In my Inbox this morning….
 
Steven,
There’s nothing like walking through an old-growth forest.
Magnificent Douglas firs, red spruces and white pines stand like giants against the sky, while ferns, shrubs, mosses and wildflowers dot the understory.
But right now, 20 logging projects from the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia to the Kootenai National Forest in Montana are putting mature and old-growth trees in imminent danger.1
Last year, President Biden ordered a first-ever inventory of America’s mature and old-growth forests on federal lands and directed federal agencies to then develop policies to protect them. But the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have continued to allow timber companies to log older trees at an alarming rate.
Right now, logging projects are targeting more than 300,000 acres of mature and old-growth forests.2
We know that the longer a forest remains untouched by human development, the more that life can grow and thrive there.
But these old-growth forests aren’t just irreplaceable habitat for countless animal species (though they are). They’re also our best allies in the fight against climate change — allies we lose the minute we cut them down.
The older a tree is, the better it is at storing carbon. Nearly 70% of all carbon stored in trees is absorbed in the second half of their lives.3
We simply can’t afford to chop down our oldest trees. But if we don’t act quickly, we could soon hear the chainsaws and see our beloved forests reduced to stumps.
Donate to our 2023 Fiscal Year-End Drive to be a guardian for our oldest trees in the year ahead.
We won’t let these forests be chopped down. Here’s what we’re doing to keep trees standing for generations to come:
Environment Oregon and our national network have a long history of defending our forests. We helped deliver landmark protections for 60 million acres of roadless areas in national forests, and we helped restore these roadless protections to all 9.2 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest earlier this year.
Now, we’re sending a strong message to the Biden administration to let our oldest trees grow. And we’re just getting started. With your help, we can protect mature and old-growth forests in the year ahead.
Will you stand with us as we stand up for our oldest trees?
Thank you,
Celeste Meiffren-Swango 1. Ellen Montgomery, “Threatened Forests,” Environment America, May 19, 2023.
Your donation will be used to support all of our campaigns to protect the environment, from saving the bees and protecting public lands, to standing up for clean water and fighting climate change. None of our work would be possible without supporters like you.
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I am a forester and have been for 35 years. I have participated In two intensive inventories each ten years from the other. The data was gathered mostly on old growth stands. We learned that on the site 3,4, & 5 stands the trees stoped growing at around 125 years. A little older on the site 3 stands. At that age we learned that not only did growth slow way down disease and fungus started to infect the trees. Those stands are now approaching 200 years old and are very defective. As the stands of decadent old growth continue to deteriorate, trees die and brush species come in leaving a perfect environment for intense wild fires.
Forests need to be managed and replaced when they become decadent and diseased. Young healthy stands consume much more carbon than the decadent oldgowth which consume practically none. Carbon from wild fires has become one of the greatest producers of green house gases world wide.
The environmental industrial complex doing what it does best (separate ignorant and gullible candlepackers from their money) by yet one more “team” of lily-white, disconnected urban elites.
https://environmentamerica.org/oregon/team/
I agree with Shaun.The Environment Oregon plea for money to save old growth forests comes across as disingenous at best and outright fraud at worst. Where are these old growth trees that are on the chopping block? Could it be that these folks have re-defined old growth as anything more than 100 years? Or, do they view any entry into a stand with old growth trees as a threat, when the entry may in fact be targeting younger trees that threaten the very existence of the old growth trees that they hold dear.
I see a parallel here with Donald Trump’s scam of raising funds with “Stop the Steal” Environmentalism has become a business endeavor and often times a dishonest one at that.
There are still lots of preservationists out there, wanting Wilderness protections for all public lands. Luckily, those numbers have gotten smaller in the last 20 years. However, some people like the idea of thinning (small submerchantable trees, instead). Some have embraced limited harvesting of small merchantable trees, too. Of course, everything has to be site-specific, and some (on both sides) want to ignore those ‘details’.
There still seems to be some active disinformation going on, which supports their donation potential. The public often falls for these ‘online petitions’, thinking that their support of the petition could result in environmental protections. In fact, some of those online petitions don’t allow you to participate unless you supply your phone number and email address (hint, hint… nudge, nudge).
(Yes, there are still those around who want to go back to the 80s style of ‘management’, too.)