Sustainable Northwest leads rural effort

by Adam Worcester

Contributing writer

November 18, 2010

Martin Goebel believes sustainability begins in rural communities.

That's why Sustainable Northwest, the Portland-based nonprofit he founded in 1994, has focused its attention on locales far from the bustling downtowns of major metropolises.

"Rural businesses, products and services are very germane to urban environments," Goebel said. "I think sustainability saves everybody lots of money. The second thing is, it produces fresh water, thriving wildlife, a healthy forest, clean air — things we all need."

Sustainable Northwest aims to fashion consensus among disparate parties, such as small towns, the federal government and special-interest groups, to solve thorny issues centered around land use, water conservation and economic development.

Most of these battles rage in poor agricultural communities such as Wallowa County, where in 1996 Sustainable Northwest helped forge a local nonprofit, Wallowa Resources, to "develop, promote, and implement innovative solutions to help the people of Wallowa County and the Intermountain West sustain and improve their communities and their lands," according to its mission statement.

More recently, Sustainable Northwest has been active in the Klamath River Basin, a Switzerland-sized area along the Oregon-California border where for years Native Americans, fishermen, farmers, federal agencies and local governments have clashed over water use.

Its mediation efforts culminated earlier this year with the signing of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, a proposal that would implement a broad set of measures to restore fisheries and spur economic development in the region. A key feature of the agreement is the removal of four major dams on the Klamath River.

To Goebel, the pact is a model not of dam removal but of a successful collaborative process. More than 50 organizations were involved in the settlement, including the U.S. Forest Service, the California Department of Fish and Game, the Klamath Tribes, and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

"We want to balance ecological health with community well-being," he said. "In a word, what we do is help to create jobs and businesses that do good things for the environment."

Original founding board members of Sustainable Northwest ranged from Cecil D. Andrus, a four-term Idaho governor and former secretary of the interior under President Carter, to Jill Thorne, a Pendleton wheat farmer.

Goebel is an Oregon State University graduate who had recently returned to Oregon (his mother’s home) after working as a conservationist and resource specialist in Mexico, where he was born.

Though he possessed some natural negotiation skills, Goebel said he had no formal training for a job that required intercession between loggers and preservationists.

"It all boils down to listening," he said. "People don’t seem to change until there’s an enormous conflict."

Sustainable Northwest’s initial negotiations were marked by acrimony and litigation on opposing sides. Today, however, Goebel said aggrieved groups are much more likely to attempt collaboration before resorting to lawsuits.

"We're in the early changes of a dramatic paradigm shift. Our next project is to scale these 'points of light' that we have helped bring about to where we’re really affecting and improving whole landscapes," Goebel said. "Klamath has taught us that we can affect very large areas with multiple communities inside them."

One such area is the Dry Forest Investment Zone, spanning 12 counties in Southern Oregon and three in Northern California. Sustainable Northwest was awarded a $2 million grant from the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities to establish the zone.

The mission of forest investment zones is to collaborate with public and private partners for systemic, sustainable change in the nation’s working forests and nearby communities, according to the endowment website.

Each county within the Dry Forest Investment Zone shares similar forest types. All are also extremely poor.

Goebel said there are pockets of the Pacific Northwest that look like developing countries. In fact, they remind him of the poverty-stricken Mexican village where he was raised.

"I intuited early that the poorer the country, the more screwed up its environment. In my mind's eye, there was a relationship between poverty and environmental degradation," he said.

A key aim of Sustainable Northwest is to help financially struggling communities find ways to profit from the forests and rivers around them. One example is encouraging the development of bio-meth energy — generating fuel from forest wastes.

Sustainable employs 14 people, including three at Sustainable Northwest Wood Inc., a new for-profit arm that connects local mills with green builders.

Federal grants account for about 72 percent of Sustainable Northwest's $2.13 million in annual revenue.