Region Archives: US West

Decades of industrial logging left deep scars on the Tongass – and on the people and communities of Southeast Alaska. Many Alaskans do not want to return to large-scale old-growth logging. Instead, they support projects that uplift Indigenous cultures and community uses of the forest and benefit the region’s current economic drivers—fishing and the visitor and recreation economies—if done responsibly and sustainably. The timber industry is no longer an important economic force in Southeast Alaska. Far from it. According to a regional economic report, the timber industry makes up less than four percent of Southeast Alaska jobs while the visitor and seafood industries combined make up nearly a quarter of the region’s workforce, with only government providing a similar share of employment. The economic impact of subsistence, sport, and commercial fishing within the region is estimated at nearly $1 billion annually, according to the Forest Service.

Businesses, communities, and wildlife across a vast portion of western Washington, western Oregon, and northwestern California rely on healthy national forests. Since 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) has guided conservation, recreation, timber production, and other uses of these 19.2 million acres of species-rich and economically important lands and rivers, and now, as it does periodically, the U.S. Forest Service is updating the NWFP… The scientists and land managers who authored the original NWFP recognized the importance of drawing on the best available science. They also had the foresight to incorporate ways to monitor the forests and adjust management if their assumptions—for example, about the plan’s impact on nature and communities—proved wrong… The Forest Service is accepting public comment on the DEIS through March 17.

PORTLAND, Ore.– Amid efforts by the Trump administration to purge the federal workforce, a group of Democratic lawmakers in Washington state are voicing concerns that recent firings are “devastating” ahead of wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest. According to the lawmakers, nearly 10% of the United States Forest Service workforce was impacted by recent federal firings, including roughly 260 workers across Washington and Oregon. …The coalition said even though the Trump administration previously noted public safety positions would be exempt from the firings, the lawmakers are seeing reports that Forest Service staffers supporting wildfire mitigation and response were still terminated. …Some USFS stations in Washington state are also seeing higher proportions of firings, the lawmakers said, including the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, where 46 USFS employees were terminated, along with at least 15 staffers working in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest.

A new study using the largest network of microphones to track birds in the United States is providing crucial insights for managing and restoring fire-prone forests across California’s Sierra Nevada region. The research, published March 11 in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, demonstrates how emerging bioacoustics technology can enhance wildlife monitoring and forest management… The team focused on 10 important bird species, including spotted owls and woodpeckers, that can provide information about the forest’s health… This information is particularly valuable now, as forest managers face tough decisions about preventing destructive wildfires while protecting wildlife. The study creates detailed maps showing where different birds are likely to live, helping managers make better-informed decisions about where to thin forests or conduct controlled burns.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Monday urged the Trump administration to scrap plans to kill more than 450,000 invasive barred owls in West Coast forests as part of efforts to stop the birds from crowding out a smaller type of owl that’s facing potential extinction. The 19 lawmakers claimed the killings would be “grossly expensive” and cost $3,000 per bird. They questioned if the shootings would help native populations of northern spotted owls, which have long been controversial because of logging restrictions in the birds’ forest habitat beginning in the 1990s, and the closely related California spotted owl. Barred owls are native to eastern North America and started appearing in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. They’ve quickly displaced many spotted owls, which are smaller birds that need larger territories to breed.

Federal officials are preparing to disband an advisory committee tasked with guiding policies for millions of acres of national forests in the Pacific Northwest. …The 21 members of the Northwest Forest Plan federal advisory committee… have been meeting since summer 2023, hashing out how to tackle wildfires, pests and diseases across nearly 25 million acres of national forests in Oregon, Washington and Northern California. On Thursday, officials with the US Forest Service told committee members the agency was likely to dissolve the group in the coming weeks. Some members said they had been expecting this news. …The Forest Service pulled the committee together to help amend the decades-old Northwest Forest Plan, a set of policies that came out of the timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s. …The committee delivered its recommendations to the Forest Service last year.

…in the early 2000s, a group of scientists and businessmen began arguing that forest thinning was too much for the government to take on. If Arizona had any hope of decreasing the risk of catastrophic forest fire, private industry would have to play a part. From this debate emerged Arizona Forest Restoration Products, a company that had planned to make oriented strand board from the low-dollar trees. …But …the Forest Service unexpectedly awarded the contract in 2012 to Pioneer Associates, a group it favored, even if they were arguably less qualified and had gathered almost no funding for their proposal. …Pioneer quickly went defunct, and the company that took over its contract, Good Earth, only thinned a fraction of what it promised. …And a cautionary tale as we fall into a pattern of on-again, off-again federal infrastructure funding cuts and threatened tariffs, which were enacted and then delayed on Canada and Mexico until April.

SALEM — Annual logging targets would be established for Oregon’s state forests under a bill meant to provide more certainty for timber companies and county governments. However, opponents of House Bill 3103 argue the proposal would constrain the authority of state forestry officials and undermine environmental protections. The bill’s supporters counter that state and federal regulations would be factored into the “sustainable timber harvest level” calculated by the Oregon Department of Forestry. …Under the latest version of HB 3103, the ODF would estimate the volume of planned timber harvest from state forests at least once a decade, separated into annual increments. If the actual amount of logging falls below those targets, the ODF would have to make up that volume later, unless the shortfall is due to wildfires, diseases or winter storms. …The bill would also allow lawsuits seeking to compel the agency to establish logging targets and abide by harvest volumes if it doesn’t comply with those requirements.

Republican-led policy directives could rewrite forest policies that affect public lands in Oregon and the rest of the West. New executive orders from the Trump administration call on federal agencies to fast-track logging projects by circumventing endangered species laws, and to investigate whether lumber imports threaten national security. …Some experts say it’s too soon to tell how these directives will affect Oregon’s timber market, particularly Trump’s order on fast-tracking timber sales to benefit logging companies and mills. Mindy Crandall, associate professor of forest policy at Oregon State University, said Canadian imports make up a large chunk of the U.S.‘s softwood lumber supply. Oregon also leads the nation as the top softwood lumber-producing state — so in some ways, limiting Canadian imports could benefit Oregon softwood growers. Still, Crandall suspects any policy changes will likely result in only short-term windfalls for Oregon mills and forest owners.

The Northwest Forest Plan lays out how to manage millions of acres across Washington, Oregon and Northern California. But the scientists behind the plan say it hasn’t been very successful. It cost thousands of timber industry jobs and failed to protect vulnerable species. Now that the government is reconsidering it, the scientists reflect on what was considered the best option 31 years ago. In the early 20th century, clearcutting huge swaths of ancient trees in the Pacific Northwest was routine. That was great for loggers, but it wasn’t great for biodiversity. In the 1990s, the northern spotted owl took center stage in a looming fight over old-growth forests. After researchers began studying the owl, they realized it could pose a challenge to the timber industry. …Norm Johnson, who worked for the College of Forestry at Oregon State University during the plan’s development and the other scientists agree that the plan wasn’t very successful. 

The Trump administration’s executive orders calling for the “immediate expansion” of timber production on federal lands appear poised to kick off a new chapter in how Oregon’s vast forests are managed — but what that will actually look like remains to be seen. Trump issued two executive orders last Saturday: the first to boost timber production and the second to address wood product imports. …The order gives public lands agencies 30 days to issue guidance on ways to increase timber production, reduce delivery times and “decrease timber supply uncertainty.” Timber groups back Trump’s plan, environmental groups call it ‘reckless’. …Timber groups and rural lawmakers said that in addition to increased harvests of board feet, the orders could help manage overstocked forests and reduce the threat of wildfire. …The threat of lawsuits, and how the orders will be implemented, weighted heavy on the mind of Oregon’s sole Republican member of Congress.

Sacramento – The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) is soliciting applications for California business and workforce development projects that support healthy, resilient forests and the people and ecosystems that depend on them. Competitive projects will also sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.   Applications will be accepted until midnight on April 25, 2025, via the Wood Products and Bioenergy webpage. A total of $5 million in grant funding is available. CAL FIRE’s Wood Products & Bioenergy Program supports the creation of a robust and diversified wood products industry to facilitate the economic and sustainable management of California’s forests. These grants help make California a more competitive place to conduct forest-sector business and create financial incentives for industries to invest in clean technologies, develop innovative ways to process wood products, and support the growth of a strong forest-sector workforce.

Dave Upthegrove

Last month, in my first act as commissioner of public lands, I paused the sale of certain structurally complex, mature forests on state lands. These are older, second-growth forests that have spent almost a century regrowing naturally into diverse stands. …At the Department of Natural Resources, our existing plans and policies envision restoring and maintaining 10% to 15% of the forest landscape in Western Washington as structurally complex mature forests. My goal is to meet this important habitat objective sooner, ensuring the long-term sustainability of our forests and supporting our state’s forest products industry. I’m not setting our forests aside. I’m setting them on a better path. …My plan, once we have new criteria in place, will simply defer some sales while prioritizing others until we reach our habitat goals. In doing so, we will hit these habitat goals sooner — while enabling us to achieve the kind of long-term sustainability we all want.

Four conservation groups filed suit in January over the Round Star logging project west of Whitefish on the Tally Lake Ranger District. In the suit against the Flathead National Forest, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Council on Wildlife and Fish, Yellowstone to Uintas Connection and Native Ecosystems Council argue that the project is ill-conceived and encroaches on lynx, grizzly and elk habitat. “Lynx critical habitat is the worst place for clearcuts,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, in a Jan. 9 press release. “The surest way to drive lynx to extinction is to continue massive deforestation of the West.” However, local loggers say that the lawsuit is a deterrence to the bigger picture of forest management.  

Gavin Newsom

SACRAMENTO – California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he has proclaimed a state of emergency to speed up wildfire prevention projects ahead of the peak wildfire season. Saturday’s announcement comes nearly two months after the Los Angeles area wildfires. Newsom says the emergency proclamation will suspend the California Environmental Quality Act and California Coastal Act, which he says has been slowing down forest management projects. This could allow for more projects like vegetation and tree removal, adding fuel breaks and prescribed burns. The proclamation will also allow nonstate entities to conduct approved fuel reduction work. Lastly, the proclamation calls for increasing the efficiency and utilization of the California Vegetation Treatment Program to promote a rapid environmental review of large wildfire risk reduction treatments. …In a letter to Congress, Newsom requested nearly $40 billion to help Los Angeles recover from the fires.

Ty Williams

Noah Greenwald’s Jan. 11 opinion piece demanding the governor set aside 9,500 acres of Oregon’s older forests in the name of wildlife habitat is a frustrating example of outdated, and frankly dangerous, anti-forestry rhetoric. This same hands-off approach to our forests is part of the reason we are losing millions of acres of forests to catastrophic wildfire at an increasingly alarming rate, harming local economies, wildlife habitat, air quality and forest health. The biggest threat to Oregon’s old growth forests is wildfire. In the last decade, wildfire has scorched over 6 million acres of land, including tens of thousands of acres of old and mature forests, far more than the 0.03% Greenwald is opining about. …Greenwald’s own employer, the Center for Biological Diversity, is one of many environmental groups that routinely sue to stop proposed forest management projects intended to increase wildfire resiliency and protect existing wildlife habitat.

Oregon Senate Democrats sent a letter Thursday calling on the federal government to restore recently dismissed fire-prevention workers and stabilize the operations of the U.S. Forest Service. Earlier this month U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said she supported the decision to release 2,000 probationary and non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. Although the USDA said firefighters were exempt, current and former Forest Service employees said critical work such as prescribed burning and forest thinning had been slowed by the cuts. “We need Forest Service trail workers back on the job, thinning trees and removing combustible material, so we can save lives and property,” said Oregon Senate Majority Leader Kayse Jama, D–northeast Portland. “It’s not clear whether the personnel firings were legal to begin with.”

…Giant ponderosa pines—some of the last remaining in the area—share space with at least 13 other tree species on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Yet despite its high conservation value and proximity to severely burned forests, the Emerald Point stand has not been managed to reduce its risk of drought or catastrophic wildfire. The fire-adapted forest has also not experienced fire for at least 120 years. This has led to massive increases in forest density, fuels, and insect- and drought-driven mortality. A fire modeling study conducted by the University of California, Davis, and the University of Nevada, Reno, found that forest thinning followed by a prescribed burn could greatly improve the stand’s resistance to catastrophic fire. The study, published in the journal Fire, indicates that such treatments could also help other seasonally dry, mature, old-growth forests in North America.

…The loss of key environmental stewards will be keenly felt across the West, home to most of the nation’s public lands managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Besides the personal blow of losing what many workers described as “a dream job,” the impacts will have a massive ripple effect on the health of public lands — and on people’s ability to enjoy them safely. Forest Service employees generally tackle arduous, unglamorous work that, if done correctly, is invisible to most of those who benefit from it. …The Forest Service staff targeted by DOGE also include the biologists and botanists who ensure that projects on public land comply with environmental regulations. These staff members conduct surveys of the landscape before signing off on logging, mining or other activities. The sudden hemorrhaging of agency employees means that many economically valuable projects will be delayed or halted altogether.

RAPID CITY, S.D.  – South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden says during one of his several meetings with USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins last week, he and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon had an extensive conversation about the Black Hills and timber contracts. “Just what’s at stake for the Black Hills as far as wildland fires, dangers, the insect infestations and just our timber industry and the future of that in general,” said Rhoden. Rhoden continued on saying he was “very encouraged by the conversation we had with her, that we’re going to take steps to rectify that.” Rhoden says the current amount of timber harvested is far below what is allowed. “Not even close, and under the Biden administration we were just banging our heads against the wall. We would provide the facts and the data, and they were ignored,” the governor explained. 

For over a century, the American environmental movement has been animated by an intuitive and simple idea: Protecting trees means leaving forests alone. This stance—championed by figures like John Muir—was based on the belief that any alteration, including thinning or intentional burning, of wilderness harms it. While this ideology helped prevent widespread destruction by timber companies, it also created unintended consequences. Research now shows that overgrown forests are fueling unnaturally severe wildfires, causing irreparable ecological damage and massive economic loss… A key issue remains limited funding. Budget cuts to state and federal land management agencies have reduced the resources available for proactive fire prevention… Insurance and legal concerns further complicate matters. While the need for improved wildfire mitigation is widely recognized, legislative gridlock, environmental regulations, and partisan divisions have slowed progress.

Each spring, the U.S. Forest Service hires dozens of seasonal biologists to venture into remote Northwest forests on federal land and set up acoustic recorders to monitor for sounds indicating the presence of northern spotted owls, a threatened species.  There are only as many as 5,000 northern spotted owls left in the Northwest… The counting is crucial for preventing the owls’ extinction. But President Donald Trump ordered a hiring freeze that means the Forest Service cannot hire more than 40 seasonal scientists to count the owls, according to Taal Levi, an associate professor at Oregon State University who works on owl monitoring. The monitoring typically involves about 60 scientists working from central California to Canada, Levi said. It also means the agency will likely go without dozens more scientists needed to monitor threatened and endangered salmon, frogs and other fragile species…. 

Emma Schultz

Emma Schultz, a Minnesotan employed with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado has her job back a week after being laid off. Schultz was terminated from her position as a result of the Trump administration’s reduction in federal workers, including about 3,400 Forest Service jobs. …Schultz  said on Feb. 24, a supervisor notified her over the phone that she had been terminated by mistake because her job had been deemed “mission critical.”  “I was then sent an email that said similar stuff and was able to accept my job back by email,” Schultz said. She heard one of the reasons for the decision was because the forest industry as a whole had expressed concerns about a lack of timber staff across the nation.

…On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Missoula federal district judge Donald Molloy’s rulings on a few counts that will require the Kootenai National Forest to keep the Black Ram logging project on hold for a while longer. The appeals court upheld rulings on two of four claims that the U.S. Forest Service challenged, so the agency must redo parts of its project analysis. First, the justices agreed that the Forest Service failed to comply with Kootenai Forest Plan because the agency didn’t show whether or how it included unauthorized roads in its road density calculations. …Second, the justices agreed that the Forest Service didn’t take “a hard look,” as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, at unauthorized road use and its effects. The justices pointed at the agency’s unsupported claims of sporadic use of roads and prompt barrier repair as proof.

The Oregon Department of Forestry plans to plant around 2.3 million seedlings throughout more than 6,100 acres of harvested timber statewide. The agency announced that planting will soon occur across the Tillamook, Clatsop and Santiam forests. It is set to begin in the Sun Pass and Gilchrist forests later in May, with planting taking between six weeks to eight weeks — depending on factors like weather and soil conditions… The department revealed that planting seedlings has become more difficult since the Private Forest Accord was added to the Forest Practices Act in 2023. The new accord enforced further new requirements for maintaining forest roads and further monitoring for rule compliance, among other changes impacting private and non-federal forests throughout Oregon.

The 87th Annual Oregon Logging Conference (OLC) took place from Thursday to Saturday, February 20-22, at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene. The theme for this year’s event, “Timber Builds Dreams,” reflected the growing impact of timber on Oregon’s economy and landscape as technology transforms the industry… On Friday, Feb. 21, more than 900 high school students from 33 schools participated in the 7th Annual Future Forestry Career Day. This invitation-only event offered students hands-on experiences in fields such as engineering, wildland firefighting, trucking, diesel mechanics, welding, and heavy equipment operation. Additionally, twelve high school teams competed in a forestry skills relay, showcasing their expertise in tasks such as choker setting and chainsaw use.

A familiar range of comments about logging, fishing, tourism and tribal issues are being expressed in response to a draft “biography” of the Tongass National Forest, with the 45-day comment period ending Monday as part of the agency’s years-long effort to update its management plan for the forest. A big unknown, however, is if that biography and other aspects of the management plan will be drastically reshaped by the Trump administration’s wholesale overhaul of the federal government, including large staffing cuts and an executive order mandating the repeal of federal regulations that inhibit maximum utilization of Alaska’s natural resources… An affirmation that a shift in priorities will occur under the Trump administration was offered by federal officials participating in a Feb. 11 panel discussion at the Southeast Conference’s Mid-Season Summit in Juneau.