Medford, Oregon — Deep in the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon, crews head to new heights to harvest a valuable commodity.
“We look for the mature cones at the top of the tree,” said Brian Kittler, Resilient Forests program manager at the nonprofit conservation group American Forests.
Using lift operators and climbers, Kittler and his team showed CBS News how his team hunts pine cones.
“The more forests we lose, the more we lose our clean air and our clean water, our ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere and fight climate change,” Kittler said.
The threat comes from the unprecedented type of mega-fires in the West which, fueled by climate changehave destroyed more than 33 million acres since 2020, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. It’s about the size of the state of Arkansas.
If nothing is done to restore a forest after a wildfire, a vicious cycle begins. Fewer surviving trees means fewer pine cones that humans can pick and plant. That’s what happened in the Fremont-Winema National Forest during the Barry Point Fire in 2012, Kittler said.
“There are virtually no living trees and there is no natural regeneration,” Kittler said.
Once the pine cones are collected, they are taken to a network of nurseries, where the seeds are extracted and transformed into seedlings. One million seedlings will plant approximately 4,500 acres of new forest.
But the program alone isn’t enough to restore the forest, said Brian Reatini, a geneticist with the U.S. Forest Service. He says they’re short about 200,000 acres – and that’s just part of Oregon.
A warming environment also means fewer seedlings are likely to reach maturity, which takes about 20 years.
“The weather has become much more arid, hotter and drier. One of the consequences of that is that it can push trees to the limit of what they can physiologically tolerate,” Reatini said.
To help combat this problem, they source their seeds from more “drought tolerant” tree species.
Demand for inventory now requires all hands on deck. Logging companies like Collins Pine help the Forest Service procure pine cones and clear burned land for replanting.
“Fire, ecology, insects and disease – it doesn’t care about property lines. So if we are able to replant our small block of land, but we are surrounded by untreated and burned forest land , it will eventually become a brush field and it will burn again and threaten our lands again,” said Galen Smith, the company’s vice president of resources.
Neighbors are helping neighbors in a program the Forest Service hopes to expand to other affected states.
Looking at the seedlings, Kittler said he sees “the forests that will be passed through by our children and our children’s children.”
Jonathan Vigliotti
