Modern Washington summers are rarely spared a painful surge of wildfires on both sides of the Cascade Mountains. The escalating toll has scorched communities and cloaked vast areas with so much smoke that even venturing outside is a health risk. Every fire-reduction method in the state’s arsenal must be deployed against this perennial menace. …The Legislature should approve Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz’s logical strategy to reverse the trend and keep our state’s people, habitat and property safer. Her plan, contained in House Bill 1168 … would step up investments in making Washington more wildfire resistant. It would also expand firefighting resources to help stop forest fires in time to minimize devastation, and reduce the high costs of importing help from other states and nations. …Millions of Washington residents deserve better protection from an entirely predictable problem. The Legislature should enact HB 1168.

CORVALLIS, Oregon — Selectively cutting trees in riparian zones to aid forest restoration can be done without adversely affecting streams’ water temperature as long as the thinning isn’t too intensive, new research by Oregon State University shows. Published in PLOS One, the study led by OSU College of Agricultural Sciences graduate student David Roon is one of the few to quantify restorative thinning’s effects on forest streams. …Roon and collaborators Jason Dunham and Jeremiah Groom examined the effects of riparian thinning on shade, light and stream temperature in three small watersheds in second-growth redwood forests in northern California. …”where the thinning treatments were less intensive, smaller reductions in shade and light resulted in minimal changes in stream temperatures.” That means, Roon said, at lower intensity levels thinning within riparian zones in second-growth redwood forests looks like a feasible restoration strategy.

OREGON — Fire crews dropped 620,000 gallons of water on the Beachie Creek Fire while it was still small and confined to a remote part of the Opal Creek Wilderness. But they also went nine days without dropping any water, never used fire retardant, and didn’t engage the fire on the ground, according to U.S. Forest Service records. The records, released after a Freedom of Information Act request, detail the early response to a fire that stayed small for almost three weeks before exploding Labor Day night. The records bring a new level of detail to the question of whether the Forest Service could have extinguished a fire that contributed to one of the biggest calamities in Oregon history. …Critics of the Forest Service response say the agency could have stayed more aggressive when the fire went quiet. [We respect the copyrights of the source publication – full access may require a subscription]

Regan Fisher

Shuttered shops and restaurants, inadequately funded schools and libraries, sheriff’s offices lacking the resources to respond to 911 calls — many of Oregon’s small towns are cash strapped and struggling.  Some blame these financial woes on a decline in revenue from logging due to environmental protection and they advocate for larger harvests. However, the truth is that despite conservation efforts, timber harvests on state and federal land have remained about the same for the past 20 years.  So why aren’t communities reaping the benefits?  The answer is that timber companies have finagled outrageously preferential tax treatment for themselves, allowing them to wring money from our forests without putting even the bare minimum back into the communities in which they operate. …The tax breaks we’ve doled out to timber companies have cost counties approximately $3 billion over the past 30 years.

Dominick DellaSalla

I was appointed to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recovery team in 2006-2008 as an independent scientist tasked with producing a recovery plan for the imperiled spotted owl under the George W. Bush administration. At the time, the timber industry blamed the demise of the spotted owl on competition with the barred owl and habitat loss from wildfires instead of logging.  This was a carefully coordinated shell game to dismantle protections for millions of acres of older forests and insert the industry’s ill-fated “recovery plan” in a sue-and-settle agreement with the Bush administration. Fortunately, that plan was overturned by the Obama administration because it was deemed scientifically indefensible, risky to the owl and hundreds of older forest species, and politically motivated. Amanda Astor’s Feb 20 op-ed in The Register Guard — a tale of two owls — is déjà vu all over again.