News from Cascadia Wildlands
July 26, 2019

SALEM, Ore.— Late Wednesday afternoon after hours of deliberation, the Oregon Board of Forestry voted 5-2 to accept a petition for rulemaking on coho salmon. The petition was brought by 22 different conservation and fishing groups under a rarely used portion of the Forest Practices Act which requires the Board to consider forest protections on private and state land when species are listed under state or federal endangered species acts. The Board is required to identify “resource sites” for listed species and subsequently develop rules to protect these species if threatened by state and private logging practices.

While coho salmon have been threatened with extinction for years, the Board of Forestry has until now never initiated a state-mandated review of its rules to protect the fish. “The Oregon Forest Practices Act requires the Board of Forestry to address conflicts between logging and habitat for species at risk of extinction,” said Nick Cady, Legal Director with Cascadia Wildlands.  “The major ongoing conflict between logging practices and coho salmon habitat is finally getting the hard look it deserves.”

The Board has only undertaken such efforts for a handful of bird species and had never done such work for coho salmon, which are listed as threatened by the National Marine Fisheries Service.  The petition specifically asked the Board to (1) collect and analyze the best available information on coho salmon; (2) conduct a resource site inventory; and (3) adopt rules to protect resource sites and to develop a process to identify new sites in the future.

“This resource site process allows the state of Oregon to take a wholistic look at the numerous different ways logging impacts salmon and its breeding habitat. Practices that perpetuate poor habitat conditions like intensive logging too close to streams and on landslide-prone areas, sediment from forest roads, and large areas dominated by clear-cuts and said Robyn Janssen with Rogue Riverkeeper. “Oregon’s rules for state and private timberlands are the weakest in the Pacific Northwest, and it is encouraging to see the Board take its first steps towards addressing these deficiencies.”

Oregon has relied heavily on voluntary measures by timber companies to protect coho.  Between 1995 and 2017, taxpayers invested $65 million dollars of public funds on instream habitat restoration efforts.  However, Oregon’s weak forest practices rules still allow logging to degrade aquatic habitat critical to the recovery of coho salmon.

“It is an obvious case of one step forward, two steps back. We need to address the root causes of fish decline. The public’s investments in habitat restoration activities cannot keep up with the pace or scale of the ongoing degradation from poor forest practices,” said Nick Cady. “The Board has a perfect opportunity now to address these inefficiencies and meaningfully address salmon recovery where it matters most.”

June 13, 2019
by Tony Schick
OPB

Click here for full story

On Feb. 26, 2019, Oregon State Forester Peter Daugherty sat in front of lawmakers during a budget hearing and reported his agency’s sterling compliance rate with the laws that govern private logging.

“The audit showed an overall rule level compliance rate of 98%,” Daugherty told them.

Others aren’t so sure about that.

“We don’t know if it’s 98, 99 or 50,” said Brenda McComb, a retired Oregon State University professor who serves on the board overseeing Daugherty’s agency, the Department of Forestry.

McComb, fellow forestry board member Cindy Deacon Williams and two consultants separately hired by environmental advocates are arguing the department’s work is riddled with biases and analytical flaws. One reviewer deemed them “sufficiently severe to preclude any defendable assessment of compliance rates.”

In response, the Department of Forestry says it is confident in its numbers but has nonetheless commissioned another statistical review by Oregon State University. It expects that to be completed this month.

All this means the state has spent five years and close to a million dollars to find out how many people and companies follow state logging rules — and came away with an answer that’s now being called essentially worthless.

“It’s just ridiculous,” Williams said. She first expressed her concerns about the numbers before ODF cited them in legislative testimony. She now says she’d like to see the monitoring redone and the record corrected.

“You can’t legislate or guide policy in a vacuum of ignorance,” she said. “We simply don’t have the information that we need in order to know whether our policies are responsible and are achieving our aims.”

Is The Law Working?

The effectiveness of Oregon’s Forest Practices Act is at the center of contentious debates about private logging.

Thousands of timber harvests take place in Oregon every year, on vast corporate forests and small family-owned woodlots.

The 288 rules of the Forest Practices Act govern them all. They dictate how many trees must be left standing alongside streams to keep them shady and cool for salmon. They govern forest road construction to lower the chances of a landslide. They direct foresters on when trees must be replanted, and more.

Oregon’s comprehensive law was the first of its kind when it was passed in 1971, but environmental advocates say it has since become the weakest state forestry law on the West Coast.

It remains the law that state officials use in defending against claims from the federal government that Oregon hasn’t adequately protected coastal streams. It’s what industry lobbyists extol and environmental lobbyists rail against.

Central to understanding the effectiveness of this law is the question of how well it’s being followed. So, back in 2011, the Oregon Legislature directed ODF to conduct an annual study of Forest Practices Act compliance, using an independent contractor to collect data from a sampling of forest owners.

The agency began by reviewing how well forestland owners and the timber industry were complying with rules on harvesting trees, building and maintaining forest roads and protecting water quality.

In Line With Other States

Its work found an overall compliance rate of 98% in 2017, the most recent year completed. The state also calculates compliance rates for specific rules, ownership classes and regions. Forest industry representatives say they are confident in the accuracy of those numbers, as do several members of the state’s forestry board.

Joe Justice, a board member who works for Hancock Forest Management in Eastern Oregon, said ODF foresters use the audits to identify areas where they need to work with landowners before, during and after tree harvests.

“Compliance Audits are just one way the Department monitors Forest Practices,” Justice said in an email. “A great deal of valuable information is gained from these audits including information and trends that help ODF focus training and education.”

Marganne Allen, ODF Forest Health & Monitoring Manager, said Oregon’s reported compliance rates are credible. She pointed out that they also fall in line with those reported by other states, which have found that landowners and timber operators are abiding by forestry laws at compliance rates that range from 61% to 99%, according to the Society of American Foresters.

“This has been a very repeatable outcome over time,” Allen said. She said the latest findings also are consistent with previous ODF studies dating back to 2002.

Department of Forestry officials say they are working to improve the way they check on logging-related activities. The department plans to involve statisticians from OSU in reviewing future audits, the next of which will focus on how landowners plant trees after harvesting. The department also opened up its external review team, Allen said, but the environmental groups criticizing its latest audit declined to participate.

A Flawed, Selective Method

A major concern they raised is who the department included and who is left out. The state made 345 inquiries with potential audit participants but ultimately studied only about one-third of them.

Participation was voluntary. Some landowners refused to give state foresters access to their woodlots — something the law permits them to do.

Don Stevens, a retired OSU statistician who reviewed the work at the request of the Wild Salmon Center, is the reviewer who said the audit’s flaws undermine the credibility of the state’s reported forestry-rule compliance rates. He said ODF’s sampling provides “enormous potential for non-response bias.” In other words, there’s no way to know if that method left out thousands of acres of forest land rife with violations. And should that be the case, the Department of Forestry’s overall picture of how well Oregon’s Forest Practices Act has been followed could be wildly inaccurate.

Stevens and others say the problems go beyond the collection of bad data. They say the department’s analysis of that data is also flawed.

Chris Mendoza, an environmental consultant who has worked on compliance monitoring for the Washington Department of Natural Resources, reviewed ODF’s work for the Oregon Stream Protection Coalition. He equated ODF’s methods to finding out that 200 out of 1,000 motorists pulled over by police were exceeding the speed limit — and assuming those 200 were the only speeders out of all 100,000 cars on the highway that day.

“If ODF intended to choose a method that selectively depicts the highest possible compliance rates for forest practices rules … then ODF’s reporting ‘methods’ hits that mark,” Mendoza wrote in his assessment.

The ODF’s Allen said her agency wanted to account for the fact that not all timber harvests are the same, and some landowners may be encountering the law more often than others.

Larger Questions About The Agency

“You can have one harvest unit that has only, say, 100 feet of road. Another may have 500 feet of road. So it’s important to get across some metric of not all harvest units are equal, and that they’ll have a different number of times that a given rule is applied.”

She said no issues had been raised with this method in the past, but that she expected OSU’s expertise to inform how they approach it in the future.

For some board members and advocates, the audit raised larger questions about how the agency works.

Bob Van Dyk of the Wild Salmon Center noted that, save for members from the Department of Environmental Quality, the audit’s external review committee was made up entirely of people from forest companies and industry trade groups.

“This audit shows that the agency that’s charged with protecting our forest waters is too close to the timber industry that they regulate,” Van Dyk said. “And that we can’t be confident in the quality of the laws, nor in their implementation.”

Williams, who was a fisheries biologist for 30 years before serving on the Board of Forestry, said the audit appears to be part of a pattern that causes her to be skeptical of scientific information coming out of the forestry department.

The City of Ashland sent a letter to the Board of Forestry in support of strengthening stream buffer rules in the Siskiyou Region.

Read the letter

by Lydia Doleman
Sunday, May 26th 2019

Mail Tribune

I am a mother, a carpenter, a business owner, and the co-founder of a non-profit called Speak for the Trees. I live in the Little Applegate Valley and have for nearly 10 years. During that time, I’ve seen our local forests and hillsides decimated by private forestry practices and lack of reasonable, science-based rules from the Oregon Board of Forestry.

The stated mission of the Oregon Department of Forestry is “To serve the people of Oregon by protecting, managing and promoting stewardship of Oregon’s forests to enhance environmental, economic and community sustainability.” My experience of interacting with the Oregon Department of Forestry has been that it caters heavily to private timber companies and has little regard for communities, businesses and species that depend on healthy forests and waterways.

Currently, rules for clearcut logging on private lands in the Southern Oregon “Siskiyou Region” require 50- and 70-foot riparian “management” areas for small and medium streams. However, all too often the “management” of these riparian areas results in harvesting down to a 20-foot required no-cut buffer minimum. If a stream is non-fish bearing, trees can be cut all the way to the stream’s edge.

You don’t have to be a scientist to know that this is not good for waterways. Lack of trees and streamside vegetation causes warmer temperatures, increased sediment, and additional impacts to cold water streams vital to our fisheries and communities.

Even my 6-year-old could point out that removing the trees (i.e. the shade) from a stream will make it warmer, having a detrimental impact on stream health and salmon habitat. So why even consider excluding any Oregon bioregion from expanded stream buffers when doing so is also in direct violation of the Clean Water Act? Especially in a region that supports threatened coho salmon and other sensitive fish species.

For the rest of Western Oregon, stream buffer rules are at least better than what we have here in the Siskiyou Region. When the Board of Forestry voted to increase stream buffers for Western Oregon forests, increasing buffer zones by 10 feet, they left the entire Siskiyou Region out of these increased protections, claiming there is no data to support the need. Again, I’m not a scientist, but I know that trees create shade and shade creates cooler temperatures on land or water.

From a profit perspective, an extra 10 feet of buffer at the stream would have a minimal economic impact on the vast majority of private-land logging operations and would provide a net positive impact on our environment and our communities. Healthy streams are the life-blood of our rural communities. Water is the bank account we all draw from; it’s how we grow our food, our medicine and our businesses. We are looking at hotter, drier times ahead and our streams deserve and will require more protection as we stare down the barrel at systemic climate changes.

As a carpenter I love working wood and I love our forests. Stream health, forest health and economic health do not have to be at odds. One of the biggest issues is that our forest products are greatly undervalued. With the trade war with China and a slowing construction sector, the price per million board feet is dropping, mills are slowing production and exports are a fraction of what they once were. The time is ripe to encourage holding onto more of our precious resources and managing our forests in a sustainable, innovative and conscious way.

The Oregon Board of Forestry has a responsibility and an obligation to uphold its mission in its decisions. Excluding the Siskiyou bioregion from increased stream buffers seems counter to that mission. I believe we can do better for our watersheds, our communities and our future. You can speak up by asking the Board of Forestry to include the Siskiyou Region in increased stream buffers rules like the rest of Western Oregon.

What legacy do you want to leave?

Lydia Doleman lives in the Little Applegate with her daughter, owns Flying Hammer Productions and is the co-founder of the nonprofit Speak for the Trees.

Published in Mail Tribune

By Jason Clark
December 09, 2018

Another year of extensive wildfires, debilitating smoke, and several tragedies across the West have made it clear that Oregonians cannot afford forestry practices that continue to make this problem worse. The consequences of our forest management history and our changing climate have been illuminated by a hazy vermilion sun. The complex, fire-resilient forests of yesteryear have been replaced with younger, denser stands more likely to experience stand-replacing fires. Meanwhile, climate change is causing fuels to dry out earlier and stay dry longer, creating the conditions for more fires and greater fire severity.

Many commendable thinning and fuels reduction projects have been carried out on unnaturally dense Forest Service and BLM lands in recent decades. These efforts need to be improved and expanded into a widespread restoration forestry effort to put our fire-suppressed public forests on a path toward increased fire resiliency.

But there is another half of the equation that can’t be ignored — private, industrial forestlands. A recent study of the 2013 Douglas fire by leading scientists at Oregon State and Humboldt State Universities confirmed the forests most likely to burn at high severity are the dense, young stands on private timberlands that are planted after conventional clearcut logging practices sanctioned under the Oregon Forest Practices Act, not the typically older stands on public lands.

Therefore, it is critically insufficient to only improve forest management on public lands.Locally, the Rogue Basin Cohesive Forest Restoration Strategy, created by a multi-party team of federal, state and nonprofit contributors, provides a well-considered, science-based framework for how to approach restoration forestry and increase fire resiliency in our region. The “All Lands” approach described therein proposes to treat 900,000 acres of federal land plus 200,000 acres of non-federal lands of mixed ownership, in and around communities and infrastructure. A small proportion of the 200,000 non-federal acres is industrial timberlands, however, tens of thousands of acres of industrial timberland are directly adjacent to the proposed treatment areas on federal lands. Without meaningfully addressing these fire-prone, private timberlands, our success in achieving a more fire-resilient landscape will be limited.

To responsibly address the role that private forests play in contributing to wildfire risk, we must transform the Oregon Forest Practices Act, the decades-old state statute in dire need of modernization. Increased fire risk is just one of the negative side effects of industrial logging practices that Oregonians are left to bear. Soil loss, diminished water quality, degradation of fisheries, and habitat loss for rare species are some of the others. The state should convene a team of scientists and progressive forestry practitioners to hammer out rational, proactive, and easily verifiable operational standards for the future of forestry in Oregon. This team should set new standards dramatically reducing the allowable size of harvest units, requiring longer rotation times, and maintaining legacy retentions of older trees, requiring that a proportion of the more fire-resilient trees be left standing. To put Oregon’s private forests on a path toward greater fire resiliency, we must diversify the landscape level expanses of tightly packed, even-aged tree farms that cover so much of our state. We should also require timber companies to address the enormous amounts of slash left behind following timber harvests that are tinderboxes of explosive fuels. And we should ban the aerial spraying of herbicides which adds additional fuels and pollutes our streams.

In the long run, timber companies will benefit from management practices that lead to more fire-resilient forests. As improved practices are implemented and fire resiliency increases over time, timber assets will become less vulnerable to going up in flames. Further, there are numerous benefits to other ecosystem services that will follow from fire-resilient forestry practices including improved habitat, water quality and more secure carbon storage.

It is imperative that Oregon implement forestry practices that improve fire resiliency. We can supply the local mills and support the invigoration of our economy while improving our forests’ structure in a way that helps to protect it and our communities from future wildfires. Imagine a future where Oregon’s private forests are structurally diverse forests that include larger, fire-resilient trees and where large clearcuts and expansive, even-aged tree farms are a memory. We must move our state’s private timberlands in this direction, because not doing so allows the wildfire problem to get worse. To get there, we must reform Oregon’s outdated rules and account for the role private timberlands play in wildfire risk. Oregonians need strong leadership in Salem to address this issue in 2019 and beyond. Who is ready?

Jason Clark is a botanist who lives in Talent and works in forests across the Northwest.