Daily Archives: August 13, 2018

Imagine words so prophetic yet so misunderstood that agencies and science get sabotaged by ignorance and greed. The U.S, Forest Service refuses to admit that past management has had significant ongoing consequences and that we can’t solve a problem using the same thinking that created it. Case in point: the wildfires currently raging throughout the West. The Forest Service says we are experiencing these cataclysmic wildfires due to fire suppression and climate change, and that thinning the forests will reduce the danger. Now witness California, Oregon and worldwide, as wildfire records are broken yearly. Forty years ago, I remember the old bulls saying, “We don’t put out fires in the woods. Either the rains come or they run into an old growth forest and fall to the ground as a surface fire and go out.” Now, with 95 percent of the old growth gone, only the rains really help extinguish fires of any size and consequence.

There are nearly as many theories about the best forest-management practices in Oregon as there are trees. Despite claims to the contrary, a number of conservation practices are embraced by the timber industry because without them, soil and water resources would be lost, and there would be no way to maintain healthy, sustainable and productive forests for harvest. But that’s about where the similarities end. In a nutshell, the timber industry wants to harvest and environmental groups don’t.  With fires raging in the West for a second consecutive summer, we asked both sides of the issue to weigh in. We invited logging-centric experts from organizations such as the Oregon Forest Resources Council and environmental groups such as Oregon Wild, to share their thoughts.

Roy Keene

University of Oregon professor Steven Beda’s Aug. 5 Commentary essay, “Rural Americans unprotected by the Endangered Species Act,” tells only half the story and doesn’t get that half right. Beda speaks of environmentalists and loggers being “on the same side,” saying that timber workers “eagerly backed the Wilderness Act.” As someone who was ostracized as a pro-wilderness timber cruiser in Roseburg during the last big wilderness struggle, I can say from experience this is a myth. The timber industry polarized the wilderness conflict, demonizing environmentalists, and claiming wilderness withdrawals would shut down logging. Ironically, the five years that followed the passing of the million-acre 1984 Oregon Wilderness Act saw the biggest timber harvests since the early 1970s. The Bureau of Land Management alone cut an average of over a billion board feet a year, twice the 1937 O&C Act’s mandated sustained-yield rate of 500 million feet.

The Forest Service has completed an innovative, fast-tracked environmental study to clear the way for the massive thinning of the 64,000-acre watershed of the C.C. Cragin Reservoir — the key to Rim Country’s water future. …The Forest Service doesn’t have the money to actually do the thinning itself — and has no contractor lined up to undertake the project for the sake of the wood the company can harvest. “Right now, we don’t have the money — and we don’t have a timeline for actually starting the thinning,” said George Jozens, deputy public affairs director for the Coconino National Forest. Nonetheless, the completion of the environmental study on the slopes that drain into the C.C. Cragin Reservoir represents a dramatic shift in the way the Forest Service operates when it comes to restoring forest health and protecting vital assets like reservoirs.