Our old friends Chad Hanson and Dominick DellaSala are in the news again (or “news,” if you prefer), in an article in the UK’s Guardian. The article also quotes TSW regular Jim Furnish. Main point, aside from suggesting that the USFS isn’t doing enough to protect old-growth, is that they also aren’t protecting “mature” timber. My opinion, for what it’s worth (not much!) is that this reads like a John Muir Project press release dressed up to seem like a news article.
The first photo in the article — caption, “Felled trees are stacked at the Humbolt Redwood Company sawmill in Scotia, California, in 2020,” are of relatively young coast redwoods, which can grow to that size in 50 years or so.
Subheading:
Biden’s efforts to save mature trees are not getting enough Forest Service support, according to some conservationists
Excerpt:
They are the ancient giants of America – towering trunks of sequoias or beech or ash that started to sprout in some cases before the age of the Roman empire, with the few survivors of a frenzy of settler logging now appreciated as crucial allies in an era of climate and biodiversity crises.
Joe Biden has vowed to protect these “cherished” remnants of old growth forest, as well as the next generation of mature forests, directing his government to draw up new plans to conserve the ecological powerhouses that enable US forests to soak up about 10% of the country’s carbon emissions, as well as provide a vital crucible for clean water and wildlife.
Yet, the US Forest Service has not included mature trees in this new plan, which also includes loopholes conservationists say allow ongoing felling of trees that are hundreds of years old. The Forest Service, responsible for 154 national forests and nearly 25m acres (10m hectares) of old growth trees in the US, has also largely declined to conduct required reviews of multiple logging projects amid a stampede of tree cutting that threatens the oldest, richest trees before any new curtailments are imposed.
“The largest logging projects I’ve ever seen are targeting the last, best remaining old growth trees left in the country,” said Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and co-founder of the John Muir Project.
Hanson said the Forest Service had failed to properly follow the president’s directive, instead allowing logging that imperils the remaining trove of the US’s long-lived, untouched trees.
“We have a rogue agency in the Forest Service that is trying to benefit the logging industry before reforms take place,” he said. “The situation is rampant as far as I can tell and it risks squandering a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect these incredible forests.”
Once again, (if I remember correctly) 90 to 95 per cent of old growth trees are in parks seem to get ignored for disingenuous headlines.
Once again, pointing at private logging, then claiming that is what the Forest Service does. We’ve seen this movie before, and sequels are rarely as good as the original. I’m sure that Hanson still clings to his desire to end all logging on public lands…. at any cost. I’m pretty sure that most western residents don’t want the ‘Whatever Happens’ un-management strategy.
I suspect it’s part of a media campaign on the NOGA.
“In all, dozens of major logging projects are being advanced across the US, including the felling of 130,000 acres of old growth forest, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Chicago, in Plumas national forest in California; a plan to cut 95,000 acres in the Yaak River Valley in Montana that contains 600-year-old larch trees; and a program called the Telephone Gap project that aims to hack away a portion of ancient forest in Vermont that is 90% old growth and mature trees.”
Wow, that article is amazing! According to them, the Central and West Slope Project on the Plumas is going to impact 130K acres of old growth forest.
I looked at the EA and it looks like 137K acres of mature forest not OG. Here’s a link to the 254 page EA https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/plumas/?project=62873
So that’s actually … not true.
If they’re talking about the Black Ram project and OG, I examined it here.
“All treatments within designated old growth areas are designed to maintain and improve old growth characteristics on the landscape, and ensure it persists into the future per the requirements in the Forest Plan. No harvest of old growth is planned under the project, except if needed for public safety or to address insect or disease hazard.”
https://forestpolicypub.com/2022/07/12/lets-discuss-the-black-ram-project-on-the-kootenai/
I wish journalists would be more careful. This article is just a “he said, she said” when the journalist could have investigated the claims. Of course, they don’t have the background to think “wait, I doubt there ARE 130K acres of OG on the Plumas” but still.
Finally I think that portraying this is as being about the timber wars and then.. interviewing Imbergamo reinforces that framing. What about interviewing some fire scientists? Or members of the various Wildfire Resilience groups?
Or actually reading the project EAs?
Such extreme accusations are par for the course for the Hanson hit squad. They love the donations that such lies generate. With all that lawsuit money drying up, they go with the fleecing of their misguided (and gullible) supporters. It’s amazing what desperation will push people to do.
I doubt that the public has any heartburn over the cutting of old 18″ dbh white fir, on the Plumas. The existing diameter limits still remain in place, protecting the true old growth from logging.
I hadn’t heard about “all that lawsuit money drying up.”
Do you have any idea how big the “insect or disease hazard” exception could be? (Given the expected judicial deference to the Forest Service “scientific” interpretation of that – and that we’re talking about old trees.) Does anyone know of a definition of this phrase anywhere?
There was a time perhaps when Forest Service timber sales fit the description of those described by the “research ecologists” who contributed to this article. That would be the 60s, 70s and 80s. Suggesting now though that “The largest logging projects I’ve ever seen are targeting the last, best remaining old growth trees left in the country” is so far from the truth it’s almost comical. Most of the mills in the PacNW re-tooled in the early 2000s as logging opportunities on federal land declined (mainly due to tax breaks for the logging industry and the boom/bust of the Asian lumber market, not the Spotted Owl legislation), along with the associated abundance of larger, mature and old growth trees. The remaining mills can’t even process or remove trees the size of designated “Old Growth”, nor do they want to. In 1991, sure, they were salivating over the last 5% of OG remaining in the West, but not anymore. On the east side of the Cascades, the logging industry is a ghost town. FS contracts have to hire trucks from the coast just to haul timber from the Ponderosa/Lodgepole forest hours to the east. In contrast to what this article would lead one to believe, contemporary timber sales in many of these areas are aimed at increasing the application of commercial thinning treatments prescribed by the agency that will remove younger aged or even dead trees from these areas that have been designated as containing significant old growth or mature forest structure. Not as lucrative as projects involving even aged, mono-crop plantations found across private timber lands all over Washington and Oregon, but for the right price, still profitable. These polices are in step with the current architecture of the timber industry, who are now largely equipped to handle 30-40 year old Douglas fir vs 80 year plus Sitka Spruce, Sequoias or Redwoods. It’s a win-win for local communities and the ecological integrity of public lands. So yes, its true the forests were mismanaged by the agency for decades…but this is no longer our grandparent’s Forest Service.
Hanson would like people to think that the Forest Service is cutting 1000 year-old sequoias and redwood trees. Of course, sequoias don’t make good lumber, as was learned many decades ago. Of course, the USFS doesn’t have redwood trees on their National Forests, so that accusation falls flat, as well.
The extremes on both sides of this issue are exercising their greed.