Northwest Forest Plan

So they're rolling back NEPA, which is the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act.

They're doing revisions to the Bureau of Land Management Resource Management Plan, the Northwest Forest Plan, the Blue Mountains Forest Plan, and it's really horrendous what's happening there.

And oh, oh, the other thing I forgot to say is the roadless rule.

They're trying to get rid of the roadless rule, which would be a huge, a huge issue because of what you just talked about.

So i- if there is anybody who would be quick to blame the timber industry, I, I'm sure it would be us, but this goes beyond, uh, habitat modification and destruction.

So one thing that we know is that, uh, because of the Northwest Forest Plan, we're actually seeing increasing amounts of spotted owl habitat coming back online-

Hmm

...

As your listeners probably know, that's about enough to run two and a half typical sized sawmills or veneer plants or, or something like that.

And what happened is that before the Clinton-Gore era and before the Northwest Forest Plan and all that stuff that happened in the mid-'90s, they were harvesting closer to, to in excess of a billion board feet a year off the BLM lands.

Wow.

That went on from 1937 until 1990, approximately, when the spotted owl got enjoined in court and all that, all the harvests got enjoined in court.

And, uh, but I see...

What I see there is, um, an amazing absorption of disinformation over 20-something years where a lot of people are confusing the Northwest Forest Plan, which was the spotted owl, with the roadless rule, and that it somehow bans logging and all this stuff, right? When it, when really what it was is simply a taxpayers for common sense concept of stopping the p- the taxpayer building roads to s- marginal timber supplies.

Um, there was a fire down at Maverick ski area, um, over there kind of west of you there, you know-

Yeah

So in Oregon, for example, the counties that have the BLM ONC lands and Forest Service lands that were really productive for timber, that were clear cut through the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, they did get tens of millions of dollars in some cases from the federal government.

And when the Northwest Forest Plan came in and the timber management policies were changed, for good reason in a lot of cases, those revenues declined.

But what had happened in the interim is Oregon had a tax rule.

The state really restricted how properties could be assessed for property taxes.

what about that one?

But autumn is super relevant to you because a lot of critical habitat was designated in 1992 and 1994 in the Northwest Forest Plan, which set aside something called late successional reserves, which were old growth kept off limits for the owl.

And there were also other species that it protected.

There's

And then the Biden administration restored most of it.

And then now the timber industry is back in court trying to strip the 3.5 million acres again.

And the administration is moving to amend the Northwest Forest Plan.

um to return logging to the old growth habitat

We're going to bring all the stakeholders together and figure this thing out.

So they created the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994.

And The Forest Service, by the time Mike Dombeck, who I worked for, he was the chief, the guy who ran the agency.

By the time he got there in 97, the agency was effectively in like its seventh or eighth year of this transition period where no longer was it finding its value and its worth in figuring out how to engineer roads into remote timber sales and then selling timber.