Biden to issue Earth Day order to safeguard old-growth forests: WaPo Story

It’s always interesting to see how our issues as complex and convoluted as they are, are addressed by folks in the media. What struck me is that based on future definitions of mature trees and forests, we could have planted forests that now need to be protected in the west, and certainly in other parts of the country.

From the WaPo today 

While scientists agree that forests are important to slowing climate change, many say that years of wildfire suppression policies have led to dense forests that are fueling more extreme fires. Some of the strategies to address this involve thinning out small trees, clearing dry brush and intentionally setting beneficial fires. But federal agencies have also contracted with timber companies to clear land for fire breaks and cut down larger trees that they say threaten homes and communities.

Critics have argued that this approach amounts to a giveaway for timber companies who they say helped make American forests crowded by logging the largest, oldest trees. The many younger trees that sprung up in their place burn more easily and often don’t survive the more destructive wind-driven wildfires that have torn through the West in recent years.

Whose views are not incorporated in this story? Federal agencies nor the timber industry. Remember when the Trump Admin was bad and federal agency folks were good? Now the Biden Admin (new policy!)is good and things federal agencies have been doing questionable things…

Below is the rest of the article. More details tomorrow.

President Biden will sign an executive order on Friday in Seattle laying the groundwork for protecting some of the biggest and oldest trees in America’s forests, according to five individuals briefed on the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was not yet finalized.

Biden will direct the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to inventory mature and old-growth forests nationwide, three of the individuals said. He will also require the agencies to identify threats to these trees and to use that information to write policies that protect them.

(I remember inventorying once before (90’s?); I think we know the threats, but it could easily take two years to do all this and to write policies (regulations?) to”protect” them.  This doesn’t seem like the most proactive approach IMHO; but maybe it’s a political (symbolic) act.)

The president’s order, however, will not ban logging of mature and old-growth trees, they added, and the administration is not considering a nationwide prohibition. It will include initiatives aimed at curbing deforestation overseas, promoting economic development in regions with major timber industries and calculating the economic value of other natural resources such as wetlands.

While Democrats and environmentalists will likely welcome the order, it does not have the same force as legislation and could be reversed under a future president. The new order would not go as far as a bill Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) have written, which would restrict the trade of commodities linked to forest clearing, such as palm oil and beef.

The move reflects the administration’s broader strategy to fight climate change by conserving more land in the United States — and more of the trees that store the most carbon. A 2020 study of six national forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, found that just 3 percent of the largest trees contained roughly 42 percent of the carbon.

Earlier this year, more than 70 environmental groups launched a campaign calling on Biden to enact new protections for mature and old-growth trees — generally, those over 80 years old — which currently aren’t prohibited from being turned into lumber.

In November, Democratic members of Congress wrote to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, urging him to protect older forests and warning that allowing these trees to be harvested would undermine the president’s climate goals because it would release a massive amount of planet-warming pollutants.

“Allowing logging of mature and old federal forests should become a practice of the past,” they wrote.

Scientists consider forests to be critical carbon sinks, meaning they absorb more carbon dioxide than they release into the atmosphere. Old-growth trees, such as California’s redwoods and giant sequoias or the mammoth Sitka spruce and red cedar trees in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, collectively store billions of tons of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches and roots. Protecting them could help avert the worst effects of climate change.

Placing safeguards on older trees could be hugely controversial.

Timber companies are likely to object to any new limits on their access to trees in federal forests, and experts will debate what counts as a mature tree. A loblolly pine in the Southeast and a ponderosa pine in the West grow at vastly different rates, complicating efforts to define maturity as a set number of years across multiple species.

In writing new policies, the administration will also have to walk a line between preserving older trees on federal land and giving managers enough flexibility to assure those forests’ health.

While scientists agree that forests are important to slowing climate change, many say that years of wildfire suppression policies have led to dense forests that are fueling more extreme fires. Some of the strategies to address this involve thinning out small trees, clearing dry brush and intentionally setting beneficial fires.

But federal agencies have also contracted with timber companies to clear land for fire breaks and cut down larger trees that they say threaten homes and communities.

Critics have argued that this approach amounts to a giveaway for timber companies who they say helped make American forests crowded by logging the largest, oldest trees. The many younger trees that sprung up in their place burn more easily and often don’t survive the more destructive wind-driven wildfires that have torn through the West in recent years.

The fight over old-growth forests has been going on for decades. In 1991, a federal judge blocked all logging of old-growth trees in the Pacific Northwest’s national forests to protect the northern spotted owl’s shrinking habitat. Republican and Democratic administrations have put in place dueling logging rules since then, and environmentalists have brought lawsuits that have curtailed several timber sales.

By 2020, the spotted owl had lost about 70 percent of its habitat, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it could go extinct. The Trump administration stripped away protections from more than a third of the bird’s total protected habitat, but Biden officials reversed that decision, writing a Federal Register notice that the rollback had “defects and shortcomings.”

7 thoughts on “Biden to issue Earth Day order to safeguard old-growth forests: WaPo Story”

  1. Remember, spotted owls require foraging habitats, along with its nesting habitats, to thrive and multiply. I still think we should ‘create’ protected nest stands, including human-built nests, ready for use. I’m often disappointed when so-called “experts” deliberately ignore the need for foraging habitats, separate from nesting habitats. I’m also dubious about “roosting habitat” needs. Since owls often travel long distances to their foraging habitats, they also would encounter plenty of snags in those areas, too.

    Reply
    • There’s a huge amount of federal old growth and near old growth that we succeeded in protecting that was lost to the 2020 Labor Day fires when more acres burned than all acres
      that burned in the PNW in previous 35 years combined.

      So now is a good time to revisit those designations and expand them before the newfound current abundance of snag forest grows over…

      One thing that is for sure over now is the era of Spotted Owls vs tree farmers because tree farming is a far less viable long term investment due to climate change and an increase in fire intensity and frequency. So we need to do more than divide up what little remains of the big trees and instead start designating where forests are most likely to thrive with minimal risk from wildfire. As in wet valley bottoms that are sheltered from high winds in areas where the main run / alignment of historic fires is not dominant.

      And a reminder, us enviros were not trying to just save spotted owls, we were trying to save an ecosystem, of which, the owl was an indicator species. But now as we realize the long term consequences of protecting old growth on a fire prone ridgelines simply because the trees were smaller and the loggers passed it over in favor of bigger lower fire risk areas downslope is clear.

      It’s time to revisit the areas on federal land that are the least at risk for catastrophic wildfire and start planning for old growth reserves in those sites no matter how your the existing stands are, because from what I’ve seen of Late Successional Reserves under NW Forest Plan after Labor day 2020 is that we suffered massive losses that we’ve barely begun to reckon with.

      Reply
      • The Forest Service has taken some tentative steps this direction by recognizing the importance of identifying climate change “refugia” and managing them differently.
        https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/climate-change-refugia#:~:text=Climate%20change%20refugia%20are%20%E2%80%9Careas,climate%20in%20the%20surrounding%20landscape.
        “Areas that are protected from climate-related disturbance such as increasingly severe fires and extreme floods can also be considered as climate change refugia.”

        However, there is no mention of forest planning here. This was something I encouraged a decade ago (based on early research on aquatic habitats by Isaak et. al., who is cited in this document) because it amounts to assigning long-term management direction to discrete land units – which is what forest plans do. The revised Flathead plan mentions refugia, and according to the EIS, “The proposed conservation watershed network in the forest plan is designed to provide a long-term conservation strategy to conserve native fish in watersheds that are expected to be long-term cold-water refugia in the face of climate change (Isaak, Young, Nagel, Horan, & Groce, 2015).” Since the focus there was on water, it may not have emphasized areas of lower fire risk.

        Reply
  2. I should also remind people that in Sierra Nevada National Forests, old growth has been ‘protected’ from logging for almost THIRTY YEARS! It is the wildfires and bark beetles that are killing old growth, over that massive acreage. Biden’s Executive Order won’t mean much in those Forests. It does appear that there are still some people who discount the damage that firestorms and bark beetles do.

    Also, there is no lack of 80 year old trees in most National Forests, if that is the definition used for “old growth”. Just HOW can you tell a tree is more than 80 years old, just by looking at it? In practice, that definition does not work.

    Reply

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