A New Wyden Forest Bill
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden announced today that he is preparing a new forest management bill to address federal forest management in Oregon. Wyden is seeking public comment on his proposal, called the Oregon Forest Restoration and Old Growth Protection Act.
The proposed bill is [here], a summary of the bill is [here], Wyden’s Senate floor statement is [here], and a press release is [here]. Comments on the proposed bill may be emailed to Wyden [here].
In January Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio introduced legislation he called the Pacific Northwest Forest Legacy Act [here]. In February Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) introduced S. 2593, the Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008 [here] which was co-sponsored by Sen. Wyden. Both bills dealt with federal forests in Oregon; neither has moved beyond preliminary hearings.
The Wyden bill is similar to the DeFazio bill with some elements of the Bingaman bill. We will provide a more in-depth analysis soon.
From Wyden’s press release:
Striking a balance between the need to sustain forests, as well as bolster the economy, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today proposed an expansive overhaul of federal forest practices in the State of Oregon. Wyden’s initiative would permanently end the logging of old growth trees and discourage clear-cutting, while placing a new emphasis on greatly expedited, large-scale forest restoration efforts to improve forest health and create many thousands of new jobs.
“For the sake of our environment, economy, and our way of life, we must come together to pursue a concerted, new focus on sustainable forestry management that will create thousands of new jobs and restore the health of our forests,” Wyden said. “The only way to produce this kind of change is to put new ideas forward, seek common ground, and break away from the old politics that led us to this dysfunctional and dangerous situation.”
Decades of scientifically-unsound forest management and fire suppression policies have put millions of acres of choked and plantation forests at an unacceptably high risk for uncharacteristically-severe fires, disease, and insect infestation. Wyden’s proposal, the “Oregon Forest Restoration and Old Growth Protection Act,” would address this emergency by:
- requiring the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Oregon to re-direct their management activities to address fire and insect risk, while protecting environmentally-sensitive and significant lands, and promote ongoing, sustainable production of wood;
- eliminating administrative appeals for forest management conducted under the new forestry directives;
- allowing pilot restoration projects of up to 25,000 acres in each of Oregon’s national forests and BLM districts in at-risk areas without encountering years of NEPA and administrative delay (by issuing those projects a “Categorical Exclusion” from NEPA review).
As we have seen in the past with the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (2003), the elimination of administrative appeals and categorical exclusion from NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) have been rejected by federal courts time and time again. There is no reason to believe that the Wyden bill will have any success in that regard. If Congress finds NEPA to be unworkable, then they should revise or rescind it. Otherwise, they should abide by it. This appears to be a fatal flaw in Wyden’s bill at this time.
More from the press release:
“It is past the time to take the recurring quarrels over old-growth forests ‘off of the table’ so that we can move forward with programs about which we have a social consensus — such as restoring more ecologically functional and sustainable forest landscapes and providing a predictable flow of wood from the federal lands,” said Jerry Franklin, professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Washington. “This bill, with its strong scientific foundation, is an appropriate basis for the Congressional action that is needed to get things moving.”
“The forest restoration strategy contained in Senator Wyden’s proposal, if fully implemented, can provide timber products and income over the next 20 years that would significantly increase current harvest levels on the national forests and slightly increase harvest levels on BLM O&C lands compared to recent history,” said Norm Johnson, professor of Forest Resources at Oregon State University. “It also would make available significant quantities of biomass and assist many rural communities by providing employment and community engagement in the restoration process.”
Drs. Franklin and Johnson gave landmark testimony before Wyden’s Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests on this issue last December [here]. It remains to be seen whether Wyden’s new bill actually addresses the issues raised in their testimony.
The bill as currently worded prohibits cutting of trees currently 120 years old and older in moist forests and 150 years old or older in dry forests. The emphasis on individual old trees is a sea change away from mis-characterized “old-growth stands” which contain trees of many ages, so the bill may represent a great leap forward in that respect.
A more in-depth review by W.I.S.E. will be posted here soon.
by Forrest Grump
Yes indeedy — Wyden’s bill really sucks. Glad you said it, Grumps, so I didn’t have to.
Maybe we will resubmit the W.I.S.E. suggested amendments to S. 2593, the Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008 [here], and see who salutes this time. Last time it provoked deafening silence. It’s not easy dealing with posturing, narcissistic, super-politicized morons, but we’ll give it another shot.
A key issue is the understanding that excess “large trees” in one area do NOT “offset” the (historical AND current) loss of old growth in other areas.
Forest-wise, we have what we have left and the true question is; How do we mitigate problems and restore a huge variety of forests without losing lawsuits?
Step One: Educate the judges!
Step Two: Reach consensus on the least contentious issues
With the wood market the way it currently is, I’d be resistant to cutting much “old growth”. If mills go out of business, I wonder how profitable it would be to develop a modular and mobile sawmill that could travel to large salvage projects that no longer have operating mills. Maybe include a mobile co-gen plant that can connect to any point on the grid to supply “green” power to the grid, (maybe even at a premium, in the near future!)
by bear bait
Yeeee Hawww! I really believe Wyden wants to do the right thing. Only his advisers don’t know spotted owl poop from imported apple butter. No cutting of old growth in moist forests. And that is any tree over 120 years old. The template to gain total exclusion of cutting any but plantation trees on the Siuslaw Natl Forest.
You can protect a forest from man, but that will never preserve it. In the end, it will be burned over ground and celebrated, I guess.
I lost interest in Wyden, DeFazio, the dumber-than-a-bucket-of-rocks Hooley, the bow tie fairy from Portland, the date raper from Beaverton, all of them, a long time ago. They don’t have a clue. No historical or personal connection to the issue. It is a board game to them. An exercise in what they do. Wyden is slinging dung at the wall in hopes some will stick so he might have a legacy. My prayers are that it all slides off onto his shoes.
I spent this morning at the Steam Up swap meet at Brooks. They fired up their steam sawmill, and ran a few 24″ second growth logs through it. It was almost too emotional for me to watch. The volunteers who built the mill and run it, all are familiar looking people to me. They are the guys with the fading tattoos from some long ago liberty, the Okie kid who got a job that fed his brothers and sisters still picking strawberries and cherries who lived in a one room shack at a farm labor camp, the single mom who pulled core on the graveyard shift so she could be home to see the kids off to school and when they came home, her sleep for the day was over. And they are working that steam mill, because it is fun for them, and it is who they are. I love each and every one for who they are. The sawyer is a pencil thin young man with suspenders who projects he is an important cog in the operation. The grader in the red felt crusher, working between the edger and headrig, the 50 something gal running the hula saw trimming what the grader marks, her forearms still have veins the size of pencils, and her biceps pull that cut-off saw against its strong return spring like nothing, as old men who once worked these mill jobs off-bear, throw chunks, oil the steam engine running the sawdust belt and the main. The mill is cute, and a work horse as well as being a work house as they all once were. Brute strength now is replaced by air and hydraulics, and computers decide cuts to be made. But to see those salt of the earth, hard working and honest men and women working for fun, to keep our history alive, was great fun.
The emotional part is the knowledge that Oregon was built by the people running this sawmill, and not the pilgrim architects and lawyers in Portland with all the grand ideas of how to manage other people’s affairs. These sawdust savages were the ones who bore the burden of education when Oregon led the nation. We have done our damnedest to rid the State of Oregon of these people who created money by making raw material, natural resources, into useable products, and in doing so, we have diminished our education system, k-PhD… We have allowed carpetbaggers to come in and steer the State to ports of call that don’t include resource use, hard working laborers, and a fair tax system that supports a first class education system.
All the great college scholarship programs in Oregon came from timber people for yesteryear. There is no great H-P program to send kids to college if they are admitted. I don’t see a grand Intel college program for kids in John Day or Astoria. Those are operations held by people far away, who will be here until the day they decide to go elsewhere, and all Oregon will get for their being here is a lot of really, really fine farm ground turned to housing and high tech campus, streets, parking lots, and structures to run water down the storm sewer and collect heat. And Wyden supports them and is in turn supported by them, would like to be their hero but he does not know how to get there and never will with the advice he nows gets. He wants to look like he supports rural Oregon but he does not know how. So he does it from the radical environmental perspective. Bor—-ing. Who Cares, USA? PIssing in the wind, 101. Go flap your lips where someone who cares might hear you, Ronnie. We don’t.
If you don’t know the history of the land, from the last Ice Age until now, you cannot make a plausible plan to “manage” forests and wildlands. You don’t know what you want in the end. You don’t know what the outcome should be. If the intent is to turn it all into a cookie cutter one size fits all old growth forest of old trees, on every available acre, then you are as misinformed and mislead as someone who thinks that clearcutting it all, right now, is the answer. The only difference is the extreme ends at which you find yourself. So why should I care? Wyden’s is just another exercise that will waste energy and time and accomplish nothing but to further hone the knives of dissent.
And I can’t tell if Wyden is losing hair. I like the Bozo Orange coloring. I like the eyes-wide-open plastic surgery result. And the affected speech. I love the senatorial tones, the dramatic tempo, the I-ah-I—ah’s all around. He and Senator Spector must go to the same stylist. Morrie the Barber… some guy like that. Bad orange hair. All made to go where hair does not grow… anymore.
Don’t get between Wyden and a TV camera is the advice from Capital Hill insiders. That has been compared to getting between a sow grizzly and her cubs… chuckle…
Wyden is who he is. All politicians are the same. They pander. They pander big time, like jellyfish; that’s how they got to where they are.
The problem is Wyden is getting some very bad advice. He is talking to the wrong people. His advisers are stuck in the Old Paradigm, a Sixties mentality saddled with bygone myths and misperceptions.
Too many of his advisers know jack about forests, and that includes the vaunted forestry professors as well as the political jumping bean “activists.”
Sadly, they know too little about the law, either, which one would expect would be their sole strength, if they had any.
Exhibit A is the attempt to circumvent NEPA. If NEPA is unworkable, then let’s fix it. The idea that federal activities cannot occur under the provisions of NEPA means that law is funky. The solution is revision, not exclusion. Exclusion does not work. Federal judges will not allow it. The law applies to all or it applies to none. There are no special circumstances where the law needs to be ignored, and certainly not across millions of acres.
I think the drafters of the bill know that. The Categorical Exclusion clause is a poison pill. Even if the bill is enacted, no projects will occur because NEPA suits will enjoin them. The people who drafted the bill intend to shut down the projects from Day One. There is deep cynicism and sneaky monkey-wrencher conspiracy behind that clause.
But more telling, the basic forestry is all fouled up. The fundamental forest science that “informs” the bill is pseudo and dystopic.
For example: basal area is a cludge, a tool that was invented for measuring sawlog timber volume but that has no application in restoration forestry. It’s like using a screwdriver to pound a nail. What’s worse is that the “forestry experts” involved know that. They are pandering, too, to a lay audience that has no conception of what these words mean or how they are used (or supposed to be used) in forestry.
One could blame the forestry colleges, but it really is the fault of the professors who teach at those colleges. The forest scientists that know better do not speak up, and those that do get themselves involved in political games pander to ill-informed constituencies.
I don’t know if it is worth tearing apart Wyden’s (really DeFazio’s) bill and explaining every silliness and poison pill in it. That would be a lot of negative effort. It would be easier to present the better solution (which W.I.S.E. has done already in our suggested amendments to S. 2593, the Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008 [here]).
I will think it over. Maybe there is some merit in slapping around the folks who should know better and casting their doofy ideas into the burn barrel with verbose aplomb. Seems like a waste of time, though. Maybe it is necessary. I will cogitate on it.
More eco-porn for the Eugeenies.
No large tree can be sold commercially? “Nothing in these provisions shall be used to develop a post-fire harvesting project.” Observers will certify that no more than one percent of all OG will be cut? Paid observers? 35% basal area standard?
Arbitrary and capricious. Idiocy. The more hair Wyden loses, the colder his brain gets. This is the Beschta usual suspects trying to get NEPA exemption for their “old growth legacy.” Nouveau voodoo.