Region Archives: US West

The State of Oregon’s Wildfire Risk Explorer map was finalized in January, along with new defensible-space standards. A home-hardening building code (regulations designed to make homes more resilient to wildfire) is in draft form. …One Oregon lawmaker has proposed revising the map so risk levels apply broad areas rather than indicating the risk on individual properties. I’m sympathetic to the opposition to the map, etc., but scrapping it would be a mistake. …All tax lots in the state are assigned one of three wildfire hazard classes: Low, Moderate, or High; US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other public lands also are rated. …Despite the sharp criticism, this effort is a much-needed and well-intentioned project. …However, there’s a big problem: The owners of the other 94 percent of tax lots—roughly 1,786,000—rated at Low or Moderate hazard will not be required to take any action to create defensible-space around their homes or businesses.

The Pacific Northwest is fortunate to have vast forests and ideal conditions for growing trees quickly. These forests have long been a cornerstone of our rural economies while also protecting streams, sequestering carbon and supporting wildlife. However, we face a troubling trend: a decline in local timber production and a growing reliance on imported lumber. We use science for active forest management with the toughest regulations in the world, we do forestry the best here. It’s time to prioritize local timber and rebuild a robust, sustainable industry right here in Washington… Prioritizing local wood production is a win-win for the Pacific Northwest. Wood is good, but local wood is best if we want to restore a vital, create economic stability and protect our environment.

It’s a cold day at Sun Mountain Lumber in Deer Lodge, Montana. Outreach Forester Sean Steinebach walks toward the mill’s massive kiln where freshly cut two-by-fours are dried. You can feel the heat radiating off the fresh boards. He stops and inhales. “It smells fresh and it smells bright and it smells wild,” he says. The mill’s lumber yard is filled with stacks of Douglas fir and lodgepole pine logs that will soon become lumber. Having a steady and reliable supply of logs is crucial to keeping the mill in business, says Steinebach. “We drive the economics of Powell County for sure, Anaconda, Deer Lodge County. We’ve got a lot of employees that live there. Granite County, we’ve got employees there. We’re a big impact in the whole state, I think. Forest products in general is a huge impact in the state of Montana.”

A warm and dry 2024 wasn’t great for Colorado’s forests, according to the Colorado State Forest Service.  The agency’s annual forest health report released Wednesday found that after a wet and cool year in 2023, near-record-breaking temperatures and below-average precipitation stressed trees trying to build a defense from forest pests. The insects can create fuel for wildfires by filling forests with dead and dying trees… The report details how wildfires in Colorado’s forests impact the state’s watersheds. Colorado’s mountain watersheds are vital to the nation’s freshwater supply. The report recommends protecting the state’s watersheds through “ongoing collaboration among landowners, contractors and partners at the local, state and federal level.” Lastly, the report explains the importance of wildfire mitigation saying, “Active management is critical to help keep wildfires at a low severity and protect the many benefits that forests provide.”

Amy Harding

The Pacific Northwest is fortunate to have vast forests and ideal conditions for growing trees quickly. …However, we face a troubling trend: a decline in local timber production and a growing reliance on imported lumber. We use science for active forest management with the toughest regulations in the world, we do forestry the best here. It’s time to prioritize local timber and rebuild a robust, sustainable industry right here in Washington. …Fifty percent of our state timberlands have already been placed into conservation. …The recent move to place some timber sales on hold jeopardizes the Department of Natural Resources’ capacity to do this in the future and maintain a steady pace. …Our Pacific Northwest forests are managed under some of the strongest science-based forest protections in the world, ensuring sustainable harvesting practices and safeguarding water quality for people and fish.

MISSOULA, Montana — Kristin Bail is being named acting regional forester for the Northern Region on March 31. Bail will temporarily succeed Regional Forester Leanne Marten who has planned to retire after 34 years of service. In her role, Bail will oversee management of nine national forests and one national grassland within Idaho, Montana and North Dakota. The USDA Forest Service sent out the following: USDA Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz today announced Kristin Bail will serve as acting regional forester for the Northern Region, effective March 31, 2025.Bail will temporarily succeed Regional Forester Leanne Marten as she reaches her long-planned retirement date after 34 years of service. …As acting regional forester, Bail will oversee management of nine national forests and one national grassland within Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota.

OREGON — A timber sale near Roseburg and an accompanying protest have been pushed back to April 22, or Earth Day. The protest against the Yellow Panther timber sale was originally set for Tuesday, March 25, but the auction was postponed till late April. This timber sale is part of the Blue and Gold project, a controversial timber harvest plan by the federal Bureau of Land Management approved last year. Madeline Cowen from the environmental non-profit Cascadia Wildlands said this timber harvest was pushed through during the Biden Administration. …She said that this project is particularly important because of how much logging is planned for old-growth forests. …Cowen’s group filed a lawsuit against the BLM regarding this project, and just last month, the BLM agreed to notify the conservation group 30 days in advance of any logging on future projects before a court hearing set for the fall.

President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at ramping up logging on federal lands. The directives prompted polar and predictable reactions from timber industry advocates and environmental groups in the Pacific Northwest. The former have been advocating for more aggressive “management” of federal forests for decades to increase log supplies for local mills and combat increasing wildfire risks. The latter say the orders will prioritize commercial logging over all other uses of public lands and will inevitably result in protracted litigation. …Somewhere in the middle, however, is a group of organizations who say the executive orders could provide an opportunity to go much bigger on necessary forest restoration projects. But, ironically, they say the potential to make that happen likely will be significantly undermined by Trump’s separate push to slash the federal workforce that would oversee the work.

In August 2002 during one of the worst fire seasons to that point in recent history, President George W. Bush launched the Healthy Forests Initiative aimed at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires. It was a solid, common-sense plan intended to remove wood debris which fuels infernos and rehabilitate diseased, dying, and dead forests. It would generate revenue from wood sales to pay for healthier timberlands. …Bush ran into a buzz saw of well-financed opposition which branded it as front for logging in the public forests. It got scorched by endless bureaucratic federal, state, and local appeals and lawsuits. Little happened while wildfire dangers mounted. Then along came the January’s deadly L.A. fires … where 29 people died and more than 12,000 … structures were destroyed. …Hopefully, President Trump will dust off Bush’s blueprint, cut the bureaucratic red tape and reign in lawsuits. It made sense then and is ready to go now.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders aimed at ramping up logging on federal lands. The directives prompted polar and predictable reactions from timber industry advocates and environmental groups in Oregon. The former have been advocating for more aggressive “management” of federal forests for decades to increase log supplies for local mills and combat increasing wildfire risks in forests choked with flammable fuels. The latter say the orders will prioritize commercial logging over all other uses of public lands and will inevitably result in protracted litigation if federal agencies look to fast-track projects by eliminating existing protections for habitat, clean water and endangered species. [A subscription to the Oregonian is required to read full article]

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is one of the last great wild places. Spanning nearly 17 million acres, it is the largest national forest in the United States and one of the world’s largest remaining temperate rainforests. …And yet, despite its immense ecological and economic value, the Tongass remains under threat. For decades, the logging industry and its political backers have tried to chip away at the Roadless Rule [claiming] cutting down these ancient trees is an economic necessity. …The timber industry in the Tongass is not only economically unsustainable, it is a drain on the American taxpayer. …on his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order to repeal the Roadless Rule protections for the Tongass National Forest. Nothing has happened yet, but we should expect it. Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is taking a wrecking ball to the Forest Service, which could make administration oversight of any logging and roadbuilding even more difficult. 

President Donald Trump’s March 1 executive order calling for “immediate expansion of American timber production” generated lots of enthusiasm in the Northwest wood products world. But analysts added equal amounts of concern that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency-driven federal cuts might keep the woods quiet. “It’s going to be a good thing in terms of helping stimulate activity on national forests,” the University of Montana’s Todd Morgan said… but also recognizes the uncertainty spiraling around Washington, D.C. “A lot is going to depend on who’s left in federal agencies at the end of the day, the week, the next four years,” he said. “All this funding- and budget-cutting is going to interfere with the stated goals.” …Trump’s order also calls for timber production targets. That’s something that has been missing from federal land management for a long time, according to Montana Wood Products Association Director Julia Altemus.

Silver City, NM — On March 1, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “The Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” seeking to rapidly expand domestic timber production. The order was announced before President Trump’s tariffs on Canada took effect under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. …Many public land advocates and conservationists are sounding the alarm on the order’s potential consequences on decades of conservation efforts. Randi Spivak, who serves as the public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said this order will have long-term consequences on the health of public lands. …Those within the logging industry see the executive order as an opportunity to boost local economies and revive an industry that has struggled for the last few decades. American Loggers Council Executive Director Scott Dane spoke on the order and what it means for the domestic logging industry.

King County foresters are planting native tree seedlings acquired from warmer, drier climates for a long-term study designed to promote healthy, resilient, and productive local forests. Based on climate modeling that predicts conditions at the end of the century, the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks secured tree seedlings from Southwest Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. Forest specialists selected four planting locations throughout King County that have different site conditions and will monitor the trees’ survival and health multiple times over the next decade. The climate-adaptive tree planting trials are one of the strategies included in King County’s 30-Year Forest Plan launched by Executive Dow Constantine to promote urban and rural tree canopy and improve forest health and productivity for current and future generations.

Wildland firefighters will keep a four-year-old pay hike under a GOP-led spending bill signed by President Donald Trump, but many worry that mass federal worker firings will leave the nation more vulnerable to wildfires. …The permanent pay raise comes as Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has cut about 3,400 workers at the U.S. Forest Service… Many of those workers kept trails free of debris, oversaw prescribed burns, thinned forests and were specially trained to work with firefighters. They say staffing cuts threaten public safety, especially in the West, where drier and hotter conditions linked to climate change have increased the intensity of wildfires. …Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees warned that continued efforts by the Trump administration to cut firefighters and their support personnel “will cripple the workforce and make Americans less safe.”

President Donald Trump’s orders direct federal agencies to set aggressive targets for timber harvests. …State officials and forestry experts say Trump’s plan relies heavily on state land management agencies to carry it out. Most states say they’ll cooperate to some extent — especially to boost wildfire prevention projects. But most states also are concerned that federal workforce cuts will undermine their goals, and some worry about loosening environmental standards. …Leaders in liberal-leaning states say they’ve invested heavily in wildfire resilience work on federal forests. They’re cautiously optimistic that Trump’s orders could allow them to expand such projects. But they oppose efforts to slash environmental regulations. Meanwhile, foresters in conservative-leaning states say they welcome the chance to increase domestic timber production and help a struggling industry. …The Forest Service is poised to shed another 7,000 employees in the coming months. The cuts are likely to increase the feds’ reliance on state partners.

…thousands of federal employees across the country lost their jobs as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s initiative for large-scale reduction and grant freezing. …Layoffs included essential employees whose responsibilities were to respond to wildfires, provide wildland fire safety education… Dustin Tetrault, Big Sky Fire Department’s fire chief said the state is well-equipped at the local government level has been gradually filling more roles to have large-scale incident response. …Many tenured forest service employees are being fired or accepting a leave with promised pay because the state of the forest service remains so uncertain. This takes away years of knowledge of the land and relationships built with local services like BSFD, making future collaboration more difficult. …Despite uncertainty, there are two potential bills in the Montana legislature that, if passed, could have a major effect on the reorganization of how the U.S. deals with emergency fire services, Tetrault explained.

Lombard and Stanley are two co-founders of Rising Appalachia. The nonprofit is revitalizing 45 acres of former mine land, once owned by the Sugar Creek Coal Company… But the space won’t exist solely for recreation and education; they want to make it economically productive for the community again. The Sugar Creek Coal Company still owns 900 acres surrounding Rising Appalachia’s project. Lombard, Stanley and other community members are trying to raise approximately $4 million to purchase the rest of it and establish a community forest. “People can hunt on the land, they can gather food on the land, they can be involved in submitting public comments for projects and management proposals,” Stanley said. “But it’s not exactly managed by the community. A community forest in contrast, is designed by and managed by the people who live here and depend on the forest.”

It might be time to treat your trees to prevent pine beetle infestations in the Black Hills. That’s according to US Forest Service Entomologist Kurt Allen, and Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Forest Health Specialist John Ball. The pair have been hosting talks and information sessions on mountain pine beetle outbreaks since 1999. Last week, they stopped in Spearfish with a handful of clear messages. For one thing, the Black Hills is not necessarily on the verge of a mountain pine beetle epidemic — at least not on the scale last seen a decade ago… “Between the larvae feeding and a blue stain fungus they introduce, they kill trees very quickly,” Ball said.

An annual wildfire briefing between staffers for Southwestern members of Congress and Forest Service officials was unusual for two reasons, according to a congressional aide in attendance. First, the private briefing was a month earlier than is typical, a sign of the acute risk of wildfires this season in New Mexico and Arizona amid years of climate change-caused drought and especially low snowpack this spring. Second, Forest Service officials … refused more than 10 times in the meeting to say how many Forest Service employees had been fired, how many resigned and what might come of wildfire dispatch centers if the Trump administration terminates their leases. “We’ll have to send this to Washington and they will get back to you,” was the standard response, according to a Congressional aide… The meeting embodied how fraught the relationship has become between Forest Service and congressional staff amid President Donald Trump’s blunt efforts to slash federal spending.

…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?