Updates on Northwest Forest Plan Comments
- Tom Wheeler
- Mar 25
- 1 min read
The comment deadline for amendments to the Northwest Forest Plan has closed. By EPIC’s rough count, over 84,000 people commented on the draft amendments, including over 900 EPIC members. As an organization, EPIC contributed to, drafted, or signed onto five letters.
You can read our letters listed below:
EPIC would also like to acknowledge some fantastic partners in this effort: the Western Environmental Law Center, Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Conservation Northwest, and many other friends. Getting robust turnout was a project of the entire Pacific Northwest forest defense community and I am proud of our collective work.
In particular, I am very proud of the community for uniting around increasing tribal co-stewardship of public lands. (Check out the letter signed by 61 groups in support!) When the Northwest Forest Plan was first drafted in 1994, tribal co-stewardship was not part of the conversation.
What’s next? We wait and see. Rumors are flying but they often conflict. Should the Trump Administration attempt to massively increase logging, as he has threatened to do, EPIC and our allies will be ready. Comments form the backbone of litigation. It is through comments that we put forward the science that the agencies work hard to ignore and layout critical legal issues that they bypass.
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