Region Archives: US West

In a typical year, the agency hires more than 1,000 summer workers for temporary roles in Oregon and Washington’s federal forests The U.S. Forest Service says it won’t be hiring temporary seasonal workers next summer, citing a tight budget for the coming year. The agency will still hire seasonal staff to fight fires, but temporary summer hires for all other roles — like building trails, conducting archaeological surveys and doing engineering work – are on hold. The Forest Service has also rescinded some job offers it’s made, and is limiting decisions around other permanent staff positions, senior leaders told workers in a briefing this week. The agency hires seasonal workers to staff 11 national forests in Oregon and five in Washington. It usually hires thousands of additional summer workers in other forests across the country. Leaving those roles unfilled is a move the public could notice when warm weather returns.

American Forests is working around the clock to rebuild forests ravaged by fires. On Sept. 5, American Forests, in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, launched a significant reforestation initiative in Eldorado National Forest, located in Peavine Ridge, California. This effort is part of a broader strategy to address the critical reforestation needs in the Northern Sierras, where American Forests has been intensifying its cone collection activities. The urgency of these efforts cannot be overstated. The 2024 wildfire season in California has already surpassed the five-year average in terms of burned area. According to the U.S. Forest Service, national forests alone require restoration across at least 3.6 million acres. To address the 1.5 million acres in need of reforestation statewide, the U.S. must significantly ramp up its seed collection efforts. Without an adequate seed supply, wildfires will continue to outstrip our replanting capabilities. Fortunately, 2024 has brought a promising increase in cone production. 

OREGON – As the weather gets cooler and wetter, the Oregon Department of Forestry is reminding people that this year’s historic fire season is not over just yet. Jessica Neujahr, public affairs officer with ODF, said recent rains have helped moderate fire behavior, allowing crews to make progress on containing numerous blazes across the state. Though the precipitation has not been enough to saturate fuels dried by this summer’s heat and eliminate any potential for fire. “We’re in a stage of season where we’re really trying to just remind people to check the conditions and not the calendar,” she said. “It might seem like we’re in a good space, but when you actually look at the conditions, we’re stilling having really dry fuels. We’re not getting those wetting rains yet.”

TRUCKEE, Calif. – Last week, the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation (TTCF) awarded a $1 million grant to the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment—the biggest grant that TTCF has directed in its history. The money will go towards the Sierra Institute’s Mosaic Timber operation to help thin the area’s overcrowded forests, create a forest economy, and offer a new building material called Cross-Laminated Timber. Stacy Caldwell, CEO of TTCF was excited about the scale and impact of the grant that they awarded to the Sierra Institute. “We’ve been building trust with them over the years, seeing what they’re doing, supporting them with different, smaller grants along the way,” said Caldwell. “We’re just really confident about the solutions they have been offering.” …However, this biomass that is removed needs to go somewhere. Without nearby milling factories, money needs to be spent to ship the lumber to processing facilities. 

With the state facing an estimated $45.8 million in wildfire expenses so far this season, Idaho Gov. Brad Little and other state officials are discussing the need to replenish the fund before next year. During the last legislative session, the state pre-funded its emergency fire suppression fund at about $68 million, Idaho Department of Lands Director Dustin Miller said Tuesday. Miller briefed Little and other state officials Tuesday during a meeting of the State Board of Land Examiners at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. So far this year, the state has spent an estimated $51.1 million, about $5.2 million of which is reimbursable costs, Miller said. That leaves the state on the hook for about $45.8 million so far. …The Idaho Legislature will decide whether to approve additional pre-funding for the emergency fire suppression fund once the 2025 legislative session convenes in January.

HELENA, Mont. – Joining Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) Director Amanda Kaster, Governor Greg Gianforte highlighted the impact of the state’s investments in fuel reduction and fire suppression efforts this fire season. Through $60 million in funding secured when Gov. Gianforte signed House Bill 883 into law, the state is prepared now more than ever before to increase the pace and scale of forest and wildfire management. “…many fires have been prevented or suppressed through our investments in an aggressive initial attack and through new technology,” Gov. Gianforte said. “Our increased resources have made a noticeable difference this season, allowing us to catch fires before they become visible.” With the additional funding, DNRC has expanded its wildfire prevention and suppression efforts by using cutting-edge technology to find fires before they show visible smoke, securing additional equipment to fight fires faster, and addressing forest health through fuel reduction work.

WASHINGTON STATE — Sherwood State Forest in Washington’s Mason County escaped the industrial clear-cutting that transformed much of the Northwest last century. …Last year, those islands of protected forest shrank even further as Washington’s Department of Natural Resources auctioned off rights to log almost 160 acres of Sherwood Forest, located about 40 miles southwest of Seattle. …This story is hardly unique. Throughout Western Washington, pockets of state forestlands that were logged in the early 1900s have regrown into ecosystems that sequester tons of carbon and serve as valuable wildlife habitat. …These regrown forests also represent a potential bonanza for timber companies, however, and they don’t benefit from protections given to most old growth on state lands. …A paper published last year by the independent research nonprofit Resources for the Future found mature forests sequester more carbon than younger trees do.

Two conservation groups asked a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel to stop three commercial logging projects slated for a south-central Oregon forest, accusing the U.S. Forest Service of exceeding its authority and bypassing environmental regulations in approving the projects. Oregon Wild and WildEarth Guardians appeared before a three-judge panel on Wednesday to implore the court to prevent the service from commercially thinning 29,000 acres within the Fremont-Winema National Forest in southern Oregon. The conservation groups argue that the service illegally authorized the projects and bypassed environmental impact analysis by misapplying a categorical exclusion to the National Environmental Policy Act. …The forest service argued the projects are crucial to the health of the forest and mitigating wildfires, and that nowhere in the text of the categorical exclusion was there a potion limiting acreage.

When wildfires rage, the immediate threat is obvious – but smoke from the fires actually kills far more people than the flames. As fires become more frequent, that smoke is leading to a public health crisis. In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, it was found that wildfire smoke likely contributed to more than 52,000 premature deaths across California alone from 2008 to 2018, with an economic impact from the deaths of more than US$430 billion. Previous studies have examined the short-term health risks from wildfire smoke, but few have assessed how exposure to wildfire smoke over years adds up to shorten human lives.

One year after a wildfire burns in a forest, the U.S. Forest Service assesses the damage. What the agency finds at this one-year mark informs its post-fire restoration efforts, including how many trees foresters are required to plant to replace ones that died due to the fire. But according to a growing body of research, one year just isn’t enough time to determine how many trees have died following a wildfire… The phenomenon being investigated is called “post-fire delayed tree mortality.”… Previous field research has shown that trees continue to die for years after wildfires. This research is some of the first to use satellite imagery to study the phenomenon remotely.

Officials with a tiny school district nestled in northwest Oregon’s Clatsop State Forest have paid tens of thousands of dollars to fight new state limits on logging and are prepared to “bet the farm” to support its lawsuit against the state, the Capital Chronicle has learned. The Jewell School District has paid $148,000 and owes $3,000 more to lawyer John DiLorenzo for his work on its lawsuit that was filed in March, according to records obtained by the Capital Chronicle. Jewell’s superintendent, Cory Pederson, said the cost was justified. …The suit, filed in Clatsop County Circuit Court against the Oregon Department of Forestry, state forester Cal Mukumoto and state forest chief Mike Wilson, claims the logging limits in the Western State Forests Habitat Conservation Plan will drastically reduce revenue for the school district, forcing it to cut staff and services.

Credit: Lee Donohue

The Lost Fire, ignited by lightning in Redwood National Park in 2023, provided a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of thinning treatments that have been progressively implemented across the park over the past few decades. Most of Redwood National Park consists of secondary-growth redwood forests, where old-growth redwoods were harvested long ago. Restoration thinning aims to accelerate the development of these younger forests into mature, complex ecosystems that are ecologically valuable and aesthetically significant.

Land managers in both the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and federal agencies have set a target of intentionally burning 400,000 acres annually by next year, an amount of land that when combined would be larger than the city of Los Angeles. The goal is to chip away at the 10 million to 30 million acres that officials estimate would benefit from some form of fuel reduction treatment. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is data publicly available, about 96,000 acres were burned by these land managers… While the state is increasing its use of beneficial fire, as the method is called, officials and experts alike say it is far from enough to meet the threat posed by catastrophic wildfires.

A logging and clearcutting project in the Bitterroot National Forest will make it harder to hunt elk, inflates the amount of “old growth” that would be left, and will cost taxpayers $4.2 million, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana. It also illegally ignores grizzly bears and wolverines, and it misinforms the public about effects on pine marten, among other problems, said the complaint about the Gold Butterfly Project and related Forest Plan amendments filed by two conservation groups. For instance, the U.S. Forest Service doesn’t appear to have ever collected required monitoring data on pine marten, and it doesn’t have a population trend established, the lawsuit said. …In 2020, the Forest Service staved off separate litigation over the same project by withdrawing a formal decision in favor of more analysis, according to the current lawsuit.

A frozen forest, preserved as tiny seeds packed in tall stacks of labeled boxes, holds the future of California‘s scorched woodlands. With wildfires consuming trees at an alarming rate, the role of the sub-zero repository at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Reforestation Center is taking on new urgency… “There’s a moral imperative for human involvement at this point,” because decades of fire suppression have created overcrowded forests that burn quickly and intensely, said Leana Weissberg. Decades ago, before environmental regulations reduced logging in forests and the timber industry collapsed, there was a bustling business of nurseries. At its height, the U.S. Forest Service had 13 tree nurseries in the nation; today, only six remain, including one in Placerville.

AS FORMER STATE legislators, we’ve been on the front lines of the work to both protect our natural environment and advocate for a vibrant timber industry that benefits Clallam County residents. …Modern foresters plant more trees than they harvest and manage forests to keep them healthy and fire resistant, preserve wildlife habitat and clean water, and combat climate change by sequestering carbon in trees. …That’s why when special interest groups advocate for abandoning previously managed forests in favor of doing no management at all we have to object and advocate for the forests, wildlife and communities they support and protect. Forests are complex ecosystems that must be managed according to the best available science, not political talking points. …When timber revenue is delayed or eliminated, Clallam County taxpayers are forced to make a choice: fewer services or higher property taxes.

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan was designed to quell the decades-long “timber wars” between loggers and environments. The plan placed 24 million acres of federal forests in Oregon, Washington and northern California under a single management model that was supposed to protect spotted owls and promote ecological, social and economic stability for the next 100 years. Yet 30 years later, it has failed to recover owl populations. Wildfires scorch Northwest forests, destroying old-growth and owl habitat. And many historically timber-dependent communities continue to struggle. …Despite prohibiting timber harvest on significant swaths of the owl’s territory, populations have plummeted by 65% since the plan was adopted. In some areas of Washington, that number is closer to 90%. …Timber towns weren’t the only communities neglected by the plan. Native Tribes weren’t just left behind, they were left out. This oversight has been detrimental because Northwest forests were heavily impacted by Native American management.

One of the Oregon Board of Forestry’s newest members faced concerns this week over a June trip to potential state timber harvest sites in Clatsop County at the invitation of an environmental nonprofit. …Bob Van Dyk, the former policy director for the Wild Salmon Center, was appointed by Gov. Tina Kotek to the Board of Forestry and confirmed by the state Senate this spring. In June, North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection invited him to visit Mothball Hill and Davis Ridge east of Astoria and hear from property owners. …During the public comment portion of the meeting, Clatsop County Commissioner Lianne Thompson shared similar concerns, describing the situation as a breach in “ethical integrity.” Speaking as a private citizen, she called on the board to address the issue. …“It’s really disingenuous to say, ‘Oh, I was just going out to meet with people.’

Last July, 21 scientists, loggers, conservationists, and tribal and government representatives were convened for one simple task: decide the future of Northwest forests. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan was supposed to dictate how 24 million acres of federal forests were managed for the next century. Thirty years in, the plan has failed to meet most of its objectives. Even though timber harvest has been reduced, endangered species that depend on old-growth forests are still declining. …On July 16, in a historic display of collaboration, the committee published their recommendations. The committee is led by co-chairs Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, and Susan Jane Brown, chief legal council of Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm. Joseph represents the timber industry, and Brown, the environmentalists. The pair worked together under U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and their partnership traverses the divide between loggers and conservationists.

As Oregon heads into another hot weekend, Oregon House Republicans are calling on the state Legislature to reform forest management and logging policies they say would prevent large fires from starting and spreading… In a letter sent Wednesday, representatives said lawmakers should roll back regulations and conservation plans to allow more logging on state forests, limit liabilities for volunteer firefighters who might cause injury or property damage while on the job and prohibit and sweep homeless encampments in fire prone areas… “Oregon’s war on the timber industry must end,” the Republicans wrote. “The logging industry plays a vital role in clearing out deadwood and decreasing the severity of fires. Seven sawmills have closed this year due to anti-business policies. Republicans support reforming burdensome regulations while treating the lumber industry as partners in conservation.”

The Oregon Department of Forestry is warning the public to remain cautious and safe as the risk of wildfire remains high across the Pacific Northwest. The Oregon Department of Forestry wants to remind Oregonians that with weather fluctuating across the state, fire is still on the landscape and fire season is still in effect,” the ODFW announced on Sept. 5. “Oregon is still experiencing one of the worst seasons we’ve seen in the past decade, and the department warns the public against complacency.”