In the early 20th century, clearcutting huge swaths of ancient trees in the Pacific Northwest was routine. That was great for loggers, but it wasn’t great for biodiversity. In the 1990s, one imperiled bird — the northern spotted owl — took center stage in a looming fight over old-growth forests.
After researchers began studying the owl, they realized it could pose a challenge to the timber industry.
“The owl's habitat ranges from large contiguous blocks of older forest to patchwork habitats resulting from timber harvest and historic wildfire,” an announcer stated in a 1989 Bureau of Land Management video.
Clinton attempts to end the logjam
A court decision in 1991 essentially halted all logging in the range of the northern spotted owl, which by then was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Jerry Franklin was one of the scientists who worked on the Northwest Forest Plan. He said a presidential hopeful from Arkansas helped to clear the way.
“When [Bill] Clinton ran for president, he said he would solve this crisis because no timber was getting harvested in the Northwest,” said Franklin.
President Bill Clinton first organized the Forest Conference, an all-day meeting with scientists, tribes and the timber industry to tackle the issue and find consensus.
“We're all here because we want a healthy economic environment and a healthy natural environment because we want to end the divisions here in the Northwest and the deadlock in Washington,” Clinton said during his opening address at the conference.
Franklin was at the 1993 meeting in Portland and talked with President Clinton about what researchers had learned about old-growth forests.
“That's fundamentally the concept, to take the new knowledge produced in the last 20 to 25 years and put it to work in terms of trying to build forest landscapes that provide better for a mix of values,” Franklin said at the conference.
Balancing environmental laws and logging
Three decades later, Franklin said working on the Northwest Forest Plan was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He was excited to see the president prioritizing science in order to solve this deadlock.
“Somebody was going to have to produce a credible plan for conserving the northern spotted owl,” he said. “And he put together the science team to do it.”
Shortly after the conference, the White House assembled a team of around 100 scientists and gave them an almost unthinkable task: come up with ways to meet environmental laws and log as many trees as possible — and do it in just two months.
“The Northwest Forest Plan couldn't have come together in 60 days from scratch,” said Tom Spies, a former U.S. Forest Service scientist who was part of this team.
Spies said they relied on previous research and what he called “expert opinions” to develop the plan.
“You get in a room full of scientists and say, ‘Okay, I think it works like this. How many people, let's vote. How many people think it works like this? How many people think it works like that?’ And a lot of the science that went into the Northwest forest plan was that,” Spies said.
They presented a range of options to the president. But the outcome was clear, there was no viable way the government could meet its environmental obligations without major sacrifices to timber harvesting. President Clinton picked essentially the least bad option, one that would harvest the most timber while protecting the most habitat for native species. But no one really liked it: neither the loggers, the environmentalists nor the tribes.
“This was a tremendous gain for the conservation slash environmental movement,” said Norm Johnson, who worked for the College of Forestry at Oregon State University during the plan’s development “But, the way the analysis was done, it still showed that about half the species, you couldn’t guarantee they were protected.”
Little protection for the northern spotted owl or jobs
Johnson and the other scientists agree that the plan wasn’t very successful. Studies conducted 25 years later showed it’s done little to protect old-growth forests or the northern spotted owl.
“Despite net increases in NSO [northern spotted owl] forests on federal lands during the monitoring period, the population of territorial owls on federal lands decreased by an estimated 61.8 percent,” said one Forest Service study.
A lot of the decline is attributed to a rise of the invasive barred owl, which outcompetes the northern spotted owl for habitat.
And the timber industry suffered too. Employment in the timber industry as a whole dropped 40% between 2001 and 2013, a loss of 40,000 jobs.
“I still go through Sweet Home and Oakridge, and I say, ‘Oh, what did we do to these people? They didn’t deserve this,’” Johnson said.
Johnson said that they knew from the start that nothing scientists could come up with would please people, and they could never achieve the levels of timber harvests seen in the past. Johnson said he wished he had pushed officials to do more to help the people that would be affected by this plan because there was no way to prevent job losses.
“Even though almost nobody agreed with it, it’s still here.”
“I won’t forget sitting on the stoop in the old regional office building with one of my colleagues who helped on the timber harvest scheduling,” he said. “She went out for a smoke, and we were doing the numbers and said, ‘Oh my god, we're really going to badly impact a lot of people's lives. These results are really going to be traumatic for a lot of people.’ And so I had a real sense of foreboding.”
While $1.2 billion in federal funding was made available to help communities that suffered the major loss of timber jobs, later analysis found that the money wasn’t distributed evenly, didn’t do enough to help displaced workers and disproportionately favored larger communities with the ability to seek out grants and opportunities.
A missed opportunity
One major regret Jerry Franklin had was about the so-called “adaptive management areas.” These were special areas of forests across the region designated for research.
“The whole idea there was that there'd be a lot of freedom to explore different approaches to management of the forest in the AMAs, the adaptive management areas,” Franklin said. “And we proposed additional funding for them so that they could go immediately to work.”
But, Franklin said in the final version of the plan, these areas ended up with more restrictions on them, making them inaccessible for experimentation. He said the wildlife advocates were worried these areas would be used to find ways to harvest more timber.
“The majority of them, nothing significant got done because it was so difficult, and there was no extra funding available or anything for it,” Franklin said. “And so they, for the most part, just sat there.”
He said despite the outcome, it was the best they had. At the very least, it ended the court injunction on logging in the Pacific Northwest and put the emphasis on the ecosystem rather than the commercial value of the timber.
“Even though almost nobody agreed with it, it’s still here,” said Johnson.
All eyes now turn to major updates proposed by the U.S. Forest Service. The agency is making some big changes to the plan, including greater involvement of tribes, changing how forests are distinguished and a recognition of the threat of climate change.
It’s still unknown how the new Trump administration could change the plan. President Trump signed an executive order on March 1 ordering an expansion of timber production.
Public comment on the proposal ends on March 17, and the Forest Service hopes to adopt the changes by the end of the year.
