Monthly Archives: June 2018

Steve Daines

U.S. Sen. Steve Daines hopes one of his amendments to the Senate’s proposed farm bill will create economic growth in the sagging timber industry in Northwest Montana. The Montana Republican hosted a media teleconference Tuesday afternoon on the efforts to pass the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018. The U.S. House last week narrowly passed its version of the bill. The Senate will debate its own version of the farm bill today. One of Daines’ amendments to the Senate bill calls for pilot arbitration that would allow the Forest Service’s Region 1 to use arbitration two times a year to streamline solutions to objections to timber sales. …The senator also touted that the proposed bill would legalize the production of industrial hemp, which he said would boost and diversify Montana’s agriculture economy.

LOS ANGELES — U.S. officials offered Nestle, the maker of Arrowhead bottled water, a three-year permit on Wednesday to keep taking millions of gallons of water from a national forest in Southern California — but with new restrictions designed to keep a creek flowing for other uses. The offer announced by the U.S. Forest Service allows Nestle Waters North America, the biggest bottled-water company in the nation, to keep piping water from the Strawberry Creek watershed that it’s tapped for decades. The permit would allow extraction only when water is available to protect natural resources in the San Bernardino National Forest northeast of Los Angeles. Use could be restricted if the state’s scattered drought conditions worsen.

Tim Freeman

Lone Rock’s recent construction of a forest road demonstrated how some environmental groups manufacture controversy to attract attention. The Roseburg-based company worked proactively with the Bureau of Land Management and followed all environmental laws and regulations to access their own property. Because a small number of large trees were removed in the process, groups opposed to our local timber industry weren’t going to allow an opportunity go to waste. Portland-based Oregon Wild leveraged this manufactured controversy in a fundraising email, stoking their supporters to send cash with claims of “logging loopholes” exploited by the “Trump Administration’s BLM.” Never mind the truth. …Spreading false information and inciting threats against working people only damages the credibility of these organizations attempting to stop the responsible management of our public and private forest lands.

Jed Arnold

I’m lucky to be able to spend most days in the woods, helping to look after the sustainability and health of 33,000 acres of Hampton Lumber’s forestland here in Clatsop County. As a family-owned wood products company, our outlook is inherently multi-generational. …The work we do every day is focused on ensuring our forests are as healthy in 50 years as they are today. We recognize how climate change could affect forest and community health. …Sustainable timber harvest as a strategy to fight climate change makes a lot of sense when one looks at modern forest management and timber production in the proper context —through a long-term life cycle analysis. A good portion of a tree’s carbon remains stored in the wood products that are created from it, locking that carbon away for the life of the product, while atmospheric carbon is taken up by the tree planted in its place.

The U.S. Forest Service is ready to unveil its final environmental impact statement for the much-anticipated Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision, covering 5.5 million acres of public forests in Eastern Oregon. At long last, the U.S. Forest Service is ready to unveil its final draft of the much-anticipated Blue Mountains Forest Plan Revision. The plans, which were last updated in 1990, will guide land management activities — including timber harvest, recreation and livestock grazing — over 5.5 million acres in the Umatilla, Wallowa-Whitman and Malheur national forests in Eastern Oregon for the next 10-15 years. A draft environmental impact statement, or EIS, for the plans was released in 2014, but after a significant public backlash the Forest Service embarked on three more years of outreach to build consensus.

A coalition of six environmental advocacy groups filed a petition with the state Tuesday seeking protection for the Humboldt marten, a secretive cat-like predator, under the state’s endangered species rules. The tiny mammals, of which there are thought to be fewer than 200 in the state, once roamed the coastal mountains from the Columbia River south to Sonoma County in Northern California, but their population has been decimated by over-trapping and logging of old growth forests, said Nick Cady, legal director at Cascadia Wildlands, one of the groups that filed the petition. …In Oregon, only two populations of the marten exist, one in the Siskiyou National Forest and the other in the Siuslaw National Forest, both isolated from one another.

STEWARTS POINT, Calif. — A grove in Northern California with hundreds of ancient redwood trees, some taller than the Statue of Liberty, is being acquired by an environmental group that plans to preserve it and open a new public park, the group announced Tuesday. Save the Redwoods League said it is purchasing the 738-acre grove, which is a third larger than Muir Woods National Monument and has 47 percent more old-growth trees, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Known as Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve, the sprawling forest in Sonoma County matches Muir Woods’ majesty. One of its oldest trees in the grove has a diameter of 19 feet — wider than a two-lane road. …The tallest of the 1,450 trees in the grove is 313 feet, eight feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, Hodder said. The tallest at Muir Woods is 258 feet.