A co-management agreement with the Salish stewardship council

This month we signed a co-management agreement that puts decisions about the Cascadia restoration under shared control with the Salish-led stewardship council. It is not a consultation arrangement. It is shared authority over what happens on the land.

This ground was managed with fire and careful tending for thousands of years before it was logged in the last century. The people who held that knowledge did not disappear. They are still here, and the council represents them.

Under the agreement they decide alongside us what gets planted, where it goes, and how the land is burned and tended once the trees are in. On the points where their judgement and our plot data disagree, the agreement gives us a way to talk it through rather than one side simply overruling the other.

It has already changed our planting list. Several species we would have leaned on were cut back in favour of plants the council values for food, medicine and weaving, and the mix is better for it. We had been planting for carbon and timber structure and missing things that matter to the people who live here.

Cultural burning has come back on two parcels under the council's direction. Low, controlled fire of the kind that kept these woods open and healthy for centuries, the absence of which is part of why the last wildfire burned as hard as it did.

The agreement also means the project does not belong to us alone, and we think that is how it should be. A restoration that the local people do not control is one that ends the day the outside charity loses interest. This one will outlast us, which was always the point.