Chris Edwards

Travis Joseph

Oregon made history this summer, and not the celebratory kind. It’s a wakeup call: The system is broken and fixing it requires new thinking. …Beginning in 2019, the Wasco County Forest Collaborative… worked with the U.S. Forest Service on the Grasshopper Restoration Project to reduce hazardous fuels and wildfire risk. …Professional foresters and scientists concluded treatments would reduce wildfire risk. …Now those “protected” acres are burning in the nearly 94,000-acre Grasshopper Fire, and years of collaboration were wasted. Oregonians should be outraged. …But here’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable. When a proposed solution includes the word “logging,” many Democrats recoil. We say this as two native Oregonians who have worked within the Democratic Party. That response is rooted in outdated ideology. …Active management does not mean managing national forests like industrial timberlands. It means giving public land managers the tools and access to thin overcrowded forests, reduce hazardous fuels and respond to wildfire.