Trump logging push hits home in Lane County’s checkerboard forests

In a small lumber shed, Dave Eisler and Jason Gonzales stood between towering honey-colored, raw hardwood boards they milled from the forest around them. 

Each plank bore its own defining feature — some with dark grain and bark edges, others with warm tones that shifted iridescently in the light — all reflective of the diversity of what grows in the coastal range that stretches through western Oregon. 

The pair doesn’t source from tree farms, which often are just monocultures featuring a single species such as Douglas fir, but instead salvage trees toppled during storms or powerline maintenance. Because the wood comes from forest rather than crop, the species vary: bigleaf maple, red alder, ash, cherry and yew. 

“There are those of us who love wood, the character of it, the feel of it, everything,” said Eisler, but who added a caveat: “the big logs are a hell of an effort.” 

That work happens on a sawdusted hill near the shed, where they roll logs onto a 25-foot track and manually push a gas-powered blade through them. Then they rotate the log and repeat. Despite its sprawl, the setup is simple compared with that of industrial milling — no hydraulics or automation.

Even so, Eisler and Gonzales produce enough to sell boards for furniture and cabinetry, and to build sheds, barns and a house on the 200-acre property where they live with their families. 

It’s small-scale forestry, unlike that of their neighbors. 

Halfway between Eugene and Florence, Eisler and Gonzales are in a literal patchwork of property ownership — a land pattern of private, public, private that extends across 18 counties. 

Since buying land in 1979, Eisler has joined collaborative groups that bring small forestland owners like himself together with those around him including businesses and federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. The discussions brought everyone to the table, but they were still tough. 

While Eisler supports harvesting, it is in balance with keeping the integrity of an ecosystem intact for wildlife and future generations. And many of the neighboring properties have supported large logging operations with practices he and Gonzales say can compromise their families’ access to clean drinking water. 

“We’ve been head-to-head for quite some years now, and this Trump era has made it even worse,” said Eisler. “It’s just an ongoing battle. You think you’ve solved it, and then things change.” 

Now, the Bureau of Land Management is revising its Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan, which provides direction for roughly 2.5 million acres of land once owned by the Oregon and California Railroad.

Named for that railroad, the O&C lands are concentrated in Oregon, including Lane County, where about 277,000 acres run parallel to Interstate 5 — flanking Eugene and Springfield and extending west toward Deadwood and east to Dexter Lake.

The Trump administration is seeking to increase timber harvest, pointing to levels from the 1960s and 1970s, when clear-cutting reshaped forest policy. The proposal could push logging to levels up to 10 times what Eisler and Gonzales see today.

Acting Bureau of Land Management Director Bill Groffy said “bringing timber production back is essential to reviving local economies,” a view echoed by some Lane County leaders, as timber revenue continues to support county budgets.

Whether this one-of-a-kind temperate rainforest should be managed primarily for timber production or ecological protection is a decades-old debate — one taking on new urgency in a warming climate. 

‘A legacy of railroad corruption’

Steven Beda switches on GPS tracking when he rides his bicycle through places like Marcola, where the land changes drastically, mile by mile, in the Bureau of Land Management checkerboard. 

A University of Oregon professor of labor and environmental history in the Pacific Northwest, Beda maps those routes on his computer alongside satellite images and historical records, sharing them with students as he teaches about O&C lands.

“These are squares that are a legacy of railroad corruption,” he said, referring back to the late 19th century at the inception of O&C lands. 

“The whole idea was the federal government would keep a mile, and the railroad would get a mile, and the railroad could sell it off, but they could only sell it off to someone who would want a one-by-one square mile piece of land, which would be a family farmer,” Beda said. “[The] idea on the part of the federal government was to prohibit land monopolization. Additionally, we [the U.S.] want to continue to encourage white westward settlements. So we’ll solve both these problems with this land grant system that is this one-by-one checkerboard,” 

Instead, the railroad went on to do what the government was trying to avoid: selling much of the land at higher than the government’s fixed price and in large swaths to single buyers seeking profit. Congress intervened, and in the absence of a fully built railroad, the remaining land was returned to federal control through the O&C Lands Revested Land Act of 1937, eventually falling under the Bureau of Land Management. 

But the checkerboard was set. 

“It’s been a constant fight over logging on those lands,” said Beda.

Timber companies cut aggressively through the mid-20th century, with harvests peaking in 1964 at nearly 1.6 billion board feet — much of it from forests like those in Lane County. 

Under the O&C Act, counties received a share of timber revenue as the Bureau of Land Management sold trees to companies while retaining public ownership of the public land — land that, once logged, was often left stripped to stumps and brush. 

Many residents didn’t like what they saw.  

In the decades that followed came the “timber wars,” as tensions boiled over between logging interests and environmentalists seeking to protect old-growth forests and species like the northern spotted owl. 

The conflict grew so intense that the Clinton administration intervened. In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan redrew the boundaries of where logging could — and could not — occur on federal land. It also deepened divisions, as mill closures and job losses rippled through timber-dependent communities.  

Since then, the region has struggled with lost county revenue and jobs. And in 2016, the Bureau of Land Management moved away from the Northwest Forest Plan, instead relying on its own Resource Management Plans for Western Oregon.

With those very plans up for amendments, many Republican politicians support reopening forests to logging, pointing to the O&C act’s mandate for permanent forest production. 

Managing forests ‘the way Congress intended’ 

After the Trump administration released its notice of intent to amend Bureau of Land Management policies in February, U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, a Republican who represents much of eastern and southwest Oregon, introduced an O&C Renewal Act to reaffirm timber as a primary purpose of the lands.

Leadership with the American Forest Resource Council and the O&C Association, which lobbies for timber interests in Oregon counties, published a statement in support of the administration and Bentz’s bill. 

“The O&C Renewal Act clarifies congressional intent, incorporates decades of legal guidance, and directs the federal government to manage these forests the way Congress intended,” said Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council. 

Both Bentz’s bill and the agency’s notice of intent are broad. While places such as Eugene and Springfield are still milling hubs, the proposals do not explain how long-shuttered infrastructure would be rebuilt locally to meet production levels of what may be a bygone era.

Additionally, the O&C Act operates alongside other federal laws — including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act — which require land to also be managed for a clean ecosystem, wildlife habitat, and give the public a say in how their land is used. 

Cutting ‘the public out of the process’

Hundreds of people convened in Eugene for the 44th annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference on the sunny weekend of March 13 and 14. In one of the panels in a University of Oregon meeting room, attorney David Woodsmall spoke with the western Oregon matrix projected behind him.

“[The lands] have already largely been heavily logged, and so that really increases the importance of the interspersed BLM land for conservation and connectivity,” Woodsmall explained. 

Woodsmall works for the Western Environmental Law Center, and this week represented a case in U.S. District Court over timber projects on Bureau of Land Management land in Southern Oregon. Even for him, litigation is not the preferred path for working out conflicts. But with fewer opportunities for direct collaboration with agencies and companies, he said, the options are narrowing. 

“The [Trump] administration is continuing to take more and more steps to cut the public out of the process and limit the scope of transparency in terms of the actions that they’re taking on public lands,” he said. 

An example is the current amendment process for O&C lands, in which the public was given about a month to submit comments virtually, ending March 23. There were no in-person meetings, unlike past revision periods under previous presidential administrations, which included multiple in-person meetings and a three-month comment period. That shift diminishes the voices of people who live on and around the land, he said.

“The reason so many people chose to live here is because of the access to nature,” said Woodsmall. “There is a local appreciation of the value and importance of wildlife and natural resources for the residents of Oregon. On the federal level, you have the exact opposite happening, which is this attempt to really chip away” at [foundational environmental laws.] 

‘Rich’ in many ways

M.L. Herring was among those drawn to the Oregon Coast, moving to Newport in 1974 after graduating from the University of Virginia. A freshly minted ecologist, she went on to work as a salmon biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, chasing wild salmon through mountain streams beneath giant old-growth forests. 

“You cut down an 800-year old forest, and it takes 800 years to grow back.”  M.L. Herring

She has spent her career studying this temperate rainforest — the largest of its kind in the world — and chronicles it in her recent book, “Born of Fire and Rain: Journey into a Pacific Coastal Rainforest.” 

It extends far beyond Oregon, she told Lookout Eugene-Springfield in an interview, “from the cedars in southeast Alaska down to the redwoods in Northern California.” 

“These lands are described as timber-rich, but they are rich in so many other services and values to the public,” she said. 

That is because deep, damp soils store massive amounts of carbon through sequestration — a process in which trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, roots and surrounding soil. Meanwhile, thick mosses, rotting logs and layered leaf litter act like sponges, soaking up and slowly releasing water. 

That living, saturated ground helps feed some of the cleanest municipal water supplies in the country, she said, and supports an underground web of fungi and microorganisms that keeps the forest alive. 

That ecological value is why some parcels under BLM management are designated as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern for intact ecosystems and wildlife habitat. Nineteen of those designations are in Lane County and now under review as part of the agency’s amendment, raising the possibility they could be opened to logging. 

“You cut down an 800-year-old forest, and it takes 800 years to grow back,” Herring said. “A forest is not a tree farm.” 

“There’s nothing going on in there that resembles the complexity and the water holding and the carbon holding, the biodiversity that is of an ecosystem,” she said.  

Harvesting in balance

For people like Eisler, it’s not just research — it’s practice. Alongside his forestry work, he has set aside 110 acres for carbon sequestration, earning income in a market where industrial businesses pay landowners to keep trees standing to offset their emissions. 

Those standing trees also provide a buffer against wind, a key driver of extreme wildfire.

Wildfire is a central argument for the Trump administration’s push for expanded logging, including its move to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which it says will improve access for forest treatments that reduce risk. 

But for those who live in and study the Coast Range, a wet forest does not have the same needs as the drier forests east of the Cascade Mountains. While coastal forests still benefit from low-intensity burns that clear built-up vegetation and return nutrients to the soil, they say management must be tailored to the region. 

The administration’s latest BLM notice points to treatments such as salvaging as a method for removing fuel that can burn quickly into an intense fire. And that’s work Eisler and Gonzales already do. 

“If they say they’re trying to help communities survive, wildfire is an area where the science is clear and we need help with home hardening,” said Gonzales, referring to upgrades that give properties and people a better chance of surviving wildfire. 

What his community needs most from the government, he said, is help managing grass along roadsides, where sparks from passing vehicles can ignite brush — the kind of risk that keeps him up at night. 

After the public comment period closes Monday, the Bureau of Land Management will begin drafting an environmental impact statement. That could include proposals for building new roads or reopening decommissioned ones — like an old forest route just a few hundred feet from his home. 

“That’s my worst fear,” he said.