Forest Web

Logging continues to pose a major threat, a new report finds

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By Rochelle Gluzman

InestigateWest - September 9, 2022

On Earth Day this year, President Joe Biden visited Seattle’s Seward Park — home to 200-year-old stands of bigleaf maple and western red cedar covered in moss and licorice fern — where he gave a speech and signed an executive order aimed at strengthening the nation’s forests, communities and local economies.

Section 2 of the executive order recognizes the value of mature and old-growth forests as natural tools against climate change and the biodiversity crisis. After all, big trees store a lot of carbon, and protecting older forests helps maintain healthy ecosystems and critical habitat. The order also directs the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, to inventory these forests on federal lands and develop policies that conserve them as a linchpin of U.S. climate policy.

By the time all that comes to fruition, however, many of these forests could be gone.

Logging continues to pose a great and immediate threat to mature and old-growth forests, according to a new report “Worth More Standing” by the Climate Forests coalition. This initiative works to conserve the remaining older forests and trees on federal lands, considering them “one of the country’s most straightforward, impactful and cost-effective climate solutions,” according to the coalition’s website. The group is made up of more than 100 organizations including EarthJustice and the Center for Biological Diversity…

Advocates worry they could lead to the loss of hundreds of acres of old-growth forests in eastern and northeastern Oregon

By Paula Hood

Oregon Capital Chronicle – August 9, 2022

Mark Webb, director of the Blue Mountains Forest Partners collaborative, recently attacked a colleague who dared to shed light on what’s actually happening across public lands in eastern Oregon.

Forest collaborative groups, such as the BMFP, were initially created to bring together diverse interests, such as loggers and environmentalists, to restore forests. Unfortunately, collaboratives no longer work towards common ground and are increasingly dominated by extractive interests. Collaborative groups have ample financial incentives to promote logging, with millions of dollars in government subsidies going to collaborative members, staff and intermediary groups.

Regrettably, there is a tremendous disconnect between what the U.S. Forest Service and collaboratives put forth to the public and what is actually happening on the ground. Despite Webb’s claims that the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest no longer logs old growth, there are centuries-old fresh stumps that say otherwise. I know there are hundreds more acres of old-growth at risk in the Big Mosquito project on the Malheur. I’ve read documents that show the Umatilla is proposing logging up to 27,000 acres of pristine forests. I’ve been in meetings where the agency admitted they are developing proposals to log roadless forests while side-stepping standard environmental review…

By George Wuerthner

National Parks Traveler

The New York Times recently published an article titled At Yosemite, A Preservation Plan That Calls For Chainsaws. The idea that we need to log the forest to create healthy forests in a national park is a major threat to the management policies of the National Park Service, which generally promotes natural ecological and evolutionary processes.

The article states without qualification, “many experts say there is a consensus among scientists and political leaders on the need to thin and burn forests more proactively.”

The article suggests that humans always managed the landscapes in Yosemite and elsewhere. And that there is consensus that Indian burning kept the forests open. This view has been challenged but is not acknowledged in the New York Times piece.

Never mind that several scientific studies in Yosemite concluded that pre-European burning was primarily localized and had little influence on the forests.

Analysis by Maxine Joselow

with research by Vanessa Montalbano

July 13, 2022 at 7:56 a.m. EDT

A major piece of environmental legislation could pass the Senate and reach President Biden's desk before Labor Day, and it starts with the letter “R.”

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No, it's not Biden's long-stalled reconciliation package, which is still the subject of intense negotiations between Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

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Rather, it's the Recovering America's Wildlife Act, an ambitious bill to conserve the nation's wildlife and habitat as the biodiversity crisis causes the extinction of animal and plant species at an unprecedented rate.

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While the wildlife measure has gotten far less attention in Washington than the reconciliation bill, environmentalists say it would make a crucial investment in protecting vulnerable species before it's too late.

By Matthew Daly

AP News - July 5, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday threw out a host of actions by the Trump administration to roll back protections for endangered or threatened species, a year after the Biden administration said it was moving to strengthen such species protections.

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in Northern California eliminated the Trump-era rules even as two wildlife agencies under President Joe Biden are reviewing or rescinding the regulations. The decision restores a range of protections under the Endangered Species Act — including some that date to the 1970s — while the reviews are completed. Environmental groups hailed the decision, which they said sped up needed protections and critical habitat designations for threatened species, including salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

Tigar’s ruling “spoke for species desperately in need of comprehensive federal protections without compromise,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. “Threatened and endangered species do not have the luxury of waiting under rules that do not protect them…”

The greatest immediate threat to mature and old-growth forests and trees on federal lands is logging.

ClimateForests– July 13, 2022

Today, the Climate Forests Campaign, of which Forest Web is a part of, released a report highlighting 10 threatened forests on federal lands at risk of being devastated by logging, despite their extraordinary benefits of carbon sequestration and reducing the long-term impacts of climate change. The Flat Country Timber Sale is listed as the 2nd worst timber sale in the country.

The new report, “Worth More Standing,” details logging proposals affecting nearly a quarter of a million acres of federal forests overseen by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Read the report and take action!

Advocates of the West

27th of Jun 2022

Advocates for the West won a significant victory in our case for Friends of the Clearwater when a federal District Court issued a ruling halting the “End of the World” and “Hungry Ridge” logging projects on the Salmon-Clearwater Divide in Idaho. In its ruling, the Court faulted the U.S. Forest Service for failing to protect old growth forest.

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The Salmon-Clearwater Divide is the mountainous, forested ridge rising between the Salmon River and the South Fork Clearwater River between Grangeville, Idaho, and the Gospel Hump Wilderness. 

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“This is a big win for fisher, marten, goshawk, and other wildlife that depend on old growth forest,” said Bryan Hurlbutt, Staff Attorney at Advocates for the West. “Stopping these misguided projects is also a big win for other at-risk species that would have been harmed by a decade of intensive logging across all types of forest, including salmon, steelhead, lynx, and grizzly bear, which have been documented on the Salmon-Clearwater Divide in recent years.”

By Matthew J. Reilly, Aaron Zuspan, Joshua S. Halofsky, Crystal Raymond, Andy McEvoy, Alex W. Dye, Daniel C. Donato, John B. Kim, Brian E. Potter, Nathan Walker, Raymond J. Davis, Christopher J. Dunn, David M. Bell, Matthew J. Gregory, James D. Johnston, Brian J. Harvey, Jessica E. Halofsky, Becky K. Kerns

Ecosphere - June 13, 2022

The 2020 wildfire season in the western United States was not only record-setting in terms of area burned (Higuera & Abatzoglou, 2021), but large fires also affected forest types that rarely burn. The wildfires that burned through the temperate rain forests of the “westside” of the Cascade Mountain Range in the Pacific Northwest (Figure 1a) were striking in their scale, speed, and severity, as well as their devastating societal impacts. Westside forests extend from the crest of the Cascade Mountains to the Coast Range and Olympic Peninsula along the Pacific Coast and include some of the most productive and biomass-rich terrestrial ecosystems in the world, harboring unique old-growth biodiversity (Figure 1b,c; Spies et al., 2018; Waring & Franklin, 1979), as well as short-rotation Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) plantations that are economically important in the region (Figure 1d). In combination with long intervals between large, severe fires, the exceptional productivity of these forests supports some of the world's largest trees and one of the most densely vegetated ecosystems globally, meaning they naturally contain substantially more biomass, carbon, and fuel than most drier, fire-prone forests elsewhere in the western United States (Smithwick et al., 2002)…

By Carmen Kohlruss        

The Fresno Bee – June 15, 2022

Yosemite National Park has a large logging project underway that a California conservation group is asking a federal judge to stop. The project summary states that trees up to 20 inches in diameter could be cut down in Yosemite across approximately 2,000 acres and 40 miles of park roads and trails. “In some places, the logging that they’re doing in Yosemite Valley is so intensive, it’s actually clear cutting,” said ecologist Chad Hanson, co-founder and director of the John Muir Project. “They’re actually clear cutting the forest – mature and old forests – in Yosemite Valley.”

The John Muir Project is part of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Earth Island Institute that filed the federal lawsuit on Monday in the Fresno division of U.S. District Court. It names Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon in her official capacity, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Little oversight leaves collaboratives to move on forest decisions without considering all voices.

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By Rob Klavins

Oregon Capital Chronicle – May 30, 2022

Here in eastern Oregon, our identity and way of life is deeply connected to our public lands. Landscapes of deep canyons, snow-capped peaks, dense forests, and deserts are quite literally our backyard.

They provide clean cold water, abundant wildlife, freedom, and a core piece of our identity.

In post-colonial times, our relationship with the land has been based on what we can take from it. Thankfully, many of us are rethinking that relationship.

The idea of logging big old trees and intact forests runs counter to Oregonians’ deepest held values. It also runs counter to science showing the irreplaceable values these forests provide. Keeping forests functioning is one of the best things we can do to slow climate change and the extinction crisis.

Bethany Cotton

Register-Guard  May 1,  2022

Last month, in honor of Earth Day, President Biden signed an executive order on Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies. While the EO represents progress in its acknowledgement that old-growth and mature forests are essential bulwarks against the worst impacts of climate change, its stated commitment to science-based management, and its inclusion of indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge as key to sustainable forest management, it does not — yet — actually safeguard the last of these forests here at home.  

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Amongst the substantive provision of the EO is a directive for the secretaries of agriculture and interior to “define, identify and complete an inventory of old-growth and mature forests on federal lands,” and to make it public within one year. Following the inventory, the agencies are directed to “develop policies with robust opportunity for public comment to institutionalize climate-smart management and conservation strategies that address threats to mature and old-growth forests on federal lands.”  

By Michael Garrity

Counterpunch – April 22, 2022

Today, on Earth Day, President Biden will announce a new policy to protect mature and old-growth trees which store the most carbon. Unfortunately, the president’s order will not ban logging of mature and old-growth forests or even protect the trees.  Instead, the President’s order is the latest version of a long bipartisan, Orwellian plan to subsidize the destruction of America’s national forests and the carbon sinks they contain.

Biden Won’t Stop Logging of Big Trees

Biden is clear that instead of prohibiting the logging of mature and old-growth forests, he is directing the Forest Service to study how to protect these trees.  From their past history the Forest Service’s answer will call for more logging because no matter what the problem has been, the Forest Service always says logging is the solution.

Even if Biden banned the logging of mature and old-growth trees like the Sierra Club and others have requested it wouldn’t save old-growth forests since old-growth forests are more than just big trees, they also have dead trees and young trees.  Old-growth forests are thick, multi-layered forests with horizontal cover that many species in decline such as bull trout, pine marten, spotted owls, pileated woodpeckers, lynx, and northern goshawks depended on…

Forest Web has joined with over 150 other environmental and climate justice organizations, adding our name to an open letter to Jennifer Morris, the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, to protest TNC's work with corporate polluters to promote industrial logging & wood products that harm the climate, biodiversity, & communities of color.   Forests are our best defense from the climate crisis & they need us now more than ever!  We must end the constant greenwashing by @nature_org who's promoting policies that favor the timber industry at the expense of the climate, nature & environmental justice.

Cristina Hubbard, Executive Director

Forest Web

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Dogwood Alliance – April 5, 2022

New exposé condemns The Nature Conservancy for falsely promoting industrial logging and wood products as climate solutions

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A coalition of scientists, faith and environmental justice leaders, and forest defenders has released The Nature Conspiracy, a tell-all exposé calling out The Nature Conservancy (TNC) for falsely promoting wood production and logging as climate solutions. The coalition decided to produce the exposé after The Nature Conservancy repeatedly dismissed concerns about the destruction it’s helping to cause.

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“The Nature Conservancy – the biggest, richest, and most influential environmental organization in the country – has been working with the logging and wood products industries and lobbying governments at all levels to increase logging and expand markets for wood products, often calling these efforts ‘natural climate solutions,’” said the Reverend Leo Woodberry, executive director of the New Alpha Community Development Corporation and prominent leader in the environmental justice movement…

By Alex Baumhardt

Oregon Capitol Chronicle – March 2, 2022

The Private Forest Accord passed the Oregon Senate on Wednesday, making its way to a final House vote before the end of the February short session.

“I think we’re making history this morning,” Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, said before the vote.

The bill would change the way more than 10 million acres of private forests in the state are managed to protect at-risk animals and water quality in rivers and streams.

The accord, called Senate Bill 1501, passed with 22 Democrats and four Republicans in favor. Five Republicans opposed.

The accord would dramatically change logging rules for private forests established in the Forest Practices Act, 50-year-old regulations dictating various rules, including how close logging can occur to rivers and streams and the use of pesticides.

The Private Forest Accord directs the state Board of Forestry to update the Forest Practices Act, requiring larger unlogged zones around rivers to protect fish habitat and ending commercial beaver trapping and the lethal removal of beavers on private forestland. It calls for improving roads in private forests and sets up stricter logging standards on slopes, which can cause landslides that send harmful debris into rivers…

A judge has restored federal protections for gray wolves across much of the U.S. after they were removed in the waning days of the Trump administration

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By Matthew Brown and John Flesher

ABC News- February 10, 2022

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A judge restored federal protections for gray wolves across much of the U.S. on Thursday after they were removed in the waning days of the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland, California, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to show wolf populations could be sustained in the Midwest and portions of the West without protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Wildlife advocates had argued state-sponsored hunting threatened to reverse the gray wolf’s recovery over the past several decades.

The ruling does not directly impact wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and portions of several adjacent states that remain under state jurisdiction…

By Liz Kimbrough

Mongabay – January 19, 2022

Animals that eat fruit and spread the seeds in their droppings offer an all-inclusive transportation service for half the world’s flora. But as more seed-dispersing birds and mammals die off globally, some of these plant species will lose their ability to shift their locations to keep pace with escalating climate change, says new research.

“When you hear the headlines about the biodiversity crisis, some call it the sixth mass extinction, that decline of birds and mammals also means the decline of seed dispersers,” Evan Fricke, lead author of the new study, recently published in Science, told Mongabay.

Fricke and colleagues reported that the loss of birds and mammals has reduced the ability of animal-dispersed plants to track climate change by 60%.

This number “is somewhere in the alarm bell territory,” Fricke told Mongabay. “I hope [this finding] focuses people’s attention on the importance of seed-disperser biodiversity for plant adaptation to climate change…”

KMTR – January 19, 2022

EUGENE, Ore. – Rep. Peter DeFazio said he was "disappointed" after talking to the Biden Adminstiration's Interior Secretary Deb Haaland about emergency reinstatement of Endangered Species Act protections for the gray wolf.

“Secretary Haaland has the power to immediately relist the gray wolf using emergency authority, and I strongly urged her to take this action," said the Democrat from Springfield, who is not seeking re-election this year. "I am disappointed she has chosen to delay this vital action to stop the slaughter."

DeFazio and other lawmakers have argued wolf recovery has been endangered by the lifting of protections under the Trump administration - and the current administration's failure to restore those protections.

“While I appreciate that Secretary Haaland took the time today to discuss the survival of the gray wolf, I came away from the discussion disappointed," DeFazio said in a statement Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022…

Ecologists thought America’s primeval forests were gone. Then Bob Leverett proved them wrong and discovered a powerful new tool against climate change

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By Jonny Diamond

Smithsonian Magazine – January 2022

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I meet Bob Leverett in a small gravel parking lot at the end of a quiet residential road in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We are at the Ice Glen trailhead, half a mile from a Mobil station, and Leverett, along with his wife, Monica Jakuc Leverett, is going to show me one of New England’s rare pockets of old-growth forest.

For most of the 20th century, it was a matter of settled wisdom that the ancient forests of New England had long ago fallen to the ax and saw. How, after all, could such old trees have survived the settlers’ endless need for fuel to burn, fields to farm and timber to build with? Indeed, ramping up at the end of the 17th century, the colonial frontier subsisted on its logging operations stretching from Maine to the Carolinas. But the loggers and settlers missed a few spots over 300 years, which is why we’re at Ice Glen on this hot, humid August day.

To enter a forest with Bob Leverett is to submit to a convivial narration of the natural world, defined as much by its tangents as its destinations—by its opportunities for noticing. At 80, Leverett remains nimble, powered by a seemingly endless enthusiasm for sharing his experience of the woods with newcomers like me. Born and raised in mountain towns in the Southern Appalachians, in a house straddling the state line between Georgia and Tennessee, Leverett served for 12 years as an Air Force engineer, with stints in the Dakotas, Taiwan and the Pentagon, but he hasn’t lost any of his amiable Appalachian twang. And though he’s lived the majority of his life in New England, where he worked as an engineering head of a management consulting firm and software developer until he retired in 2007, he comes across like something between an old Southern senator and an itinerant preacher, ready to filibuster or sermonize at a moment’s notice. Invariably, the topic of these sermons is the importance of old-growth forest, not only for its serene effect on the human soul or for its biodiversity, but for its vital role in mitigating climate change…

By Cassandra Profita

OPB – 12-14-2021

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Oregon State University researchers outline a plan for creating ‘Strategic Forest Reserves’ across the Western U.S.

Researchers with Oregon State University say the U.S. needs to establish new “Strategic Forest Reserves” to protect wildlife and reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.

A new study maps the Western forests that would store the most carbon and help the most species if they were given the same level of protection from logging, grazing and mining as designated wilderness areas receive.

Researchers analyzed which forests are currently protected in 11 states and which ones should be prioritized for protection in the future, outlining a plan for creating Strategic Forest Reserves across the region…

By Mateusz Perkowski

Capital Press - November 23, 2021

Timber groups can’t intervene in Endangered Species Act litigation over red tree voles because a federal judge said they lack a “significantly protectable interest” in the case.

In 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined it’s not warranted to list the red tree vole as threatened or endangered, which would have provided protections for the species and its habitat in Northwest Oregon.

The Center for Biological Diversity and several other environmental nonprofits challenged the decision, arguing the rodents are in danger of extinction from habitat loss caused by logging and other factors.

By Bradley W. Parks (OPB)

Bend, Ore. Nov. 5, 2021

A federal judge has ordered an immediate stop to a U.S. Forest Service plan to log along more than 400 miles of roads within the Willamette National Forest.

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U.S. District Judge Michael McShane said in an order issued Friday that the federal agency overstretched its authority under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, to effectively log some 20,000 acres of forestland in the name of post-fire road repair.

By Cassidy Randall

Sat 25 Jan 2020 06.00 EST

Twenty-five years ago, the national park attempted to reintroduce wolves – now scientists are celebrating it as one of the greatest rewilding stories ever

Supported by

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Twenty-five years ago this month, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, America’s first national park and an ecosystem dangerously out of whack owing to the extirpation of its top predator.

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This monumental undertaking marked the first deliberate attempt to return a top-level carnivore to a large ecosystem. Now scientists are celebrating the gray wolves’ successful return from the brink of extinction as one of the greatest rewilding stories the world has ever seen.

By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI Capital Press

Oct 5, 2021 Updated Oct 5, 2021

A federal judge has halted a 900-acre logging project in Southern Oregon because its impact on great gray owls wasn’t properly evaluated.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled the U.S.

Bureau of Land Management’s approval of the Griffin Half Moon project was “arbitrary and capricious,” which means logging cannot proceed until the plan is revised.

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Aiken has adopted a federal magistrate’s recommendation to block the project for violating the National Environmental Policy Act, dismissing the BLM’s objections that the case was analyzed under the wrong legal standards...

By Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald

OregonLive - September 17, 2021

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has authorized killing most wolves from the Lookout Mountain pack, including its breeding male.

But the agency does not plan to target the breeding female from the pack in eastern Baker County, which has killed six head of cattle since mid-July and injured two others, including a six-month-old calf killed late last week.

The permit allows ranchers to kill up to two wolves, not including the breeding pair, before Oct. 31. The permit applies to four ranchers who have lost cattle to wolves, and allows any of them to kill wolves on land they either own or legally use for grazing…

As climate change and habitat loss push wildlife to the brink, the time to protect biodiversity is now.

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By Ben Goldfarb

The Nature Conservancy - August 27, 2021

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In 1999, a strange virus began to afflict pig farmers in Malaysia. Patients suffered headaches, fevers and brain inflammation; ultimately more than 100 Malaysians died. Named the Nipah virus for the village where it was first identified, the pathogen is carried by fruit bats, which had been driven from their natural habitat by deforestation and fire and were foraging in orchards surrounding pig farms. It is believed that the bats were transmitting the virus to pigs, which passed it to humans. Nature’s deterioration, it seems, had spawned a public health crisis.

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The Nipah virus spillover provided evidence of a profound truth: Our fate is inextricably linked to the biodiversity that surrounds us. Insects pollinate our crops; oceans feed us; forests provide us with shelter. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the fact that when nature suffers, human well-being follows suit—loss of habitat and more contact with wildlife increases the risk of transmitting zoonotic viruses to humans. “Healthy waters, healthy lands, healthy people—all are part of a cohesive and integrated whole,” says Lynn Scarlett, chief external affairs officer for The Nature Conservancy.

To keep that whole intact, delegates from nearly 200 countries will convene for the next meeting of the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity, which will set global priorities for safeguarding habitats, saving species and protecting the ecological services that sustain human communities. Although a date for the convention is uncertain due to global travel restrictions at the time of publication, its mission couldn’t be more urgent. Since the late 19th century, the world has lost approximately half of its coral reefs, and other critical ecosystems, like wetlands and tropical forests, are shrinking fast. Around 1 million species are threatened today with extinction. “The arc of conservation is at a pivot point,” Scarlett says…

By Courtney Flatt

OPB – August 17, 2021

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Hundreds of endangered northern leopard frogs have hopped into the only wild place these frogs are found in Washington.

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The release recently was an effort to help boost this genetically important population. The frogs are bellwethers for ecosystem health.

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These tiny frogs first hatched at the Oregon Zoo and Northwest Trek Wildlife Park in Washington’s Pierce County. Now that they’ve grown to roughly six centimeters long, the frogs are ready to join the state’s only known population at Central Washington’s Columbia National Wildlife Refuge.

There’s no going back, but there is a way forward: Act now and go big.

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By Jeff Turrentine

NRDC – August 9, 2021

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Early this morning, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first portion of its Sixth Assessment Report on how climate change is altering the planet’s natural systems and worsening extreme weather events around the world. The news, you won’t be surprised to hear, is not good.

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Here are just some of the takeaways made by the authors with “high confidence”—which is IPCC-speak for near-certitude. In 2019, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were higher than at any time in at least two million years. The earth’s average surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2,000 years. Between 2011 and 2020, the annual average area of sea ice coverage in the Arctic reached its lowest level since at least 1850. And the global average sea level has risen faster since 1900 than over any preceding century in at least the last 3,000 years…

By Emma Snaith

Independent – July 28, 2021

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Humans will have already consumed all the natural resources that Earth can sustainably supply for 2021 by tomorrow — overshooting by five months.

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This year’s “Earth Overshoot Day” lands on the 29 July, after being moved forward temporarily in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic.

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From this point until the end of the year, the global economy is operating in “ecological deficit”, campaigners say. Humanity currently uses 74 per cent more resources than what the planet’s ecosystems can regenerate each year — or 1.7 Earths….

By Zack Budryk

The Hill – July 20, 2021

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The Biden administration is proposing to restore protections for millions of forests home to the northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, the latest reversal of environmental protections undone by the Trump administration.

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In a Federal Register notice Tuesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined there was “insufficient rationale and justification” behind the Trump-era removal of protections. The affected 3.4 million acres stretched across nearly 45 counties in Oregon, Washington and Northern California.

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The agency said it would instead curtail protections on about 200,000 acres in Oregon, following up on a 2020 proposal…

By Carson Vaughn

High Country News – June 29, 2021

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California experienced more wildfire last year than any previous year on record, but the severe drought currently strangling nearly three-quarters of the American West threatens to make the 2021 fire season even worse. And while many state and federal agencies are taking extraordinary measures to prevent the further loss of life and property — including prescribed burns, thinning and the deployment of the largest firefighting force in California’s history — some question the efficacy of these increasingly costly measures.

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In Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, published last month by the University Press of Kentucky, author Chad Hanson suggests that wildfire behavior is driven primarily by weather and climate. “Extreme weather — hot, dry, windy conditions — will drive wildland fires until the weather changes. Under such conditions, which are becoming more common due to climate change, no matter how many billions of dollars we spend to try to manage vegetation in remote areas, we cannot stop or curb fires,” he writes.

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“Nor can fires be stopped by fire suppression tactics during extreme weather, regardless of how much money is spent or how many firefighters and water tankers are employed. In the era of climate change, we can no more stop weather-driven fires than we can stand on a ridge and fight the wind,” he adds…

By Rebecca White

Register Guard – June 26, 2021

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Let’s talk “proforestation.”

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Coined by scientist William Moomaw, this term describes letting older forests do their natural thing, growing and sequestering carbon while nurturing a deep network of wild lives. Proforestation means leaving forests alone if they are already mature and letting younger forests survive to become old-growth. 

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Proforestation does not sideline other forestry terms: Reforestation refers to either natural regeneration or to planting trees in formerly forested areas, and afforestation means planting trees in areas not historically forested. By contrast, proforestation recognizes the contributions of young trees are mostly decades in the future, and that greater carbon sequestration — and intact habitat — is necessary now as we face the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Our Cascadian forests are among the world’s most powerful natural climate solutions, able to store more carbon than almost any other ecosystem. We should permanently protect our remaining mature and old-growth forests as part of a national strategic carbon reserve. Forest protection is not a substitute for, but must occur along with, an end to burning fossil fuels…

By Nathan Gilles

Columbia Insight August 31, 2022

Their branches drop gracefully, then curve upward to their tips. 

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They’re conifers, yet they don’t have coarse, rough needles. 

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Instead, they have soft, folded, scale-like “leaves,” bright green when new, darker when old. Their trunks — covered in thin reddish-brown bark — can grow to nearly 20 feet in diameter, though they aren’t ramrod straight like a Douglas fir, but noticeably wider at their bottoms, where flowing buttress-like structures form. 

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They grow as understory trees for much of their lives, but they can also stretch to the forest overstory, reaching heights of up to 200 feet. 

They’re a key part of Pacific Northwest ecosystems, though they rarely dominate the forest, often living alongside firs, hemlocks, alders and maples. 

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These trees are the Pacific Northwest’s iconic western redcedars (Thuja plicata). 

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To many Indigenous peoples, who used the trees for houses, clothes, weapons, tools, medicines, art and canoes, they’re known as the Tree of Life. 

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They’ve been recorded to live for over 1,500 years. 

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But these trees are now dying. 

By Megan Marples

CNN – August 12, 2022

Gray wolves may be getting a major habitat upgrade, if these experts have any say, that is.

A group of researchers from across the United States wrote a proposal that would include setting aside a significant amount of federal land as a sanctuary for gray wolves and other animals such as beavers, and it's known as the Western Rewilding Network, according to a report published August 9 in the journal BioScience.

"Although gray wolves and beavers currently have low risk of extinction, we are very concerned that these keystone species have been lost from many ecosystems across the American West," said report coauthor Christopher Wolf, a postdoctoral scholar in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University in Corvallis…

Public Lands & Protected Spaces

March 2, 2022 - by Tara Lohan

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Ten bills in Congress would add conservation protections to 7,000 miles of river to safeguard drinking water, biodiversity and recreation.

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Each year thousands of tourists who visit Central Oregon trudge up a steep half-mile path to see Tumalo Creek emerge from the pine forest and plunge 97 feet over lava rock into a narrow canyon. Tumalo Falls is the highlight for visitors who hike along the 20-mile creek. But for residents in nearby Bend, the creek is also a prized source of drinking water and a haven for wildlife.

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Years-long efforts to protect the ecological integrity and scenic values of Tumalo Creek could be solidified with a bill now in Congress. The River Democracy Act would designate not just Tumalo but 4,711 miles of rivers throughout the state as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

By Elizabeth Miller

OPB – July, 15, 2022

A group representing schools across the state would like to see its draft legislation add climate education throughout grade levels and core classes.

Student activism around climate change has been ramping up in recent years, with students across Oregon and the country leading walkouts and protests.

Students see climate change discussions on social media and they talk about it with their friends.

“For our generation, this is something that everyone is talking about, because we understand how pressing this issue is,” said Bend Senior High School junior Olive Nye. “And it really feels like an emergency to us...”

By Kathy Egland & Leo Woodberry

Truthout – July 13. 2022

Everybody’s heard about the importance of protecting the Amazon rainforest. But when it comes to protecting forests here in the United States, a lot of people in business, government and the environmental movement seem to have a willful ignorance. That needs to change.

U.S. forests need protection, now. We must end government policies shaped by the logging and wood products industries that sound sensible but are actually meant to expand logging, rather than contain it. We are calling out big, influential environmental organizations whose efforts end up furthering the interests of industry. Forests — and people and the planet — are paying too high a price for the wood product sector’s profits.

Forests are the only proven, large-scale system we have for soaking up carbon and locking it away for centuries. But logging is slashing U.S. forests’ ability to accumulate carbon by over one-third. And because felled trees immediately release most of the carbon they store, logging in the United States releases about 723 million tons of carbon dioxide every year…

Study finds it's not just fish that use wood pieces for shelter and passage.

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By Mary Jo DiLonardo

Treehugger – July 7, 2022

When a large chunk of wood sits in a stream, it offers benefits to the creatures around it. New research finds it’s not just fish, but other wildlife that take advantage of the wood too.

Researchers were curious how logjams and floating wood could have an impact on animals in the ecosystem.

“We were interested in this topic because as the importance of large wood in rivers is well recognized for salmon, we knew little about the implications for wildlife,” study author Ivan Arismendi, a scientist at Oregon State University, tells Treehugger…

Center for Biological Diversity

For Immediate Release, June 28, 2022

EUGENE, Ore.— A U.S. District Court judge issued a ruling today preventing Scott Timber from clearcutting old-growth forest that was previously part of the Elliott State Forest. The court found that the proposed logging of the Benson Ridge parcel by the subsidiary of Roseburg Forest Products would harm and harass threatened marbled murrelets, in violation of the federal Endangered Species Act. The court’s ruling permanently enjoins logging of the occupied murrelet habitat.

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In August 2016 Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity and Portland Audubon filed suit seeking to block Scott Timber from clearcutting 49 acres of the 355-acre parcel of land because of the impacts to threatened marbled murrelets.

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“Today’s ruling is groundbreaking because it holds a private timber company accountable for plans to destroy habitat essential for imperiled wildlife in Oregon,” said Nick Cady, legal director at Cascadia Wildlands. “This ruling establishes that private timber companies can no longer violate the Endangered Species Act with abandon.”

By Laura Benshoff

NPR – June 14, 2022

A bill to conserve endangered species — from the red-cockaded woodpecker to the snuffbox mussel — was passed by the U.S. House in a 231-to-190 vote on Tuesday.

The Recovering America's Wildlife Act would create an annual fund of more than $1.3 billion, given to states, territories, and tribal nations for wildlife conservation on the ground. While threatened species have been defined and protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1973, that law does not provide robust funding to proactively maintain their numbers.

The effort comes as scientists and international organizations sound the alarm about accelerating species decline.

"Too many people don't realize ... that roughly one-third of our wildlife is at increased risk of extinction," said lead House sponsor Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, echoing a recent study about climate change…

By Bradley W. Parks

OPB – June 15, 2022

For more than two decades, a federal rule prohibited cutting trees larger than 21 inches in diameter on millions of forested acres in Oregon and Washington. That changed in the final days of the Trump administration.

Six conservation groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Forest Service over a decision to weaken protections for old and mature forests east of the Cascades.

Just days before President Trump left office last year, the Forest Service approved amendments to the Eastside Screens, a plan managing about 8 million forested acres of Oregon and Washington.

The amendments scrapped the “21-inch rule,” which prohibited cutting trees larger than 21 inches in diameter. The rule is seen among many in the conservation community as one of the most significant protections for large trees in dry-side forests…

By Matthew G. Betts, Zhiqiang Yang, Adam S. Hadley, Adam C. Smith, Josée S. Rousseau, Joseph M. Northrup, Joseph J. Nocera, Noel Gorelick & Brian D. Gerber

Nature - April 28, 2022

Abstract:

In many regions of the world, forest management has reduced old forest and simplified forest structure and composition. We hypothesized that such forest degradation has resulted in long-term habitat loss for forest-associated bird species of eastern Canada (130,017 km2) which, in turn, has caused bird-population declines. Despite little change in overall forest cover, we found substantial reductions in old forest as a result of frequent clear-cutting and a broad-scale transformation to intensified forestry. Back-cast species distribution models revealed that breeding habitat loss occurred for 66% of the 54 most common species from 1985 to 2020 and was strongly associated with reduction in old age classes. Using a long-term, independent dataset, we found that habitat amount predicted population size for 94% of species, and habitat loss was associated with population declines for old-forest species. Forest degradation may therefore be a primary cause of biodiversity decline in managed forest landscapes…

By Charles C. Chester, Brandeis University, and Mark Hebblewhite, University of Montana

The Oregonian - April 28, 2022

As human development spreads ever farther around the world, very few large ecosystems remain relatively intact and uninterrupted by highways, cities or other human-constructed obstacles. One of the largest exceptions is the Yellowstone to Yukon region, or Y2Y, which stretches more than 2,000 miles northwest from Wyoming, across northeastern Oregon, and up into Canada’s Yukon territory.

For the past 30 years conservationists have worked to knit this huge stretch of land together under the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Y2Y seeks to make room for wildlife in connected landscapes that give animals the ability to move across large areas – whether they are following age-old migration patterns or responding to a changing climate.

Throughout this huge region, hundreds of partners – conservation groups, private landowners, businesses, government agencies, tribes and scientists – have worked to knit landscapes together and make it possible for animals to move across it. Participants have constructed wildlife road crossings, conducted “bear aware” campaigns to reduce clashes between people and animals, placed conservation easements on private lands and supported Indigenous efforts to protect sacred spaces…

By Laura Benshoff

NPR - April 22, 2022

President Biden will sign an executive order to inventory and protect old-growth forests while visiting Seattle later Friday.

The order requires the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture to come up with a shared definition of mature and old-growth forests and gives them a year to take stock of their numbers in the U.S. After collecting that data, the agencies must come up with new policies to manage and conserve these wooded areas, with an eye towards threats like wildfires.

The carbon stored by forests, harvested wood products, and urban trees offsets around 14% of carbon released each year in the U.S., according to a 2020 Forest Service report. Older, wider trees tend to store more carbon, although there is some scientific debate over how much carbon they continue to take out of the atmosphere as they age…

Science has made clear the value of public forests in capturing carbon, helping the environment

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By Lauren Anderson

Oregon Capital Chronicle – March 7, 2022

Oregon has had to contend with some serious climate impacts in recent years, from life threatening heat waves to ice storms that left thousands without power for days.

Persistent drought, wildfires, and changing precipitation patterns have also placed our most vulnerable communities at risk. Given how dire the situation is becoming, it is critical that we use every tool in the toolbox to prevent future climate impacts from becoming worse.

While Oregon has made real progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, emissions reductions alone are not enough. We must also pull a significant amount carbon dioxide from of the atmosphere and there is currently no technology that can do this at the scale that is needed. Luckily, our oldest, simplest, and most-cost effective climate solutions – forests – have yet to be fully utilized to combat climate change.

New bill would decouple the Elliott State Forest from the Common School Fund and create new research forest

By Clayton Franke

Eugene Weekly – February 24, 2022

Francis Eatherington’s iPad slides across the dash of her Subaru as she swings the car onto the 7700 road in the Elliott State Forest. The tablet is full of downloadable maps of past timber sales, some she stopped, some she didn’t. Cobwebs in the corner of the dash light up as sunlight beams through the windshield. She stops the car in the middle of the road and pulls out a paper map littered with swatches of blue, pink and yellow and a web of logging roads.

“It’s kind of like a plate of spaghetti,” she says of the map.

The graveled forest roads weave through the Elliott — 82,000 acres of clearcuts, timber plantations and native old growth forests just south of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon’s Coast Range. Eatherington, the former conservation director at Cascadia Wildlands, knows the roads well from her work fighting old growth timber harvests and protecting endangered species habitat.

The Elliott has been one of the battlegrounds for Oregon’s “timber wars,” with decades of conflict surrounding forest ownership and timber harvest revenue. But a new bill in the Oregon Legislature could resolve the conflict and pave the way for other agreements between historically disparate groups…

After seeing how beavers helped Birch Creek flow again, Idaho rancher Jay Wilde has inspired hundreds of people to try beaver-assisted stream restoration.

By Brianna Randall  

The National Wildlife Federation Blog – January 8, 2022

Thirteen years ago, Idaho rancher Jay Wilde sat in his kitchen sipping coffee before dawn. As the caffeine kicked in, he was once again pondering why the stream running through his ranch had stopped flowing.

It suddenly hit him: “Beavers! That’s what’s missing.”

When Wilde was growing up on the ranch, Birch Creek had flowed year-round. He used to spend summers fishing for trout and swimming in the ponds created by beaver dams. But Wilde hadn’t seen beavers or their dams since 1995, when he moved back to take over the ranch from his parents.

“I began researching the role of beaver, and learned that for a watershed to be healthy, there needs to be beavers there,” says Wilde.

Beavers are some of nature’s best engineers. They gnaw down trees to create intricate dams and lodges as their shelter. In turn, their dams act to slow the flow of a stream, creating ponds that act like a piggy-bank that stores water for the ecosystem…

In 2020 the Department of the Interior kiboshed a long-running grizzly restoration study. Its authors and supporters still want answers

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By Jordan Rane

Columbia Insight – January 13, 2022

In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee—a cross-agency organization spearheading conservation of the threatened species in six designated wilderness areas across the Northwest—launched a program aimed at studying the possible restoration of grizzlies in one of their most decimated yet still viable habitats in North America: Washington’s North Cascades.

The Grizzly Bear Restoration Plan for the North Cascades Ecosystem—which began with a multi-year environmental impact study—was more or less unprecedented. Its intent was to study the feasibility of transplanting the iconic bear into a vast wildland situated between farms, ranches, rural communities and large coastal cities.

In 2020, however, the expansive study was suddenly and unexpectedly terminated by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Aside from citing local opposition to the federal program, then Interior Secretary David Bernhardt provided no concrete explanation for the decision to end the program…

Wolves once again need federal protection

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By Stephen Capra

Changing America – January 13, 2022

Last year, the nation witnessed an attack on our nation’s capital, it is etched in our mind for the shock that is was, American citizens attacking a sacred place and stealing and bringing harm to the capitol police. It was a low point for our democracy. Such low points are spreading across our country, no place is this clearer than the boundaries of our nation’s most sacred National Park — Yellowstone. For it is here, that wolves have become another part of our country’s tribal divide.

If you are going to visit Yellowstone, perhaps one of the most important reasons is to see wolves in the wild. People come from across the globe spending large amounts of money for the chance to see them. On any given day Lamar Valley will host long lines of cars and people staring across the landscape looking for movement and a chance to see Canis lupus in the wild.

Yet over the past year, the governor of our state, a trapper and avid predator killer, Greg Gianforte, has made clear he does not care about tourism, he does not care that wolves bring much needed economic relief to our state (numbers show close to 60 million a year), instead he has led the way by killing a collared wolf Max last spring on the border of Yellowstone. Long known for his bully tendencies, Gianforte seems all too impressed with trappers and longs to satisfy their every need. Using his newly appointed Game Commission he removed protections from the borders of Yellowstone, which has resulted this year in the killing of more wolves than any year since their reintroduction, more than 20 as of last count. The entire Phantom Lake pack of 13 has been destroyed by hunters…

By Carole King, Opinion Contributor

The Hill – January 11, 2022

The already-enacted bipartisan infrastructure bill allocated billions of dollars to facilitate logging in our national forests, with scant public awareness of those provisions. The House-passed Build Back Better bill contains similar sections.

Over 200 U.S. climate scientists and ecologists oppose those logging provisions.

As negotiations resume, lawmakers could achieve compromise by excluding sections providing billions more for “restoration,” “fuel reduction,” “forest health,” and other euphemisms for commercial logging.

Removing those provisions would free up money to extend the child tax credit, which families have been putting back into the economy through buying food, gas, toilet paper, medicines, and shoes for growing children, among other necessities.

But the cost of logging on public land is not just money. Logging releases more than 723 million tons of carbon a year, which accelerates climate change and destroys wildlife habitat, which hastens the extinction of species….

By AP Staff

OPB – December 5, 2021

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A federal judge has halted U.S. Forest Service plans to log part of the Willamette National Forest burned by last summer’s wildfires after a lawsuit filed by environmentalists.

The ruling Friday by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken comes after Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild sued to stop the logging near Breitenbush Hot Springs and Detroit Lake, the Statesman Journal reported.

The groups allege the Forest Service modified logging contracts — which were focused on thinning green trees and doing prescribed burns — to include logging fire-charred trees without going through the proper environmental review process.

By Rebecca White

Register Guard – November 27, 2021

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After two weeks of often tense negotiations, the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow have concluded. What remains is to make sense of the commitments the United States, and the international community, made to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The short answer: not enough. Climate plans submitted by 151 nations would limit warming to 2.5 degrees Celsius. But to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists predict we must keep warming to under 1.5 degrees, which requires cutting worldwide carbon emissions in half by the end of this decade.

That’s a tall order.

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Nations will gather again in 2022 to submit stronger emissions-reduction targets. In the meantime, the major emitters, including the U.S., must ramp up fossil fuel emissions cuts. Additional measures require signatories to curb the potent greenhouse gas methane, as well as phase out fossil fuel subsidies and "phase down" coal use…

Letter from environmental organizations urges president to include older and mature trees in his climate plans

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For Immediate Release

Thursday, October 28, 2021

WASHINGTON -- As the Biden administration prepares to attend the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, 128 environmental groups delivered a letter to the White House asking that the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management stop the logging of older forests and trees on public lands. The correspondence specifically asks for this commitment to be part of the United States’ larger climate goals.

By Alexandra Humphries

ABC News - October 5, 2021

There is growing pressure on the Tasmanian government to rethink its native forest management practices, after new University of Tasmania research found regenerating forests are more prone to high-severity bushfires than mature forests.

The study focused on Tasmanian eucalyptus forest, aiming to assess how fire danger changes as forests mature, to help predict bushfire behaviour.

Wildfire ecologist James Furlaud said the study found fire risk in older forests was much lower than in young forests, and clear-felling — the practice of removing all trees from a coupe — could increase fire risk.

By Rebecca White

The Register Guard – September 25, 2021

I recently steeled myself to take a good look at the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Prepared by hundreds of volunteer scientists from around the world, its findings are dire.

Our world is on track to exceed Paris Agreement limits, ensuring a rising toll on human life and wildlife. We still have time to act, but the hour is late, and we can no longer take part in such pointless activities as debating and deflecting polluter misinformation campaigns. Many of the worst predictions of earlier IPCC reports have already occurred in the Pacific Northwest. Unprecedented wildfire, drought and heatwaves this year alone have transformed climate change from an academic issue to one with devastatingly direct impacts…

By James Goodwin and Rob Verchick

The Hill – Sept. 1, 2021

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A legal pillar of environmental justice is now under attack

A few weeks ago, the Army Corps of Engineers made a startling announcement: It would give Sharon Lavigne and her neighbors in St. James Parish, La., a chance to tell their stories. The fact one of the world’s largest chemical companies has fought for years to keep Lavigne quiet tells you how commanding her stories are. Those stories may stop this particular company from building a multi-billion dollar chemical plant surrounding her neighborhood.

For this, we can thank a simple law, signed by President Nixon in 1970, called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Unlike other environmental laws, NEPA doesn’t tell agencies what choices they must make — like where to erect a levee or whether to permit a plastics plant. But it does insist their choices be informed. So, before the Army Corps can approve a company’s wetlands development permit it has to study whatever effects that chemical plant might have on the health of people in that community and on the properties they own.

One critical way that agencies like the Army Corp learn about such effects is by giving people — particularly local residents a chance to share their concerns in their own words. You don’t need a degree in law or chemistry to have a say, although sometimes it takes a dose of courage. It’s not easy to speak or write publicly about having to cook with tainted tap water, visiting with neighbors on a foul-smelling porch, or dreading some rare cancer that’s been associated with your zip code. As far as NEPA is concerned, those stories are just as important as ones that global chemical companies have to tell…

The U.S. Forest Service clears trees from public lands in the name of fire prevention, but it doesn’t work. There are better strategies to protect communities, but don’t expect to hear about them from the logging industry.

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By Chad Hanson

Fix Solutions Labs – August 24, 2021

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Earlier this month, the Dixie Fire leveled most of the town of Greenville, California. I know the town well — I conducted fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation there. Thankfully, everyone survived. But the downtown is gone, along with 75 percent of the homes.

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It didn’t need to happen.

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Fire has always been a concern for communities like Greenville in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains. And, for decades, the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry told the townspeople that logging tens of thousands of acres — under the guise of “thinning” — would create “fuel breaks” to slow or even stop wildfires and prevent flames from reaching Main Street…

By Sid Tafler

The Tyee – August 11, 2021

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Suzanne Simard grew up in a province home to ancient forests. Now 60, she laments that B.C. has become a province of clearcuts, with only remnants of old growth left.

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On Sunday, she flew by helicopter from Port Renfrew on southern Vancouver Island to the disputed Fairy Creek area, diverting north to pass over Caycuse, an old-growth watershed recently clear cut after forest protectors were evicted by the RCMP.

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“The clear cutting is disgraceful,” she told The Tyee Monday as she sat by the windows of a friend’s waterfront home in Saanich. “It looks like a war zone.” Whole hillsides have been scalped and once majestic ancient trees reduced to gaping stumps…

Higher confidence, compounded extremes – and high seas that will persist for millennia.

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By Bob Henson

Yale Climate Connections – August 9, 2021

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A hellish northern summer laced with deadly heat waves, perilous floods, and massive wildfires may be just a preview of coming attractions, according to a blockbuster new assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The assessment lays out how the planet’s air, oceans, and ice are pushing relentlessly into new territory.

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Eight years of research from more than 14,000 papers have been telescoped into the exhaustive new report, part of the sixth comprehensive assessment in the IPCC’s 33-year history.

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The report finds that Earth is on the doorstep of the much-discussed 1.5°C threshold, more likely than not to be reached by 2040. The hazards of compound impacts – such as heat and drought together ­– have risen to new prominence since the last assessment, and the risks of cataclysmic tipping points continue to loom.

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“Unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5°C will be beyond reach,” said Ko Barrett, senior advisor for climate for NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research and one of three IPCC vice-chairs, in a press briefing on Sunday, August 8…

By Erik Neumann

OPB – July 25, 2021

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Since it started on July 6, 2021, the Bootleg Fire has been characterized by its size and speed. Miles of forest land has burned each day. At over 400,000 acres, it’s Oregon’s third largest wildfire since 1900. In recent weeks firefighters have had to retreat multiple times as embers crossed containment lines and hot, dry and windy weather made fighting the fire impossible.

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The footprint of the Bootleg Fire includes a history of commercial logging, thinning, clear cutting, prescribed fire and other intensive management practices, according to Bryant Baker, conservation director of Santa Barbara, California, nonprofit Los Padres ForestWatch. Baker says those management activities contributed to the fire’s spread. One example, he says, is when it burned into the U.S. Forest Service’s Black Hills Ecosystem Restoration Project.

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“Essentially the fire burned through these areas really quickly,” Bryant says. “So, the fire in its initial rapid growth burned right through these pretty expansive areas of commercial thinning and prescribed fire and did not seem to slow down…”

For Immediate Release, July 9, 2021

SALEM, Ore.— The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission today approved a petition filed by five conservation groups to give marbled murrelets more protection by reclassifying them from threatened to endangered under the state’s Endangered Species Act. The 4-3 decision comes two years after an Oregon judge ruled that the commission had violated state law by denying the petition without explanation in 2018.

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“We’re relieved that after so many missteps, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission will finally move forward with extending marbled murrelets the full protection of endangered status under state law,” said Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These unique birds face serious threats in Oregon from climate change, ocean warming, wildfire, and unchecked logging of their nesting habitat and should have been protected as endangered years ago.”

By Tony Schick

OPB – June 29, 2021

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Oregon lawmakers pledged to increase taxes on the timber industry and rein in its influence during this year’s legislative session. Instead, they handed the companies an unexpected gift — another tax break.

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As the session wrapped last week, lawmakers gutted the remaining $15 million annual harvest tax paid by timber companies for cutting down trees. The move eliminated about $9 million in annual revenue that helps fund Oregon State University’s forestry research and the Department of Forestry’s enforcement of state logging laws. Money for the programs will temporarily come from the state’s general fund, forcing the costs onto taxpayers…

By Beverly E. Law AND William H. Schlesinger

The Hill - August 23, 2022

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The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that we must substantially reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and simultaneously increase removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by land and ocean reservoirs.

A recent executive order recognizes the importance of mature and old-growth forests in limiting climate change and makes their conservation a national policy. It also sets ambitious goals for the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM), including “to conserve our mature and old-growth forests on Federal lands and restore the health and vibrancy of our Nation’s forests...”

By Juliet Grable

OPB – August 2, 2022

One morning in late March, Charlie Schelz, an ecologist with the Bureau of Land Management, hiked across a steel railroad bridge that spans Interstate 5 near Siskiyou Summit, four-and-a-half miles from the Oregon-California border. Gravel crunched under his feet as a ceaseless river of cars and trucks roared below. At the end of the bridge, Schelz set down his backpack and unlocked the cable that secured a trail camera to a tree.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” said Schelz, popping out the memory card. It contained 51 video clips. He clicked through them.

“There’s a deer…another deer, a train,” he said, scrolling. “There’s a guy walking his dog — I see him every day. There’s one, two, three, four deer, heading east.”

Schelz has set up nearly a dozen such cameras along wildlife trails near drainage culverts and vehicle bridges that pass over and under I-5. By monitoring these sites, which span from Neil Creek just outside of Ashland to the California border, he hopes to better understand which animals are using existing corridors to safely traverse the busy highway…

By Todd Milbourn (OPB)

July 21, 2022 11:31 a.m.

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Researchers have snapped a photo of an adult wolf with five pups roaming the Oregon wilderness and say it could represent the establishment of a new wolf pack in the state.

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The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife captured the image July 4 in the Upper Deschutes Wildlife Management Unit, which spans Deschutes and Klamath counties.

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ODFW had been monitoring the area after members of the public reported wolf sightings to the agency. Earlier this year, tracks of four wolves were found in the area. Since then, researchers have been trying to figure out whether the wolves represent a new pack or are wolves from the Indigo Pack to the south.

NPR - July 3, 2022

The federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) is launching an investigation after U.S. Forest Service-controlled burns that escaped caused the largest wildfire ever recorded in New Mexico.

The GAO is examining controlled burn policies at the Forest Service and other federal land agencies.

On May 20, USFS Chief Randy Moore halted all so-called prescribed fires on its land for a 90-day safety review. The New Mexico fire has burned more than 340,000 acres and is still not fully contained.

But many fire ecologists and forestry experts are concerned that this "pause" is only worsening the wildfire risk. Critics say it's merely masking the agency's dangerously incremental, outdated and problematic approach to intentional burns and fire mitigation, a policy that has failed to adapt to climate change and megadrought…

By Jake Spring and Bruno Kelly

Reuters – July 8, 2022

Manaus, Brazil, July 8 (Reuters) - Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest reached a record high for the first six months of the year, as an area five times the size of New York City was destroyed, preliminary government data showed on Friday.

From January to June, 3,988 square km (1,540 square miles) were cleared in the region, according to national space research agency Inpe.

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That's an increase of 10.6% from the same months last year and the highest level for that period since the agency began compiling its current DETER-B data series in mid-2015…

Massive Logging Plan Threatens Coastal Martens, Marbled Murrelets

Cascadia Wildlands – July 5, 2022

MEDFORD, Ore. — A coalition of Oregon conservation organizations notified the Bureau of Land Management today it intends to sue the agency to protect marbled murrelets and coastal martens from a plan by the agency to log thousands of acres of old-growth forest in areas designated as late-successional reserves. The reserves were designated as part of the Northwest Forest Plan to protect the two threatened species, as well as hundreds of others.

“The Bureau’s plans to remove thousands of acres of old-growth forests from late-successional reserves in southern Oregon is a death sentence for wildlife that are on the brink of extinction,” said Nick Cady, legal director for Cascadia Wildlands.

The Bureau’s “Integrated Vegetation Management Project” proposes using a wide array of activities, including commercial logging across 17,000 acres including mature and old-growth forest that would destroy habitat for threatened and endangered species…

More than 150 conservation, environmental, and social justice organizations have accused The Nature Conservancy of “promoting false climate solutions.”

By Christopher Ketchum

Grist – June 29, 2022

In the fight against climate change, the $300-billion U.S. logging and woods products industry has positioned itself as a purveyor of “natural climate solutions.” The idea is intuitive: Trees are the ultimate renewable resource. After they are cut they can be replanted, absorbing carbon once again as they mature.

Wood energy succored Homo sapiens and its ancestors for millions of years, the argument goes, and only during the last couple of centuries was it replaced with fossil fuels like coal. As our civilization begins the slow process of jettisoning fossil energy, logging interests assure us that wood products are not a retrogression but a way forward. The industry claims that forests that are felled sustainably — for construction, say, or for burning to produce electricity in utility-scale power plants — can provide jobs and energy, stimulate the economy, and even reduce society’s net carbon emissions.

By Anna Phillips

June 15, 2022

Not far from the town of McKenzie Bridge, Ore., on the western slope of the Cascades, stand towering groves of trees that have survived more than a century of wind, fire, insects and disease. To Jerry Franklin, long-considered one of the foremost authorities on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, this landscape of mature Douglas-fir and western hemlock is thriving and, most significantly, removing evermore carbon from the atmosphere.

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That is not what the Forest Service sees. Too many trees in this corner of the Willamette National Forest are competing for water and sunlight, and some are dying, agency officials say.

Now the service is preparing to auction off these woodlands as early as next year as part of a timber sale, called Flat Country, that targets nearly 4,500 acres. Conservation groups that have analyzed the project say the vast majority of the lumber the agency intends to cut would come from stands of trees ranging in age from 80 to 150 years old.

By Norman Christensen, PH.D., AND Jerry Franklin, PH.D.

The Hill – June 8, 2022

On Earth Day 2022, President Biden signed an Executive Order for actions to capitalize on the ability of forests — especially mature and old-growth forests — to combat climate change. We applaud this action, but the Biden administration now needs to follow through and adopt durable, science-based forest conservation measures.   

Biden’s executive order seeks to conserve mature and old-growth forests on federal lands, curb global deforestation and deploy nature-based solutions that reduce emissions and build resilience to a rapidly warming planet. More specifically, the order directs the Departments of Agriculture and Interior to inventory existing mature and old-growth forests nationwide, identify threats and develop climate-smart conservation policies to address those threats…

By Damien Sherwood

Cottage Grove Sentinel – May 17, 2022

Cottage Grove’s first Climate Action Town Hall took place on Saturday (May 14) in the Cottage Grove Armory, bringing together community members, public officials and other local entities to participate in a forum about climate change and local resiliency plans.

The event, hosted by the groups Climate Action Cottage Grove, EcoGeneration, Forest Web and Sustainable Cottage Grove, included speakers, information booths and discussion sessions.

“I was really pleased with the events and we had a respectable showing of the community,” said Rob Dickinson, a co-organizer of the town hall event.

Along with participation from the City of Cottage Grove, a number of local organizations turned out on Saturday.

Lane Transit District (LTD), EPUD, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, 350 Eugene, Elders Climate Action, Forest Web, Sustainable Cottage Grove, and EcoGeneration all had representation and provided information at the event. The town hall was also attended by Cottage Grove city councilors Greg Ervin and Mike Fleck as well as Mayor Jeff Gowing and Public Works and Development Director Faye Stewart…

By Ted Sickinger| The Oregonian/OregonLiv

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The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday erased a $1.1 billion verdict against the state over its management of state forests, determining the Department of Forestry and its policy-setting board are not obligated to maximize timber harvests and associated payments to counties where the forests are located.

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The state appealed the verdict on 28 alleged legal errors before and during a 2019 trial in Linn County, but the appeals court based its decision on just one. Its ruling said that specific language in the Forest Acquisition Act of 1941 did not constitute a contract between the state and the counties to maximize revenues from timber harvests. The trial court, it said, erred by failing to grant the state’s original motion to dismiss the lawsuit on that basis.

IPCC – April 5, 2022

Limiting global warming to 1.5C or 2C would mean “rapid and deep” emissions reductions in “all sectors” of the global economy, says the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Instead, emissions have continued to rise – albeit at a slowing rate – and it will be “impossible” to stay below 1.5C with “no or limited overshoot” without stronger climate action this decade, says the new document, which forms part of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

It outlines how these emissions cuts could be achieved, including “substantial” reductions in fossil fuel use, energy efficiency, electrification, the rapid uptake of low-emission energy sources – particularly renewables – and the use of alternative energy carriers, such as hydrogen…

By Rachel McDonald

KLCC – March 4, 2022

This week, Oregon lawmakers approved a bill that establishes the Elliott State Research Forest on more than 82,000 acres in the coast range near Coos Bay.

The Elliott is a unique tract of coastal forest originally meant to generate logging revenue for Oregon’s K-12 schools. Conservation groups and others long worked to halt that practice and keep the forest intact.

Josh Laughlin, Executive Director of Cascadia Wildlands in Eugene said Senate Bill 1546 preserves the forest for education and research

“Which will have these incredible benefits for clean water and carbon storage and habitat for imperiled species,” he said. “But most important it delinks school funding from clear cutting old growth forests. That was the goal that we set out to achieve about 20 years ago...”

By Steve Lundeberg

Oregon State University - February 15, 2022

Research led by Oregon State University shows that fires are more likely to burn their way into national forests than out of them.

The findings contradict the common narrative of a destructive wildfire igniting on remote public land before spreading to threaten communities, said Chris Dunn of the OSU College of Forestry.

The study, which looked at more than 22,000 fires, found that those crossing jurisdictional boundaries are primarily caused by people on private property.

It also showed that ignitions on Forest Service lands accounted for fewer than 25% of the most destructive wildfires – ones that resulted in the loss of more than 50 structures.

The loss of biodiversity around the planet comes with very human costs, I tell the hosts of The Silent Why podcast.

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By John R. Platt

The Revelator - January 24, 2022

What do we lose when we lose species? And how can we turn grief into action?

As I discuss on a recent episode of The Silent Why — a podcast exploring 101 different types of grief and loss — the extinction crisis affecting this planet sometimes feels overwhelming. It can fill us with dread while it robs the world of wonder, culture and connections. Extinction leaves the world a little less amazing, and we’re all a little poorer and sadder for it.

But sometimes that grief can also drive us, deepen our capacity for empathy, renew our commitment to do better, and encourage us to celebrate life while it still exists. That’s something we can all share when we experience loss, whether it’s the death of a parent or the solastalgia we feel from the decline of nature…

By Jasmine Lewin

Ethos – January 10, 2022

Former firefighter and fire ecologist Tim Ingalsbee positions himself in front of his computer webcam, surrounded by textbooks, Smokey the Bear posters and a large banner with the acronym “FUSEE” printed in bold letters.

He’s getting ready to begin a virtual news conference about logging practices and firefighting strategies, specifically in the context of the West Coast’s recent history of severe and widespread wildfires. The 2020 Oregon wildfire season was one of the most destructive on record in the state, with a catastrophic outcome that killed at least 11 people, destroyed thousands of homes and burned more than 1 million acres of land.

As climate change causes dryer and hotter weather in Cascadia forests, wildfires are only predicted to get more severe in damage and frequency; climate and fire experts working with Oregon State University concluded that Oregon’s recent wildfires are a precursor to what the region will see in the future as the climate warms. Due to the intensification in damage and frequency of these natural disasters, traditional suppressive wildfire prevention methods are being questioned in favor of other, more environmentally friendly strategies.

By Bradley W. Parks

OPB – January 14, 2022

The U.S. Forest Service has abandoned a plan to log along more than 400 miles of roads in burnt areas of the Willamette National Forest.

In a written statement issued Wednesday, Willamette National Forest supervisor Dave Warnack said mounting legal costs influenced his decision to withdraw the plan.

“Our work to safely restore public access to areas burned in the 2020 Labor Day fires continues to be top priority,” Warnack said. “Upon withdrawal of this decision, my staff will conduct another review of the purpose and need of this project and will consider a new approach to addressing this important issue.”

The federal agency crafted the plan following the Beachie Creek, Lionshead and Holiday Farm fires of 2020, saying roadside trees killed or injured in the fires posed a safety risk to recreators and motorists.

The plan drew a legal challenge from environmental groups Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild and Willamette Riverkeeper, who argued the plan was a thinly veiled attempt at commercial salvage logging of some 20,000 acres of public lands, and that carrying it out would degrade water quality and wildlife habitat…

By Lynda V. Mapes, The Seattle Times

Dec. 22, 2021, 12:17 p.m.

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Port Blakely Companies, a family-owned company with timber operations in the U.S. and New Zealand, has returned 2 miles of waterfront and 125 acres of tidelands on Little Skookum Inlet in Mason County to the Squaxin Island Tribe, at no cost.

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The return of the tideland property is part of a growing “Land Back” movement, in which landowners are returning property lost by tribes when white settlers arrived and began colonizing the landscapes where Indigenous people had lived and thrived for thousands of years.

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The return of the shoreline restores the tribe’s direct access to Puget Sound, and some of the most productive shellfish beds in the region — the very reasons the tribe had made the land and water home.

By Carisa Cegavske

The Oregonian – December 1, 2021

The developers that had hoped to build the Pacific Connector Pipeline and Jordan Cove Energy Project have told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission they do not intend to move forward with the project.

The developers filed a brief with FERC Wednesday that announced the decision.

“Among other considerations, Applicants remain concerned regarding their ability to obtain the necessary state permits in the immediate future in addition to other external obstacles,” wrote Donald Sullivan, manager and associate general counsel for Jordan Cove Energy Project and Pacific Connector Pipeline in Wednesday’s brief.

Cascadia Forest Defenders - November 16, 2021

Community members from across the state defy Forest Service closure order  to protest post-fire clearcutting

Detroit, OR – This morning, community organizers defied a closure order and are occupying a road leading to public forest slated for clearcutting in the Willamette National Forest. The organizers are holding a concert and teach-in, discussing the ecology and rich history of the area, and preparing for further actions if logging continues to move forward...

By Jake Spring and Simon Jessop

Reuters – November 3. 2021

GLASGOW, Nov 2 (Reuters) - More than 100 global leaders have pledged to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by the end of the decade, underpinned by $19 billion in public and private funds to invest in protecting and restoring forests.

The promise, made in a joint statement issued late on Monday at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, was backed by the leaders of countries including Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which collectively account for 85% of the world's forests.

The Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forest and Land Use will cover forests totaling more than 13 million square miles, according to a statement released by the UK prime minister's office on behalf of the leaders…

By George Wuerthner

Counterpunch - October 8, 2021

An employee of RY Timber presented misleading commentary in his essay “Forest Service is Right to Restore Forest Health.”

First, keep in mind that the timber industry and forestry profession (both dependents on logging for their employment) have conveniently defined forest health.

For example, the commentator suggests dead beetle-kill lodgepole pine represents an “unhealthy” forest. From the timber industry perspective, he’s correct. Dead trees have little value to the mills.

However, ecologists have found bark beetles are a keystone species that creates many ecological opportunities for plants and animals.  The snag forests resulting from either beetles or wildfire have the second-highest biodiversity after old-growth forests…

By Zane Sparling

Portland Tribune – September 14, 2021

Eco-activists have scaled several trees — and they aren't coming down, they say — until the Biden Administration halts the planned sale of logging rights in the Willamette National Forest.

Members of Cascadia Forest Defenders say they have built several platforms 100 feet above the canopy in order to deter the planned Flat Country timber auction from going forward.

"They're staying on these platforms for the foreseeable future to keep this space occupied," said Daniel, an organizer for the group, who asked not to use their last name. "If any timber companies buy that sale — they're buying our resistance..."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must begin taking actions to improve passage for chinook salmon and winter steelhead struggling to survive.

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By Bradley W. Parks

OPB – Sept. 2, 2021

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A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to take immediate action to improve fish passage at dams in the Willamette Basin.

In a final opinion and order issued this week, U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez said the Corps had for years failed to provide adequate passage for threatened chinook salmon and winter steelhead trout at dams it operates in the basin.

“As evinced by the listed species’ continuing decline, the Corps’ failure to provide adequate fish passage and mitigate water quality issues is causing substantial, irreparable harm to the salmonids,” Hernandez wrote in the opinion.

The order comes a little over a year after the court decided in favor of three environmental organizations that sued the Corps and the National Marine Fisheries Service, arguing the agencies weren’t doing their part to protect the species…

Biden officials say Trump’s call to end wolf protections was a move already years in the making and was the right decision, but say the feds are keeping an eye on a recent surge of pro-wolf killing and trapping laws in some states.

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By Carson McCullough

Courthouse News Service – August 20, 2021

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The Biden administration is reportedly not walking back the removal of federal protections for gray wolf populations, one of the last major environmental actions of the Trump administration.

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After nearly a year of calls to reinstate federal protections for gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act — including a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife by conservationists aimed at restoring the safeguards — officials say the Biden administration is standing by the decision made by his White House predecessor…

By George Monbiot

The Guardian – August 8, 2021

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Planting 10 saplings does not replace a twisted old oak. ‘Slow ecology’ is the only way to preserve and restore ancient habitats

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We have a slow food movement and a slow travel movement. But we’re missing something, and its absence contributes to our escalating crisis. We need a slow ecology movement, and we need it fast.

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The majority of the world’s species cannot withstand any significant disruption of their habitat by humans. Healthy ecosystems depend to a great extent on old and gnarly places, that might take centuries to develop, and are rich in what ecologists call “spatial heterogeneity”: complex natural architecture. They need, for example, giant trees, whose knotty entrails are split and rotten; great reefs of coral or oysters or honeycomb worms; braiding, meandering rivers full of snags and beaver dams; undisturbed soils reamed by roots and holes. The loss of these ancient habitats is one of the factors driving the global shift from large, slow-growing creatures to the small, short-lived species able to survive our onslaughts. Slow ecology would protect and create our future ancient habitats…

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - July 22, 2021

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In the archive of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology there is a typed note from the 1960s that planted the seed of an idea.

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Written by Kenneth Mellanby, director of the Monks Wood Experimental Station, a former research centre in Cambridgeshire, UK, the note describes a four-hectare arable field that lies next to the station and the ancient woodland of the Monks Wood National Nature Reserve. After harvesting a final barley crop, the field was ploughed and then abandoned in 1961.

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The note reads:

It might be interesting to watch what happens to this area if man does not interfere. Will it become a wood again, how long will it take, which species will be in it?

So began the Monks Wood Wilderness experiment, which is now 60 years old. A rewilding study before the term existed, it shows how allowing land to naturally regenerate can expand native woodland and help tackle climate change and biodiversity loss…

By Tony Schick

OPB – July 21, 2021

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The institute operates with broad authority and almost no oversight, undermining its public benefit and credibility, according to the audit released Wednesday by the secretary of state.

Oregon’s tax-funded forest education institute misled the public by presenting a biased view of forestry and might have broken the law by trying to influence policy, a state audit found.

The Oregon Forest Resources Institute, established by lawmakers in 1991 to provide credible public education based on facts and reliable science, operates with broad authority and almost no oversight, undermining its public benefit and credibility, according to the audit released Wednesday by the secretary of state.

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Auditors found that the agency “has long engaged in activities that may fall outside of its statutory authority.” They wrote that their findings “reasonably raise the question” of whether OFRI broke the law, which bars the agency from attempting to influence the actions of any other state body. But lawmakers would have to seek a formal legal opinion, the auditors said…

PBS News Hour – July 15, 2021

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Thursday that it is ending large-scale, old-growth timber sales in the country’s largest national forest — the Tongass National Forest in Alaska — and will focus on forest restoration, recreation and other noncommercial uses.

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The U.S. Agriculture Department, which includes the Forest Service, also said it will take steps to reverse a Trump administration decision last year to lift restrictions on logging and road-building in the southeast Alaska rainforest, which provides habitat for wolves, bears and salmon…

By Jenifer Skene

NRDC – June 22, 2021

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For decades, an unchecked myth that forests are a renewable resource has permeated how we view, consume, and regulate forests. In international parlance, the very meaning of the word “deforestation” is tied not to the act of cutting down trees, but how the forest is used afterwards: a stump-filled landscape is still deemed a forest if it’s replanted with saplings or allowed to regrow. Instead, companies can downplay their forest impacts with tenuous promises of nature’s capacity to heal and boasts that for every tree their suppliers cut down, they plant one (or even two!) in its stead, as if forests were a machine of discrete, interchangeable parts. It’s a notion based on a mixture of hubris and denial and fueled by corporate profit margins, that somehow we can raze centuries-old forests without consequence. That we can clearcut a forest and have it not even count as deforestation.

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But now, that myth is crumbling, with a groundswell of scientists, policymakers, and marketplace leaders raising an urgent alarm about the climate and biodiversity calamities that await if we don’t recognize the irreplaceability of the remaining intact forests we have left.

In a Growing Campaign to Criminalize Widespread Environmental Destruction, Legal Experts Define a New Global Crime: ‘Ecocide’

Supporters now hope the 165-word definition will go before the International Criminal court’s member nations for ratification, which could take years.

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A panel of 12 legal experts from around the world on Tuesday released a proposed definition for a new international crime called “ecocide” covering “severe” and “widespread or long-term environmental damage” that would be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.

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The panel’s announcement was seen by environmentalists and international legal scholars as a significant step in a growing global campaign to criminalize ecocide, which requires one of the court’s 123 member nations to formally request consideration of a fifth crime within the court’s purview. The process could take years to complete.

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“The four existing international crimes focus on the wellbeing of human individuals and groups …and rightly so,” Philippe Sands, the noted international human rights attorney and author who co-chaired the panel, said during a virtual press conference. “We don’t in any way wish to diminish those vastly important crimes. But what is missing is a place for our natural world. None of the existing international criminal laws protect the environment as an end in itself, and that’s what the crime of ecocide does…”

Forest Service Protections Sought for Wolves in Idaho, Montana Wilderness Areas

BOZEMAN, MT — A coalition of wildlife advocates and hunters, represented by the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice, today asked the U.S. Forest Service to issue new protections for wolves in designated wilderness areas following Idaho and Montana’s enactment of a rash of aggressive anti-wolf laws.

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The petition, submitted to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and top Forest Service officials, asks the Service for protection of wolves in national forest wilderness areas from new Idaho and Montana laws allowing professional contractors and private reimbursement programs — resembling 19th-century wolf bounties — to dramatically reduce wolf populations in the two states.

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During their 2021 sessions, the Montana and Idaho legislatures enacted harsh anti-wolf laws that target up to 1,800 wolves. One goal of the laws is to artificially inflate elk populations — which are currently at or above population objectives in most management units — to levels last seen in the mid-1990s, before wolves were reintroduced to their historical range in the Northern Rockies. Wolves are being targeted even though scientific studies show that drought and excessive hunting quotas, not predation, caused some elk populations to decline…

In Vietnam and Oregon, the battle continues over Agent Orange

Street Roots talks with acclaimed documentary director Alan Adelson about his latest film, ‘The People vs. Agent Orange’

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American chemical companies made an enduring mark on the human species with the creation of Agent Orange. While no longer in use, the genome-altering impacts of the herbicide are crippling descendants of people exposed to it — generations later.

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A documentary film released last year, “The People vs. Agent Orange,” revisits this old problem with a new lens. Through the stories of two elderly women fighting the same battle against chemical manufacturing giants, it shows the ways in which Agent Orange never really went away. Though continents apart, both women were catalyzed by the harm, including death, that befell their children, and they have each spent years seeking justice against chemical manufacturing giants that produce herbicides.

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One of the women, Carol Van Strum, lives in Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest, and a significant portion of the film is dedicated to revealing how herbicides, including a main ingredient of Agent Orange, are sprayed over industrial forests and watersheds that supply drinking water to some areas of the state today…

Judge Deals Possible Blow To Pedal Power Timber Sale Near Springfield

A ruling last week by a magistrate judge may derail the Bureau of Land Management’s plans to log about 100 acres outside Springfield.

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The BLM plans to build a network of mountain bike trails adjacent to the Thurston Hills recreation area and to log 100 acres.

Magistrate Judge Mustafa Kasubhai held up a previous decision that the agency failed to set adequate buffers between the trails and timber harvest.

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Conservation groups who sued to stop the logging project see this as a win. Nick Cady is Legal Director of Cascadia Wildlands in Eugene.

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“We’re just glad that the court stuck to its guns and reaffirmed its prior holding that the BLM has to, within this designated recreation area, protect its trail system,” Cady said…

It Takes A Forest To Grow A Tree: The Revolutionary Forest Ecology Of Suzanne Simard

Four short decades ago, the prevailing wisdom among forestry officials was the “Free To Grow” model by which, when a forest was clear cut for lumber, the earth was to be cleared of as much vegetation as possible to make room for planting monocultures of the most profitable trees, neatly spaced in symmetric grids.  Allowing other shrubs and trees to exist next to your cash seedlings, everybody knew and instinctively felt, would rob resources from those seedlings and doom them to an early demise.

The problem was, the ideal Free To Grow forests of government theory were proving to be anything but robust.  Stricken by disease, heat shock, and more susceptible to short term water shortages, these designed forests were not prospering as they should have, but as there was too much bureaucratic inertia at that point behind the Free To Grow concept, it seemed likely that it would continue as the central dogma of reforesting for decades to come, replacing vibrant and diverse forest life with acres of barren, herbicide soaked soil from which one variety of trees struggled to strain its way skyward.

Fairy Creek blockade 2021: What you need to know about the anti-logging protest in B.C.

A protest over old growth forests is shaping up to be B.C.’s largest act of civil disobedience over logging in decades. Here’s what’s at stake.

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Since last week, RCMP have arrested more than 100 people blockading logging roads in a Vancouver Island valley, in a protest that is shaping up to be the largest act of civil disobedience over logging in British Columbia in decades. Much of it is taking place in Premier John Horgan’s riding. As Mr. Horgan’s government drafts a new old-growth forestry model for the entire province, the battle over Fairy Creek is putting a spotlight on the management of a shrinking base of ancient forests.

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What is Fairy Creek?

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This section of rain forest on southern Vancouver Island, northeast of the coastal town of Port Renfrew, is a small part of Tree Farm Licence (TFL) 46, which covers 59,432 hectares. Parts of the TFL have been logged, and a section was carved out and protected in the Carmanah Walbran provincial park. Other sections are intact old-growth forest that are available for logging…

Trees Fell Faster in the Years Since Companies and Governments Promised to Stop Cutting Them Down

The Forest Trends report shows a 50 percent increase in deforestation of tropical woodlands, most of it for agriculture and much of it illegal, since the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests.

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In the seven years since governments and corporations promised to stop deforestation, the clear cutting of critically important tropical forests has instead increased by more than 50 percent, a new report shows, with commercial agriculture driving most of the increase.

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The report, released Tuesday by the conservation group Forest Trends, tracks deforestation, legal and illegal, in 23 countries with large areas of tropical forests, including Brazil, home to most of the Amazon rainforest. The research looks at the period, starting in 2014, when dozens of governments, organizations and companies signed onto the New York Declaration on Forests, a voluntary agreement to halve deforestation by 2020 and stop it altogether by 2030.

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The researchers found that, since those commitments, an area nearly twice the size of California has been cleared of trees, mostly for commercial agriculture, which is the largest driver of deforestation and the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions from land use...

More Than 100 Scientists Ask Biden Administration To Restore Protections For Gray Wolves

Researchers Argue Wolves Haven't Recovered And Face Threats Of 'Hostile Treatment' Under State Management

More than 100 scientists have signed a letter asking the Biden administration to restore federal protections for the gray wolf.

The Trump administration announced last fall that it would remove the animal from the endangered species list across most of the country beginning in January, prompting lawsuits from environmental and wildlife groups to restore the protections. The Biden administration has said it's reviewing the delisting, along with other agency decisions as part of a broad executive order issued in January.

In the letter, scientists argue that gray wolves have not recovered to their historic range, including along the West Coast, southern Rockies and the Northeast. In its decision to delist the wolf, they say the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service within the U.S. Department of Interior wrongly relied on the health of the wolf population in the Great Lakes region, which has grown to around 4,200 wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin…

Arborists say ODOT post-fires tree cutting is excessive, rushed

Critics who worked on state project say it’s removing trees that aren’t actually hazardous

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Oregon has a lot of cleanup work to do after more than 1 million acres of land burned in last year’s wildfires.

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That cleanup involves removing burned trees near roads and structures that could fall and create safety hazards. But which burned trees are truly hazardous and need to be removed?

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More than 20 conservation groups sent a letter Tuesday to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack opposing the post-fire roadside logging proposed or actively being carried out by federal agencies. And a growing number of people are sounding alarms over excessive tree-cutting along scenic highways and protected rivers as the Oregon Department of Transportation and its contractors proceed with plans to cut nearly 300,000 trees deemed as hazardous.

Ex-wildlife managers want veto of Idaho wolf-killing bill

Nearly 30 retired state, federal and tribal wildlife managers sent a letter Wednesday to Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little asking him to veto a bill backed by agricultural interests that could cut the state's wolf population by 90%.

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The former workers at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Nez Perce Tribe, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, University of Idaho and U.S. Forest Service say the methods for killing wolves allowed in the measure violate longstanding wildlife management practices and sportsmen ethics.

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Those methods include the hunting, trapping and snaring of an unlimited number of wolves on a single hunting tag, and allowing hunters to chase down wolves on snowmobiles and ATVs. The measure also allows, on private land, the killing of newborn pups and nursing mothers…

View 2021 Harvest Schedule and Virtual Tour Here

Despite specific language in the (reinstated) 2005 Research Forest Plan calling for carbon assessments to be conducted for each harvest unit, there still appears to be NO consideration given for the carbon impacts of OSU's forestry operations.  I brought up this shortcoming during last year's forest tour to Director Fitzgerald.  He claimed he couldn't find anyone to do the called-for assessments.  It is difficult to understand how the College can claim to be exhibiting "leadership in forestry education" when they are ignoring carbon impacts of their timber cutting.

Most of the trees to be cut are considerably older than the industry average (e.g. in 70 to 90 year-old stands).  This means the carbon impact of cutting these trees is correspondingly much greater than typical clearcutting operations.  Research Forest managers don't offer much in the way of specific justification for cutting these older stands.  My sense is that the overriding factor in the harvest plan is revenue generation.  A recent public records request revealed that only 0.5% of the income from OSU's "Research Forests" funded research during the 2017 to 2020 time period.  There's nothing in the 2021 plan to indicate a change in approach.  Under the new Dean's leadership, the College is still relying on the forests as a "cash cow".

As the State Land Board and Oregonians consider whether OSU is qualified to manage an Elliott State Research Forest, our best guide is to look at how they are managing their existing "Research Forests".  OSU's 2021 harvest plan does not give one confidence they are qualified to be stewards of the Elliott.

How “Act Locally” Became “Shop Locally” | What Happened To Earth Day?

Since 1970, the purpose of Earth Day has changed from one day each year when corporate polluters were exposed (what corporations should do), to a celebration of the personal (what you can do). Today’s bland, uncontroversial event typically features everything from 5k runs to esoteric spiritualties, but almost always carefully avoids any discussion of local polluters or environmental bad actors. If environmentalism is mentioned at all it is confined to climate change and recycling. The fierce green warrior has been replaced by the frugal green consumer now focused laser-like on the grass-fed beef at the local farmers’ market. Earth Day has converted attention from the public realms of pollution, environmental degradation, and over-development into the personal realm of the spiritual and inspirational. Certainly, all of us should improve our personal habits and recycle more, ride bikes, “reach out” to others, and listen to more Pete Seeger. But “all of us” don’t cause pollution from oil refineries; only a few people do, and Earth Day is the one day of the year they should be called out and shamed even more than usual. Corporate sponsors open their checkbooks for Earth Day to avoid having individual companies’ behaviors singled out for scrutiny. To accomplish this, they are willing to furnish unlimited seedlings, paper bags with green writing, and funds to print brochures on how to recycle containers that shouldn’t have been produced in the first place…

Forest Service Agrees to Stop Challenged Logging Project in Mendocino National Forest

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The U.S. government has agreed to halt a plan to remove fire-damaged trees on 7,000 acres in a Northern California forest after the Ninth Circuit ruled last year that it should have studied the project’s impact on the environment first.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen this week approved a settlement with an environmental group who sued to block the logging project in Mendocino National Forest in October 2019. An order approving the settlement was filed Monday but not recorded on the docket until Thursday.

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Under the terms of that deal, the U.S. Forest Service will stop moving forward with planned timber sales in six areas of the forest. The service had already allowed private logging companies to cut down trees in about a third of the 7,000-acre area when the Ninth Circuit ordered it to stop the project this past August.

The project was intended to remove trees damaged by the 2018 Ranch Fire, which burned 410,000 acres including 288,000 acres in Mendocino National Forest. It was the largest wildfire in California history until August 2020, when the August Complex Fire burned over 1 million acres — also in Mendocino and five other counties.

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The settlement will allow the government to move forward with tree-cutting work in one area of the forest under an M10-Letts Stewardship Agreement. That mostly involves “smaller diameter” trees and vegetation, not larger trees that an environmental group had objected to removing, according to the group’s lawyer, René Voss of Natural Resources Law.

Forest pesticides found downstream in coastal Oregon waters

Pesticides used on forests and in other applications have been found by researchers in watersheds along the Oregon Coast, raising concerns that aquatic species may be exposed to a toxic mixture of chemicals in the region...

A timber lobbyist called our investigation ‘completely bogus.’ We have the receipts to show it’s not.

Lobbyists for the timber industry have repeatedly attacked our investigation, which was based on extensive interviews and a review of thousands of documents. Here’s the evidence to back up the investigation’s major findings.

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With the Oregon Legislature taking up bills to overhaul or eliminate the Oregon Forest Resources Institute after a news investigation last August, lobbyists have repeatedly attacked the reporting as incorrect.

Global Call Goes Out to End Destruction of Canada's Ancient Forests

More than 100 prominent individuals throughout Canadian society, along with a handful of international supporters, urged British Columbia Premier John Horgan on Friday to fulfill his campaign pledge to immediately protect the region's imperiled old-growth forests, which continue to be logged despite scientific warnings against further destruction.

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"Some things can't be replaced," the coalition of influential Indigenous leaders, political figures, academics, activists, authors, artists, and athletes wrote in a letter to Horgan, a member of the B.C. New Democratic Party (NDP).

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"For thousands of years, these forests have cleaned our air and water, nurtured species, stabilized the climate, and been stewarded by Indigenous Nations through the jurisdictional management of their traditional lands," they added. "Protect the irreplaceable..."

As Climate Warms, a Rearrangement of World’s Plant Life Looms

Previous periods of rapid warming millions of years ago drastically altered plants and forests on Earth. Now, scientists see the beginnings of a more sudden, disruptive rearrangement of the world’s flora — a trend that will intensify if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in.

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Some 56 million years ago, just after the Paleocene epoch gave way to the Eocene, the world suddenly warmed. Scientists continue to debate the ultimate cause of the warming, but they agree on its proximate cause: A huge burst of carbon dioxide entered the atmosphere, raising Earth’s average temperature by 7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), as this event is known, is “the best geologic analog” for modern anthropogenic climate change, said University of Wyoming paleobotanist Ellen Currano.

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She studies how the PETM’s sudden warmth affected plants. Darwin famously compared the fossil record to a tattered book missing most of its pages and with all but a few lines obscured. The PETM, which lasted roughly 200,000 years, bears out the analogy. Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin is the only place on Earth where scientists have found plant macrofossils (visible to the naked eye, that is) that date to the PETM. The fossil leaves that Currano and her colleagues have found there paint a vivid portrait…

50+ groups across US Northwest unveil Green New Deal vision for region's vital forests

More than 50 conservation and climate justice organizations across Northern California, Oregon, and Washington on Wednesday called on policymakers to preserve the region's tens of millions of acres of forest land by adopting a Green New Deal for Pacific Northwest Forests—a plan comprised of six pillars aimed at safeguarding against destructive wildfires while also mitigating the climate emergency.

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"Forestlands in the Pacific Northwest can become central in drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and defending against the worst impacts of climate change, all the while supporting the local economies and rural communities that rely on forestlands." —50+ conservation groups

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"The forests of the Pacific Northwest have the potential to take up and store as much if not more carbon per acre than any other forest in the world—including the Amazon rainforest,"  said (pdf) the organizations, calling for a transformation of industrial forestry in line with the demands of the Green New Deal legislation originally introduced in 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)…

After our investigation, Oregon House moves to curb forest institute’s power and budget

The Oregon House voted Tuesday to cut the Oregon Forest Resources Institute’s budget by two-thirds and redirect the money to the type of climate science it tried to undermine, delivering a sharp rebuke to a tax-funded agency that a news investigation showed had attacked scientists and acted as a lobbying and public relations arm for the timber industry.

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Representatives agreed in a 32-27 vote to increase oversight of the institute, end its public advertising campaign and shift $2.7 million of its $4 million annual budget to the Oregon Department of Forestry for projects including climate research in forests and assisting small landowners. The bill now moves to the Oregon Senate for consideration.

Biden Administration Suspends Oil Leases in Arctic Refuge

Trump administration approved leases in the pristine wilderness, but no major oil companies had bid for rights

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WASHINGTON—The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, blocking plans for the first-ever drilling program in the pristine 19-million-acre wilderness.

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The Interior Department said the program will be on hold until it completes a comprehensive analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. The review could ultimately lead to the leases being voided altogether, the department said.

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“Today marks an important step forward fulfilling President Biden’s promise to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, said in a statement. Drilling could change “the character of this special place forever,” she added.

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The decision is the latest twist in more than 30 years of fights, often highly partisan, over how to manage what many consider some of the country’s last unspoiled wilderness...

Holiday Farm Fire Salvage Logging Proposal Gets Mostly Critical Comments

The Bureau of Land Management has wrapped up their comment period on a proposal to log 910 acres affected by the Holiday Farm Fire last year. The agency expects to put out a decision by the end of this month.

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Becca Brooke with the BLM said they received about 200 comments on the plan.

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“If we decide to proceed, we’ll probably be able to offer salvage sales for auction in July,” Brooke said. “So, the earliest that the public could anticipate seeing salvage on BLM lands here is early August.”

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Brooke said only 30% of public comments are in support of the proposal, while the majority ask for a more rigorous environmental review. Conservation groups have voiced concern over potential harm to wildlife habitat and the McKenzie River.

Biden’s Climate Chops Face A Big Test On Old-Growth Forests

As the administration lays out an aggressive climate and conservation agenda, the Forest Service has primed logging projects in carbon-rich forests.

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In the Cascade Mountain Range of west-central Oregon, near the small town of MacKenzie Bridge, is an area of Willamette National Forest that’s home to a patchwork of mature Douglas fir and western hemlock. The oldest are between 120 and 150 years, towering more than 100 feet.

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Few mature forests remain in the continental United States after decades of intensive logging. And, like so many before them, these trees could soon be gone as the U.S. Forest Service moves ahead with a plan that would allow about 2,000 acres to be cut down in what’s known as the “Flat Country” project.

The Biden administration is pushing an aggressive environmental agenda, pledging to both slash greenhouse gas emissions at least in half and to conserve 30% of America’s lands and waters by 2030. Those commitments include broad language about the need to “invest in forest protection and forest management” and to “fight climate change with the natural solutions that our forests, agricultural lands, and the ocean provide…”

‘Make-or-break moment’ for forests

“Forests are at the core of our efforts to restore our relationship with the natural world,” the deputy UN chief said on Monday at the UN Forum on Forests.

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Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said we were at a “make-or-break moment”, adding that woodlands provide vital functions, including as guardians of fresh water sources and biodiversity protection.

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“Forests are at the core of the solutions that can help us make peace with nature”, she underscored, stressing that "we need all-hands-on-deck" to support of forests worldwide.

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Moreover, failure to protect them would have a major, negative impact on damaging and rising carbon emissions.

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The deputy UN chief said that forests must be adequately financed, including through alleviating debt burdens for those States which are expected to do more for woodland protection and sustainable agriculture overall…

Lawmakers investigate reports of irresponsible tree-cutting after wildfires

More employees come forward with allegations of mismanagement in state wildfire cleanup project

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More and more workers are lining up to blow the whistle on a state project that they say is irresponsibly removing trees along roads and properties that burned in last year’s wildfires.

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Multiple people who have worked for Oregon Department of Transportation contractors have now come forward to flag problems with the state’s hazard tree removal project.

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Lawmakers heard many of their concerns at a hearing before the Senate Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee on Wednesday and are now considering their options for trying to stop the work until it can be reviewed.

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On Thursday, committee chair Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, sent a letter to Gov. Kate Brown asking her to suspend the state’s tree removal operation and order an investigation of the allegations shared in Wednesday’s testimony. He flagged concerns that mismanagement of the state contracts could jeopardize Federal Emergency Management disaster funding that the state is counting on to help pay for wildfire cleanup work…

Bill Allowing 90 Percent of Idaho’s Wolves to Be Killed Passes House and Senate

A bill allowing hunters and private contractors to kill up to 90 percent of the state's wolves passed the Idaho House on Tuesday.

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The measure also passed the Idaho Senate last week, which means that the fate of around 1,000 wolves now lies with Republican Gov. Brad Little.

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"If this horrific bill passes, Idaho could nearly wipe out its wolf population," Andrea Zaccardi, Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) senior attorney, said in a statement emailed to EcoWatch. "Unless we can stop this from becoming law, decades of progress towards wolf recovery will be lost…"

'Watershed Moment' as Haaland Revokes Trump-Era Orders, Creates Climate Task Force

As the Biden administration reviews the U.S. government's federal fossil fuels program and faces pressure to block any new dirty energy development, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland won praise from environmentalists on Friday for issuing a pair of climate-related secretarial orders.

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"Today is a watershed moment in the history of the U.S. Department of the Interior," declared Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians. "With Secretary Haaland's actions today, it's clear the Interior Department is now working for communities, science, and justice. We are grateful for her leadership and bold action to put people over polluters."

Amid climate crisis, a proposal to save Washington state forests for carbon storage, not logging

CAPITOL STATE FOREST, Thurston County — Older than Washington state, the biggest Douglas firs on this patch of state forestland have stood through more than a century of logging.

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Part of a 180-acre timber sale auctioned off for $4.2 million last November by the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), their next stop was a plywood mill. Then, something unusual happened.

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Hilary Franz, state commissioner of public lands, pulled back nearly 40 acres with most of the biggest, oldest trees from the sale.

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Now, this timber sale named Smuggler (sales are often whimsically named by state foresters) also is swinging open a door to a broader conversation in Washington, home to the second largest lumber producer in the nation, to rethink the value of trees on state lands not as logs, but as trees to help address the twin crises of species extinction and climate warming…

Op-Ed: The Slippery Slope of Hazard-Tree Logging

Pacific Northwest forests are crisscrossed with roads — enough logging roads alone to circle the planet 13 times. Some asphalt, some gravel, some renowned for their scenic vistas and traveled by visitors from around the world, others rarely used, converted to trails or permanently decommissioned. These roads are among the most harmful human impacts to our forests: increasing wildfire risk, releasing sediment into our waterways and chopping up intact habitat into small, degraded remnants.

Wolf-killing bills draw expert opposition

A hearing on two controversial wolf-killing bills pitted those who believe state wildlife managers aren’t listening to hunters against those who believe legislators aren’t listening to science.

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“The people felt they have not had a voice with the (state Fish and Wildlife) commission,” Sen. Bob Brown, R-Thompson Falls, told the House Fish and Wildlife Committee on Tuesday as he closed debate on SB 267 and SB 314. “That is the attitude, the feeling, the people I represent have. That’s why this legislation comes forward.”

Oregon’s timber industry says it can’t afford new taxes, despite record profits

Lobbyists claim the timber industry is “up against the ropes.” Here’s what they’re not saying: Lumber prices are at record highs and profits are soaring.

Thirty years after Oregon lawmakers began giving the state’s timber industry tax cuts that cost rural counties an estimated $3 billion, industry lobbyists warned them not to follow through on efforts to reinstate the tax this year.

What is Forest Health?

In an article in the Bozeman Chronicle about the North Bridger Timber sale, the Forest Service justifies logging the forests based on what it calls “forest health”. The agency claims logging will “restore” resiliency.  But few ask what exactly constitutes a healthy forest ecosystem?

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The agency defines forest health as a lack of tree mortality, mainly from wildfire, bark beetles, root rot, mistletoe, drought, and a host of other natural agents. To the Forest Service, such biological agents are “destructive,” but this demonstrates a complete failure to understand how forest ecosystems work.

This Industrial Forestry Paradigm espoused by the Forest Service views any mortality other than that resulting from a chainsaw as unacceptable…

Forest advocates press EU leader to rethink views on biomass and energy

·        EU officials are currently working to finalize REDII renewable energy policy revisions and amendments by mid-July for EU parliamentary review. One component of that review is to determine whether forest biomass burning will continue to be considered carbon neutral by the 27 EU member states.

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·        Current science is clear: burning forest biomass to make energy is not carbon neutral, and the burning of wood pellets is dirtier per unit of electricity than burning coal. But the forestry industry and EU continue defending biomass, prompting an open letter from forest advocates harpooning the policy.

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·        In the leadup to the updated REDII policy revision proposals, European Commission Exec. VP Frans Timmermans says he truly values forests, but simultaneously believes that cutting them down and burning them to make electricity remains viable climate policy. More than 50% of the EU’s current wood harvest is being burned for energy.

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·        “Ecocide threatens the survivability of our forests. I certainly don’t underestimate the challenges we face, but still, I believe [burning forest] biomass can play a very useful role in the energy transition,” says Timmermans.

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“Please get the science right,” forest advocates implored last week in an open letter sent to the most influential European Commission leader on climate, as the European Union reevaluates its renewable energy policies this month.

That letter comes at a crucial moment which will determine whether the continent hits its ambitious voluntary carbon-reduction target under the Paris Agreement, and also whether it does so without relying on an existing EU carbon reporting loophole that allows the burning of forest biomass to make electricity, with the resulting greenhouse gas releases counted as generating “zero emissions…”

New Report: Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss Must Be Tackled Together, Not Separately

The two leading science groups studying ecosystems and climate urged protection of carbon-rich habitats and warned against solutions to warming that lower species diversity.

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Slowing global warming and stemming the loss of biodiversity have been viewed as independent challenges for years.

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But a new landmark report concludes that climate change and the rapid decline of natural ecosystems are intertwined crises that should be tackled together if international efforts to address either are to succeed.

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The report, released Thursday, was written by 50 of the world’s leading experts on biodiversity and climate change, representing two major international scientific groups collaborating for the first time: the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The findings emerged from a workshop held in December and months of subsequent research, and come as leaders gear up for two major upcoming United Nations conferences, one focusing on biodiversity and the other on climate change.

The 'messy' alternative to tree-planting

Trees are excellent at taking carbon out of the atmosphere and trapping it in their trunks, roots and leaves. But what if planting them wasn't the solution?

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At a former intensive dairy farm in Sussex, England, oak trees now tower up to 20 feet tall (6 metres), sucking in carbon from the atmosphere, providing habitat for birds, mammals and insects, purifying air and water, and protecting land from flooding. Alder, hornbeam, ash and birch trees are also thriving.

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Twenty years ago, these trees weren't here at all. The transformation is the kind of story that many countries are aiming for with large-scale tree planting programmes, from India to the US to Ethiopia. But they might be surprised to learn of the secret to this farm's success – none of these trees were "planted" here at all.

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Instead, the trees at Knepp Castle Estate in southern England were allowed to spread naturally. Birds such as jays can disperse as many as 7,500 acorns in four weeks. "Not a single tree was planted, no saplings were bought from commercial nurseries, no tanalised wooden stakes, no polypropylene tubes and plastic ties, no direct financial or carbon costs – no effort," says Isabella Tree, co-owner of Knepp Castle Estate….

The Legacy of 'Silent Spring' Continues Nearly 60 Years After Publication

Rachel Carson shaped environmentalism by taking an eloquent stance against pesticides.

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A book about pesticides hardly sounds like a page-turner, but in the skilled hands of Rachel Carson, it became precisely that—and so much more. "Silent Spring," published in 1962, is widely hailed as the single most influential book on the environmental conservation movement. Carson's cool, meticulous arguments against the rampant spraying of toxic chemicals on crops, forests, and bodies of water resonated with a public largely unaware of what was going on, spurring them to action.

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Carson is best known for her criticism of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), a pesticide commonly used at the time, which Carson said would be more properly termed a "biocide" for its ability to kill everything with which it comes into contact. She captured readers' attention with a haunting opening chapter called "A Fable for Tomorrow" that described an idyllic American village where "a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change" after pesticides were applied broadly. Birds stopped singing, animals sickened and died, trees failed to blossom—and yet, "the people had done it to themselves…"

Environmental group sues over Southern Oregon post-fire tree removal

An environmental group is suing the U.S. Forest Service claiming it unlawfully approved the removal of burned trees in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.

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The Klamath Forest Alliance's lawsuit accuses the agency of improperly "categorically excluding" the Slater Fire Safe Re-entry Project from environmental analysis, Capital Press reported.

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The complaint alleges that logging trees along 146 miles (235 kilometers) of roadsides without an “environmental assessment” or a more rigorous “environmental impact statement” violates the National Environmental Policy Act.

Big and Bad National Forest Clear-cuts Continue

Many politicians think they can get away with misleading the public. For example, Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) and Montana Republican Governor Greg Gianforte claim the Forest Service no longer clear-cuts our national forests. Obviously, as the picture shows, the timber industry is still clearcutting national forests with the Forest Service’s blessing. Case in point, Montana’s Custer Gallatin National Forest just signed a draft decision for the South Plateau logging project – literally on the border of Yellowstone National Park – that calls for clearcutting 5,551 acres or 8.6 square miles of forests in grizzly bear and lynx habitat. To haul out all of this timber, the Forest Service plans to bulldoze in 56.8 miles of new logging roads.

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Clearcutting is occurring throughout the Northern Rockies. The Kootenai National Forest’s Black Ram logging project calls for clearcutting 1,783 acres in grizzly bear habitat and in federally- designated lynx Critical Habitat. The Flathead National Forest wants to clear-cut 468 acres of grizzly and lynx habitat between Swan Lake and Flathead Lake…

Flattening a Forest

Retired forestry professors, an environmental group and a lawmaker speak out on a proposed logging of mature forestland

During a recent trip to the McKenzie River area, Congressman Peter DeFazio tells Eugene Weekly that he’s seen more logging trucks in that one day than he’d normally see in a year.

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But logging trucks could soon haul away more than the controversial Holiday Farm Fire-related salvage timber. The U.S. Forest Service is proposing forest management actions scattered across a project area of 74,091 acres near McKenzie Bridge, according to sale documents. Called the Flat Country Project, the project in the Willamette National Forest concerns opponents who say the agency would be logging mature forests, affecting diverse ecosystems and affecting a space that could be a part of capturing carbon emissions….

ODOT to hire independent arborist to review hazard tree removal project

In response to allegations of mismanagement, the Oregon Department of Transportation plans to hire an independent arborist or forester to review the state’s post-wildfire hazard tree removal operations.

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Mac Lynde, ODOT’s director of Oregon’s Debris Management Task Force, told lawmakers in a hearing on Friday that the agency is working to sign a contract in the next couple of days with someone who can do a professional “quality assurance review” of how contractors are identifying and evaluating hazard trees along roads and properties.

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“We’re working aggressively to get that underway quickly,” he said. “It’s an important step we want to ensure transparency of the operation but more importantly that we are delivering the quality product that Oregonians deserve...”

Salvage does not aid ecological recovery of forests

There are many reasons why people may wish to salvage trees after wildfires like those that occurred in the western Cascades last September, including getting logs to the mill, recovering the economic value of the burned trees and reducing hazards to the public along roads and around houses and communities. 

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While these economic and social values are important, it is critical to understand that timber salvage will not contribute to the recovery of westside forests, but will instead interfere with natural recovery processes, over the short and long term.

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Forests in the Douglas-fir region of western Oregon evolved under a regime of infrequent, intense disturbances and are well adapted for dealing with such phenomena. These forests have evolved with infrequent but high severity fire, such as occurred last summer. They have a natural ability to immediately mitigate wildfire effects and initiate the long-term recovery of their functional capabilities, including watershed protection and provision of wildlife habitat…

Contemplating Earth Day’s 51-year midlife crisis

At 51, Earth Day is in a midlife crisis. So, let’s look at its past, present, and future.

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Born in 1970, Earth Day was an outcome of the tumultuous ’60s. Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring, sounded the alarm about pesticide residues in people and nature. Cleveland’s infamous Cuyahoga River, awash in oil and sewage sludge, was on fire. Our nation’s symbol, the bald eagle, was facing extinction.

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In response to public outcry, President Richard Nixon (R) created the EPA and signed the Endangered Species Act, two of the nation’s premier eco-achievements. At the time, just five nations had satellite launching capabilities and Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong took that “one giant leap for mankind.” Returning astronauts shared their outer-worldly experience…

Arborists say ODOT post-fires tree cutting is excessive, rushed

Critics who worked on state project say it’s removing trees that aren’t actually hazardous

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Oregon has a lot of cleanup work to do after more than 1 million acres of land burned in last year’s wildfires.

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That cleanup involves removing burned trees near roads and structures that could fall and create safety hazards. But which burned trees are truly hazardous and need to be removed?

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More than 20 conservation groups sent a letter Tuesday to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack opposing the post-fire roadside logging proposed or actively being carried out by federal agencies. And a growing number of people are sounding alarms over excessive tree-cutting along scenic highways and protected rivers as the Oregon Department of Transportation and its contractors proceed with plans to cut nearly 300,000 trees deemed as hazardous.

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The critics include arborists who have worked on the project and say the reckless tree-cutting operations across the state are being mismanaged and need to be stopped…

The Active Forest Management Scam

There are daily news stories about the recent large wildfires in 2020. In nearly all of these media accounts, almost always attributed to a lack of active forest management. In other words, proponents of logging/thinning forests assert fuel reductions would diminish fire severity. The prevailing assumption is that fuels are the major cause of large blazes.

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This chainsaw prescription is all a scam to promote logging.

The Institutional Bias of Forestry School Research

Institutional bias doesn’t just exist in race relationships. The Forest Service and Forestry Schools have been the handmaiden of the timber industry for so long they do not even recognize their own biases.

A good example is a recent announcement by the Oregon State University Forestry School that:...

Oregon Conservation Groups Call For Protection From Post-Fire Logging

The letter was signed by 38 conservation groups including the Native Fish Society, Sierra Club and Oregon Wild.

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Together they’re urging Oregon’s elected officials to halt proposed logging projects on about 10,000 acres of federal lands. The letter singles out areas that burned during the Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River and Archie Creek Fire along the North Umpqua River.