Save Oregon's Old Growth
By oregonwild.org Did you know that the Willamette Forest has the highest carbon rich forests in the US?
Last week, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a set of policy recommendations that the Forest Service will be pursuing in response to President Biden’s executive order calling for the protection of mature and old-growth forests. Vilsack’s policy guidance boils down to one thing: more logging. Rather than protecting our forests that store massive amounts of carbon and provide critical habitat for endangered wildlife, Vilsack is making excuses to cut them down at an even faster rate.
The Forest Service’s Secretarial Memorandum claims that a majority of our mature and old-growth forests on federal lands are already in a protected status, but this is demonstrably false. Oregon Wild and our allies across the country in the Climate Forests campaign can point to thousands of acres at risk right now of being logged. In fact, just last week I toured the Flat Country logging sale right here in Oregon where I saw acres of mature trees over a century old. These forests are on the verge of becoming old-growth, and projects like Flat country would mean that they are reduced to stumps.
Secretary Vilsack’s memo hides behind bad science and places the blame for our rapidly-vanishing mature and old-growth forests on climate-driven wildfire without first recognizing that the Forest Service logging methods are truly the #1 threat to our forests.
President Biden’s Executive Order should have signaled an end to “business as usual” logging of mature and old-growth forests on federal lands, but it’s clear that we, and the Biden administration, cannot trust the Forest Service to steer this ship.
Tell the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that they must act now to protect our forests on federal lands and allow for a meaningful public engagement process.