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By accelerating old growth clearcutting and reducing protection for streams, the WOPR would have destroyed much of what we love about Oregon's forests. If properly protected our federal forests can help stabilize our climate, provide clean drinking water, recover endangered species, and offer diverse recreation opportunities.

Thankfully, the Obama administration seeks to embrace sound science and move beyond the divisive proposals of the prior administration.

Now is the time to build on the success of the Northwest Forest Plan and focus on broadly supported solutions for our forests. It's time to take mature & old-growth forests and roadless areas off the table and focus our efforts on watershed restoration and thinning dense young stands. This will create jobs, restore the forest, and produce a modest supply of wood products.

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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It is arrogant to say that humans can do better than nature. Wilderness is reserved for places that have not been previously messed up by humans so wilderness areas retain the natural processes suitable for their own perpetuation. There are numerous examples where well-intentioned management has lead to disastrous unintended consequences. Jack Ward Thomas said of NW forests, they are not only more complex than we think; it is more complex than we can think. Only a tiny fraction of Oregon is set aside for nature to manage. Leave it alone!

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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The BLM guy just said that BLM was not meeting it's timber targets, but the attached file shows he's not telling the whole story. The BLM lands are in fact producing significant amounts of timber and meeting the timber targets that Congress establishes in each years budget. The short-fall in 1999 and 2000 was due to a huge batch of illegal timber sales that BLM tried to push through and those sales were stopped by concerned citizens who just wanted BLM to do what was promised in terms of wildlife protection. BLM needs to serve the people not the timber industry. The people want clean water, fish & wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and quality of life, not more old-growth clearcuts on our public lands.

The timber industry blames habitat loss on fire, but in fact fire is a natural process that does not destroy habitat, it renews habitat. Also, harmful logging still affects far more habitat than fire. See attached.

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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OPB has been baited by a red herring dangled by the timber industry. Old forests are hard to define. So what. This complication is raised again and again by the timber industry and their allies in the agencies in order to prevent the old-growth discussion from moving forward.

The Oregon Department of Forestry recently framed the issue as "What is old growth?" and "How much old growth do we need?" In reality, we can act decisively and meaningfully without answering either one of these questions.

What is old growth? Answer: It does not really matter where on the forest continuum we draw a precise line that defines old growth, because there is currently such an extreme deficit of old forests that in order to restore old forest ecosystems that adequately provide habitat for endangered species, clean water, and carbon stores we need to protect and restore both mature and old growth.

The real question is NOT "What is old growth?" but rather "Which forests will benefit from human interventions such as prescribed fire and thinning and which forests already have the building blocks of recovery and do not require human intervention?" There is general agreement among scientists and conservationists and the authors of the Northwest Forest Plan and the Eastside Screens that stand-based protection of older forests (>80 years) is appropriate on the moist/westside, while tree-based protection (>21" dbh) is appropriate on the dry/eastside. These standards allow high priority restoration activities such as variable density thinning in dense young plantations on the westside and treating surface and ladder fuels to protect large old trees on the eastside. There is no basis for weakening these science-based standards.

How much old growth is enough? Answer: We don't need to know 'how much is enough' for another 50-150 years, so let's take our time and not be distracted by trying to answer this question prematurely. In order to start acting, we only need to know which direction to move. This much is clear - we logged too much old growth in the past, so there is too little old growth today. Our immediate objective should be to protect all we have and then restore much of what has been destroyed. This is recognized in the Northwest Forest Plan, the Eastside Screens and the statements of elected officials. Since we know which direction we need to move the system, we can start now without answering precisely where we will end up.

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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The Clackamas River provides drinking water to a variety of municipalities south of Portland and, unlike the Bull Run watershed, public lands in the Clackamas watershed is still subject to logging by the Mt Hood National Forest and Salem BLM. I am surprised a professional such as yourself who worked on the Mt Hood NF never learned this. During major storms there is a noticeable spike in water pollution, not just in the river, but also in our drinking water. Did you ever experience that muddy taste in the water after big storms? You can thank the government for the landslides the spill from clearcuts and logging roads.

posted 4 years, 10 months ago
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Paul Beck's argument seems to be that since native Americans underburned the forests, therefore he should be given the unfettered right to clearcut and bulldoze them. We've seen the results of that approach. No thanks.

Thinning, carefully done, can mimic natural processes like low-intensity fire, but certain elements in the timber industry do not want that.

Clearcutting does not mimic fire in any way. Even at her most angry, mother nature never wrecked the soil with a mess of roads, nor removed all the complex structural legacies that remain after severe fire.

Let's more forward with careful thinning, not backward with more clearcutting and high-grading.

posted 4 years, 10 months ago
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While there is some tension between forest carbon storage (which tends to have a cooling influence on climate) and forest albedo (which tends to have a warming influence on climate), this trade-off is most pronounced in the boreal forests which might be replaced by highly reflective snow for long periods after forests are lost due to fire or logging. In the low-elevation temperate forest of the Pacific northwest, our forests are quickly replaced by new forests (not snow). Since our forests are dark green virtually all the time, we might as well store as much carbon as possible in them. From that standpoint our forests are much like tropical forests in terms of both carbon and albedo.

posted 4 years, 10 months ago
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Spotted owls are an indicator species that are sending us a signal that the whole old growth forest ecosystem is in danger. The Northwest Forest Plan was supposed to protect owls, salmon and hundreds of other species that depend on old growth ecosystems. This new owl recovery plan is s step backward from an ecosystem plan to a single species plan so it will likely be less effective.

I hope everyone realizes that almost all of our wood products come from non-federal lands, so we can stop logging old growth right now and will not really have much of an effect on our wood supply.

Now climate change gives us another profoundly important reason to protect all the remaining mature and old growth forest and restore much of what has been lost. Logging releases massive amounts of carbon to the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Old-growth forests safely store tons of carbon per acre and help ensure a livable climate.

There is no longer any plausible reason to log mature & old-growth forest forests, but many reasons to protect those forests: endangered species, clean drinking water, livable climate, recreation, spiritual renewal, soil conservation, flood control, slope stability, and quality of life that attracts high skilled workers and businesses that want to employ them.

posted 5 years ago
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