Professors' timber proposal faces protest by tree sitters

Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sold the rights to log a small grove of Douglas firs to a private company called Roseburg Forest Products. Roseburg bid more than $1 million for the trees, and planned to start logging this fall. Then the tree sitters showed up. Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. But the scheduled logging also is part of a pilot project designed by Northwest forestry professors to mimic nature. The professors’ plan has become politically popular and is a key component of bills proposing new management for Oregon’s O&C Lands — a checkerboard of parcels in Western Oregon named for the Oregon & California Railroad that once owned them. Those on both sides of the protest say it’s potentially the first battle in the next big debate over how to manage Northwest forests. Several years ago, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar asked Johnson and Franklin to help the BLM develop timber harvests that would be profitable while serving an environmental purpose. The professors drew inspiration from a wealth of new research, published in the years after the Mount St. Helens eruption, on the importance of so-called early seral habitat that develops after natural disasters such as eruptions, windstorms and large wildfires. In the “variable retention harvest” Johnson and Franklin developed, the largest, oldest trees on a site don’t get cut down. About a third of the standing and fallen wood is left untouched, while the rest gets logged. The site largely is allowed to recover naturally, with foresters replanting a minimal amount of species like fir, cedar, and hemlock. This moment just after the destruction of a forest, when young trees compete with bushes and grasses for sun is called an early seral ecosystem. Studies show as much of 35 percent of the landscape in the western Cascades used to be early seral habitat, but that’s now fallen to as little as 2 percent. Johnson and Franklin’s idea: mimic nature, and create a few more rural jobs in the process, has proved popular with politicians. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a bill that would use Johnson’s technique to significantly increase the amount of timber cut on public lands in Western Oregon. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management says moving forward with the logging pilot project is critical...more