In August, we hosted two separate field tours – one for state legislators and one for media – of beetle impacted areas in Summit County. We brought in scientific, firefighting and forest products industry experts to tell their sides of the story, and by many accounts the events were very successful. In a third event in October, we organized a fly-over tour of the northern Front Range and portions of the West Slope to look at forest and watershed issues with state and local legislators.

What has begun to emerge is not just agreement about the issue of protecting homes from fire, but about the importance of prioritizing our actions on those areas that need it most. Contrary to what some initially assume, much of the work that needs to be done is on private land, not public forests. Based on a recent mapping exercise for a 10-county area in northern Colorado, roughly two-thirds of these wildland-urban interface areas within a half-mile of homes and infrastructure are on private land. Local governments like Summit County are working to make resources available to interested homeowners to help defray the costs of creating defensible space, and hopefully other jurisdictions will follow suit. Several laws also emerged from the Colorado Legislature in 2007 that offered funding or mechanisms to raise funds to address wildfire risk.

By many accounts it has been a successful year of bringing stakeholders together, building a common understanding of the issues, and agreeing on appropriate responses. The hurdle yet to overcome is convincing the U.S. Forest Service to implement these community-based priorities, and to focus its logging and other fuels reduction efforts around homes and communities. Colorado Wild’s Forest Watch Campaign continues to fight the worst abuses, where the cash-strapped Forest Service continues to use scarce taxpayer dollars to propose logging far from communities or infrastructure, where it will do nothing to reduce wildfire danger.