In February, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) filed a notice of intent to revise its resource management plan for the nearly 2.5 million acres of forest land it manages in Oregon—aiming to quadruple its annual timber harvest.
If the revised plan goes into effect, it could represent a step back in time to an era when logging interests dominated conservation goals in a state that has seen its timber industry shrink dramatically over the last three decades.
Of the 2.5 million acres of BLM forest land, which runs from near the Washington border all the way to the California border, around 500,000 acres are protected by congressional orders or lack sustainably grown forests. The rest could be opened up for clear cutting.
“They’re going after basically everything that they possibly can in this proposal,” Lauren Anderson, the climate forest program manager at environmental nonprofit Oregon Wild, said.
For environmental watchdogs like Anderson and George Sexton, the conservation director at the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, the proposal represents the kind of all-out assault that has characterized much of the Trump administration’s environmental approach so far.
“The BLM is clearly and overtly saying, ‘The only thing that matters to us is timber and timber production,’” Sexton said. “That’s a step away from real fire and fuels management and restoration.”
Sexton said that where the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) operates under a multiple-use paradigm emphasizing the importance of logging alongside other recreation, wildlife, and water quality, the BLM has long been primarily focused on logging.
“The culture of the BLM has always been timber first, second, and third, nobody else gets to drive the car,” Sexton said. “What the Trump administration has done is to smash through any and all guardrails that might mitigate the impacts of that timber production agenda.”
Last year, Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” that lambasted “heavy-handed Federal policies” regulating logging on federal lands across the country and vowed to increase production.
“These onerous Federal policies have forced our Nation to rely upon imported lumber, thus exporting jobs and prosperity and compromising our self-reliance,” the order read. “It is vital that we reverse these policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security.”
The order directed both the BLM and the USFS to issue updated guidance tools designed to boost timber production and for other government entities to take steps in furtherance of the same goal.
A BLM spokesperson told the Mercury that better compliance with the executive order was one of the reasons for the revision proposal, which they characterized as “part of the BLM’s commitment to the Nation to provide a reliable, secure, and resilient domestic supply of timber, lumber, and other wood products.”
“Expanding timber production helps address the threat of high severity wildfire and provides economic activity across local industry, particularly in the construction and manufacturing sectors,” the spokesperson wrote.
But local experts do not agree that the plan will help limit the threat of wildfire.
“There’s a chance that by going in and doing old school, clear cut logging… that it could actually increase wildfire risk,” Anderson said. “When you open up large areas and remove any sort of windbreak, when you get those really extreme weather events, there’s a chance that wildfires could actually be more severe.”
The BLM plants new trees to replace trees that have been logged, but Sexton said that approach comes with its own wildfire risks. Douglas Firs, planted close together, might have their crowns closer to the ground and each other and spread fires more quickly.
“The model of plantation forestry that is being proposed—maximum extraction followed by maximum conifer planting—does not do good things for fire behavior,” Sexton said.
The question of how the BLM proposal would impact wildfire risk is particularly significant given that much of the forest land managed by the BLM in Oregon is at lower elevation and closer to population centers than the forest land managed by the USFS.
“There are people who live really, really close to these areas,” Anderson said. “They’re not distant, abstract national forest lands. They’re peoples’ backyard forests, in a lot of ways.”
Wildfire risk is not the only environmental concern observers are considering when they evaluate the merits of the BLM proposal.
One of the components of the plan that has most alarmed environmental groups is a plan to shrink logging buffers along rivers and streams, which could imperil salmon native to rivers that run through BLM forest land, as well as drinking water sources nearby communities rely on.
There are longer-range environmental calculations to consider, too: Oregon’s temperate rainforests are some of the most carbon-dense ecosystems on the planet, storing more carbon per acre than the Amazon rainforest—making them a critical component of the state’s climate resilience.
“They are Oregon’s most important, biggest natural climate solution,” Anderson said. “If people go in and log them, in the long term it’s going to make our state more vulnerable to climate change.”
The BLM expects to publish a draft environmental impact statement over the summer, at which point it will open an additional public comment period. Observers believe the BLM will ultimately adopt the plan, though it will likely face legal challenges.
“Public opinion is very clear: there is no social license to log old growth forests in Oregon anymore,” Anderson said. “So what we saw with the last public comment period is more engagement than we’ve seen on any other bad proposal coming out of the Trump administration.”
Anderson said Oregon Wild alone was responsible for facilitating more than 17,000 public comments during a comment period so brief that Oregon’s entire Democratic congressional delegation signed a letter to Kim Prill, the acting state director of the BLM, asking her to extend the input period and “take a more proactive approach to public involvement.”
But the BLM did not extend the comment period, and the Bureau spokesperson told the Mercury that while the agency is “diligently reading through all of the comments,” it is too soon to say what the general tone of the comments are.
While there has not been any public polling on the BLM proposal specifically, Oregon Wild released a poll earlier this year showing that strong majorities of Oregonians oppose a host of Trump administration environmental policies and support stronger protections for mature forests.
The abbreviated public comment period appears to be part of a pattern that has led activists repeatedly to sound the alarm about the federal government’s disregard of public input and processes. The BLM, for instance, stopped allowing the public to attend federal timber sale auctions in southern Oregon last year.
“For a while, it looked like the land management agencies were sliding away from democracy in kind of a gradual way,” Sexton said. “And now in the second Trump administration, it’s turned into a full-on gallop.”
That is not to say there is no local support for the plan. The federal government shares revenue from logging on federally-owned Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands, more commonly known as O&C Lands, with 18 counties in the state, whose split from that revenue rose from 50 percent to 75 percent earlier this year.
A higher annual timber yield could see millions of additional dollars flow to those counties each year, while some residents of towns that have struggled economically since the decline of the timber industry in Oregon also see reasons for hope.
The BLM plan also has the support of the American Forest Resources Council, a major timber lobby with ties to the Trump administration. Sexton, however, urged caution.
“There are so many small towns that were vibrant when I was a kid that are ghost towns now, and that’s got to change,” Sexton, who is based outside of Ashland, said. “But tying your wagon to a boom-bust timber industry that really doesn’t care about workers is the last way you’re going to find a path forward.”
Part of the issue, Sexton said, is that mechanization in the timber harvesting and production processes mean that even increased timber production likely won’t lead to the number of local jobs it would have decades ago—and that’s aside from the myriad concerns about what the BLM plan might cost the state it in the long run.
“If we want to have old growth forests and the wildlife that relies upon them, the BLM has to retain what they’ve still got,” Sexton said. “If we’re liquidating places like Valley of the Giants, that’s not a path to sustainable forestry or having the full suite of wildlife and old growth values that were bequeathed to us.”
