By TED SICKINGER/The Oregonian/OregonLive
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders aimed at ramping up logging on federal lands. The directives prompted polar and predictable reactions from timber industry advocates and environmental groups in Oregon.
The former have been advocating for more aggressive “management” of federal forests for decades to increase log supplies for local mills and combat increasing wildfire risks in forests choked with flammable fuels. The latter say the orders will prioritize commercial logging over all other uses of public lands and will inevitably result in protracted litigation if federal agencies look to fast-track projects by eliminating existing protections for habitat, clean water and endangered species.
Somewhere in the middle, however, is a group of organizations who say the executive orders aren’t necessarily inconsistent with ecological forestry, and in fact could provide an opportunity to go much bigger on necessary forest restoration projects. But, ironically, they say the potential to make that happen likely will be significantly undermined by Trump’s separate push to slash the federal workforce, including at the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, two agencies that would oversee the work.
As it stands, the Forest Service is failing to meet its annual harvest targets in Oregon and nationally. And advocates say the reductions in permanent staff, elimination of seasonal employees and on-again, off-again funding freezes are jeopardizing and halting projects that are vital to reducing wildfire risks, protecting communities and are already generating much of the log supply coming off federal forests.
“The status quo is not working as it relates to wildfire and forest management,” said Dylan Kruse, president of Sustainable Northwest, an Oregon nonprofit and conservation group. “We’ve reached a tipping point. We’re seeing the impacts of climate change and watching these resources we’ve fought for being destroyed.”
He said tens of millions of acres of forest and rangeland need restoration work – thinning, brush clearing and prescribed burns – and that work is vital to save the region’s mills, its workforce and its rural tax base.
The executive orders could ramp up pressure to expand the work, he said. But simply “cutting the (Forest Service) is not a recipe for doing more. We still need this agency to be staffed accordingly and pursuing those goals.”
Terry Fairbanks spent three decades working for the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and is now the executive director of the Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Cooperative, based in Jacksonville, near Medford.
She said there are better ways for the agencies to conduct business, to streamline multi-year analyses of projects and do active forest management while improving habitat. But she’s doubtful the administration’s “sledgehammer approach” will increase productivity.
She said the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, already understaffed, initially laid off 39 employees. Some of those may be rehired, but ongoing reductions in force could leave the agency trying to manage a 1.8-million-acre forest with a few dozen employees.
“They can’t get contracts out. They a can’t get the marking done. They don’t have enough people to administer the sales once the contract is out,” she said.
“It’s one delay after another,” she added.
Missing targets
Providing a sustainable supply of timber was one of the original purposes for the establishment of the national forest system. But it’s only one of the management priorities under the agency’s multiple use mandate, which includes recreation, grazing, fish and wildlife habitat, and clean water.
For the last decade, the Forest Service has failed to meet its timber sales goals, according to a report issued last year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Between 2014 and 2023, harvests fell short of its targets every year. It sold between 71% and 98% of its annual targets during that period, averaging about 90%.
Region 6 of the agency, which comprises Oregon and Washington, is the largest source of timber, generating about 20% of the total harvest over the ten-year period.
But it only managed to meet 90% of its target, on average, over the decade. Put another way, federal forests in the region sold an average of 585 million board feet of timber annually – or enough to build an estimated 46,000 homes of 2,000 square feet.
Among the existing barriers identified in the report: limited staff capacity to plan and implement the sales, coupled with wildfires and other natural disasters that shifted priorities or impacted areas where the agency had planned timber sales.
Trump’s executive orders don’t specify new, higher harvest targets but require the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to submit them by early June.
The Forest Service generates a significant portion of its harvest volume – in Region 6 it was more than half in 2023 – through so-called stewardship contracts and good neighbor agreements. Both rely on revenue from the sale of commercially valuable timber to pay for forest restoration work that reduces wildfire risks, including brush clearing, prescribed burning and the thinning of smaller trees.
The contracts are controversial, as environmental groups say they incentivize the removal of mature, fire-resistant trees. But they are often the only way to make the restoration projects economically viable.
That need, advocates say, is vast.
A task force created by then-Gov. Kate Brown to look at the state’s wildfire preparedness recommended treating some 5.6 million acres of forest and rangeland at high risk of fire – nearly 10% of the state’s land base – over a period of 20 years, with an estimated price tag of $4 billion.
“Getting these projects implemented now is enormously important,” said Matt Donegan, a forestry executive who chaired the task force.
He said funds from the Inflation Reduction Act provided a short-term sugar boost for restoration projects, but never the sustainable funding needed to support the mill infrastructure and the workforce necessary to make real headway on wildfire resilience.
“I’m not hearing a lot of panic that this is going to be a big pivot toward unsustainable forestry,” he said. “But these workforce reductions are going to have a big impact on critical work.”
‘In catastrophic disarray’
Susan Jane Brown is an environmental lawyer who works with Blue Mountain Forest Partners, an eastern Oregon group of loggers, conservationists, landowners, timber companies and government officials that has focused on restoration projects in the Malheur National Forest, near John Day.
Those projects, she said, take years of process by an interdisciplinary team of experts to develop, analyze impacts, take public comment and get required environmental approvals before any timber hits the market.
“It’s all in catastrophic disarray at this time,” she said. “It’s already been disrupted.”
At a retreat last week, the collaborative’s board met with the forest’s leadership team.
“They told us they’re whittling down their priorities list in terms of the things they can accomplish,” she said. “Prescribed fire won’t happen this spring or this fall. They don’t feel like they have the staff to do it. … They’ll see how much staff they have at the end of the (reduction in force) and go from there.”
Staff at the Malheur did not respond to a request for comment.
Sarah Altemus-Pope, executive director of the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative, based in Oakridge, said she sees “nothing super alarming” in Trump’s executive orders. But she’s skeptical about achieving any additional harvest volumes and is more focused on implementing existing grant-funded community wildfire reduction projects.
She said the collaborative’s work on the Willamette National Forest has been repeatedly disrupted by big fires that burn prospective project areas and disrupt the planning cycle because the resource specialists involved have collateral fire duties.
“Theres a lot of non-controversial acres that we can go after, but the planning has to get done and we need the workforce to implement it,” she said. “I have no faith that these things are going to get done faster without investing in both the Forest Service and forestry sector.”
Legal fights await
Marko Bey is the executive director of Lomakatsi Restoration Project, a nonprofit based in Ashland that has worked on forest restoration projects in Oregon and Northern California for the last three decades.
Last month, the organization wrote to Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-Ore., and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., telling them that federal funding freezes had already forced it to lay off 20% of its 95 employees and that it had been forced to stop work on active projects on both private and public lands. The funding freeze, it said, impacted more than 30 separate grants and agreements the organization has with federal agencies.
“Seven timber sales on National Forest System lands that we are co-administering through stewardship authority are also on hold, preventing millions of board feet from reaching the local mills and wood products manufacturing facilities that this work helps sustain,” the letter said.
Bey said he was in Washington, D.C., earlier this month to meet with members of Oregon’s delegation and Forest Service officials. He said he left with assurances that the funds for the organization’s federal stewardship projects were being released.
“There’s a win-win that can be accomplished here, an opportunity to reduce hazardous fuels, supply logs to local mills and do it in an ecologically responsible way,” he said.
But at the end of the day, he said, Lomakatsi still relies on federal specialists to get the work done. “We’re in partnership with these agencies. We depend on them. … These are our colleagues we’ve worked with for years.”
Trump’s executive orders also call on the land management agencies to expedite environmental reviews on timbers sales by streamlining Endangered Species Act consultations and adopting new “categorical exclusions” that exempt thinning and timber salvage projects from detailed environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Mark Webb, executive director of Blue Mountain Forest Partners, said he thinks the widespread use of such exemptions will be legally questionable. And the call for higher harvest volumes amid steep staff cuts is divorced from reality.
“You can’t plan projects that are going to withstand a legal challenge unless you have competent experts on the ground that are planning these in legally and scientifically appropriate ways,” he said.
And those legal challenges will come, said Steve Pedery, conservation director for Oregon Wild.
“100 percent certain” it will end up in court, he said. “The Endangered Species Act still exists. The Clean Water Act still exists. The National Forest Management Act still exists. The people designing these policies know full well they’re going to get sued, and they’re going to lose.”
– Ted Sickinger is a reporter on The Oregonian’s investigations team. Reach him at tsickinger@oregonian.com or @tedsickinger
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