of similar process RNAs for all natural disturbance mechanisms (e.g. floods, windstorms, insects and diseases, etc.) distributed in all ecoregions across the continent. Those roadless wildlands affected by these natural disturbances should be studied, not "salvaged" or "sanitized" with commercial logging and roads.

We believe that the RNA strategy fits well into the goals of the Wildlands Project for protecting and rewilding landscapes. Importantly, RNAs and Wilderness are not mutually-exclusive; indeed, some Wilderness areas presently contain RNAs. In some places it may be more politically feasible to propose an RNA because Wilderness designation requires an act of Congress, while RNA establishment merely needs the stroke of a Regional Forester's pen. The potential socioeconomic benefits of managing RNAs may also provide effective arguments for people normally unswayed by ecocentric reasons for Land protection.

With citizen-initiated fire process RNA proposals, conservationists now have another tool for advocating wildlands protection, particularly for recently burned or fire-prone landscapes. Fire process RNA proposals give people a positive alternative management plan for so-called "fire recovery" projects that avoids the false choice between salvage logging and No Action. When the stakes are framed as science vs. salvage, or students vs. stumps, we discovered a powerful new alliance can be built between the research and conservation communities that is capable of saving burned forests from the salvage saws.