Sue Kuehl Pederson, GOP candidate for Commissioner of Public Lands, talks how to stop forest fires

We at the 37th District Republicans had a chat with Sue Kuehl Pederson, who is running for Washington state Commissioner of Public Lands on the Republican ticket. You can find out more about her campaign here.

Note: This transcript has been abridged in some places for clarity.

LD-37: What exactly does the Commissioner of Public Lands do? What is the job of this office?

Sue Kuehl Pederson: Well, one thing they do is to oversee the Department of Natural Resources… that’s a rather large agency. In our state constitution, the public lands of Washington are to be used for earning revenues for our public schools and our counties, universities, fire districts, other public services… So there are about 3 million acres of what they call uplands, terrestrial land, plus another 2.6 million acres of aquatic lands, which are underwater, so shorelines, navigable waters, that sort of thing.

In my opinion, the Commissioner of Public Lands should be using those lands to earn revenues through things like timber sales, agricultural leases, cattle grazing, recreation… there’s all kinds of ways… geoduck harvesting in the aquatic areas… So, in my opinion, the job of the Commissioner of Public Lands is to protect the environment but also to earn as much revenue as they can for those purposes.

They also have a role in regulations on private lands. The DNR oversees some of the fish habitats and other kinds of the environmental regulations on private lands.

What made you want to run for this office?

Pederson: [Laughs] Well, I am a natural resources manager, my whole career. I’m a biologist, and I’ve studied fish and forests, and later in my career I was a public power manager. So I have a broad background in natural resources, and a lot of people pointed that out to me. [Laughs] I’ve actually been retired since 2007, so I’m coming out of a very comfortable retirement… [Laughs] I was so tired of the forest fires. I’ve lived in Washington all my life, and I have never seen such horrific fires as we’ve had in the last few years, and I have ideas about how to reduce the fire danger. So I said, “Well, I think I could do that.”

Let’s expand on that a little. You have lots of experience working with various government agencies which are concerned with natural resource preservation. How will you apply the know-how you picked up during that time to this office if elected?

Pederson: That is a really great question. I have worked at city, county, state, and federal levels of environmental agencies, and I also have a Master’s Degree in Public Administration, so I have been for a very long time interested in organizational structure and management and improvement, so I feel very well qualified to run an agency from the top. I do believe that leadership comes from the top. Not that I would be a hierarchical manager, but I think leaders provide vision and a path for people to coalesce behind their collective purpose.

So that would be my approach. I’d want to know what the problems are. I’m a big stickler on defining problems before you try to solve them. I’m a scientist, I think very logically, so even if I’m in an arena I haven’t had a lot of experience in, for example, with off-road vehicles… that’s an issue that has come to my attention, and I frankly don’t have a lot of expertise in that field, but I would define whatever problems there might be, figure out how to solve them, figure out how to find the best workable solution.

If you are elected Commissioner of Public Lands, what will be your policy objectives, and how will you seek to accomplish them?

Pederson: Well, my first policy objective is to make our forests less prone to runaway wildfires. So the way to do that is to… I’ll take a minute to try to explain this… So there’s been a goal of creating old-growth forests, and that started with the endangered species listing of northern spotted owls about thirty years ago. So the habitat conservation plan for the northern spotted owl ended up setting aside large tracts of land for old-growth forest creation.

But thirty years later, the northern spotted owl is still having trouble, still threatened or endangered, and it’s been discovered that they will live in young forests, they don’t require old-growth forests. Also, there’s a predator of the northern spotted owl, which is an introduced owl from the east coast. It’s called the barred owl.

The reason I believe that we have these horrific fires is because we took forests that were managed for harvest –for over a hundred years our forests have been managed for harvest- which means we would plant trees in an area. Those trees would all be the same age. They would grow up together. The plan was that you would harvest them when they got to be thirty, forty, fifty years of age depending on their conditions.

So we have now all these trees that were planted for harvest, and instead they are just growing up large and crowded. So that’s why we have these horrific fires. We have way too much biomass in the forests. Too much fuel. If a spark starts a fire, oh my gosh, there’s just way too much wood to burn. And a lot of that wood is diseased, because the other thing about a crowded forest is that diseases spread rapidly. Y’know, with COVID, we social-distance, but the trees can’t distance themselves from each other. [Laughs]

So that’s the reason we have these fires. If you wanted to have an old-growth forest, if you wanted to create an old-growth forest, you can’t do it by just stopping any management of the trees. Because a natural old-growth forest -it’s called forest succession- there’s a natural process where a disturbed piece of land, maybe, Mt. St. Helens, say, a volcanic eruption… when you have a bare piece of land, the plants grow in a certain order. So you start with the grasses, and then some wildflowers, and shrubs, some alder… the plants get bigger over time, and the bigger plants shade out the floor or the ground, so that over time you end up with the shade and sun kind of determining what species are going to progress.

The climaxed forest would be made of doug fir and cedar, the trees that we see all the time. But those trees won’t be very close together, because they’ve been shaded out by the other species that came before them. By the time you get maple trees, a doug fir doesn’t have a lot of space to grow in, they just grow where they have an opening. An old-growth forest has the climax trees far enough apart, and the ground is not all crammed full of brush. An old-growth forest is a pretty wonderful thing. But you can’t just get there by stopping harvest of a planned forest which was designed for harvest.

So, my first task would be to thin out the forests so that the trees are growing in a more natural state of being spaced apart, and that would reduce some disease. Take out some of these trees. I am certainly not against harvesting trees. I think we’ve learned a lot about how to take care of the environment. We don’t trash the streams and the slopes like we did in the 1950s, say. So I would take care of the environment and also prevent forest fires. That’s my main thing.

I also want to open up the forests to recreation. Apparently, people are reporting to me, I’m getting a lot of people asking me, “What about recreation?” Because it’s been shut down gradually over the past couple decades. So I just want to find out what people want, because I view these as public forests. I don’t want to reserve them for some other reason. They’re public forests that need to be used to earn revenues for schools and provide recreation for folks, provide agriculture usage, which we’ve had in the past… Our forests, the state forests in particular, they’re designed, and our state constitution specifies that they’re to be used for revenue and public enjoyment.

Learn more about Sue Kuehl Pederson's campaign at CitizensForSue.com

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