Dedicated to the conservation and restoration of nature, The Larch Company is a non-membership for-profit organization that represents species that cannot talk and humans not yet born. A deciduous conifer, the western larch has a contrary nature.
If President Biden wants to be remembered in history for saving the nation’s remaining mature and old-growth forests and trees for the benefit of this and future generations, the Forest Service is going to have to do significantly more than what it has proposed so far.
The prospective defeminization/emasculation of the Northwest Forest Plan by the Forest Service is likely inevitable. All the more reason for the Biden administration to promulgate an enduring administrative rule that conserves and restores mature and old-growth forests.
Any inventory reveals that most of the nation’s mature and old-growth forests have fallen to the saw. Not only must all that remains remain, but degraded forests should also be allowed to become mature and old-growth forests once again.
A conspiracy of self-interested timber companies, misguided public land foresters, misinformed wildlife biologists, and Kool-Aid-drinking conservationists.
Old-growth forests in the American East have been so far gone for so long in the public consciousness that Big Timber (from private corporations to government foresters) has conned conservationists and buffaloed biologists into believing that massive and repeated logging is the only salvation of “wildlife.”
As public lands conservationists continue their fight to save the last of the mature and old-growth forests for the benefit of this and future generations, we must not forget the preforests.
While the Oregon Private Forest Accords is a grand bargain with a great net gain for the conservation of Oregon forestlands, it is not a complete one. A comparable grand bargain is needed for terrestrial species conservation on Oregon’s private timberlands. Regulation of private land is inadequate to provide optimal public benefits. More private timberland should be reconverted to public forestland.
The OPFA—an agreement between Oregon private timberland interests and conservation and fishing interests to convince the Oregon Legislative Assembly to rewrite the Oregon Forest Practices Act in the 2022 short session—is epic. If legislators agree, conservation requirements on the state’s private timberlands will be strengthened significantly.
The old forests of the Pacific Northwest are in far better condition today than they would be if not for Professors Jerry F. (for Forest!) Franklin and K. Norman Johnson.
The Oregon legislature has directed and authorized the Oregon Board of Forestry to manage state forestlands under its control “so as to secure the greatest permanent value of those lands to the state.”
The seven-member Oregon Board of Forestry will decide next Tuesday, October 6, whether to proceed in seeking a habitat management plan and concurrent incidental take permit for sixteen imperiled species that inhabit western Oregon state forests.
Figure 1. There is lots of money to be spent by taxpayers and made by the fire-industrial complex. Fires boost the local economy. Source: National Interagency Fire Center.
