Northwest Forest Plan Update: Trump Begins to Meddle?

The Forest Service quietly announced that it is going to reopen its process to amend the Northwest Forest Plan. What does this mean? It’s unclear. But we are worried. 

As a reminder, the Northwest Forest Plan was the single most important intervention in the protection of mature and old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Passed by the Clinton Administration in 1994, the Plan created a system of “late-successional reserves” and “riparian reserves” where timber harvesting was limited, with timber production from federal lands to come from the remaining “matrix” lands. This system has worked well. Because of the Northwest Forest Plan, older forest logging in the Pacific Northwest significantly decreased, with more timber production transitioning from primary forests to second- or third-growth. (More on the success of the Northwest Forest Plan here.)

That success has also meant that the Plan has been a target for the timber industry, which has sought to weaken protections since its inception. In March of this year, President Trump signed an executive order, “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” that called for his government to work towards increasing timber production through a combination of efforts, including setting more ambitious timber targets and working to “streamline” (read: gut) regulations that get in the way of those more ambitious plans. The Forest Service has responded to this executive order, articulating its belief that it can raise timber production by 25% over four years. 

While the Northwest Forest Plan has been a success, it is also showing its age. When the Plan was approved in 1994, topics of climate change, fire management, and incorporation of Indigenous land management and traditional ecological knowledge were underdeveloped. To better adjust the Plan for the next 30 years, the Biden Administration convened a “Federal Advisory Committee” to sort through management issues and provide recommendations. These recommendations formed the basis for a draft revision to the Plan, which EPIC and our allies invested significant effort to improve through comments. While there were significant issues with those revisions, the process by which they were developed was strong and there were many elements proposed that we did like. 

When Trump took office, he abolished the Federal Advisory Committee. Now it appears that those revisions—and all of the work of the Committee—might too be for naught. The draft revisions left unfinished by Biden were arranged in a Goldilocks fashion, intended to make their preferred alternative appear most reasonable by sandwiching it between two other alternatives, one to the “left” and another, more timber-heavy, alternative to the “right.” By seeking a new revision process, it perhaps means that even this timber-heavy alternative did not go far enough for Trump. That’s scary.