Debate intensifies over conservation of PNW’s old growth forests
The fight over the future of the last old and mature forests in America intensified Tuesday when the Biden administration called for preservation of old-growth trees.
The administration, after creating an inventory of the nation’s old growth, wants to amend 128 forest land-management plans to conserve and steward 25 million acres of old-growth forests and 68 million acres of mature forest across the national forest system.
For the Pacific Northwest — home to much of the nation’s remaining old forests — an effort is already underway to overhaul and update key old-growth protections in the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994, one of the world’s most ambitious conservation plans. More than 1 million acres of old and mature forest in Washington, Oregon and Northern California that were explicitly set aside for logging within the boundaries of the plan are under scrutiny.
A wildland firefighter argues for setting more fires. Ryan Reed says: “In short, let’s look to Indigenous leadership.”
Reed is a member of the Karuk, Hupa and Yurok tribes in Northern California (those tribal lands are just across the Oregon border, and he got an environmental studies degree at the University of Oregon). Those tribes for years have lobbied the Forest Service for a return to Indigenous forestry practices, which include regular prescribed burns to reduce the underbrush that turns forests into tinderboxes. The concessions they’ve obtained—including the right for the Karuk Tribe to conduct controlled burns in Six Rivers National Forest—have been hard won.