Top Line: Blumenauer’s bill would open up Mount Hood National Forest to new logging loopholes.
Figure 1. Mount Hood itself is not in the current Mount Hood National Recreation Area. Source: Kim McCarrell.
In 2009, at the instigation of Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR-3rd) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Congress, among other things, established new and expanded wild and scenic rivers and wilderness lands on the Mount Hood National Forest (MHNF). One of those other things was the establishment of a Mount Hood National Recreation Area (MHNRA), totaling 34,550 acres. The modest three-unit “NRA” was primarily established to afford increased conservation status to predominantly roadless areas for which wilderness designation was politically problematic. The name of the NRA was more ambitious than the area itself in that the eponymous Mount Hood was not in the MHNRA.
Since Blumenauer entered Congress in 1996, he has established a strong record on the conservation of nature and the protection of the environment. However, if Blumenauer’s proposed Mt. Hood and Columbia River Gorge Recreation Enhancement and Conservation Act of 2022 (H.R.7665, 117th) is enacted into law as introduced, Earl’s conservation legacy will be severely tarnished. The legislation is also called the REC Act of 2022, where, to be accurate, “REC” should be pronounced and/or read as “wreck.” The conservation of nature would lose out to new treaty rights and increased recreation.
Figure 2. The naturalness, wildness, and beauty of the Mount Hood National Forest ought to be passed on to future generations. One-way trails, mass transit, zoning, permitting, and other recreation fixes are but Band-Aids on the open chest wound of excessive population. Source: Oregon Department of Transportation.
What’s Not in the Bill
During the well over a decade that Blumenauer talked about introducing legislation to protect additional wild areas on the Mount Hood National Forest, his staff occasionally consulted me (and many others) about what should be in such a bill. I disclose this to acknowledge that I am suffering from an anchoring effect (“a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered”) Based on Blumenauer’s concept paper released in December 2021, I expected this bill to, among other things, designate significantly more additional wilderness area and wild and scenic rivers, provide stronger protections for forests, include strong restrictions on new road building, and have a substantive protective corridor for the Mount Hood National Forest portion of the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail. But many good parts of the draft bill were not included in the bill as introduced.
As examples, the bill now calls for
• ~7,500 acres of the anticipated 30,000 acres of additions to the National Wilderness Preservation System, down 75 percent from the concept outline a few months before (Map 1), and
• at least 15 fewer miles of wild and scenic rivers.
Map 1. The Blumenauer bill whittles the expected 30,000 acres of additional wilderness protection down to ~7,500 acres, a reduction of 75 percent. Source: Oregon Wild.
What’s in the Bill
The MHNRA would be expanded to 349,877 acres, a tenfold increase that would actually include Mount Hood and much more (Map 2). Sounds good, right?
Map 2. Existing wilderness outside the proposed MHNRA expansion is in dark green. Blumenauer-proposed wilderness additions are in slightly nauseating neon green (look closely as they are not big). The existing Mount Hood National Recreation Area is in orange, with existing wilderness within it in greenish orange. Proposed additions to the MHNRA are in purple, and existing wilderness within this added area is in darkest purple. The “Indian Treaty Resources Emphasis Zone[s]” are not defined in the bill but could end up encompassing the entire Mount Hood National Forest (lightest green). Source: Outdoor Alliance.
Not so fast. The Blumenauer bill is replete with problems. Permit me to enumerate the major ones.
1. Worse management on the ground. While the color on the map would change to indicate an expanded national recreation area, actual management on the ground would worsen. The new mandated management plan could end up being worse than what exists today for these lands.
2. New excuses to log. The existing NRA statute allows logging for certain reasons under certain prescribed circumstances, most of which could be interpreted by the Forest Service authorize/justify inappropriate logging. The Blumenauer bill would further authorize Forest Service logging “to the extent necessary to improve forest health in a manner that . . . (D) improves watershed conditions; (E) improves scenic character; or (F) increases carbon storage and sequestration wherever possible.”
Earth to Earl: In fact, any logging of any kind in any amount harms water quality, mars the scene, and reduces forest carbon while emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Figure 3. Ironically, the Blumenauer bill could increase carbon emissions from logging on the Mount Hood National Forest at the expense of the glaciers on Mount Hood that are melting due to climate change. Source: Tom Kloster.
3. Enlarged and expanded treaty rights. Though the Blumenauer bill states that treaty rights would not be enlarged or newly established, in fact they are—especially ones that could likely be harmful to the conservation of nature. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs could be given veto power over Forest Service management of the entire 1.1-million-acre Mount Hood National Forest, not just the expanded NRA.
Couched in the language of protecting existing treaty rights, this bill would expand treaty rights, particularly in matters that result in increased logging—including clear-cutting. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs has a history of advocating increased clear-cutting on the Mount Hood National Forest to (1) create huckleberry fields and (2) prevent wildfires—especially those that might spread and burn timber they will be logging on the adjacent Indian reservation.
The Blumenauer bill would set as a purpose of the “Indian Treaty Resources Emphasis Zone” (which could be the entirety of the Mount Hood National Forest) to
recognize and integrate indigenous knowledge (including traditional ecological knowledge) as an important part of the best available scientific information that is used in forest and resource management areas within the Zones . . .
“Indigenous knowledge,” per se—no more than common sense or folk wisdom—is not necessarily the “best available scientific information.” Prescribed fire might be “traditional ecological knowledge,”—not logging mature and old-growth forests to increase huckleberry bush growth rather than allowing fire to do that job as it historically did.
Figure 4. The Blumenauer bill fails to include many miles of free-flowing streams worthy of wild and scenic river protection. Source: Tom O’Keefe.
4. Bowing to Big Timber. Companies in the timber industry are oiling their chainsaws and revving their bulldozers. Whether or not it is Blumenauer’s intent, the timber industry will love this new regime, as it will dramatically increase logging in the name of recreation, “conservation,” and treaty rights.
5. Betrayal of recreationists. The Forest Service and the Warm Springs Tribes will have to issue earplugs and rose-colored glasses with blinders to recreationists so they won’t hear all the chainsaws and see all the stumps.
6. Weakening of bedrock environmental laws. The protections of the Endangered Species Act and the procedures of the National Environmental Policy Act would be weakened everywhere on the Mount Hood National Forest.
7. Putting mature and old-growth forests in jeopardy. The legislation would undermine President Biden’s recent executive order to conserve mature and old-growth trees and stands on the Mount Hood National Forest.
8. Threatening the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail. Under the National Trails Act of 1968, the PCT (and all the others) received congressional recognition, but not congressional protection. Significant and substantive protections that were in the December 2021 concept paper for the Blumenauer bill were watered down to directing the Forest Service to amend its forest plan to give more consideration to the PCT. The biggest threat to the PCT is the Forest Service itself in that it allows roads, power lines, logging, off-road vehicles, and other harms to diminish the PCT.
Figure 5. The Forest Service has contemplated logging mature and old-growth forest near Tamanawas Falls, something the Blumenauer bill would not prevent. Source: Tom Kloster.
I could go on.
For More Information
More information can be found on Representative Blumenaeur’s website. See also an interactive map of the proposal, an article in Willamette Week, and Oregon Wild’s explanation for its opposition to the Blumenauer bill.
Bottom Line: The Blumenauer bill should never be enacted into law.