[The following article sources information from emails obtained through a public records request. All emails from the request are available on DocumentCloud.]
The Northwest Forest Plan, developed in the 1990s, is a set of regulations that reduced private industry logging on our public lands in parts of Washington, Oregon, and California. The U.S. Forest Service convened a committee that released a recommendations report for the plan in July 2024.
The committee was co-headed by Susan Jane Brown, an environmental lawyer who soured her reputation with some conservationists because of her increasing friendliness with the timber industry, and Travis Joseph, President of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry lobbying group that laid the groundwork for Trump’s Project 2025 assault on our public lands.
Putting the timber industry in charge of regulating the timber industry is a fool’s errand. It’s no different than putting the American Petroleum Institute in charge of updating our climate policies.
Joseph made his intentions to protect timber industry interests clear to the committee. “My lens and posturing on the [Northwest Forest Plan Federal Advisory Committee] is to try and minimize further erosion of the very infrastructure – physical and human – needed to steward our forests,” noted Joseph in an email to committee members.
He said in an AFRC podcast episode that he was “surprised” and “pleased” that the committee agreed with him that the Forest Service needed to go beyond thinning, that it needed to log older trees and generate revenue for the timber industry. According to Joseph, the committee’s recommendations report pointed to one thing in particular – more logging on our public lands.
“What is this report saying? It’s saying do more work in the woods. Do more active management […] Make sure you’re providing the industry with what it needs to be sustainable,” stated Joseph.
The simple fact that a lobbying group can lead a committee on timber industry regulation updates, make its intentions crystal clear, and get what it wants shows the absolute travesty that is modern forest management. Joseph was not advocating for industry interests alone, though.
A severe lack of transparency
Brown said in an interview that communities could trust the committee’s recommendations partly because of its transparency. “[I]f you want flexibility, you're going to have to accept accountability, which means you need to be very transparent and honest with the public about how these forests are going to be managed.”
But the committee’s report was far from transparent. For instance, the reasoning behind the committee’s recommendation to relax or eliminate Survey and Manage, a Northwest Forest Plan regulation that AFRC claimed illegally reduced harvestable timber when it sued the federal government in 2002, differed between its publicly available report and its internal conversations.
The report noted, “We strongly urge the Forest Service to take appropriate actions to remove or lower existing barriers to active management in younger stands and dry forests, especially requirements to conduct pre-disturbance surveys for Survey and Manage species. Conservation of the remaining unprotected older forests would effectively address the habitat needs of old-growth dependent species for which the Survey and Manage program was originally designed, thus casting doubt on the continued necessity of the program.”
Yet, an email from committee member James Johnston, an Oregon State University assistant professor who worked with AFRC on a previous timber industry deregulation attempt, gave the impression that doing away with the Survey and Manage regulation was a capitulation to industry interests.
He stated, “[G]iven that old forest logging is off the table, it would probably be prudent to relax or do away with survey and management provisions. These sorts of formulations are win-win-win. There is more formal protection for old forest than the status quo, potentially more timber harvest than the status quo (because almost all timber harvest currently occurs as thinning in dry forest and plantations and there would be more of that), and less regulation to facilitate more/better restoration and timber harvest.”
Johnston was the main driving force behind the argument that the timber industry should be allowed to log more trees if we decided to protect old-growth. But his argument made little sense because the timber industry did not want to log old-growth.
Brown said she learned while on the committee that the timber industry no longer wanted old-growth. Joseph publicly stated, “The timber industry in the West [where the NWFP applies] does not need or want big, old-growth.”
Even Johnston, himself, told me in an email last year, “In the distant past, there was strong demand for large Douglas-fir in western Oregon because larger Douglas-fir are generally older Douglas-fir and the tight ring structure of old growth trees is highly valued for a lot of applications (particularly molding, veneer, etc.). But those days are long gone. Your average western Oregon timber mill runs pretty small trees.”
There was no logic in deregulating the timber industry as compensation for protecting something the industry “does not need or want.” The only logical conclusion is that the committee recommended timber industry deregulation because the timber industry wanted deregulation.
Doing the timber industry’s dirty work
Johnston explicitly called for more logging on our public lands for political reasons, quite a departure from his carefully curated ‘evidence-based scientist’ persona.
“Given this reality—that we can guarantee forest protection but can’t guarantee active management—it’s a mistake to whittle the allowable timber harvest base down to around 10% of the total land base, which is what our current proposed language would do, and then try and add additional protections on top of that for some portion of the young stands within that 10% of the total land base still eligible for timber harvest. At that point, no one associated with the timber industry is going to bother with our process, because, well, why bother? I’m concerned that we’ve already reached that threshold where there’s very little for the timber industry to even bother with,” Johnston noted in an email to committee members.
He added, “All we can do via forest planning to facilitate additional timber harvest is loosen rules and provide clear direction. But that doesn’t guarantee that timber harvest will happen. That’s worth repeating: We are all but guaranteeing more not less mature and old. We are not guaranteeing more logging. Because we can’t guarantee more logging. All we can do is try and make logging a little easier, and we’re not really doing much of that.”
Johnston, however, also advocated against protecting younger forests that may become future old-growth. “It's been suggested that we should think more spatially in terms of adding forests to new protection schemes such that forests that may have more potential as future old growth habitat be included in the protection scheme even if they fall under the age threshold. I disagree,” he stated in an email to committee members.
His opposition to future old-growth forest protections aligned with timber industry interests. Joseph made it clear in an AFRC podcast episode that the industry wanted to log trees in the 100 to 200-year-old range, or large trees inappropriate for thinning but too young to be considered old-growth.
Johnston’s support for Joseph’s goals for the committee was unwavering. In an email discussing the AFRC President’s edits to a community benefits matrix, Johnston said, “I’m very appreciative of [Travis Joseph’s] language.”
“I read the essential thrust of this language as elevating the importance of timber harvest and insisting that a NFWP amendment ensure that more not less timber harvest actually takes place. I am not troubled by this direction. I support it,” he added.
Johnston set himself apart from other committee members with his timber industry advocacy. He and Joseph spearheaded the narrative that we needed more logging to help rural communities.
Committee member Meg Krawchuk said in an email, “I recognize that we are talking about stands that currently are not reserved from timber harvest, and this has consequences for the profile of economies and livelihoods that we’ve discussed. Travis [Joseph] and James [Johnston] have eloquently made this point, that this would be further whittling down a small landbase available for harvest. Travis has asked us to consider what the parallel would be from the community economies perspective.”
Johnston also targeted me with pro-timber propaganda last year during an interview. He argued that there was no net gain to protecting Pacific Northwest trees because logging would increase elsewhere to meet demand.
Job loss would be the main result, from his perspective. His opinion is no different from the climate denier’s argument that the United States should not reduce carbon emissions because China will keep emitting carbon, and we’ll lose American jobs.
Committee recommendations benefit right-wing billionaires
The development of federal forest protections coincided with the neoliberal idea that cutting corporate taxes helped the working class (trickle-down economics). The timber industry successfully lobbied to slash its taxes in the 1990s, resulting in massive underfunding of public services in rural Oregon.
The industry lobbies against attempts to raise its taxes to this day and is directly responsible for the destruction of Oregon’s rural communities.
The winners with industry deregulation are always the owning class. In this specific case of the Northwest Forest Plan recommendations, the winners are the right-wing billionaires that own AFRC member Sierra Pacific Industries.
AFRC President Joseph took the committee to Eugene to visit an SPI-owned sawmill in early 2024. Joseph said in a press release that the committee was “indebted” to SPI for helping ensure that “recommendations are grounded in an understanding of their impacts.”
SPI’s First Quarter 2024 newsletter highlighted the tour it gave the committee members. It stated, “The tour also highlighted the critical relationship between forest management and log supply on public timberlands and mills, reinforcing the importance of collaboration between federal forest managers, policymakers, and industry leaders like us, to ensure a balance between conservation and community needs.”
The billionaire Emmerson family, the country’s largest private landowner and one of Oregon’s biggest right-wing political donors, owns SPI. The billionaires profited off government wildfire policies after substantial donations to Republican politicians managing our public lands.
In early 2023, SPI announced plans to modernize and expand its manufacturing capacity in Lane County, Oregon. The Emmersons need forest protections severely relaxed to recoup their investment.
SPI’s investment is not an opportunity to grow jobs and rural economies. The reality is that modernizing the company’s operations increases profits with little to no benefit for the working class.
Industry news reported that Pacific Northwest timber facilities invest in modern equipment to reduce labor costs. Oregon’s university researchers noted that creating a mass timber industry means competing with Europe which is much more automated and less reliant on manual labor.
Don’t be fooled by the committee’s attempt to deregulate the timber industry. It’s just another corporate handout disguised as forest restoration.
We’ve had 50 years of neoliberal rule that promised wealth would trickle down to the working class. It’s always been a myth.
Sounds bad. But what if the timber shills have a point?
The ‘deregulate industry to help rural communities’ narrative is a myth propagated by science deniers working for destructive industries like Big Oil and Big Tobacco. The myth exists so capitalists can convince you that regulation is socialism is communism is fascism taking away your freedoms and destroying your livelihoods.
Even so, Johnston’s arguments may have convinced you that protecting forests will do more harm than good. But your concerns are not insurmountable.
Are you afraid the private sector might become unwilling partners in forest restoration? No problem, we can make forest restoration a public good administered by the government.
The expansion of electricity to rural communities provides a perfect example. Many communities paid exorbitant electricity fees or were quite left in the dark by the private sector because of profitability issues. The government provided a better and cheaper electricity service to rural communities.
Are you worried about reduced logging volume causing job loss? Well, the federal government can create jobs.
A renewal of New Deal politics would apply to this issue. The federal government produced 20 million jobs and stimulated a floundering economy after the country’s worst depression.
Government job programs have the double impact of covering the need to restore forests. Believe it or not, forest restoration requires more than just cutting down trees.
A strong government solves many issues with the private sector. I know it might sound scary because anything the government does is socialism is communism is fascism, blah, blah, blah.
But the only thing you should be afraid of is right-wing billionaires controlling your politicians and public lands.
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