The U.S. Forest Service illegally repealed protections for old growth trees in six national forests in central and Eastern Oregon and southeastern Washington by skirting the process for environmental review and public objection, a federal judge ruled Aug. 31.
U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary James Hubbard, a Trump administration appointee, unilaterally reversed a decades-old rule prohibiting logging trees 21 inches or more in diameter in the final days of the Trump administration. A coalition of conservation groups, including Oregon Wild and Central Oregon Landwatch, sued the Forest Service in response to the decision, which was made without environmental review or public input. U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Hallman ruled in favor of the plaintiffs Aug. 31.
The 21-inch rule, implemented in 1995, was designed to maintain wildlife habitat in six national forests — the Deschutes, Fremont-Winema, Malheur, Ochoco, Umatilla, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests — amounting to 7 million acres of public land.
Conservation groups say the ruling supports democratic land management and conservation goals.
“This was an important victory for public process,” Rob Klavins, Oregon Wild representative, said. “By following environmental laws and meaningfully engaging with independent scientists, tribes and the public, we will arrive at a better outcome for people, wildlife and the climate.”
Nick Smith, an American Forest Resource Council representative, a timber interest group that intervened on the side of the U.S. Forest Service, said logging large trees is necessary for forest health.
“As we experience another summer of wildfire and smoke, this litigation represents another obstacle preventing public lands managers from implementing proactive efforts to promote the health and resiliency of eastside forests,” Smith said.
Hallman ruled any attempt to reverse the 21-inch rule necessitated a full environmental impact statement, or EIS.
“The highly uncertain effects of this project, when considered in light of its massive scope and setting, raise substantial questions about whether this project will have a significant effect,” Hallman wrote in his decision.
When a project may have a “significant effect,” the U.S. Forest Service is required to submit an EIS, which assesses its effect on endangered species. The process also allows communities and conservation groups to propose changes to the plan and to prevent its implementation.
Mitigating climate change and protecting wildlife
In the three years since the reversal, the Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project, or BMBP, extensively documented the logging of large trees, many of them over 150 years old.
Paula Hood, BMBP director, found the U.S. Forest Service’s restoration and wildfire prevention projects actively damage eastside National Forests.
“Far too often, the logging that is happening on the ground does not look like what most people would consider restoration,” Hood said. “It looks like virtual clear cuts, it looks like logging large trees, it looks like targeting mature and old forests, it looks like logging in streamside riparian corridors, and it looks like other practices that make forests less climate resilient, that put fish, wildlife and water quality at risk.”
Logging large trees can also lead to landslides, flooding, and fragmentation of wildlife corridors, Hood said.
If the U.S. Forest Service reinstates the 21-inch rule after completing the EIS, it would help protect wildlife and reduce the Pacific Northwest’s carbon emissions due to the large trees’ carbon capture capabilities.
A 2023 study found remaining trees larger than 21 inches made up 3% of the trees in eastside National Forests but held 42.2% of the total above-ground carbon. Logging trees releases much of this carbon into the atmosphere, simultaneously increasing greenhouse gasses and decreasing forests’ natural carbon capturing.
Public lands without public input
When the U.S. Forest Service first eliminated the 21-inch rule, the Forest Service completed an environmental assessment, an environmental review that does not provide the same detailed analysis as the legally required EIS. The report included only two pages assessing how the change would impact wildlife.
By providing an EIS, the U.S. Forest Service is required to publicly assess how the 21-inch rule affects specific aspects of forest health, like grazing, stream corridors and wildfire risk.
If the new plan laid out in the EIS does not protect large trees and stream corridors, conservation groups are likely to send the U.S. Forest Service back to the drawing board until it produces a more ecologically sound plan.This will likely involve reimplementing the 21-inch rule or creating similarly strict large tree protections.
“The Forest Service will have to grapple with the significant impact logging has on the climate and wildlife, from salmon and salamanders to owls and goshawks,” Klavins said.
The 2020 process also did not offer room for public objection, a move Hallman ruled violated existing regulations.
The Nez Perce Tribe, whose ancestral home included portions of the land forcibly seized by the U.S. government and later turned into the national forests impacted by the rule, submitted an amicus curiae brief arguing in favor of the plaintiffs.
“Defendants were, therefore, required to provide public notice of the USDA Under Secretary’s proposal of the Plans Amendment, notice of the USDA Under Secretary’s designation as the responsible official for the Plans Amendment, and notice of the cancellation of the objection process prior to the comment period on the Plans Amendment’s Environmental Assessment,” the brief argued. “To interpret (the law) and the requirements … otherwise would fundamentally undermine fairness and transparency by precluding the public and Tribe from meaningfully responding before a decision is rendered.”
The U.S. Forest Service has a long history of de-emphasizing the public review process and misrepresenting its logging projects, according to conservationists.
Over the past 20 years, the U.S. Forest Service increasingly opted to conduct less stringent environmental assessments rather than follow the full EIS procedure, Hood said.
“The Forest Service has increasingly given itself more and more discrepancy in recent years, and because of that, the logging practices on the ground differ from how they are presented to the public,” Hood said.
Arran Robertson, a representative for Oregon Wild, noted the clear-cuts BMBP documented are referred to as “vista enhancements,” “regeneration harvests” or “temporary wildlife openings.”
“There's this whole lexicon that is essentially logging and different shades of logging, but because the very like the variation of how it's being deployed is so broad,” Robertson said. “The public doesn't know what is actually being prescribed on these landscapes.”
These terms are not legally defined, making it difficult to legislate against the U.S. Forest Service when the agency performs clearcuts where “thinning” was prescribed.
“The Forest Service has created a framework that makes it very difficult to hold them accountable because so many of their guidelines and their project design criteria are so squishy and lack enforceable teeth,” Hood said.
U.S. Forest Service environmental reviews also failed to account for the cumulative effects of its logging activities. BMBP calculations found the cumulative impact of just four logging projects in the Malheur National Forest would adversely affect 29.2% of mid-Columbia River steelhead habitat in the forest.
These projects, which included logging 21-inch-wide trees, reported the individual impact on endangered steelhead habitat without accounting for their cumulative impact.
By curtailing the public environmental review process, the U.S. Forest Service risks alienating the public from the care of national forests, according to Robertson.
“The more that the public gets cut out from those things, which is the direction we're heading in, I think it's going to be really hard to get forests back on track and have people invested in how they're managed as public lands,” Robertson said.
National forests are publically owned, but in Oregon, politicians tend to cater to private timber interests rather than the general public, Hood said.
On average, Oregon lawmakers receive $21,416 per year in contributions from the timber industry, more than lawmakers in any other state, according to the Oregonian’s analysis of National Institute on Money in Politics data.
“We are all stewards, all of us across the country, and politicians are catering to small groups of very vocal people, and a lot of this is ultimately driven by resource extraction industries,” Hood said.
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