{"id":481773,"date":"2026-02-21T10:54:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T10:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/481773\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T10:54:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T10:54:11","slug":"oregon-old-growth-logging-trump-plan-could-clear-3-sq-miles-a-week-critics-warn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/481773\/","title":{"rendered":"Oregon old-growth logging: Trump plan could clear 3 sq. miles a week, critics warn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Federal officials are attempting to open up millions of acres of forests in western Oregon for \u201cmaximum\u201d timber production to \u201cadvance Trump administration priorities,\u201d including areas that are home to federally protected, vulnerable species, the Bureau of Land Management announced.<\/p>\n

The agency on Thursday shared in a notice of intent<\/a> that officials will propose new updates to the Western Oregon Resource Management Plans<\/a> that have governed logging and conservation on 2.5 million acres of forests in 17 Oregon counties for decades, and that were last updated in 2016. The notice kicks off a month-long public comment period that will wrap on March 23. The agency does not expect to hold any public meetings in advance of releasing its proposal, the notice said.<\/p>\n

About three-quarters of the 2.5 million federal acres, known as O&C lands for having once belonged to the Oregon and California Railroad, are protected from regular logging. But in its notice of intent, the land management bureau indicated it could return those acres to 1960s harvest levels, more than 10 times current harvest levels.<\/p>\n

\u201cBringing timber production back to historic levels is essential for reviving local economies and reducing the threat of catastrophic wildfires,\u201d said acting director of the land management bureau, Bill Groffy, in a statement. \u201cPresident Trump has made it clear \u2014 enhanced domestic timber production is vital for our national security, economic prosperity, and effective wildfire management.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"An Oregonian file photo shows logs cut from an old growth Douglas fir stand in Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the 1970s.Oregonian<\/p>\n

Conservationists have called it a plan to return to a time when the agency and the U.S. Forest Service clear cut roughly 3 square miles of old-growth forests per week, and an attempt to override years of court precedent protecting vulnerable species that depend on the stands. That level of logging nearly drove the federally protected northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet, a small seabird that nests in old-growth forests, to extinction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe public does not want to go back to the days of rampant old-growth clearcutting. They don\u2019t want to go back to dead salmon and polluted rivers, or see their favorite places on public lands liquidated in order to maximize profits for the greedy few,\u201d said Chandra LeGue, an advocate with the nonprofit conservation group Oregon Wild, in a statement. \u201cThese are treasured public lands, and we\u2019re going to fight for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his March executive order<\/a> \u201cImmediate Expansion of American Timber Production,\u201d President Donald Trump wrote that he\u2019d use the Endangered Species Act Committee, commonly referred to as the \u201cGod Squad,\u201d to override the species\u2019 protections standing in the way of increased logging. The committee earned its nickname given its authority to review and determine the fate of imperiled species, and it\u2019s been tapped rarely since its creation in 1978.<\/p>\n

In a statement, Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association for the commercial logging industry, celebrated the bureau\u2019s announcement that more acres would open for logging.<\/p>\n

\"\"A logged area in Tillamook County is pictured in 1992, in this Oregonian file photo. Oregonian<\/p>\n

\u201cBureau of Land Management lands in western Oregon continue to grow significantly more timber each year than is harvested, contributing to overstocked forest conditions and increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfire across much of the region,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Joseph said they are some of the most productive timberlands in the world. Bev Law, a forest scientist and professor emerita at Oregon State University, said they are the most effective carbon-storing forests in the world, as long as they remain intact.<\/p>\n

She called the plan to return to harvest levels of 1 billion board feet of timber per year \u201cinsanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese forests are the low hanging fruit \u2014 the temperate rainforests and the long-lived forests that we have in Oregon and Northern California \u2014 they live for thousands of years,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s carbon that\u2019s not in the atmosphere, and they still keep taking in more carbon as time goes on. The best thing that we can do is to let the forest grow, to try and turn this (climate change) around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arran Robertson, a spokesperson for Oregon Wild, said the plans governing the management of the federal forests in western Oregon exist because species were being driven to extinction in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The Bureau of Land Management under several presidential administrations has tried to allow more aggressive logging on the O&C lands, he said, but lawsuits stopped some of the most sweeping attempts, particularly under former president George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow this administration is going full throttle,\u201d Robertson said.<\/p>\n

\u2014Alex Baumhardt<\/p>\n

The Oregon Capital Chronicle<\/a>, founded in 2021, is a nonprofit news organization that focuses on Oregon state government, politics and policy.<\/p>\n

Reporters Alex Baumhardt contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal officials are attempting to open up millions of acres of forests in western Oregon for \u201cmaximum\u201d timber…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-481773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}