Region Archives: United States

MISSOULA – Forestry students at the University of Montana are working hard this week to set up the 106th Foresters’ Ball, a beloved campus tradition and fundraiser for students in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation.  Students and alumni have turned UM’s Schreiber Gym into an old logging town featuring wooden false fronts of a saloon, chapel, jail and other buildings. The Western atmosphere will draw hundreds of flannel-clad visitors to gather and dance to live music. This year’s theme for the ball is “Tankers Dumpin’ & Crews a Jumpin’,” a nod to the brave firefighting crews across the state. The work to create this year’s ball was inspired by fire crews past and present, said Koson Verkler, a senior forestry student and “chief push” of the Foresters’ Ball Committee. A replica wooden smokejumper aircraft and parachutes will be displayed at the ball. 

Around a hundred community members showed up to the U.S. Forest Service office in Medford on Wednesday night for a public meeting about proposed amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan was created in 1994 to protect threatened and endangered species, like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. It was meant to put an end to the timber wars of the 80s and 90s, when environmental activists protested the over-harvesting of trees in the region. The plan covers all of the Forest Service lands in Oregon and Washington, as well as a small part of Northern California. While innovative at the time, even environmentalists like Carol Valentine with the Sierra Club believe the plan needs to change to meet our new challenges. …Environmental activists held a rally outside the Forest Service office to push for stronger protections for old-growth ecosystems in the amendments.

The ecosystems on the American Southwest’s federal lands are hemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than any other region in the U.S., according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. While federal land ecosystems in most states are sequestering carbon dioxide on average, California’s lost six times more than any other state during the 17-year period from 2005 to 2021 that the study analyzed. “In California, it’s primarily a story of fire,” said Benjamin Sleeter, a research geographer with the USGS who led the ecosystem analysis in the new study. While scientists typically expect the movement of carbon in and out of ecosystems to cancel out in the long run, human intervention and climate change have destabilized the delicate balance. It’s made the daunting task of modeling carbon flowing between ecosystems and the atmosphere, which has challenged scientists for decades, even harder.

…some electric utilities and cooperatives are urging the Senate to seal the deal on the “Fix Our Forests Act” that aims to expedite some federal approvals and reduce wildfire risk overall. The legislation …establishes requirements for managing forests on federal land, including reducing wildfire, expediting certain forest management projects, and implementing forest management projects and activities. …The legislation prohibits courts from immediately halting a project unless they determine that the person suing to stop it “is likely to succeed on the merits” of the case if the lawsuit gets a full hearing. …The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association applauded the bill, arguing it would make it easier for electric cooperatives to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires, and called on the Senate to also pass the bill. …Pacific Gas & Electric “supports legislation that would expedite permitting and approvals and reduce barriers to the essential work of keeping powerlines clear of vegetation.”

Assembly Republicans announced a series of bills to address and improve California’s wildfire prevention, response and recovery efforts. The Republican proposals will streamline badly needed wildfire prevention projects, encourage residents to harden their homes against fire, hold people accountable for arson, looting or flying drones near fires, and help communities and homeowners recover from disasters. Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher … highlighted the urgent need to remove the fuels that drive catastrophic wildfires. … “California hasn’t done nearly enough to remove flammable vegetation and prevent devastating wildfires – if you don’t believe the science, believe your own damn eyes,” Gallagher said. … Republicans’ policies are focused on three areas: preventing devastating wildfires through fuels reduction projects and home hardening, improving disaster response by cracking down on looting and irresponsible drone use, and helping communities recover by supporting local nonprofits and making it easier to rebuild.

The catastrophe of wildfire is creating interesting politics in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, America’s liberal center, has waived environmental reviews and permitting requirements to allow Los Angeles wildfire victims to rebuild their homes with less oversight and regulation. …It’s remarkable that Newsom put the Coastal Commission in a choke hold. Over-regulation is the charge Republicans have leveled at the commission for years. …Given Republican Donald Trump’s win, are Democrats adjusting their politics to meet the moment? Are environmental rules that have guided development for over half century still relevant when wildfires burn whole communities and forests? …How the stress of wildfires changes the way we consider environmental regulations will be something to watch in the coming years. Trump wants make such rules go away. That’s not right. But giving a blanket waiver as Newsom has done may not work well, either.

Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review

Federal officials and an environmental group have settled a lawsuit over a Kettle Range timber project’s potential impacts on Canada lynx. The Kettle Range Conservation Group and the Colville National Forest finalized an agreement last week that ends a lawsuit over the Bulldog Project, a combination of logging and prescribed burning the agency had planned on about 13,600 acres in the Kettle Range and a nearby area known as the Wedge. The Kettle Range Conservation Group sued over the project in 2023, arguing that it would damage important habitat for lynx, which have been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 2000. The suit raised concerns with a 2020 update to the agency’s lynx analysis units, which shrank the area protected as habitat for the snow-loving big cats. In the settlement agreement filed last week, the Forest Service agreed to return to its previous lynx unit boundaries and to not authorize timber work within the units, both old and new.

In 2021, a nonprofit formed to answer county executive Satpal Sidhu’s call to plant one-million trees in Whatcom. The organization, Whatcom Million Trees Project (WMTP), has now planted over 2,800 trees and protected nearly 323,000. The mission is to plant and protect mature trees, while also connecting people to nature and spreading the understanding of why trees and forests are so important to our region. The planting and protecting takes place in community parks and neighborhoods, as well rural lands in more remote parts of the county. Though the group clarifies that young saplings won’t add notable climate or biodiversity benefits for years, they hope to spread hope though the communal planting of trees.

Wayne Phillips

Clemson University has named Wayne Phillips, a forester with 28 years of experience across all aspects of the forestry supply chain, as the new manager of the Clemson Experimental Forest. Phillips takes over management of the forest after eight years as area marketing manager with Weyerhaeuser, a timber, land and forest products company that owns or manages 28 million acres of forestland. Phillips is the seventh manager of the 18,000-acre forest since Clemson College began supervising the land in 1939 under an agreement with the federal government. Over nearly 100 years, careful management has transformed the land from depleted row crop farmland to a resource for teaching, research and outreach, as well as a valued community asset.

The Fix Our Forests Act, co-sponsored by a Republican receiving substantial donations from the logging industry, makes it easier to bypass environmental review on federal lands. It would allow loggers to more easily thin forests by reducing environmental regulations and public input. The thinking is that reducing tree counts means reducing wildfire fuel. However, the most dangerous fires—the ones that threaten densely populated areas—rarely begin deep in the woods. For example, the Los Angeles firestorms “originated in very brushy areas just outside of town, then became an urban configuration issue,” said Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, or FUSEE. “No amount of logging would have saved anything—it’s this spurious connection.”

Related content from UtilityDrive: PG&E, other electric utilities call for Senate to pass forest management bill

In the first two days of his new term, President Donald Trump signed more than 200 executive orders. One was aimed at accessing more natural resources in Alaska. It attempts to roll back protections on over 9 million acres of Tongass National Forest, potentially opening them up for logging… The Juneau-based Southeast Alaska Conservation Council has been fighting to keep most of the Tongass roadless for decades. Council Director Maggie Rabb said it’s hard to predict what this administration will do next… Rabb said that the conservation council is not anti-logging. There is still active logging in the Tongass. For Rabb, the Roadless Rule has been an effective tool to protect old growth without actually ending logging. “The push to roll back the Roadless Rule has very little to do with on-the-ground realities in Southeast Alaska or market demand, and it’s very much about external agendas that are disconnected from our region,” she said.