The Northwest Forest Plan: FAQs in Fantasy Land

I hope all 70,000 people who follow our website read the Northwest Forest Plan FAQs. You can troll through them in about 15 minutes.

I love Question 3.

·     “Why is the Northwest Forest Plan being amended instead of revised?

And the answer to Question 3:

·     A plan amendment is required to add, modify, or remove plan components or to change how and where plan components apply to all or part of the plan area. A plan revision would create an entirely new plan.

·     The amendment approach allows us to keep what is working about the Plan and update those critical plan components most urgently needed to meet modern management challenges within the plan area.

The Forest Service says its final [amended] Environmental Impact Statement will be ready for public review by late Fall and that it hopes to have the updated plan amendment completed by early 2025.

A tip of my hat to the Northwest Forest Plan Federal Advisory Committee for making an extra effort to involve Indian tribes in the review process. They were virtually ignored when the plan was written 30 years ago.

But why in heaven’s name was only one ex-Forest Service person named to the advisory committee and why were no agency retirees selected? Collectively, these men and women represent hundreds of years of first-hand, on-the-ground experience. They know what works and what doesn’t.

One retiree I know well said, “From a technical and managerial standpoint, this is a major failure. Execution is a critical part of reviewing a strategy or plan, and yet there was only one person on the advisory committee who had any experience at all to execute the 1990 plan which covered over three states, involving many field and management people from all the Forests over the past 30 years. This makes no sense at all.”

He’s correct. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s 1990 all over again - and it stinks.

It is fair to ask why I hold tribal forestry in such high regard. I have worked side by side with tribal forest managers for almost 40 years. Our history of engagement mostly involved the Indian Forest Management Assessment Team [IFMAT] which is overseen by the Intertribal Timber Council based in Portland, Oregon.

My role was to translate the team’s voluminous and very technical reports[IFMAT I, II, III and IV]including site visit data into plain English for congressional review.

One theme repeats itself in all four reports.

Simply put, tribal forestry is seriously underfunded. On a per acre basis, tribes accomplish far more with far less federal funding that does the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management [BLM].

The nation’s 300 plus tribes collectively own about 19.3 million acres of timberland. Forty-one tribes are each stewards of more than 10,000 acres. In my opinion, these tribes are among the best forestland managers in the nation. There is a sacred sense of place and duty embedded in tribal forestry that reaches seven generations into the future.

Suffice it to say I fervently wish the Forest Service and the BLM could manage the public's federally-owned forests and rangelands with as much foresight and wisdom as tribes but their plans only span 10 years and both agencies are constantly embroiled in political turmoil and litigation.

More than 20 years ago I said publicly that I thought the time had come for the federal government to return all of the forest and rangeland it stole from Indians in the 1800s to their respective tribes.

Many people thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. And many of my Forest Service friends thought I was wrong. A few were angry with me because they thought I had insulted their careers. But as our wildfire pandemic grew worse, some of them circled back in disgust to say they now agreed with me.

If I was driving this bus the Forest Service would toss its 2025 Plan Amendment in the nearest trash can and start over.

Here’s why:

Northern spotted owl population numbers are still in freefall thirty years after Congress and the federal courts ran “greedy loggers and lumbermen” out of the region’s federal forests. Can we still blame them for the fact that owl populations have not recovered? Some do, but no we can’t.

The Sierra Club insists that old growth timber is still being harvested in western federal forests. It isn’t – and hasn’t been since the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan was implemented. But somewhere around one million acres of Late Succession Reserve [spotted owl habitat] have been incinerated in wildfires made worse by the Forest Service’s unexplainable “managed wildfire” policy. Why? And why the hands-off approach that has biomass fuel loading levels increasing exponenetially?

There are many areas in the West where dead trees that have fallen look like jumbled pick-up sticks. Elsewhere, trees grow so close to one another that elk and deer cannot walk through. In their competition for growing space, soil nutrients, sunlight and moisture, these trees – young and old – are killing one another.

Speaking of old growth and future old growth...

If the Biden Administration’s proposal for placing these trees in no-harvest reserves is approved, every forest plan – all 154 of them - will require further revision, a process that will take years and cost billions of dollars.

This includes the amended 2025 Northwest Forest Plan. Yes, the amended plan bows to Biden’s proposal, but simply amending the amended plan only creates a new feeding ground for the anti-forestry mob and its taxpayer-funded lawyers.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to give a higher priority to the Biden proposal first, then circle back to a new revised Northwest Forest Plan?

Adding to the craziness of this mess, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has announced it wants to shoot 470,000 predatory barred owls over the next 30 years to "protect" spotted owls from extinction.

Where did this number come from? "Saving trees" didn't protect the spotted owl so now they are going to kill off 15,557 barred owls a year at the public's expense.

Didn't get the desired outcome? Just eliminate the evidence - remove the variable that was missed - or ignored.

Science you can trust.

Everyone involved in this forest planning charade – those for it and those against it – knows that the spotted owl was the chosen surrogate to represent old growth forests because owls are a species and old growth is a value judgment in the eye of the beholder. Thus, it had no legal standing when the 1990 forest plan was written. Owls had the full protection of the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

Hold this thought while I tell you a story you probably haven’t heard...

Early in the owl war the long gone National Forest Products Association [NFPA] went looking for a statistician who could review the government’s owl data.

I know this because the late Con Schallau, a brilliant PhD forest economist and member of the Evergreen Board of Directors, called the late Ben Stout, with whom I was well acquainted, to ask who Ben might recommend for the job.

Stout earned forestry degrees from West Virginia, Harvard, and Rutgers Universities. He taught and held administrative positions at Harvard University, Rutgers and the University of Montana, where he was also forestry school dean until 1985.

He was then hired as National Program Manager, Air Quality and Forest Health by the science-heavy National Council of the Paper Industry for Air and Stream Improvement [NCASI] based in Corvallis, Oregon.

Suffice it to stay, Stout was well traveled and well respected in academic circles. Hence, the call from Con. Although Stout did not know him personally, he told Con that NFPA ought to consider Ed Green, a young statistician teaching at Rutgers.

Con hired Green to do the review because, among other things, he hadn’t heard much about the owl wars in the West. Thus, not much risk of bias.

The day before Green was scheduled to fly to Washington D.C. to present his findings at an NFPA press conference, he called Con to say he couldn’t go through with it.

When Con asked why, Green explained that Forest Service Chief, Jack Ward Thomas, had walked into his office unannounced the day before and threatened his untenured career if he released his findings in D.C.

“You’re in the big leagues now, boy,” Thomas had said. “Be careful.”

How did Thomas know what Green was doing? It turned out that Green’s boss and Thomas were elk hunting buddies.

About 20 years ago, I flew to Rutgers in Camden, New Jersey to interview Green.

I wanted to know if Thomas had threatened him. He had.

I left Green’s office that day with a copy of his statistical review. It blew the statistical validity of many owl plan assumptions to smithereens.

After Thomas quit the Forest Service, he taught graduate level wildlife biology classes at the University of Montana.

I was living in Bigfork, Montana at the time, so I drove to Missoula to interview him, not once but several times.

I confronted him with what Green had told me. At first Thomas denied it, but he ultimately grumbled that “something like that” had happened.

Jack [we were now on a first-name basis] also admitted the daily working notes from the scientists who worked on the Spotted Owl Plan - had been shredded every night - then packed in large black plastic garbage bags and trucked to an incinerator at Boardman, Oregon.

“Why Jack,” I asked. “You were working behind locked doors with guards on the top floors of the 54-story US Bancorp Tower in Portland. Did you think burglars might steal the paperwork in the middle of the night?

“No, I was worried the press might go through the garbage bags on the first floor,” he explained. “Those were very tense times - with a lot at stake.”

I’ll stop short of calling Jack’s decision evidence tampering, but I know many Forest Service retirees who would like to have a look at what was written on all those shredded documents. Me too.

Two Forest Service employees with many years of field and management experience were taken to the bank tower to look at the draft documents.

When asked what they thought, both said...

“This plan cannot be executed. It is unworkable.”

And because the Northwest Forest Plan is unworkable it has become an ambiguous regulatory morass that federal resource management agencies with different congressional mandates and mission statements must reconcile.

Because boots-on-the-ground implementation has been so confusing and politically controversial, the whole rigamarole has become a very lucrative target for anti-forestry activists and their lawyers

In the 30 years since the spotted owl listing the West’s national forests have become diseased and dying firetraps.

If you’d like to know where things stand today and what could be done to slowly reduce risks in forests, communities and spotted owl habitat, read the latest summary sheet from Michael Rains’ Call to Action. Now retired, he held several high ranking positions in the agency during his 50-year career.

Fantasy land is burning to the ground.
Start over Forest Service. Start over and do it right this time.

Ed Green to a white paging telephone please!