Old trees are back in the spotlight with the release of a U.S. Forest Service plan to preserve old-growth forests.
The plan follows a directive by President Joe Biden in April 2022 to protect mature and old-growth forests on national forestlands in an attempt to protect biodiversity and help fight climate change.
The plan is a proposed amendment to management plans for national forests and it doesn’t go as far as some advocates wanted. Specifically, it doesn’t call for an outright ban on cutting old-growth trees. Nor does it single out maturing forests for preservation so they could grow on to become the old growth of tomorrow. Instead, the plan provides latitude to forest managers to tune forest policy as conditions require, with the guidance of preserving the health of old-growth forests.
The proposal would, for the first time, seek to create a consistent policy across the national forest system to foster the long-term resilience of old-growth forests and their ecological contributions. For some land managers, that would be a new directive.
Old growth, in general, is 150 years or older, structurally complex, and diverse in species composition. There is no one definition of old growth. But there are consistent attributes, especially structural complexity. That means the trees themselves are shaggy in their bark, stag-headed and broken in their tops, and full of cavities. A structurally complex forest includes trees of many age classes, dead and downed and standing dead trees, and a diversity of species.
An older forest, sometimes called a mature forest, is at least 80 years old.
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Today, insects, fire, and disease stoked by climate warming, not logging, are the biggest threats to old-growth forests in the West, according to a review of forest conditions that helped inform the plan. Past management practices, including timber harvest and fire suppression, contributed to vulnerabilities in the health of old-growth forests, the report found.
Early reaction to the proposed amendment is polarized. The American Forest Resource Council, an industry group, in a news release Thursday decried the initiative as red tape and a politically-motivated scheme that would delay or stop responsible tree harvesting while doing nothing to boost forest health to protect old growth from its primary threat: fire.
Alex Craven, the Sierra Club forest campaign manager, said: “We look forward to engaging in this process to ensure the amendment not only retains, but increases the amount of old-growth forests across the country. Shifting our approach to national forests from resources meant for extraction to natural wonders worth preserving is long overdue.”
The public has 90 days to comment on the plan starting Friday. The Forest Service expects to finalize this effort before the end of Biden’s term in January 2025.
Meanwhile, dozens of federal logging projects are targeting mature and old-growth trees, according to the environmental group Earthjustice, which helped lead the litigation in the Pacific Northwest to shut down logging of old-growth forests on federal lands under the Northwest Forest Plan.
The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service manage approximately 32 million acres of old-growth and 80 million acres of mature forests on federally managed lands, for a total of 112 million acres. Old-growth forests represent 18% and mature forest 45% of all forested land managed by the two agencies.
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Old-growth forests provide unique benefits, as habitat for wildlife, and for storing carbon taken out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis. Big old trees hold the most carbon even though they are slower growing, because of their enormous mass.
At the same time the national plan on old-growth policy is under consideration, there’s a separate plan focused on old growth here in the Northwest that is getting a new look. A draft environmental impact statement on part of the Northwest Forest Plan is expected later this summer, and work by the Northwest Forest Plan Federal Advisory Committee on the amendment is continuing.
Much has changed since the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted in 1994, protecting 24 million acres of ancient forest in Washington, Oregon and Northern California, in what at the time was the most expansive conservation plan to protect forest biodiversity in the world.
The spotted owl that started it all, with litigation to shut down logging, today is being driven from its habitat not by chain saws, but by the invasive barred owl. And the fate of more than a million acres of old growth marked as available for cutting within the Northwest Forest Plan now is being reconsidered, under the amendment. The team is meeting June 25-27 in Olympia and meetings are open to the public.
How to comment
The proposed national amendment will be available for comment beginning Friday in theFederal Register.
Online comments may be submitted via a web form:
https://cara.fs2c.usda.gov/Public//CommentInput?Project=65356
Letters must be submitted to:
Director, Ecosystem Management Coordination
201 14th Street SW, Mailstop 1108
Washington, D.C. 20250—1124
Lynda V. Mapes: lmapes@seattletimes.com; Lynda specializes in coverage of the environment, natural history and Native American tribes.
