Red Lodge Clearinghouse

The draft proposal would provide new guidance for the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service in Oregon, focusing both agencies' emphasis on expedited logging operations to improve forest health against the threats of wildfires and insect infestations.

Both agencies would be called on to prioritize and develop one landscape-scale forest restoration project -- up to 25,000 acres -- in each of Oregon's national forests and BLM districts. The bill would eliminate extensive litigation and environmental analysis by granting those projects categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act.

It would also require both agencies to incorporate aquatic conservation strategies and discourage clear-cutting and timber harvests in roadless areas.

In his announcement, Wyden said the plan would amplify forest health efforts and create thousands of jobs in communities affected by the decline of logging on federal lands.

"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," Wyden said.

In what will likely be the most contentious proposal, the bill places a limit on the kinds of old-growth trees that cannot be cut down, a provision likely to spark protests from critics who disagree on what defines old growth.

The bill would prohibit cutting down trees in moist forests that are more than 120 years old and cutting trees in dry forests that are more than 150 years old.

During a Senate Forests Subcommittee hearing earlier this year, forestry experts said that varying definitions of what constitutes an old-growth forest has complicated federal forest policy.

BLM Director Jim Caswell noted that the Douglas fir and the western hemlock forests west of the Cascade Range would qualify as old-growth forests just as the drier old-growth forests in eastern and southwest Oregon would (E&E Daily, March 14).

Scientists say the old-growth definition helps officials move past the issue and develop a long-term forest management strategy for Oregon's forests.

"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," said Jerry Franklin, professor of ecosystem science at the University of Washington.

Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, said he was not sure that the proposal is a complete compromise for forest management but that it is an encouraging work in progress.

"It's a least a recognition that there is a problem and that we're a player in this," Partin said.

Click here to view Wyden's draft proposal.

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