Dave Schott

Last October the BLM submitted its Final Environmental Impact Statement for their Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR).  This is their new 10-year management plan for some 2.3 million acres of BLM-managed timberland on the west side of the Cascade mountain range and in Klamath County on the east side of the Cascades.

The lands in question are the O&C timberlands, whose storied history is not well known outside of timber circles. In the late 1800s, Congress gave the Oregon & California Railroad every other section of land [a section is one square mile] in a checkerboard pattern 20 miles on either side of the rail route as an incentive to open a rail line from Portland, Oregon into northern California.

Long story short, the O&C Railroad failed to meet the terms of its agreement with Congress, so the lands were re-vested [seized] by the federal government in the early 1900s, leaving western Oregon’s counties to face a very uncertain economic future.

Congress made several attempts to fix the situation, but nothing of significance to the so-called “O&C counties” [there are 18 of them] occurred until Congress ratified the O&C Act in August of 1937. Under terms of the agreement, the counties were to receive 50 percent of the revenue generated by the sale and harvest of timber from O&C lands. In approving the Act, which was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, Congress acknowledged its responsibility to compensate the 18 counties for non-taxable lands it owned within each county. [By law, federal lands are not subject to property tax; only privately-owned lands]

O&C timber harvesting revenues have been a very important source of revenue to the 18 counties since the 1937 Act was passed. Literally hundreds of public works projects including roads, bridges, schools, libraries and county office buildings – have been built with O&C dollars. Police, fire and social services have also been funded from the same revenue stream.

Enter the 1990s and a slew of federal timber sales, including sales on O&C lands, were put forth by both the BLM and USFS but unfortunately they were immediately challenged by lawsuits filed by environmental groups bent on stopping federal timber harvesting dead in its tracks. In southern Oregon, where federal lands accounted for more than 70 percent of all timber harvesting, we lost 15 sawmills in less than a decade.

O&C timber sales – the economic lifeblood for six southwest Oregon counties, dropped from a 30-year average of more than 200 million board feet to less than 10 million board feet a year.

In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan (NFP) was formulated after President Clinton, the BLM, the USFS, environmental groups and timber industry representatives arrived at a compromise: the harvest would be 20 percent of the average of the five highest harvest years in the preceding 10 years. In southwest Oregon, the O&C harvest level would be 57 million feet per year and the federal lands managed by the US Forest Service would be 42 million feet per year.  These figures were agreed upon by all parties.

Although these new harvest levels were far below historic harvest levels, and far less than our forests were growing annually, they did bring certainty to saw mills and local governments that were trying to plan for more stable economic futures.

It’s funny how agreements with the environmental extremists have a way of never panning out.  Now, 15 years after the Northwest Forest Plan was hammered out, there still isn’t a formal or legally binding plan; nor has there been any letup in the number of timber sale appeals or lawsuits. Worse still, harvest levels on O&C timberlands managed by the Bureau of Land Management have averaged less than 30 percent of agreed upon forest plan targets.

In 2003, the American Forest Resource Council sued the BLM to force it to comply with the terms of the 1937 O&C Act.  This lawsuit is what prompted the development of the new Western Oregon Plan (WOPR).  The Final Environmental Impact Statement took over two years to produce.  The four-volume report is almost 2,000 pages long and includes 15 separate maps.  Scores of scientists from the BLM, Oregon State University and the Department of Fish and Wildlife contributed to the document. There has never been a more exhaustive study done in the history of the BLM.  Riparian areas, endangered species, flora and fauna and economic concerns are all provided for.

Under the WOPR the BLM has proposed a southwest Oregon harvest of 97 million board feet, less than 60% of annual timber growth, which is 175 million board feet. Ironically, the plan recognizes that without sound forest management our forests face the steadily increasing risk of catastrophic wildfire – stand-replacing wildfires that often incinerate the organic layer in which plant life begins. Why then is the harvest level less than 60 percent of annual growth? Shouldn’t growth, harvest and natural mortality be more closely aligned with one another? I know of no other way to account for the increasing risk of catastrophic wildfire that we face here in southwest Oregon.  That risk became starkly realized with the 2002 Biscuit fire, a fire which ultimately consumed 775 square miles most of which was virgin old growth timberland. On third of the acreage utterly destroyed was the wild and remote Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area.  Also included within the boundaries of the fire were hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat said to be critical to the survival and recovery of the northern spotted owl, a threatened species we are supposed to be protecting under terms of the federal Endangered Species Act.

So where do we stand at the moment? Well, environmental groups are screaming bloody murder, charging that the Bureau of Land Management wants to rape timberlands, clear cut remaining old growth forests and destroy spotted owl habitat. Never mind that the O&C forests the BLM is managing hold only eight percent of recognized old growth that is found in western forests.

In early December, Oregon’s governor, Ted Kulongoski, despite the fact that his staff had spent almost a year working with the BLM to hammer out an agreement acceptable to both parties, decided not to endorse the proposed WOPR. Just what the governor’s signature means on documents having to do with federal timber land is a question for constitutional scholars.  The governor was under enormous pressure from extremist environmental groups who don’t want the O&C forests to be managed, no matter what the 1937 Act requires.  Despite the Governor’s denial of support, Ed Shepard, who is the State Director of the BLM, decided that the plan was well founded in the very best available science and in late December submitted the plan as his Record of Decision (ROD).  This week, the Governor instructed his staff to attempt to have the new acting head of the Department of Interior, under which the BLM operates, rescind the ROD and if successful he will unfortunately undo all the efforts of the BLM and render the agency subject to the lawsuits that have plagued them for years.  Will we have stalemate yet again?

It is vital that the nation’s citizens come to understand that if their forests are not wisely and carefully managed for the multiple benefits they’ve been providing for more than 70 years, nature will manage them for us in the most violent of ways, and we surely won’t enjoy the results. It will take southern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forests hundreds of years to recover from the environmental impacts of the Biscuit Fire, a fire many believe could have been controlled much sooner had the government acted more quickly to contain it.

And the Biscuit is but one example of all that has gone wrong with our nation’s federal forest management policy in recent years.

In my opinion, the Western Oregon Plan Revision for managing the fabled O&C timberlands is probably as good a plan as we who work in western Oregon’s lumber industry are going to get. It is fair and it is thorough.  It is also a whole lot less than I believe rural Oregon’s sawmilling communities should be getting from these very productive forest lands, and very likely a whole lot less than we will lose to catastrophic wildfire in years to come, but it is the best we can hope for under the circumstances.