Marcy Golde

I first got involved with WEC in 1979, when I was outraged by some of the logging I'd seen out on the Olympic Peninsula. I tried to find out what was going on and how it could be done better, so I turned to WEC as a source of information. And the next thing I knew, I was taking a three day tour around the Olympic Peninsula with the chair of the WEC Forestry Committee. By the time I got back, I was hooked. I've been working on forestry issues for WEC ever since.

When I look back over the decades of working on forestry for WEC, I can see real progress. Early on, we took some important steps forward with the Timber, Fish and WIldlife Cooperative, which added riparian buffers and review of roads and harvest on unstable slopes on both State and private forest lands.

WEC continues to oversee the Forest and Fish Habitat Conservation Plan along with the other members of the Conservation Caucus. More recently we had some hard-fought successes around state forest logging levels and Forest Stewardship Council certification. But we've still got a ways to go before our forests are truly sustainably managed; implementation of the regulations and agreements on the adequacy of water quality protections remain ongoing concerns.

Achieving real and lasting protections for our state and private forests will continue to take a lot of work and a lot of patience. The only way we're going to make progress is to stay involved, bring people together and hammer out ways of doing things better. And that's something that WEC has proven it can do.