Please find a pair of short videos, a map, and links to additional information at the bottom of this article.
Preserving the mature and old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest has long been one of my overriding environmental and conservation concerns. That’s one of the many very good reasons I, like so many others, were so adamant in our opposition to a return of Donald Trump to the White House throughout 2024, and despondent in November when Trump’s second term was secured by a microscopic popular vote margin after a four-year period of relative stability and return to normalcy under President Biden following Trump’s disgraceful Jan. 6th insurrection.
Not only has Trump’s re-election marked a return of an administration that had already racked up the worst environmental record of any in modern U.S. history, but Trump’s first administration from 2017 to 2021 made several attempts, with plenty of support from Republicans in Congress, to roll back some of the nation’s best and most effective environmental polices, from illegally undoing the status of two National Monuments and threatening the status of at least another 20, cratering the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, and much more. Trump’s return may ultimately prove to be the undoing of the United States altogether.
By 2024 the Biden Administration had only just begun to address the damage incurred by Trump’s first administration. While the trajectory of American conservation did not markedly improve under Biden, especially with the rapid, and frequently reckless dismissal of environmental best practices in the destruction of native habitats in our southwestern deserts to accommodate the construction of massive solar arrays at the expense of consumer rooftop solar, the Biden administration did expand and establish several new National Monuments during its time in office.
Unfortunately, in a move that almost mirrors Trump’s pointless rollback of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah in 2017, two of Biden’s final and most heavily-vetted National Monument declarations, Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands, respectively located in California’s Riverside and Siskiyou counties, have now been thrown into jeopardy by a cowardly Trump executive order that calls for their eradication.
But even in November, it was clear Trump’s re-election heralded the arrival of the worst possible people at the worst possible time intent on doing the greatest possible damage to our environment and nation. And after the illegal and unnecessary firings of hundreds of thousands of highly-trained federal workers and civil servants, Elon Musk’s invasion of government agencies, a crashing stock market, mass deportations to Guantanamo, summary jailings, erosion of civil liberties and basic freedom of speech, acquiescence of legacy media, bullying of allies, intimidation of friends, our nation’s outright betrayal of Ukraine and its fight for survival, vaccine rollbacks and a measles outbreak, dismissal of veterans, the use of government time and resources in advancing rudderlessly stupid racist ends, airplanes falling from the sky, assaults on the security and integrity of Medicaid and Social Security, and so much more — have those predictions been proven wrong? Not in the slightest.
Now, as Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and Elon and Peter Thiel’s PayPal Mafia-trained tech terrorists take a wrecking ball to the entirety of the carefully cultivated post-1945 American state to inflate their already outsized wealth, expand their oligarchic megalomania, and serve their Russian master(s), what few course corrections the Biden administration had been able to manage since 2021 have been reversed again, and the damage to American conservation — and American democracy itself — has been made exponentially worse in a matter of weeks and may yet prove fatal. We are in terribly dark times.
Which brings us to the update of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), the landmark 1994 agreement that saved Pacific Northwest old-growth forests and ended large-scale old-growth and mature forest logging on federal public lands in western Washington and Oregon, and northwestern California. Negotiated by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in Portland over the winter of 1993-94, the aim of the NWFP was to balance timber quotas with the conservation of old-growth forests and other ecological values, particularly the survival of the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, both endangered species that, by 1990, were in danger of vanishing altogether due to the pathological destruction of the birds’ habitat resulting from the near-unregulated old-growth logging “fever” of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Interestingly, despite Oregon’s miserable and poorly-enforced logging laws and the strength of resource extractors in Salem, the northern spotted owl was first listed as a “threatened” species by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife under federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) criteria in 1975. Federal recognition of the northern spotted owl’s threatened status finally arrived when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) listed the owl as threatened under the ESA in 1990. The marbled murrelet quickly followed in 1992, and its status has remained unchanged. A seabird that lives in the upper reaches of Pacific Northwest old-growth forests, the USFWS concluded just last year that the marbled murrelet still requires ESA protections. Both decisions in the early 1990s had significant, cascading impacts in the Pacific Northwest on federal public lands like those managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and prompted the establishment of the Northwest Forest Plan to provide further guidelines and practices.
Covering 24 million acres over 17 National Forests and other federal lands in Washington, Oregon, and California, the NWFP is a landscape-scale approach to public land management designed to protect threatened and endangered species like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet in old-growth and “late successional” habitats — i.e. forest species adapted to stable and predictable environments that remain constant for as long as a site remains undisturbed — while contributing to social and economic sustainability in the region. The Northwest Forest Plan hasn’t been perfect, and destructive old-growth timber sales have still occurred since 1994, but the pace and frequency of destructive old-growth logging has been greatly reduced from previous decades, and the public now has a greater opportunity to weigh in on logging proposals on federal land.
That’s why it’s vital now — at this moment, and in the wake of Trump’s executive order calling for an abandonment of all environmental principles and laws in an effort to “get the cut out” amidst our idiotic trade war with timber-heavy Canada — to tell the U.S. Forest Service in the limited time we have left to do the following as they weigh update options to the Northwest Forest Plan.
- Strengthen protections for mature and old-growth forests to ensure habitat, water quality, and carbon storage, and utilize mature and ancient forests to restore a functional ecosystem.
- Maintain or expand protections for the network of forest reserves to allow natural processes to flourish, ensure connectivity for wildlife, and support the recovery of imperiled species. Any reduction in forest reserve protections will increase harmful impacts such as habitat destruction, sediment in streams, and carbon loss, further endangering sensitive ecosystems.
- Prioritize community safety and proven wildfire prevention measures, and end the use of the discredited argument that increased logging is a means of wildfire prevention and suppression.
- Consult with and respect the sovereignty of Tribes, support tribal co-stewardship agreements, and ensure equitable access to planning processes.
- Continue to analyze related environmental justice impacts, including the pollution of air, water, and communities resulting from logging and other resource extraction practices. A good example of these abuses is in the Oregon Coast Range, where reckless, near-unregulated logging remains so prevalent on state forest lands that wholesale watershed destruction and landslides have resulted affecting roads, property stability, residents, and communities.
While the Biden Administration paid some lip service to ending old-growth logging on federal public lands in a projected second term, there’s no doubt the science upon which those proposals were made was sound, justified, and urgently needed. As little demonstrable action was taken on that front, increased destruction of desert public lands to facilitate massive solar arrays continued, and just as Democrats failed to defend the ESA when attempts were made by Republican legislators to discredit that policy, Democrats have been working with Republicans to weaken and neuter the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which has been the bedrock upon which almost all U.S. environmental law since 1970 — including the establishment of the EPA — has been based on.
The abandonment of many of the nation’s conservation values by both parties for political convenience already made for a perilous road for an update to the Northwest Forest Plan, and Trump’s re-election has essentially guaranteed the worst will occur. None of the other unprecedented events that has accompanied Trump 2.0’s cataclysmic arrival over the last two months give us any reason to believe otherwise. This is an administration, after all, that even seeks to devalue, discredit, and destroy our own National Park Service.
Not since the early 1990s have Pacific Northwest forests, and all of our nation’s conservation advances and successes, been in such severe jeopardy. But even at the time of the implementation of the NWFP, now over 30 years ago, we weren’t facing an administration and a movement like we are today which seeks to not only undermine our nation’s conservation legacy, but American democracy altogether.
Additional information
Oregon Wild:
Defending the Northwest Forest Plan
Petition to Protect Northwest Forests
Oppose Trump’s New Public Forests Logging Order
Wild Earth Guardians:
Getting the Cut Out: How the Forest Service Is Cutting Forest Protections to Boost Logging
Northwest Forest Plan Changes Would Slash Environmental Protections, Double Logging Levels
Sierra Club Washington State
Help Shape the Future of our Northwest Forests
Bird Alliance of Oregon (formerly Portland Audubon):
Tell Congress to Protect Our Strong Northwest Forest Plan
Banner photo of Mt. Hood National Forest by Tommy Hough © 2024
Footer photo of Buck Rising Timber Sale, BLM Roseburg District, by Tommy Hough © 2013
Map courtesy of WildEarth Guardians / U.S. Department of Agriculture
