Region Archives: US West

Following a rough few months of leadership and financial turmoil at the Oregon Department of Forestry — including the abrupt resignation of its director — Gov. Tina Kotek wants to change the law so she and future governors get to pick the agency’s leader, rather than the governor-appointed state Board of Forestry. Kotek is proposing Senate Bill 1051, sponsored by Sen. Kayse Jama, D-Portland, to allow the governor to choose the director of the state Department of Forestry, also known as the state forester. …The governor-appointed seven members of state Board of Forestry, which oversees rulemaking for the state’s Department of Forestry, has historically vetted and chosen the state forester. …Under Senate Bill 1051, the state forester would not need to have a professional forestry background, but one of their deputies would have to be a “practical forester,” who is “familiar with western conditions and experienced in organization for the prevention of forest fire.”

The 87th Annual Oregon Logging Conference (OLC) took place February 20-22, at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene, Oregon. The theme, “Timber Builds Dreams,” reflected the growing impact of timber on Oregon’s economy and landscape as technology transforms the industry. Hundreds of vendors filled the venue, offering everything from equipment displays to hands-on demonstrations. The event was a mix of auctions, games with prizes, and special guests. One of the highlights was the keynote address by Chris Evans, of Portland-based TimberLab. TimberLab is known for its groundbreaking projects, including the Portland International Airport terminal roof, which used 3.4 million board feet of Oregon timber. Evans spoke about the future of large-scale construction using cross-laminated timber and custom glulam, highlighting the company’s leadership in innovation. …Overall, the 87th Annual Oregon Logging Conference proved to be a successful celebration of Oregon’s timber industry and its growing influence on both the economy.

Brian McCarthy

…The southwestern U.S. is usually synonymous with drought, but Ohio University Professor of Forest Ecology Brian McCarthy, says wet conditions this spring actually made matters worse for the January Los Angeles wildfires. McCarthy …uses a combination of experimental and observational studies to understand the population dynamics and community ecology of forests. “Southern California experienced a rather wet spring this year. This gave rise to the germination of a large number of herbaceous plants resulting in a thick luscious vegetation,” said McCarthy. “As part of the natural cycle of this region of the country, these plants then died at the end of the growing season and left an enormous amount of highly flammable fuel on the ground in the autumn.” …With fires becoming more frequent and volatile, McCarthy believes a key to mitigating damage from future wildfires is to prepare buildings and land and change the way we develop.

SEATTLE — The termination letters that ended the careers of thousands of U.S. Forest Service employees mean fewer people and less resources will be available to help prevent and fight wildfires, raising the specter of even more destructive blazes across the American West, fired workers and officials said. The Forest Service firings …are part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide. Workers who maintained trails, removed combustible debris from forests, supported firefighters and secured funds for wildfire mitigation 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. …U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington state Democrat, said on the social platform X that the Forest Service layoffs are already hurting the state, “and it is only going to get worse. Fire season is coming.”

Fewer wildfires occur in North American forests today than in past centuries, but this decline has increased the risk of more intense wildfires, according to a study published in Nature Communications. While it may seem unexpected, frequent low-intensity surface fires help maintain forest health by naturally reducing fuel buildup over large areas. Researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station compared wildfire frequency across two periods: 1600 to 1880 and 1984 to 2022. Using data from 1,850 tree-ring records in historically burned areas, they assessed past fire activity and compared it with modern fire perimeter maps from Canada and the United States. The findings show modern-day fires are much less frequent than they were in past centuries, despite recent record-breaking fire years, such as 2020. 

PORTLAND, Ore. — An environmental nonprofit is sounding the alarm over the federal funding cuts and hiring freeze instituted by President Donald Trump’s administration, which it said could threaten the population of Oregon’s endangered spotted owl. The widespread layoffs and cuts instituted by the Trump administration have set off a series of protests across the country and around Portland, some of which have focused specifically on the thousands of U.S. National Parks and Forest Service workers who have been fired. The Northwest Forest Plan and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) require the endangered owl population to be monitored, but the Center for Biological Diversity said in a news release that the federal freeze means the monitoring “either won’t occur or will be greatly reduced.”

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and Council on Wildlife and Fish filed a lawsuit in federal court in Montana against a road-building and commercial logging project on public lands in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana. The challenged Wood Duck project is located in a wildlife corridor that is critical for recovery of grizzly bears, and is highly desirable elk habitat.  Logging and road building harm elk and grizzly bears and will likely displace both species from the public lands in the area. The lawsuit raises challenges against the project, and also against the Forest Service’s failure to implement strong protections for public land elk habitat, grizzly bear travel corridors, and old growth forest across the Helena – Lewis and Clark National Forest.

Back in 2021, the SDS Lumber and Timber Company’s sale of its extensive mill properties and nearly 100,000 acres of Pacific Northwest forest reserves to sent a shockwave through the Columbia River Gorge as well as the global timber industry. Now, through a complex partnership agreement, nearly all of the forests formerly owned by SDS in southwestern Washington are remaining open to logging, while being protected against future commercial or residential development.  The Columbia Land Trust has announced a $36 million award from the U.S. Forest Service that will go toward establishing a new conservation easement on a 29,000-acre piece of former SDS Lumber land… Keeping timberlands as “working forests,” rather than carving up the land into commercial or residential parcels, is considered a major conservation win, according to Columbia Land Trust Executive Director Meg Rutledge.

Can Washington state hold off harvesting older forests in the face of a projected $12 billion budget deficit without impacting local governments and school districts that get money from those timber sales? That’s the big question facing Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s new Public Lands commissioner. As one of his first acts on the job, Upthegrove did what he promised to do on the campaign trail — pause the harvest of timber from 70,000 to 80,000 acres of older forests that don’t yet qualify as “old-growth” but still are old enough to provide valuable habitat. Upthegrove said the pause on logging older forests would be offset by increasing harvests in younger forests. He also said the fact that timber values have gone up should dampen the blow.

The U.S. Forest Service is at a crossroads in 2025. As the Trump administration takes hold and federal employees are dealing with threats of termination from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the agency is set to wrap up a 120-day comment period on March 17 to amend the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. Meant to guide forest stewardship across more than 20 million acres in the Pacific Northwest, the original Northwest Forest Plan left tribes and Indigenous communities out of the negotiating room. Climate change was barely mentioned in 1994, and here we are 30 years later addressing issues that are important to many communities across Northern California, western Oregon, and western Washington… It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will do with the Northwest Forest Plan amendment effort, and there is potential that it could go the way of the National Old Growth Amendment and be abandoned.

There’s no two ways about it: the U.S. Forest Service is at an impasse, seized by uncertainty like hardly ever before. In its quest for a supposedly leaner, more decentralized government, the Trump administration, led by DOGE chieftain Elon Musk, is taking an ax to the federal workforce. The Forest Service in particular is hemorrhaging manpower: it was reported on Friday that Trump had pink-slipped 3,400 workers. That is roughly one-tenth of USFS personnel. “These cuts are particularly impactful for the Northwest because we have vast expanses of national forest and public land,” says Rep. Kim Schrier. However much the PNW has to lose, this is no mere regional issue. It’s an affront to Mother Nature herself, Schrier says, because “we’re taking away people who do what we call ‘wildfire mitigation’: they do the work that thins the forests to prevent catastrophic wildfires. They do that year-round so we aren’t choking on smoke all summer.”

Sampling of additional coverage:

• Colorado Springs Business Journal: Governor Polis blasts recent federal cuts to the US Forest Service
• Oregon Public Broadcasting, by April Ehrlich: Trump’s firing of Forest Service workers raises concerns about wildfires in Oregon, the West
• Boise State Public Radio: In an Idaho mountain town, mass firings provoke a community backlash
• Native News Online: Layoffs at National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service Raise Concern Over Sacred Lands

Amid mounting criticism from the public and lawmakers from both parties, Gov. Tina Kotek has paused any further agency action on the state’s new Wildfire Hazard Map until the Legislature decides what to do with it. …But it has provoked backlash from homeowners in some high-risk areas who are worried about wildfire insurance rates and coverage, and potentially having to comply with new building requirements. …House and Senate Republicans at the press conference said the burden of wildfire mitigation should be on state and federal agencies, not private landowners. “It is unfair to place the burden of fuel reduction and wildfire mitigation solely on private property owners, while our state and federal governments fail to steward our forests and public lands adequately,” State Rep. Christine Drazan said. …An ongoing federal funding freeze is also threatening wildfire investments going into the 2025 fire season.

The Douglas fir is a symbol of the Pacific Northwest [that] represents the checkered past of overlogging. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia … is no friend of Big Timber after her groundbreaking research elevated the understanding of preserving healthy old forests. …Simard and colleagues are focused on the species’ survival in the face of climate stressors. …migrating genotypes or provinces northward gives the seedlings a chance to take root. …The study counters grim environmental concerns by encouraging individual action. A recent example can be found at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island [where] authorities arrested about 1,200 protesters who stopped [harvesting]. Now, Canadian officials have extended a moratorium on logging in Fairy Creek to next year. “It’s not that one watershed is going to change the world, but the movement changes the world,” Simard said. Then she adds, “The trees are still there, communicating with each other.” 

Another 29,800 acres of timberland just got conserved under easement as working forest, the third phase in Columbia Land Trust’s project of protecting about 75,000 acres, sold by SDS lumber company in 2021. Columbia Land Trust hopes to conserve almost everything except the mill itself, buying the most important 15,000 acres of habitat outright. They hope to put the other 60,000 under conservation easements. In this case, Washington’s Department of Natural Resources will hold some of the rights over the 29,800 acres of land. It can be sold, but never developed; it must always remain working forest. This is the trust’s biggest project to date… SDS Lumber was the last family-owned, vertically-integrated (meaning it owned and operated most stages of its own supply chain) timber company in this part of the Northwest.

A small but important drama is playing out now in a city of Portland land use decision involving power lines, Portland General Electric and five acres of Douglas Fir at the north end of Forest Park… The land-use fight obliges us to confront uncomfortable tradeoffs. Carbon from burning fossil fuels in power plants and automobile engines drives climate change. Shifting to zero-carbon wind and solar electricity drives down climate risk – including the risk of wildfire. Connecting new wind and solar to Portland will require upgraded and new transmission lines across many prairie and forestlands. Where we can avoid impacts to community, cultural and natural values, we should. But it is a vexing fact of our climate-altered world that where we can’t, we have to make these tradeoffs.

Related content: 

• Courthouse News Service: In Portland, a battle between preservation and more electric power

Contrary to what people might think, North American forests are burning less, not more, according to new data. A study published in Nature Communications reveals how this trend may be causing more aggressive fires… Using a fire scar dataset known as the North American Tree-Ring Fire Scar Network, which originated from work done at the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, researchers were able to compile a clearer picture of historical fire geography and frequency. This allowed them to compare recent seemingly extreme wildfire events – such as the California August Complex Fire and the Arizona Bighorn Fire of 2020 – with events from the past… The fire scar data used in the study was collected from more than 1,800 sites across North America, spanning diverse forest types.

A new Colorado State University study of the interior U.S. West has found that tree ranges are generally contracting in response to climate change but not expanding into cooler, wetter climates – suggesting that forests are not regenerating fast enough to keep pace with climate change, wildfire, insects and disease. As the climate becomes too warm for trees in certain places, tree ranges have been expected to shift toward more ideal conditions. The study analyzed national forest inventory data for more than 25,000 plots in the U.S. West, excluding coastal states, and found that trees were not regenerating in the hottest portions of their ranges – an expected outcome. More surprising to the researchers was that most of the 15 common tree species studied were not gaining any ground in areas where conditions were more favourable, indicating that most tree species likely will not be able to move to more accommodating climates without assistance.

LINCOLN, Nebraska — The Arbor Day Foundation is investing in technology to help trees grow faster. This investment aims to draw millions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the next decade, while restoring microbial biodiversity to thousands of acres of forests. Arbor Day’s Impact Fund … is supporting Funga PBC. The startup utilizes DNA sequencing and advanced data analysis to identify growth-promoting, native fungal communities that used to be present and have been degraded over time by land management practices and other factors. Funga then inoculates seedlings with these fungal communities at the nursery, so that these fungi will be established on the tree’s roots at the time of planting. Early results have shown that Funga’s inoculants can increase survival rates and boost tree growth by an average of 30%. This process not only restores and protects belowground biodiversity, but it also enables forests to pull more carbon out of the atmosphere.

The Trump administration has halted funding for federal programs to reduce wildfire risk in western U.S. states and has frozen hiring of seasonal firefighters as part of broad cuts to government spending, according to organizations impacted by the moves. The reduction in resources for wildfire prevention after devastating blazes in Los Angeles …with some expecting losses as high as $35 billion. The Oregon-based non-profit Lomakatsi Restoration Project said its contracts with the federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to reduce hazardous fuels in Oregon, California and Idaho, have been frozen. …The American Loggers Council, a logging industry group, said the funding freeze has also stopped work under the $20 million Hazardous Fuels Transportation Assistance program, which pays for removing dead wood from forests …calling on the administration to exempt forest management programs from the suspension in federal funding.

PORTLAND, Oregon— President Donald Trump’s administration is holding up money for wildfire mitigation projects funded through legislation championed by his Democratic predecessor, threatening efforts to prevent catastrophic blazes like the ones that recently ripped through Southern California. The decision undermines Trump’s repeated insistence that communities need to clear combustible materials like fallen branches and undergrowth — “it’s called management of the floor,” he said while visiting Los Angeles last month — to guard against wildfires. Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, said via email that mitigation work is “currently undergoing review to ensure consistency” with Trump’s executive orders. The scrutiny is being applied only to projects using money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, two centerpieces of former President Joe Biden’s administration. They included roughly $3 billion for wildfire mitigation efforts, often known as hazardous fuels reduction programs.

The U.S. Forest Service has completed assessment reports on over 20 topics that will inform how the Tongass National Forest will be managed in decades to come. The last comprehensive plan for the Tongass was done in 1997. There have been a few amendments since then, but the plan is still missing a lot about the way the forest is today. Barb Miranda is a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. “Our economic fabric has shifted from timber to tourism,” she said. “The reason why we are doing a plan is not just because we’re required to, but everything’s changed in the last 25 years.” The assessments are a comprehensive look at what the federal agency knows about the Tongass now and will help inform the new plan. They cover timber, energy and minerals to subsistence and the status and uses of the land. Nearly all assessments mention climate change as a future challenge.

With a name like the “Fix Our Forests Act,” it should be a good thing for forests, wildlife, and the environment, right? Unfortunately, that is not the case with H.R. 471, aka the Fix Our Forests Act. A more accurate name for this legislation would be the “Clearcut Our Public Lands Act.” Proponents of the bill say it will reduce wildfire risk. A closer look at the actual text shows that it would significantly erode bedrock environmental protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and National Environmental Policy Act, remove science from land management decisions, eliminate public oversight across millions of acres of public lands, and may even make wildfires worse. …More logging means more roadbuilding in our forests which spreads flammable weeds, disrupts sensitive soils, fragments wildlife habitat, causes more landslides and sedimentation of rivers and drinking water sources, and is linked to an increase in human-caused wildfires.