Region Archives: US West

…For millennia, Indigenous peoples nurtured the land with stewardship practices that sustained their communities and promoted resilient ecosystems based on a rich diversity of habitats and species. The forced removal of Indigenous peoples and the criminalization of their fire stewardship practices – replaced by industrial forestry practices that centered on commodity timber extraction and aggressive fire suppression – has caused a decline in landscape and biological diversity along with a loss of resilience to wildfires and climate change. Proposed amendments to the plan would work to better incorporate tribal co-stewardship and facilitate a more beneficial role for fire. …The inclusion of tribal co-stewardship and Indigenous knowledge represents a profound change that goes beyond undoing past wrongs to Indigenous peoples—it will help restore species, habitats and landscape diversity. …The Trump administration now threatens to subvert the progressive prospects of the Northwest Forest amendment by its effort to banish the words “diversity” and “inclusion.”

IDAHO, USA — The U.S. Forest Service has identified Southwest Idaho as one of the nation’s most at-risk regions for wildfires as organizations prepare for the upcoming wildfire season. The Southwest Idaho All-Lands Partnership is working on wildfire mitigation across public and private lands to reduce damage from wildfires. “Southwest Idaho is, for lack of jargon, one of the riskiest places in the U.S. for wildfire,” said Ford Van Fossan, who is the Conservation Connect program manager at the National Forest Foundation and oversees the partnership. “We have a lot of folks that are in harm’s way potentially when fires come through our landscape.” Wildfires scorched over 800,000 acres of Idaho’s land in 2024… The National Forest Foundation said it aims to use a mix of “public funding, including federal grants and private funding,” to support these efforts amid federal funding cuts.

Washington’s Department of Natural Resources says it’s coming up with backup plans to address the growing threat of serious wildfires in the state. The typically close working relationship with federal forest managers has frayed under the Trump Administration. It started in mid-February, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut thousands of probationary employees at the U.S. Forest Service. The USDA is in charge of stewarding places like the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest. Altogether, about 2,000 employees across the country were fired. The USDA emphasized that no “operational firefighters” had been let go, and argued the critical work of responding to wildfires would not be interrupted. …Grassroots Wildland Firefighters estimated that three-quarters of the employees laid off had secondary wildland firefighting duties, meaning firefighting wasn’t their primary job, but they were pulled in to fight fires as needed.

The Alaska Forest Association and two of its members have taken legal action against the US Forest Service. The lawsuit … seeks to compel the federal agency to comply with the Tongass Timber Reform Act’s mandate for timber sales, a move that could help revive the struggling timber industry in southeast Alaska. “Federal law requires the Forest Service to sell enough timber every year to meet market demand,” said Frank Garrison, attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs that include Viking Lumber and Alcan Timber. “…the agency has violated federal law three times over.” The dispute stems from the US Forest Service’s 2016 Management Plan, which outlined a gradual transition from selling old-growth timber to younger trees over a ten-year period. … However, the plaintiffs argue that the agency abandoned the plan, ceasing old-growth timber sales immediately and failing to provide sufficient young-growth timber as promised.

Time is running out for those wanting to offer feedback on proposed changes to the U.S. Forest Service’s Northwest Forest Plan. The public comment period closes Monday. The plan includes four management alternatives for 24.5 million acres of federal forest lands in Western Oregon, Washington and Northwestern California. It covers 17 national forests, seven Bureau of Land Management districts, six national parks, and 165,000 acres of national wildlife refuges and Department of Defense lands. Locally, this includes parts of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. …First put into effect in 1994, the plan includes standards and guidelines for management activities for each of the agency’s various land use and aquatic conservation categories. The proposed alternatives are intended to reduce the risk of wildfires, address climate change and — perhaps most controversially — expand logging.

It’s now clear that some moves President Trump has authorized his pal Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to make will thwart at least a few of Trump’s own often-repeated priorities. …Then there are two moves that figure to make the next fire season, coming up in late spring or early summer, as bad as or worse than recent ones. Trump legitimately repeats the conviction that cleaning forest floors can reduce the intensity and frequency of wildfires. He consistently and falsely blames California’s government for not doing this. …With Musk’s aid, though, he fired 3,400 Forest Service workers in mid-February who were still on probation in their first year of employment, many of whom had been hired to do the job Trump calls critical to stopping fires. …If he knew these firings completely contradict priorities he has trumpeted, why would he have approved them?

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.