Trump’s push for more logging on BLM forests bumps up against environmental laws

Editor’s Note: The Bureau of Land Management is revising its plan for forest lands around Eugene and Roseburg to advance the Trump administration’s goal to expand timber production. But agency documents raise questions about whether these forests can sustain that level of harvesting. Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s continuing series “The Last Stand” explores the latest chapter of a decades-long dilemma.

If you draw a circle around the Bureau of Land Management districts that stretch across western Oregon, Eugene and Springfield sit at the center.  

It’s not just geographically. The cities are in the thick of it economically and environmentally, too.

The BLM’s Northwestern Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan guides multiple districts and offices — the Northwest Oregon District (which recently merged the Eugene and Salem districts), Coos Bay, Salem and the Swiftwater Field Office of the Roseburg District — through decisions on nearly 1.3 million acres of forests and natural areas. Almost half of those acres are designated as Late Successional Reserve, a land allocation that protects dense old forests. 

Nearly a fifth is the Harvest Land Base, an allocation for timber.

Also in this plan is a declaration that sets a yearly volume of timber that the agency must sell to buyers. This volume is not measured by a tree count, but by how much wood those trees – as logs – will produce at mills. 

That number is 162 million board feet each year, supplied from about 4,970 acres cut annually within the Harvest Land Base. Underlying these timber targets is the Oregon and California Railroad Act, a nearly century-old law that requires ongoing timber from the forests that flank Interstate 5 as it passes through Eugene, Roseburg and Grants Pass.

BLM has said it has created impossible targets on what this land can produce. It revised its plan in 2016, saying that harvesting at targets set in its 1995 plan was ecologically and legally unviable. It pointed to new science and updated federal policies — specifically recovery plans for the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, species whose existence was threatened after historic logging heavily depleted their nesting habitats. 

Now, the BLM wants to revise the plan again, blaming environmental laws and policy borne out of the “timber wars” of the 1990s. The agency wants to return to timber yields of the pre-1990s. To do so, the preliminary revision would nearly quadruple the active Harvest Land Base by reallocating lands currently set aside for conservation. 

As part of the rationale, Bill Groffy, the acting BLM director, pointed to advancing the Trump administration’s orders to prioritize domestic timber production. Overseeing the revision is Kimberly Prill, the acting BLM state director for Oregon and Washington. 

The agency leaders also call out wildfire management, another divisive issue. 

According to a notice of intent posted to the Federal Register in February, the proposal outlines competing mandates of timber and conservation, but it focuses on economic output rather than seeking a compromise for other interests on public lands, such as recreation and clean water.

While a statutory conflict is hardly anything new in the Pacific Northwest, a recent case has played out on the ground in an old-growth forest on the Lane-Douglas county line, about 60 miles southwest of Eugene in the BLM’s Blue and Gold timber project. 

In May, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai stopped the project after finding that BLM wasn’t following its own rules. The agency is subject to multiple laws, two of which Kasubhai found the agency violated. 

Kasubhai’s order followed almost two years of litigation between BLM, the timber industry group American Forest Resource Council (supporting BLM), and conservation groups including Eugene-based Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild.

It came after questionable operations in one timber stand. A stand is a group of trees that foresters manage as a single unit — based on shared characteristics like age, species and location. 

In one of the stands in the Blue and Gold projects, loggers had felled a giant tree, more than 40 inches in diameter and older than 175 years. The BLM plan prohibits cutting this kind of tree. The agency considers this size and age of tree as reflecting a biological legacy: an ecological building block that helps carry a stand into its next cycle of life. 

The fallout was far-reaching. This one stand has become a microcosm of the timber pressures the agency faces through its own policy goals. It also has become a reflection of where people stand: some left without jobs, some left without their forests. 

It led Lookout Eugene-Springfield to the question: If the public isn’t benefiting from their own lands, then who is? 

Lookout is exploring this question through its developing series, “The Last Stand.” The first installment starts in the days after this tree fell. 

What happens next could come in the following weeks or months as the BLM under the Trump administration makes revisions to the Resource Management Plan. While it will be written in some cases across the country, it will also be written in communities around Eugene and Springfield, where people look at the same patch of forest and see very different things.