Northwest Forest Plan update continues, despite termination of national old growth proposal

By APRIL ERHLICH/Oregon Public Broadcasting

For months, national forests in the Pacific Northwest were set to be protected under two major updates to forestry plans — but that changed Tuesday.

That’s when the Biden administration abruptly terminated a months-long effort to create a new policy to conserve old growth forests across the country. This policy would have updated all forest plans managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

Now environmental groups are holding out hope for a different proposal — the update to the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which covers 24.5 million acres of national forests spanning Washington, Oregon and Northern California. This sweeping policy is often credited with preserving large, old trees in the West Coast’s temperate rainforests over the last three decades.

The U.S. Forest Service says efforts to modernize that plan with new protections remain in the works. The Forest Service published its draft Northwest Forest Plan proposal in November, and it is collecting public comments until March 17.

These two forestry updates overlap in some ways: Both proposals outline which types of trees and forests could, or couldn’t, be logged. But they are separate efforts, Northwest regional forester Jacque Buchanan said in a statement, adding that the termination of the national old growth policy will have “no effect” on the Northwest Forest Plan’s update.

The national old growth policy was the Forest Service’s response to President Joe Biden’s 2022 executive order to save the country’s remaining mature and old forests. These forests are powerful carbon sinks, making them critical to combating climate change.

Environmental groups worried that a Congress under President-elect Donald Trump would be apt to overturn old growth protections, preventing the Forest Service from approving similar policies in the future.

“I was worried about the precedent that it may have set,” said Susan Jane Brown, a Portland-based environmental attorney. “I think the agency did the right thing, given the election outcomes.”

Northwest Forest Plan update

An advisory committee for the Northwest Forest Plan update — made up of timber industry representatives, environmental groups, foresters and tribes — has been meeting regularly since 2023. It provided a long list of recommendations to the Forest Service, and most made it into its draft proposal.

Although the Northwest Forest Plan update remains in the works, it’s not clear if Trump’s Forest Service will continue that momentum.

“That’s just not in our control,” said Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, who is on the committee. “What is in our control is to continue working collaboratively together.”

Some environmental groups have criticized the proposed update to the forest plan for increasing the amount of timber that could be logged from Pacific Northwest forests. Most of that logging would come out of thinning forests that have become crowded with wildfire fuel after a century of fire suppression.

“They’ve been fire suppressed, so there’s a lot of young forest that is compromising the ecological integrity of mature trees in those stands and the ecological integrity of the entire landscape,” Brown said, who also is on the advisory committee.

The proposed update comes with its own guidelines for conserving mature and old growth forests. It would prohibit logging trees that are over 150 years old in dry forests. It would also forbid logging trees over 120 years old within “the matrix” — that is, areas where logging companies are currently allowed to cut most trees, even old growth.

One of the most critical components of the proposed update, Brown said, ensures tribes are included in making major decisions on how their ancestral lands are managed. The original Northwest Forest Plan doesn’t mention tribes.

• This story originally appeared Jan. 8, 2025 on Oregon Public Broadcasting.