Fubar is the name of a stream on Alaska's Prince of Wales Island, and apparently it's appropriately named. FUBAR, of course, is an acronym meaning "Fouled up beyond all recognition," or something pretty close to that, anyway.
It's the central scene in a news story by Mary Pemberton of the Associated Press outlining how restoration efforts in the national forests are helping restore jobs in places let down by the timber industry across the West:
Forest restoration is occurring all over the West, said Mary Mitsos with the National Forest Foundation, a Montana-based group. Efforts in Montana, Alaska, Washington and Oregon involve repairing watersheds to encourage healthier fish runs. In Arizona and New Mexico, restoration is more about forest thinning to lessen the danger of wildfires.
At Fubar Creek, soil washed into the waterway from clearcuts upslope, filling it in and causing the water to go all over the place, including a nearby road. The restoration there in the Tongass National Forest and elsewhere in southeastern Alaska added $8.4 million and 150 jobs to the economy in 2007, according to a study by The Nature Conservancy.
Pemberton quotes Marnie Criley, coordinator of the Montana Forest Restoration Committee:
People are getting to know each other and not automatically hating each other because this person is a timber person and this person is a conservationist. A lot of trust-building has been going on.
We should point out that this is not a new trend. In fact, we wrote about enviros making peace with loggers and agreeing to some logging in Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest back in 2004.
Nor does this mean peace is breaking out in the War In the Woods. In fact, Kim Marquis of the Juneau Empire had a story just the other day saying enviros were honked off that the Tongass approved twice as much logging as their "conservation alternative" called for in a recent timber sale on Prince of Wales Island.
About the same time the Empire also had an unbylined story recounting how an old mine on the island has been proposed for Superfund status.
So it seems this restoration industry will have lots of work for the forseeable future.
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