Activists that have blocked a logging site on federal land near Grants Pass want the head of the Interior to cancel the timber sale

By Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle

A coalition of three dozen environmental groups from around the country are calling on the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to cancel a timber sale on federal land near Grants Pass where activists are trying to block a sale.

Area residents and organizers from Pacific Northwest Forest Defense have been sitting in old-growth trees for over a week and set up a camp blocking Boise Cascade from cutting up to 516 acres of trees within an area owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Since 2019, the bureau has sold trees from more than 2,200 acres of a 10,000-acre forested area that’s open to logging and is known as the “Poor Windy Project.”

Activists are concerned that the bureau is allowing Boise Cascade and the other companies to cut old-growth and mature trees at the site. They say there are some trees slated for cutting that are more than 180 years old and up to 400 years old. 

On Wednesday, the activists and the leaders at 38 environmental organizations from Oregon and across the U.S. — including Sierra Club, Oregon Wild and Forests Forever — wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and to Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the federal land bureau, demanding they rescind the sale and end logging on the Poor Windy Project. The land bureau in 2022 reduced the Poor Windy Project’s size by about 10,000 acres after a federal judge ruled that logging in those acres would harm threatened spotted owl habitat. 

Lisa Tschampl, spokesperson for Boise Cascade Company, said there are no 400-year old trees at the site and that the trees at least 150 years old have been marked not to be cut by the U.S. Forest Service. She said the company is “thinning” the area selectively, not clearcutting it. 

Sarah Bennett, a spokesperson for the land bureau in Oregon and Washington, said it is rare for officials to allow the sale of acreage with old-growth trees and that environmental assessments have shown that contested harvest areas are low-risk for habitat destruction.

“We are committed to protecting trees above the age and diameter limits established,” she said in an email. “Generally, those that are greater than 36 inches in diameter and established prior to 1850.”

But activists disagree. George Sexton, conservation director of the Ashland-based Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, or KS Wild, said protestors are now in old-growth trees the bureau plans to cut down. Environmentalists like Sexton say that allowing old-growth trees to be cut is contrary to the Biden administration’s recent executive order to end old-growth logging on public lands by 2025. 

‘We cannot sit by’

Salal Golden, an organizer currently  sitting in an unmarked old-growth tree in the logging area, said in a news release that the administration is failing to follow its policies. 

“As our communities experience first hand the impacts of the climate crisis, we cannot sit by while the Biden administration continues to break its promises and destroy the last of these carbon-rich old-growth forests,” Golden said.

Three environmental groups — Cascadia Wildlands, KS Wild and Oregon Wild — are also trying to stop logging in another Southern Oregon area known as Rogue Gold. This month lawyers from the Portland-based Crag Law Center and Eugene-based Cascadia Wildlands filed a complaint on their behalf against the federal bureau for allowing “heavy commercial logging” at that site. That area has old-growth trees and acreage designated as a Late Successional Reserve, a designation meant to protect the trees from being logged and to allow mature trees to become old-growth stands. The area is home to threatened and endangered species, the complaint said. 

The BLM’s forests in Southwest Oregon are part of a 2.4 million-acre patchwork of federally owned forests across 18 Oregon counties that are governed by the Oregon and California Railroad Act of 1937. That act mandated that the bureau manage the lands for permanent timber production at sustainable levels. 

Today annual harvests from the Oregon and California Railroad lands are, on average, about 60% smaller than those in the 1930s, according to bureau data, and this year it reduced the volume of timber for sale by 25% across its Oregon and California Railroad Act lands. 

The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management oversee about 278,000 square miles of forests across the country — an area about the size of Texas and Vermont combined. A recent inventory from the two agencies found that about 45% of those forests are considered “mature” and about 18% are considered “old-growth.”

Most old-growth and mature forests that are left in the U.S. are in Western states such as Idaho, California, Montana and Oregon.

Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post.