In My View: Senator Wyden's Forest Bill

Oregon Wild Eastern Oregon Wildlands Advocate and founding member Tim Lillebo opines on the East Side Forest Legislation - and a possible end to the timber wars.

East side forests have suffered from decades of mismanagement. Could this bill be the end of the timber wars and allow forests like this to flourish once again? Photo by Alan Cossitt

I was born and raised in Grant County and other parts of Eastern Oregon. To this day, I call the drier side of the Cascades — with its giant ponderosas, desert vistas and snow-capped peaks — my home. I love Oregon for the same reasons that people from Burns to Baker City, from Prairie City to Pendleton do. I love our towering forests. I love the slow bends of the John Day River. I love hunting in the backcountry.

Growing up in timber country, I did what came naturally and spent summers in the woods as a timber faller and thinner. Back in the early 1970s, a quick trip through the woods was all you needed to see that something was changing in the forest. By the late 1980s — after an explosion in industrial logging — the forests I had known as a child had been drastically altered.

In 1987 alone, more than 1.5 billion board feet of timber was cut down in Eastern Oregon’s federal forests. At the same time, the move toward automated mills and massive timber exportation meant that much of the local economic benefit from logging wasn’t even staying here in Oregon — though we were all paying for the decline of our forests.

I’ve dedicated the last 35 years of my life to protecting our dwindling old-growth forest ecosystems. For years, that meant driving all over Eastern Oregon filing appeals, challenging illegal logging sales in court, and going head-to-head with timber industry representatives in public debates and in the media. Today, it means something different.

Now, more than ever, there is common ground between conservationists and the timber industry around two ideas:

1) Oregon’s old-growth forests are too few and too important to log;
2) Restoration thinning in certain drier areas can improve forest resiliency, and provide jobs and wood products for rural economies for decades to come.

I believe strongly in those two ideas and feel future forest management will only be successful if we adopt them both.

Throughout my time as an advocate for Oregon’s wildlands, I have always let science be my guide. I fought to protect wilderness and roadless areas because ecologists said these were the last, best places for native wildlife to survive and thrive. I worked to protect forests along streams when biologists warned of the dire impacts riparian logging would inflict on threatened salmon and trout.

Now, the best available science tells us that past management has left some of our drier eastside forests out of whack and that careful restoration using prescribed fire, mowing and, yes, chainsaws is a crucial strategy to get them back to more natural conditions.

I’ve become such a fervent believer in this new restoration paradigm that I worked with the U.S. Forest Service, the Warm Springs tribes and other community stakeholders to design an old-growth restoration thinning project on the Deschutes National Forest. This winter, crews began implementing science-based restoration principles by cutting trees on the Glaze Forest project, and I am proud to see it.

The Glaze restoration project is not supported by some environmental groups that want no cutting on our public lands, nor is it supported by timber industry interests that want to cut the last of our old growth.

As noted, not all of my conservationist friends agree with me, and not all of them will support this approach. However, many environmental organizations — Defenders of Wildlife, The Nature Conservancy, Pacific Rivers Council and Oregon Wild, to name a few — support science-based restoration.

Of course, as environmentalists come to understand the need for a science-based restoration thinning program in Eastern Oregon, we’ve come to realize that much of the existing timber infrastructure is needed to carry out the work. I never thought I would say this, but we need some of Eastern Oregon’s timber mills to stay in business!

Sen. Ron Wyden’s recently announced Oregon Eastside Forest Restoration, Old-Growth Protection and Jobs Act would implement the common ground reached between conservationists and the timber industry. It would provide meaningful protections for old-growth forests and important streams, and it would ensure that necessary restoration work and the associated saw logs would be produced in a timely manner and not held up by lengthy process challenges.

A “blue ribbon” science panel, composed of eminent scientists, would recommend restoration actions. The bill represents a huge step forward for everyone.

To be sure, I will always fight to protect wilderness, roadless areas, wild and scenic rivers, old growth and other Oregon treasures to pass on to future generations. In addition, I’m now committed to fighting hard to pass the eastside forests bill and get active restoration going in our forests.

Tim Lillebo lives in Bend.

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