Forest visions clash over Freedom sale

In late March, the Washington Department of Natural Resources put the Freedom timber sale up for auction. Located on 138 acres of state forestland 17 miles northeast of Naselle, the sale offered over 8,500 metric board-feet of hemlock and Douglas fir. The DNR’s timber cruise report calls it some “nice looking wood.”

Nice enough for Stimson Lumber to bid more than $3 million, despite a conservation group’s appeal of the sale in Pacific County Superior Court a few weeks earlier. To the nonprofit Legacy Forest Defense Coalition (LFDC), the stands in question are far more than some nice looking wood. They are “rare examples of structurally complex, naturally regrown, biologically diverse Western Washington forests.” Or, as the group calls them, “legacy forests.”

These aren’t mutually exclusive characterizations but they do represent competing value systems and policy interpretations that the court will have to decide between when it hears the merits of the case in early August. Stimson Lumber has agreed to stay all logging operations until then.

In the meantime, the trees stand there, as they have for a century, unchanged by any human argument. The average diameter at chest-height of the salable Doug fir is two feet. Of the hemlock, a foot and a half. These averages exclude an acre or two of true old-growth that will not be logged, no matter the case’s outcome. There are numerous snags, along with natural blow-down and clearings. There are epicormic branches growing out of the wounds where old branches died and dormant buds waited for light to again filter through the canopy. There are shade-tolerant saplings in the understory, along with myriad shrubs, ferns and mosses.

Whether one sees all of this as some nice looking wood, or a legacy forest, or both, one thing is clear: of the Southwest Washington stands that are not yet old-growth, these are among the closest.

In 1997, the DNR adopted the State Trust Lands Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) — a long-term management plan negotiated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service in order to ensure compliance with the federal Endangered Species Act. It includes specific conservation strategies for northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets, and salmonids and other riparian-dependent species, while also acknowledging the presence of many unnamed species — especially on the heavily forested west side of the state. These, it groups into a broader, “Multispecies Conservation Strategy.”

This multispecies strategy is at the root of the Freedom sale argument. More specifically, a subsection thereof that projects the forest “age-class distribution that will likely result from expected management under the HCP and existing policies.” And these projections say that by 2097, 10 to 15% of the state’s west side forests will be at least 150 years old, which corresponds to the most complex, “Fully Functional” stage of development.

The first and most straightforward question before the court is whether this 10-15% older forest target constitutes a legal obligation. The DNR says it doesn’t.

“It’s not a requirement,” says Duane Emmons, assistant deputy for state uplands. “In fact, we have a letter from the federal services that says it’s not a requirement.”

But the LFDC argues that the DNR has already committed to the older forest target via multiple internal policies, and that it can no more renege on these than on the mandates of any other state or federal law. Chief among these internal policies is the 2006 Policy for Sustainable Forests (PSF), which states that the DNR “will target 10 to 15 percent of each Western Washington Habitat Conservation Plan planning unit for ‘older’ forests…” and that “through landscape assessments, the department will identify suitable structurally complex forest stands to be managed to help meet…[these] targets.”

The most recent of these landscape assessments was released in May, which seems to suggest that the DNR still sees a need to track its progress towards the older forest target, even if it progress towards the older forest target, even if it doesn’t consider the target to be a legally-binding deliverable. But in a recent suit brought by the LFDC on nearly identical legal grounds, a different court appeared receptive to the conservation group’s interpretation. In granting the LFDC’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the Last Crocker Sorts timber sale, the Jefferson County Superior Court ruled in January that “[t]he appellants have demonstrated how DNR’s approval of the timber sale…is contrary to its…policy” and that the “…approval of the timber sale…was arbitrary and capricious.”

Or in other words, the court seemed to be saying that the agency cannot simply adopt a policy, and then treat it as optional. DNR withdrew the Last Crocker Sorts timber sale before the case could proceed any further.

Enough already?

Should the Pacific County Superior Court take the same position as its Jefferson County counterpart, it will then have to decide whether the Freedom timber sale does in fact amount to a dereliction of the older forest target.

Again, DNR says no. The agency argues that it has already conserved enough acreage to meet the target by implementing the HCP’s other conservation strategies, and that even though not all of this acreage is currently at the desired age or complexity, it is projected to get there by the end of the century. The LFDC, citing spatial data obtained through public records requests, disputes both the quality and quantity of this designated acreage.

“Many of the areas that DNR says are protected are actually not protected,” said advocate and LFDC founder Stephen Kropp. “And stream buffers in isolation… can never provide the kind of fully functional or older forest habitat that is required by species that are associated with this type of habitat….”

Stephen Kropp, conservation group founder based on the mapping data he received from the DNR, Kropp says he has been able to identify clear overlaps between planned timber sales and supposedly conserved areas. The same data shows that almost half of all conserved, older forests in west side HCP planning units are contained within stream buffers.

“Which might not be a problem if you have a high stream density,” according to forest ecologist and OSU Professor Tom Spies, but “becomes a problem if you have low stream densities or narrow buffers, and then your protected areas… have lots of gaps in between them.”

Or, in other words, the distribution of older forests matter, and not just the amount.

But from the LFDC’s perspective, an even bigger issue is that the DNR’s interpretation of the older forest target as, at best, a non-binding guideline, has enabled it to avoid a complete accounting of older, complex stands outside of areas already protected under the HCP.

“If they were to do this [accounting],” Kropp claims, “it would show that there are almost as many acres of structurally complex forest outside of conservation areas....” And in his view, logging any of these acres, when they could instead contribute to a yet unfulfilled older forest target, “…defies common sense, and jeopardizes the viability of species that are already at risk of becoming listed as threatened or endangered.”

Forest ecologist and OSU Professor James Johnston puts it even more simply: “older forests are closer to becoming really old forests than young forests.” An observation so self-evident, that he can’t help but see where the LFDC is coming from:

“Why is the DNR logging trees that are old forest or about to become old forest now, when they’re trying to increase the amount of old forests? [That’s a] good question.”

The DNR does have an explanation for why it conserves some older forests and allows others to be logged. And again, it comes down to distribution — to making sure that the conserved areas are connected to each other. Dan Donato, a natural resource scientist for the DNR, explains:

“All the way back in the 90’s when a lot of very smart scientists and habitat ecologists were [deciding], ‘How do we best manage old forests in the long term?’ And the answer that they came up with is not to preserve every shred no matter where it is or no matter how small it is… Rather, the smarter way to manage that older forest habitat is to… block it up in ways that are actually going to be the most functional over the long term, which might involve letting some of it grow….”

Donato continues: “Then you get into the philosophical question of… ’What should we do with the postage stamps that are isolated out there in the meantime?’ And that’s a policy question… Or maybe it’s a social question, but it’s not so much a science question.”

Unsurprisingly, the LFDC doesn’t buy either the characterization of stands like those in the Freedom sale as “postage stamps,” or the idea that they can be logged because other forests have been set aside in more advantageous places. But, as Donato, points out, there isn’t an objectively correct answer to the distribution question.

That question is for society to wrestle with, because, as Johnston puts it, “[it’s] formed by what society wants and expects. It’s informed by goals and objectives.”

Competing interests

By goals, objectives, and indeed, core values. By one’s answer to the most fundamental question of all. What do you see when you look at these trees?

Many in the surrounding community can’t help but see the same nice looking wood that the DNR noted in its cruise report — the difference between local governments making ends meet or barely scraping by. In neighboring Wahkiakum County, “40% of our revenue is timber,” says county commissioner and longtime timber faller Dan Cothren. And in Pacific County, timber revenue has accounted for anywhere from 7% to 15% of the county’s total income over the past five fiscal years. “Which doesn’t seem like a lot,” says Pacific County Commissioner Lisa Olsen, “but we count on it.” By the DNR’s accounting, Pacific County would net $810,414 from the Freedom timber sale alone, which, for context, is 91% of the county’s projected total timber revenue for Fiscal Year 2023, and a 108% of the actual total from the previous fiscal year.

The DNR sees both the critical, biodiverse wildlife habitat that conservation groups see, but also the nice looking wood that counties rely on. It is obligated to see and manage for both values, by policies like the HCP on one side, and its fiduciary duty to state trust land beneficiaries on the other. But no matter what balance the state tries to strike between these values, somebody is going to be unhappy, and somebody is probably going to sue.

“If this sale was [our county’s income],” said Cothren, “I’d be fighting this tooth and nail, I’d be all over the DNR.”

Still, he reserves most of his ire for conservation groups like the LFDC — not because they see something different in the trees than he does, but because they strike him as unwilling to see things from his point of view. Some of Cothren’s neighbors, including renowned writer Bob Pyle, are conservation-minded and have strong disagreements with him. But these are people “I can sit down and talk to,” he said — something that he doesn’t feel he can do with most conservation groups:

“They don’t have to live this. We do. We’re here every day… And if we don’t have timber, we don’t have a county. That’s bottom line.”