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More comments on spotted owl plan, but is it enough?

April 29th, 2011

After months of delay, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week made a big move on the new spotted owl recovery plan, but it’s a move that few people expected.

It was just two months ago that the feds planned to release a final plan, without any further chance for public comment or changes. No one, from timber companies to environmental groups, was happy with the plan, and yet it appeared the federal government was still going to ram it through.

Then last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made the surprise announcement that it was going to reopen the public comment period after all. But with two major caveats.

First off, the Service is only taking comment on just one appendix of the 181-page recovery plan, not the whole document. This appendix covers a key portion of the plan, a computerized model that “assesses the owl’s habitat and the effectiveness of various conservation measures” but it’s only an appendix in a much larger plan.

From the Medford Mail Tribune:

Basically, the model compares potential spotted owl population responses to different habitat-management scenarios and conservation measures such as barred owl management. For instance, the model suggests that if the barred owl moves into areas already occupied by spotted owls, the latter’s population is likely to decline.

The model brings together information from some 4,000 spotted owl sites in Washington, Oregon and far Northern California, according to an agency spokeswoman. Information gathered in the model includes such factors as forest stand characteristics, slope locations and elevation, she said.

That data is combined with more than 20 years’ worth of demographic information, such as survival and reproductive rates, from annual surveys, she added.

Second, the Service made its announcement so late in the game that the new comment period may not make any difference in the final plan. The new 30-day comment period will run until May 23, just seven days before a court-ordered deadline of June 1 for the Service to complete the plan.

Forestry groups across the country said the full spotted owl plan — not just an appendix — should have been opened up for public comment, and that the limited comment period that was announced won’t do anything to improve the final version of the plan.

From the forestry groups’ statement:

Further public review is sorely needed in light of the chorus of criticism raised by Members of Congress, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, the forest products industry, environmental groups and scientific peer reviewers.

David Bischel, President of the California Forestry Association:

“Ironically, some of the most robust populations of Northern Spotted Owls occupy sustainably managed private forests of Northern California.  The first draft of the recovery plan completely ignored the positive benefits provided by pro-active forest management.  We hope the Service recognizes the proactive measures that private and state landowners have already made towards owl conservation, and not add more regulatory gridlock.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service has run out of time to come out with a fully researched plan, the forestry groups said. The only solution is to try to get an extension of the June 1 deadline, said Tom Partin, President of the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council.

“We hope the agency will ask the Court for additional time to complete the Recovery Plan.  That way, whatever comments come from the public can be used and not just ignored.”

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Posted in Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Banking on biomass and “Wood First”

April 15th, 2011

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this week announced $30 million in federal biomass projects, just two weeks after he said the U.S. government would promote and research the use of wood as a green building material.

The departments of Agriculture and Energy will devote $30 million to the Biomass Research and Development Initiative, which will pay for 5-10 projects over the next 3-4 years. The research projects will cover not just woody biomass but also feedstock, biofuels and other farm waste.

“These projects will help to reduce America’s dependence on imported oil by accelerating the development and commercialization of cleaner, alternative fuels that can power our vehicles and our industry,” said U.S Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “Producing renewable fuels from biomass right here in the United States will improve our nation’s energy security and give us an innovative edge in the global market for clean energy technologies.”

In an op-ed in the Oregonian this week, Tom Holt, the chairman of the Oregon Forest Industries Council, compliments the USDA for its stance on using wood as a green building material and says that the Oregon Legislature might take it one step further.

House Bill 3429….would direct the state of Oregon to use wood as a preferred building material. Called the Oregon “Wood First” bill, it states that for structures built with state funds after July 1, 2012, the building materials used should be — to the maximum extent possible and economically feasible — made from wood…

The Oregon bill is modeled after British Columbia’s Wood First Act, passed in October 2009. Passage by the Oregon Legislature would make the bill the first of its kind in the United States.

Holt points out that British Columbia’s Jobs Minister even flew to Salem to testify in favor of the bill. With British Columbia and Oregon leading the way on “Wood First,” it’s only a matter of time before Washington and California step to the plate.

Holt describes why “Wood First” is so critical for Oregon, but the sentiment holds true for all the states on the West Coast.

Oregon is the nation’s number one supplier of softwood lumber and plywood panels. We are among the nation’s most forested states, second only to Alaska. The forest and wood products sector makes up about 8.5 percent of Oregon’s total payroll and ranks in the top four among Oregon traded sectors — those industries producing income for goods and services sold out of state…

…Just think of the possibilities if Oregon were to become the nation’s leading advocate for wood products — more innovation, more stable markets, more jobs and a cleaner environment. The sustainable use of forests and wood products defines us as Oregonians. In this state, it just makes sense to embrace “wood first.”

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Posted in Biomass, British Columbia, Green Building Standards, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry

Newspaper series on forestry goes off track

March 11th, 2011

The East Oregonian Co., which owns seven small newspapers in the Northwest, started a series of articles this week called “Fate of Our Forest.” The stories examine the changing face of the timber industry in Oregon and Washington, and we appreciate the coverage. Unfortunately, the newspaper company has already had its share of inaccuracies and distortions in the series.

Here are a couple examples:

One of the company’s papers, The Chinook Observer in Pacific County, Wash., took a look this week at the changing face of land ownership in the county, including the timber companies that are among the county’s biggest landowners.

But the Observer tried to make it sound like timber companies are trying to get away with something:

On the other hand, the recent purchaser of much of (Weyerhaeuser’s) hemlock forestland in the county, John Hancock Life Insurance, now is 16th on the list of biggest property owners in the county. Though it paid $126 million for the land, it is valued at only $2,312,800 due to a state law that grants timber companies an exception to the prevailing rule for everyone else that requires property assessments and taxes to be based on full market value.

In fact, John Hancock will be taxed on the full value of the land. Like all companies, when the timber is harvested, Hancock will have to pay forest harvest excise tax to the state. The Washington state timber industry as a whole paid $23 million in forest harvest excise tax, a significant boost to state coffers.

The Observer, in two other stories (here and here), also gives a lot of ink and quotes to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) forest certification system and its adherents. The paper tries to paint the FSC standard as the future of the industry, even while it admits “FSC-certified wood is not big business yet and may never be.”

It’s true that the market for sustainably harvested wood continues to grow, but FSC is a small and minor standard. The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) standard is the leader both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, by a large margin, and yet the Observer never even mentions it.

A newspaper series can’t provide an accurate depiction of an industry if it ignores the realities of the business on the ground.

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Posted in Oregon, Pacific Northwest, State Issues, Timber Industry, Washington

Old hands contribute to timber industry’s future

March 4th, 2011

Jerry Franklin, a retired professor of ecosystem science at University of Washington, and Norm Johnson, a retired professor of forestry resources at Oregon State University, are veterans of the timber wars of the last few decades. They even helped write the Northwest Forest Plan, which is still in effect today.

And now, in Roseburg and Medford, Ore., Franklin and Johnson are helping lead pilot projects on federal land that might be a significant step toward timber solutions that address the needs of not just timber companies but rural communities and environmental groups.

It’s a tricky proposition, but if anyone has the know-how, it’s Franklin and Johnson.

(The professors) have proposed two strategies based on the type of forest being managed.

Moist forests — flush with Douglas fir and western cedar that experience fewer but more catastrophic fires — would be treated differently than dry forests dominated by pine and which experience more frequent but lower-intensity fires.

Managing dry forests would mean leaving the oldest trees, thinning to reduce the fuels that can drive intense wildfire and increasing the diversity of age classes among the trees.

Management on moist forests would put an end to regeneration harvests, a technique also known as clear-cutting, in favor of “variable retention harvesting,” a strategy that leaves 20 or 30 percent of the trees.

Tom Partin, the president of the American Forest Resource Council, told the Eugene Register-Guard that his group supports the dry forest strategy but not the project for wet forests.

Francis Eatherington with the environmental group Cascadia Wildlands said she’s not so sure about the projects and that there is no gridlock to solve in how forests are managed.

But the pilot projects are a start. And we’re glad to see two veterans of the timber wars out there trying to come up with new solutions.

Another compelling project, at Evergreen State College in Olympia, is studying the feasability of growing moss commercially. There is a high demand for moss from the floral industry, which consumes 37 million dry kilograms of moss each year. Because of the high demand, many people harvest moss illegally from private and public forestland, which can hurt the health of forests.

The commercial viability of moss is another example of the richness of our working forests. Our forestland is about much more than just trees.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forestry Research, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry, Washington

New spotted owl plan is rushed and off-target, forestry groups say

February 25th, 2011

Forestry groups representing timber companies across the territory of the spotted owl recently sent a joint letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service saying that the new owl recovery plan is coming out too soon and without the best science to back it up.

The new plan is expected to be released any day now, and the federal government says it will be final, even though there are still several months before a court-ordered deadline of June 1.

The letter was signed by the National Alliance of Forest Owners, American Forest Resource Council, California Forestry Association, Washington Forest Protection Association and the Oregon Forest Industries Council.

Here is what the groups had to say in a press release accompanying the letter:

Instead, the recovery plan would hurt forest owners and the rural economy by tying up private lands, and increase the risk of wildfire by reducing efforts to thin forests and improve forest health.  The plan also offers few remedies for the central factor in the spotted owl’s decline: the invasion of a more dominant species, the barred owl.

“We agree with the communities, conservation groups and Federal agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service, who continue to express grave concerns about the spotted owl plan as written.” said David Tenny, President and CEO of the National Alliance of Forest Owners.  ”The draft plan was incomplete and in need of additional science and input from resource experts to address key shortcomings affecting owl recovery.  The expedited pace for publishing the final rule ahead of the June 1 deadline suggests that the agency has not adequately addressed these shortcomings, and the agency hasn’t provided a good answer for why it is moving so quickly.”

No one seems to be happy with this spotted owl plan — environmental groups and timber companies both — and yet the federal government is still trying to ram it through.

California Forestry Association President David Bischel stated, “Ironically, some of the most robust populations of Northern Spotted Owls occupy sustainably managed private forests of Northern California.  The proposed recovery plan completely ignores the positive benefits provided by pro-active forest management, and potentially adds more regulatory gridlock without focusing on the two most significant impacts to Northern Spotted Owl populations … namely risk of habitat loss from catastrophic wildfire, and the invasion of the more dominant Barred Owl species.”

“The new federal plan focuses instead on the taking of private forestland, which will hurt timber communities without helping the spotted owl,” said Ray Wilkeson, President of the Oregon Forest Industries Council.

“There is no evidence the sweeping policy changes contained in the draft plan will help the owl.  Instead, they will lead to at least a 30 percent reduction in commercial thinning harvest volume on Forest Service lands where the owl lives.  This not only hurts forest health, it will lead to further job loss in a time of unprecedented unemployment in our rural communities,” said Tom Partin, President of the American Forest Resource Council.

The battle to come up with a plan that actually helps the owl, while still maintaining our rural economies, will be an ongoing process and continue long after the new plan comes out in the next week. But what federal officials have come up with so far is not promising, to say the least.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry, Washington

The promise of biomass over coal

February 18th, 2011

The Seattle Times recently ran a laughable op-ed from an anti-biomass activist, full of wild and unsubstantiated claims about the industry. Duff Badgley tries, for instance, to claim that there won’t be enough woody debris to supply the biomass plants that are being built in Washington, when in fact the University of Washington just completed a study of the six counties most likely to host biomass plants and found there would be plenty of debris to supply the plants.

Badgley also criticized Peter Goldmark, the state commissioner of public lands, for his proposal to use biomass to make jet fuel. Goldmark is coming up with innovative solutions to meet our country’s renewable energy goals, and all a guy like Badgley can do is make empty complaints.

Goldmark himself had an op-ed in the Times a few days later, where he describes the benefits of biomass and contradicts the small number of activists who would rather live with dirty fossil fuels than explore clean alternatives.

At the same time, we have no time to waste. If we let our fears about the challenges of renewable-energy technology stop us in our tracks, we will never achieve the very real environmental gains that these technologies offer. If we refuse to move forward with biomass, then the burning of more coal and fossil fuels will be the alternative. A renewable-energy future fulfills our state and national imperative to wean ourselves off imported oil.

Meanwhile, biomass has been at the forefront of discussion in Oregon as well. Gov. John Kitzhaber just announced a grant program that will allow forest product companies to complete feasibility studies for possible biomass plants. Kitzhaber, who was newly elected in November after serving as governor from 1995-2003, has made biomass one of the highlights of his economic agenda.

President Obama visited the Portland area this week, and Tony Hyde, a Columbia County commissioner, used an op-ed in the Oregonian to encourage the president to let the biomass industry move forward and become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently delayed its regulatory decision on biomass emissions for three years, but it’s still unclear what its final decision will be.

Hyde said the biomass industry could have faced “possible extinction” if the EPA had decided this year to treat biomass emissions just like those from coal plants.

In fact, recent data supported Oregonians’ concerns about the effect of the (EPA) tailoring rule on the biomass industry. In December, Forisk Consulting found that the tailoring rule would have jeopardized as many as 26,000 renewable energy jobs and $18 billion in capital investment, as well as put more than 130 renewable energy projects at risk of delay or even cancellation. In addition, as many as 30 states would have been unable to achieve a 15 percent renewable energy standard — a standard much lower than the 25 percent that our state is attempting to achieve.

Hyde certainly speaks for everyone involved in the biomass industry when he writes:

I urge the president to take a look at our state’s potential for renewable energy generation and green job creation and affirm the carbon neutrality of biomass while taking steps to support the long-term growth of the industry.

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Posted in Biomass, Climate Change, Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry, Washington

Taking a shotgun approach to a thorny problem

February 11th, 2011

The federal government just does not seem like it knows what it wants to do about the spotted owl.

First, the Bureau of Land Management pulled out of a timber sale in Southern Oregon because it said the sale could not meet new logging restrictions designed to protect the spotted owl.

This did not go over well with timber companies.

“If (Interior Secretary Ken Salazar) is sincere about trying to get timber going again for counties and local businesses down there, they’ve got to take on things with big problems,” said Scott Horngren, an attorney for the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group in Portland. “If they are not going to do that, you’re just basically playing games.”

The federal government doesn’t even know what those new logging restrictions are going to be. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is still working on a new spotted owl recovery plan, and the early draft that’s been released is full of problems.

Just last weekend, the Oregonian broke the news that the feds are considering shooting barred owls as part of the new spotted owl recovery plan. As part of the story, the reporter tagged along with timber managers as they shot barred owls with a shotgun, and accompanying the story is a photo of 4 dead barred owls splayed out on a table.

The Oregonian’s story has attracted a lot of comments, and both environmental groups and timber advocates seem to be somewhat surprised that the federal government would take such an unusual step.

In the article, some timber leaders and local officials say the proposal is a sign that the federal government is grasping at straws and doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Down in timber country, Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson  calls the proposal to shoot barred owls an example of “dysfunctional” forest policy. Counties like his depend economically on federal timber, which Robertson says is managed to benefit a species that can’t be recovered.

“When nature takes a turn, it’s going to prevail no matter what we try to do,” he says. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s nonsense to shoot one species to benefit another. I don’t think the public will accept it.”

The proposal is also another reminder that the barred owl, a larger and more aggressive species, is the primary reason why the spotted owl is still in decline 20 years after being listed as endangered. So why does the federal government still seem intent on taking more forestland away in the new recovery plan to provide for habitat, while at the same time going to such radical means to eliminate the barred owl?

The shootout does interfere with what happens in nature all the time: survival of the fittest.

“Population dynamics between two native species should not be artificially manipulated,” says Blake Murden, wildlife and fisheries director for Port Blakely Tree Farms in Tumwater, Wash. The company is not anti-owl. In 2009 it agreed to manage 45,000 acres as spotted owl habitat in exchange for protection from additional logging restrictions.

Murden says barred owls expanded rapidly because they adapt well to mixed habitat and eat a variety of prey, while spotted owls prefer old-growth to nest and, in most of its range, flying squirrels to eat.

“It’s a generalist and a specialist,” Murden says, “and invariably the generalist will win.”

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Posted in Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry, Washington

Baby steps vs. real reform

January 20th, 2011

Earlier this month, we wrote about Hal Salwasser, the dean of the School of Forestry at Oregon State University. Salwasser described in an Oregonian article how our federal forestland is suffering from neglect and no longer offers any economic or social value.

With a new spotted owl plan still being formulated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the question of whether we should be thinning and selectively harvesting our federal forests in the West is especially pertinent.

Salwasser mentioned pilot projects in Western Oregon that are bringing timber companies, environmental groups and the federal government together to selectively harvest federal forestland, thin the forests to protect from wildfire and also create better habitat for the spotted owl.

The Medford Mail Tribune wrote last week about one of the projects in the Applegate Valley near Medford. The paper quoted local residents and government officials who were excited about a more collaborative approach to federal forestland.

“This is the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about for 20 years,” (said Jack Shipley, head of a community partnership that helped get the project off the ground.) “Instead of fighting about jobs versus owls, we all come to the table and have both. This will be ecologically driven but will include jobs.”

“…We have moved beyond the ‘cut or no-cut’ argument,” (Shipley) said. “We are saying there needs to be active management on the landscape. We want to move forward and do something proactive.

But Doug Robertson had a different take on the pilot projects in an insightful op-ed in the Capital Press. Robertson is the head of the Association of O&C Counties, a group of Oregon counties with a large amount of federal forestland.

In regard to the pilot projects, he said “while I am hopeful for success, my expectations are low.” Robertson added that the proposed new spotted owl plan — and current federal rules — make it almost impossible to smartly manage federal forestland.

He said he did not hear promising answers in a recent meeting with federal officials.

The spotted owl expert from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made no mention of the barred owl, in spite of a growing consensus that a major threat to spotted owl survival is the larger, more aggressive and invasive barred owl.

When asked how the agency would deal with this threat, the expert said the barred owl could be trapped, but he admitted that he had contacted many agencies on the East Coast, where the barred owl originated, but none of the states contacted wanted any of their native barred owls returned to them. The spotted owl expert mentioned shooting the barred owl, but doubted the public would support it.

The concern voiced by many is that we are building management policy for federal forest around the recovery of a species that can’t be recovered.

There is no doubt that the pilot projects in Oregon are promising, but much deeper reform of our federal policies needs to be done.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forest Fires, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Turning back to our federal forests

January 7th, 2011

It’s frustrating – especially with a new and flawed spotted owl plan under consideration — to think about the failed dreams and wasted potential of our forestland. So many lives and communities have been ruined by onerous harvest limitations that don’t have any connection to science or reality.

Hal Salwasser, the dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, understands this. In an extensive piece in the Oregonian, he describes how federal forest policy has created forests that are failing on all levels: suspectible to forest fires and beetles and also of no economic or social value.

Instead, he says, it’s time to reclaim the federal forests as a source of community wealth and health by making more timber available for logging. We can do it, he says, by returning to areas where trees were logged in the 1960s to 1980s, were replanted and have grown to suitable size. That can be done without screwing up the environment, without cutting old growth and without grinding intrusive new roads into roadless areas, he says.

Salwasser cites a U.S. Bureau of Land Management harvest project in southwestern Oregon as “a good experiment” in balancing harvesting with environmental stewardship.

Using federal forests for responsible harvest again will make the forests and their surrounding communities healthier.

In Salwasser’s view, Oregon has hundreds of thousands of federal acres that can be part of a sustainable timber supply. Another harvest of replanted trees would avoid cutting old growth, building new logging roads or violating stream setbacks and habitat protection rules added in the intervening years.

Forest productivity and mill efficiency have increased so it takes fewer trees to meet the international demand for wood products, says Salwasser, who has been dean for a decade at OSU.

“That frees up the rest of the forest to do something else,” such as provide wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration and water filtration.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forest Fires, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Delving into the impact of the spotted owl

December 17th, 2010

The same week that the public comment period ended on the new federal spotted owl plan, The News-Review in Roseburg, Ore., did a seven-part series on the impact of the listing of the spotted owl 20 years ago.

The series is illuminating, describing everything from death threats and lost jobs to how the city of Roseburg and Douglas County have tried to keep themselves going in recent years with new businesses and new ideas.

Unfortunately the News-Review this week just started a subscription-only model for its website, so the stories can’t be read in their entirety for free. But the series is well worth the $4.95 for a one-week subscription to the paper.

What is most striking about the series is the devastation that the spotted owl listing wrought on the timber-dependent community — and how fresh the wounds still are 20 years later.

Just take a look at some of the statistics reported by the paper:

Between 1988 and 1998, the number of lumber and plywood mills in Oregon declined by nearly half, from 252 to 127. Twenty mills closed in Douglas County alone, according to timber consultant Paul Ehinger of Eugene. Some 2,800 jobs in the wood-products industry in Douglas County vanished within two years of the owl being listed.

More than half of the 60,000 Oregon workers who held jobs in the wood-products industry at the beginning of the 1990s no longer had them by 1998, according to a report published in the Journal of Forestry in 2003.

By the end of the decade, nearly half of those who left the timber industry disappeared from state employment records. The missing workers were likely either retired, unemployed or living in another state.

Jim Geisinger, the (Douglas Timber Operators) executive director from 1976 to 1981 and now the executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers, said that in the early ’80s, the Umpqua National Forest sold 360 million board feet a year.

“Today, Umpqua National Forest is selling only about 10 percent of that,” he said.

A study by economists from the Portland-based consulting firm ECONorthwest, Oregon State University and the Oregon Employment Department tracked 18,000 former timber workers between 1990 and 1998 who found another job in Oregon. Nearly half found work in the service and retail sectors. One-third were employed in the manufacturing and construction industries.

The spotted owl listing impacted more than just job numbers — it affected lives. The bitterness was unleashed and received by both sides.

Probably the ugliest manifestation of the community’s anger came in the form of death threats to a variety of people.

Robert Heilman, a Myrtle Creek-based essayist and former laborer, said half-humorously the death threats seemed to follow a pattern.

“It struck me as odd at the time. Local environmentalists were getting (threatening) phone calls, and local timber people were getting letters from Lake Forest Park, Washington, and Garberville, California,” said Heilman, author of “Overstory Zero: Real Life in Timber Country.” “Timber people do hate by phone calls and environmental people by mail.”

Even after two decades, the bad feelings are still strong. Residents are understandably still reeling from the loss of their livelihoods, their traditions and their lifestyles.  The environmentalists, meanwhile, are unapologetic, even though the spotted owl listing has done absolutely nothing to save the spotted owl.

Heilman finds it difficult to say what the community has learned at this juncture, 20 years after the turmoil generated by a shy, forest-dwelling bird.

“In the short run, there’s an awful lot of anger out there still,” he said. “I’m optimistic in the long run … but history tells me that fundamental change takes a long time.”

If you do buy a subscription, here are links to all the articles in the series.

Part I: Overview

Part II: Interviews with five people who lived through the listing

Part III: Profile of a logger who weathered the storm

Part IV: Environmentalists say original forest plan was undermined

Part V: Barred owl causes spotted owl population to decline

Part VI: Businesses diversify from timber

Part VII: The job market adjusts

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Posted in Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry

Port Blakely leads the way

December 3rd, 2010

As the debate continues over the proposed new federal spotted owl plan, the Oregonian takes an in-depth look this week at a unique arrangement between a timber company and the federal government over protecting the owl.

The headline alone for the story indicates this isn’t going to be a typical tale of timber companies and environmentalists duking it out: “In a timber wars turnabout, Washington tree farm improves habitat for spotted owl.”

Port Blakely Companies, which is based in Seattle but has operations around the world, is doing the “timber wars turnabout” in question. On 45,000 acres in Washington’s Lewis and Skamania counties, Port Blakely is creating habitat for the spotted owl and marbled murrelet in exchange for being exempted from any future logging restrictions. The company gets to log its land but also has to make sure that significant habitat remains. This includes creating habitat by deliberately killing some trees because dead trees become homes for so many species, and leaving some limbs and fallen trees on the ground.

As the paper points out, entering into such a “safe harbor” agreement with the federal government is unusual, even if the benefits to Port Blakely are clear.

…(I)t’s a private landowner engaged in leap-of-faith collaboration with regulatory agencies, and safe harbor agreements are a relatively new option. Since the first one in 1995, protecting North Carolina woodpeckers, more than 400 landowners in 23 states have signed agreements to benefit 75 creatures listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Only three agreements cover spotted owls, however, and only two are for marbled murrelets. Port Blakely’s agreements are by far the largest in each category; the next-largest spotted owl safe harbor is 2,200 acres near Humboldt, Calif.

It’s a surprising turn, given that the spotted owl in particular was at the center of timber war lawsuits, noisy protests and rancorous legislation that drastically reduced logging in the federal forests of Oregon and Washington. Port Blakely’s agreements, signed in 2009, have environmentalists nodding cautiously while other timber companies look on with a mix of interest and skepticism.

“Nobody’s called us crazy to our faces,” laughs Teresa Loo, Port Blakely’s communications manager.

Creating habitat is one thing, but the spotted owl has bigger problems. Eric Forsman, a biologist at Oregon State University and one of the nation’s leading experts in spotted owls, tells the Oregonian that the Port Blakely project probably won’t help the owl much, the biggest reason being that the spotted owl is declining not because of poor habitat but because the larger barred owl is pushing the spotted owl out of its territory.

Still, Port Blakely, the federal government and environmental groups see the project as worthwhile because it represents a new paradigm: working together to achieve common goals.

Here’s how Court Stanley, president of Port Blakely Tree Farms, put it:

“The conversation has changed,” he says. “I firmly believe there is a good path where working forests and protection of wildlife and water go hand in hand.”

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Posted in Federal Issues, Oregon, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry, Washington

More time to have say on spotted owl plan

November 16th, 2010

As we wrote here and here, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is getting close to issuing a revised spotted owl plan and is taking public comment on the proposed plan. That 60-day comment period would have ended about now, but the feds just announced that the comment period is being extended another month, until Dec. 15th.

This is good news. The revised spotted owl plan has a lot of problems, as we outlined here, and more time will mean a few more weeks for the federal government to receive feedback and to reconsider some of the more onerous portions of the plan.

While the timber industry and members of Congress from Oregon and Washington asked for the extension, it appears that even conservation groups wanted more time, according to the Associated Press.

The timber industry and members of Congress asked for an even longer extension. They said the draft proposed significant changes to the 2008 plan, including a consideration for the first time of private lands in saving the owl from extinction.

“What’s the rush,” Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said in a statement. “It’s as if they are trying to hide fatal flaws in the plan.”

The timber industry and conservation groups both said they wanted to see details about a system of habitat reserves that would be created to protect owl habitat.

“It’s unclear whether they will actually have reserves for the owl, or something similar to what was rejected previously by scientific peer review,” said Dominic DellaSala, president of the Geos Institute, a conservation group. “Right now we’re still waiting for what’s behind the curtain.”

Use the extended comment period to let the Obama administration know that the revised plan has serious problems. It’s critical that people who are concerned about the viability of working forests make their voices heard.

Here is where to submit comments:

Emailed comments can be sent to: NSORPComments@fws.gov. Written comments should be submitted to: Field Supervisor, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Oregon Fish and Wildlife Office, 2600 SE 98th Avenue, Ste. 100, Portland, OR 97266.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Spotted Owl, Timber Industry