Region Archives: United States

Diana Tomback

Dorena Genetic Resource Center near Cottage Grove, Ore., scientists are collecting whitebark pine cones, growing seedlings, examining them for resilience to disease and then gathering cones from the strongest survivors. Those select seeds are then used to grow hundreds of thousands of baby trees in nurseries and plant them across the West. …Whitebark pine trees …stretches across 80 million acres in seven western states and two Canadian provinces. Now, one of the West’s few tree species able to survive on cold, windy ridgetops and steep slopes at alpine and subalpine elevations is in serious trouble. A blister rust, a nonnative fungus has become an existential threat to the pines, says Diana Tomback, one of the foremost researchers of the unique relationship between whitebark pines and Clark’s nutcracker. …Tomback says work on the National Whitebark Pine Restoration Plan started in 2016 — six years before the tree was listed as threatened.

In this era of accelerating climate crisis, accounting for all aspects of Earth’s carbon cycle is a crucial task. The magnitude of atmospheric carbon burden means trees and forests are limited but important instruments among a suite of mitigation options. …Understanding the role of forests requires accurate quantification of biomass, approximately half of which is carbon. Technological advances and the urgency of the problem have motivated international efforts toward biomass mapping. Airborne and spaceborne laser scanning hold great promise, and remote sensing is tempting to rely upon given its efficiency in covering large areas. However, these endeavors are of questionable value until their estimates are validated by direct measurements. A new article published in Forest Ecology and Management embraces this challenge for the world’s tallest forests. …While technological advances continue to enhance the scope of forestry research, boots-on-the-ground measurements remain essential and will provide meaningful work for generations to come.

Forest Service crews and contractors are scrambling to set as much forest on fire as possible. The increasingly narrow window of the season for prescribed fire is upon us. The time between when the forest is dry enough to burn but wet enough to contain those burns has grown increasingly compressed. The Tonto, Coconino and Apache Sitgreaves forests all sent out notices warning communities to expect smoke from nearby controlled burns to smudge the sky and maybe even send smoke drifting through town. ……None of those communities were built with Wildlands-Urban Interface codes. …So thinning projects followed by prescribed burns remain the best tool for protecting those communities, which rank among the most fire-menaced in the country. …However, figuring out how to cover the cost of thinning some 4 million acres of Ponderosa pine forest in Northern Arizona is just the start of the policies needed to restore the forest.

Jaiden Stansberry

The day before Jaiden Stansberry submitted her Truman Scholarship application — an involved process that includes 14 essays, a policy proposal and multiple interviews — she spent hours alongside her classmates razing a makeshift logging town constructed in the University of Montana’s Schreiber Gym for the 105th Foresters’ Ball. …“After deconstruction, the next day I was at the library fixing all my Truman Scholarship essays,” Stansberry said with a laugh, noting with pride that her team tore down the timber in record time. …Truman Scholars demonstrate outstanding leadership potential, commitment to a career in government or the nonprofit sector, and academic excellence. After a rigorous application, those selected receive $30,000 in funding for graduate studies, leadership training, career counseling and special internship opportunities within the federal government. …Stansberry’s application focused on the topic at the nexus of her education, professional work and heart: wildland fire.

OREGON — Three dozen environmental groups are calling on the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to cancel a timber sale on federal land near Medford where activists say centuries old trees are slated to be cut. Organizers from Pacific Northwest Forest Defense have been sitting in old-growth trees for a week and set up a camp blocking Boise Cascade from cutting up to 516 acres of trees within an area owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. …Activists are concerned that the bureau is allowing Boise Cascade and the other companies to cut old-growth and mature trees at the site… that are more than 180 years old and up to 400 years old. Lisa Tschampl, for Boise Cascade, said there are no 400-year old trees at the site and that the trees at least 150 years old have been marked not to be cut. She said the company is “thinning” the area selectively, not clearcutting it.

MISSOULA, Montana is in a forest health crisis. …And this is because of prior years of mismanagement and fire mitigation that has allowed large amounts of overgrowth, which in turn acts as fuel for wildfires. And with a complex system to manage the forest, the decline of the lumber industry has further complicated the situation. “We are dealing with a forest health and wildfire crisis. …Overtime our forests have become overgrown, more diseased, more fire prone, and we’re all familiar with the smoke we’re all breathing all summer from these catastrophic wildfires,” said Shawn Thomas, for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. …The timber sales that he oversees in large part come from mills including Pyramid Mountain and Roseburg Forest… whose upcoming closures are creating economic concerns. But besides the economic concerns, there is also the worry about how this will affect the forests health. 

A recent letter to the editor responding to a commentary objecting to timber sales in Snohomish County, promulgated outdated ideas about forest ecology that have been categorically disproven by scientists. The author states that there is no shortage of old growth forest. I suppose that is a matter of opinion, but according to the 1993 Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team report, historically 65 percent of westside Pacific Northwest forests were mature and old growth. In 2004, 70 percent of those westside forests were less than 80 years old. Furthermore, these calculations don’t account for the carbon emissions generated by the activities of road construction, logging, transporting the trees to mills, and milling of lumber. …Mature forests are next in line to become old growth, and are invaluable for this reason, but also provide essential ecosystem services in their present state.

In dense forests off I-5 in Josephine County, Oregon, up a few miles of winding dirt roads, a handful of tents, a hammock and an acoustic guitar mark the camp of those describing themselves as “forest defenders.” … The square of thick forest where activists have been camping for a week is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, part of the agency’s 11,000-acre Poor Windy project that includes areas slated for commercial timber harvest as well as forest thinning to prevent wildfires from getting out of control. At the top of one of these trees, a massive Ponderosa pine with a thin band of orange paint around its trunk, a big banner reads: “No Old Growth Logging in a Climate Crisis.” …A spokesperson with the BLM’s Medford office, meanwhile, said that old-growth logging isn’t the goal for these projects.

WASHINGTON — Members of a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee said at a hearing Wednesday they were focused on keeping pay for wildland firefighters at the higher level set in a 2021 law and urged Forest Service Chief Randy Moore to focus on ways to maintain a healthy timber industry. Senate Interior-Environment Subcommittee Chair Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, and ranking Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said they were committed to funding Forest Service programs to prevent wildfires and to maintain healthy forests. As the temporary additional funding to the agency appropriated in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and Democrats’ 2022 climate, taxes and policy law approaches an end, lawmakers and the agency must work on a way to continue strong funding for an agency that is on the front lines of a changing climate, Merkley said. “Those are one-time investments,” Merkley said of the additional spending passed in recent years. “And those funds are running out.”

Those who make that their livelihood, and others with a stake in Washington’s forests, are looking back at the successes and failures of 50 years of environmental protection and what lies ahead for the next five decades. …Grays Harbor College hosted the annual meeting of the Washington State Society of American Foresters April 3-5. Attended by about 130 people including state forest and wildlife managers, representatives from private timber companies and tribal natural resource managers, the meeting orbited around the anniversary of the important forest law. …Washington’s earliest forestry laws date back to 1946, when the state first started requiring the industry to replant harvested trees. …The collaborative approach to solving natural resource conflicts when it comes to logging practices continues today. But it’s not without ups and downs. Court Stanley, who has spent nearly 40 years in the wood products industry, likened the collaborative relationship to a marriage.