About
History of Lomakatsi Restoration Project
The Lomakatsi Restoration Project (LRP) is grass-roots 501 (3) c non-profit organization dedicated to organizing communities to participate in the rehabilitation and regeneration of the watersheds within the greater Klamath/Siskiyou bioregion of southwestern Oregon. Lomakatsi was founded in 1995 by a group of experienced tree-planters, activists, community organizers, educators, and restoration forestry technicians, who together combined over 20 years of experience working in the field of restoration, education, and social change.
Lomakatsi is a Hopi word that means ‘Life in Balance’. Since its inception, Lomakatsi has been on-the-ground, involving communities in demonstrating a new standard of pro-active, ecologically-based restoration forestry that aids in healing impacted ecosystems. Lomakatsi employs a comprehensive approach to protecting and restoring biodiversity that leans heavily on organizing and involving local community members in ways that will have long-term impact.
Lomakatsi’s dedicated staff and board combine the use of grants, donations, and volunteerism to create projects that train and empower local residents to participate in rehabilitating the land base where they live. Through these programs, Lomakatsi assists communities in demonstrating important examples of the environmentally sensitive approach to land stewardship and restoration forestry that is acceptable to them, people of the land itself. During the past seven years, LRP has worked on over 150 restoration projects on private land, including streamside revegetation, landslide stabilization, habitat improvement, native grass re-seeding, tree planting, native plant propagation, ecologically based fuel load reduction, and restoration workforce training programs.
Lomakatsi’s work is guided by its “Ecological Principles for Fuels Load Reduction and Tree Planting” (attached). These principles are a simply stated outline of basic restoration concepts that serve as an important tool for educating landowners, and for establishing common ground for activities that will alter, yet benefit, the health and condition of forests and watershed areas.
In response to the wildfires of recent summers, private landowners as well as federal land management agencies and programs have propelled fire-hazard-reduction to the national forefront. With the advent of ‘The National Fire Plan’, and other programs, millions of dollars are now available to agencies and communities for ‘thinning’ the forests to prevent intensive wildfires.
The instinctive desire to protect homes and property from wildfire is a driving force for almost everyone, yet in their own back yards, most landowners do not want fuels reduction to entail the removal of large trees or the disturbance of wildlife habitat. The guidelines of the Ecological Principles for Fuel Load Reduction clearly distinguish Lomakatsi’s work from other thinning practices, which often remove the largest trees for economic and commercial gain.
During the past four years, Lomakatsi received a series of small grants from the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters, the McKenzie River Foundation, and the Ashland Community Food Store, to develop its ecological principles as a pilot project for a ‘restoration workforce training program’. This important seed money built the notoriety of Lomakatsi’s work and community-oriented approach, and prepared it for the larger ecological-workforce training grant it received from the National Fire Plan.
In 2001-2002, Lomakatsi received National Fire Plan funding to conduct its “Multi-Regional Fuels Reduction Workforce Training Program”, which was implemented in Williams, Cave Junction, and the Wildcat Canyon area near Ashland, Oregon. Through this project, Lomakatsi’s restoration forestry technicians trained a core-group of workers in each community in the careful, ecologically sensitive methods of thinning fuels that are vastly appreciated by a wide array of landholders and concerned citizens. Lomakatsi involved community members, environmental groups, landowners, and federal land management agencies in demonstrating the thinning practices and outcomes that are regionally hailed as the new frontier in creating partnerships for restoring forest health and fire-resiliency across southwestern Oregon.
Education and research are huge factors in understanding area ecology. Scientific and historic references point to the fact that southwestern Oregon evolved as a fire-dependant ecosystem over thousands of years. Fires were not only ignited by lightening, the indigenous tribal peoples of the area also used fire as a land management tool across the region. Purposeful controlled burning and moderate intensity fire were historically used by local Native Americans to stimulate the re-growth of important cultural materials, to clear brush for easier hunting and travel, to re-stimulate browse for wildlife, and to cycle nutrients into soils to benefit forest health. Unfortunately, the indigenous peoples were removed from the land they cared for, before any settlers could fathom their intrinsic place and value in a system of historically successful land maintenance and stewardship practices.
Lomakatsi uses this historic and scientific support of Native American traditional ecological knowledge as a reference point to indicate the ultimate conditions for restoring fire to its place in the natural cycle of balanced ecosystem functions. But this cannot be achieved without decades of intensive education, strenuous labor, and strong dedication from peoples all over the nation. Through the programs and projects listed below, Lomakatsi is beginning the process of restoring watershed health and fire resiliency to the landscape, for the benefit of people, communities, forests, wildlife, and the next seven generations to come…