Calaveras County – The U.S. Forest Service recently announced that the Amador-Calaveras Consensus Group (ACCG) received the agency’s Pacific Southwest Regional Forester’s Award for “All Land Ecological Restoration.”
ACCG is a community-based organization that works to create fire safe communities, healthy forests and sustainable local economies. Their efforts have focused on reducing hazardous fuels in the Mokelumne River watershed, a common boundary shared between the Stanislaus and El Dorado National Forests.
The award, presented by Regional Forester Randy Moore, recognizes the group’s success in securing grants through National Forest Foundation to formally organize under a memorandum of agreement, and to facilitate support for on-the-ground projects that reduce hazardous fuel conditions and put local residents back to work in the woods. Other organizations that have contributed funds for this work include private landowners, Fire Safe Council, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Forest Service (FS), Calaveras Healthy Impacts Product Solutions, and the Calaveras-Mariposa Community Action Agency.
ACCG has facilitated the hiring and training of a hand crew made up of Me-Wuk tribal members as well as a non-native crew. Both crews have been working on implementing a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) for Glencoe, doing fuel reduction projects on BLM and private lands. In addition, the all-native crew has successfully completed fuel reduction work on several cultural resource sites on the Calaveras Ranger District, in a way that brings indigenous stewardship practices back to these ancestral lands.
Much of the woody material generated by these projects will be processed to make animal bedding, fence posts, firewood, or to generate electric power. These small efforts have given a much needed boost to the spirits and economic welfare of local residents and small businesses. In fact, the unemployment rate in the West Point/Glencoe area of Calaveras County recently dropped as a result of this program.
The effort began nearly two years ago, when Calaveras County Supervisor Steve Wilensky gathered a group of public agencies, private landowners, Me-Wuk tribal representatives, environmental groups, small business owners, and interested citizens together. The idea was to try to develop mutually beneficial solutions to problems of extreme fire danger, overgrown forests, threatened water quality, and persistent unemployment in the small communities of the eastern portion of the Mokelumne River watershed.
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