Nick Hazelton, a 27-year-old yak farmer from Polk County in northwest Oregon, likes to spend his free time mushroom hunting on nearby public land. One of his favorite places is Valley of the Giants, where massive Douglas firs and hemlocks, some over 400 years old, tower over a lush understory of ferns, mosses and salmonberry.
For Hazelton, this old-growth forest — a designated “area of critical environmental concern” managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — is a reminder of what a forest can be.
“It’s not just a Doug-fir farm, Hazelton said. “There’s lots of hemlock and pockets of brush that bears and other animals are utilizing.”
On Feb. 19, the BLM published a notice stating that it wants to revise how it manages some 2.5 million acres in western Oregon, ramping up timber harvest to “historically higher levels of production.” The acreage in question includes special places like the Valley of the Giants. The agency said the revision is necessary to address wildfires and comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders boosting domestic timber production.
The BLM’s order stated that it will reevaluate areas of critical environmental concern — scenic landscapes with important habitat, unique geology and the like — across western Oregon’s checkerboard of public lands, which the agency has managed for timber production since 1937. Logging peaked in the 1960s, with over 1 billion board feet harvested a year.
“It was pretty intensive,” said Ed Shepherd, a retired BLM employee who oversaw these forests in several roles, including as state director for the agency. He now serves on the board of Forest Bridges, a nonprofit that promotes active forest management in western Oregon.
Harvesting fell abruptly in the 1990s, when the Northwest Forest Plan was enacted to protect endangered species like the spotted owl and marbled murrelet, a seabird that nests in old-growth forests. Western Oregon BLM lands were managed under that plan until 2016, when the current two plans were approved.
The current plans don’t provide as much protection as the Northwest Forest Plan, said Susan Jane Brown, principal at Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm. “That management has included a lot of old-growth logging and really heavy thinning,” said Brown. “The aquatic conservation strategy is really watered down.” Over the past decade, conservation groups have litigated several timber sales.
OREGONIANS ARE GRAPPLING WITH how much logging or thinning they want — and whether they trust the BLM to do it. Shepherd says the forests desperately need thinning to reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health. Multiple studies have shown that not just thinning — but thinning combined with also intentionally-lit, controlled prescribed fires — can help reduce wildfire risk.
“I’d really like to see us get back to doing management on a much broader scale than we’re doing right now, so when you do get fire, it burns through at a lower intensity, more how it used to do,” Shepherd said. He believes the region’s BLM forests could double last year’s 267 million board feet and still be sustainable.
Hazelton is not opposed to all logging but doesn’t want to see old-growth cut in areas like Marys Peak and Valley of the Giants. When he compares Valley of the Giants to younger, denser stands of Douglas fir, he wonders whether those forests are as ecologically healthy as they could be. “It’s a lot of crowded spaces that are really dark,” Hazelton said. “I definitely find coniferous-loving mushrooms, but I don’t see a lot of wildlife.”
Hazleton wishes the agency had held public hearings, but the BLM only provided a 33-day public comment period, which closes March 23, and didn’t schedule any meetings across the 18 counties the project affects. “I think that as taxpayers and as citizens, that’s public land and we deserve to have some voice in it,” Hazelton said. A BLM spokesperson said the process is only beginning and that there will be more opportunities to weigh in later.
SOME LOCAL LAWMAKERS WOULD WELCOME a timber revival. The intensive logging days were a financial boon for Oregon counties, which received a portion of the revenues from federal timber harvests. The 1990s decline sent many counties into a tailspin, and since 2000, most have opted to receive federal payments in lieu of diminished timber receipts.
For years, local communities that chose to stick with timber receipts received 25% of that revenue; the federal government got the rest. Just last year, that was reversed: Coos County Commissioner Drew Farmer said his community received over $1 million from federal timber sales last year. “Going to a 75/25 split favoring the county permanently fixes our budget, and that’s without increased harvest.” Farmer said. Increasing the harvest would enable the county to increase its jail size and fund more police patrols, he added.
Some question whether Oregon has the mill capacity, infrastructure and labor to sustain a substantial logging increase. Others, like Farmer, say local logging would help lower construction costs, especially for housing.
Brown said it’s not so simple. Timber is an international market, she said, and “we are in the middle of a trade war with all of our trading partners who buy our wood.”
FOR MANY OREGONIANS, any economic benefits aren’t worth the potential environmental harm.
Conservation groups point out that the BLM is proposing stream buffers as narrow as 25 feet — not enough to protect waterways from eroded sediment. Jennifer Moss, who lives in Lane County near Eugene, was alarmed when she learned about the BLM notice.
“Every time we disrupt the soil and create open spaces, we create opportunities for soil compaction and degradation,” said Moss, who co-founded Friends of Fall Creek Watershed to collect trash along streams. She thinks logged areas become “eyesores” that attract illegal long-term camping and trash.
Moss doesn’t oppose careful selective thinning but fears that too much logging will make wildfires worse. Her views are informed by her father, who worked for the BLM as a forester in the 1960s but quit, frustrated by what he saw as unsustainable logging practices. Recent research by the University of Utah found that industrially-logged forests experience higher severity wildfires. An analysis of Oregon wildfires in 2020 by OPB and ProPublica found that public lands logged in the last five years burned with the same intensity as lands that hadn’t; and clear-cut private lands burned hotter, on average, than public lands.
Moss has been urging people to weigh in before the public comment period closes on March 23. After that, the BLM will produce a draft with proposed alternatives, along with an environmental impact statement. The agency must also consult with 10 affected tribes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Brown said these two agencies could conclude that a plan that substantially increased logging would likely threaten the survival or recovery of endangered species, including the spotted owl and murrelet. Litigation would follow, temporarily holding up any sort of major plan revision.
“I think that is on the table,” said Brown. “Then everyone will sue, and we will let the federal court system decide whether or not this plan is legal.”
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