Timber: To cut or not to cut?
Question of timber harvesting in Clatsop and Tillamook state forests divides residents
By CASSANDRA PROFITA, The Daily Astorian, 1/29/2010 [here]
SEASIDE - A proposal to cut more timber on the Clatsop and Tillamook state forests has divided North Coast residents.
At a hearing in Seaside Thursday on proposed changes to the Oregon Department of Forestry’s 2001 Northwest Oregon State Forest Management Plan, about a dozen people voiced opposing viewpoints on whether the new plan would be better or worse than the old one.
The plan aims to balance the economic, environmental and social values of the 630,000 acres of forestland in the Coast Range, including 150,000 acres of the Clatsop State Forest and 300,000 acres in the Tillamook State Forest.
But, as State Forests Deputy Chief Mike Cafferatta explained Thursday, the 2001 plan - which took about six years to create - is failing to meet its goals for generating timber revenue.
If foresters were to increase logging to meet the original revenue targets, they would fall short of the plan’s environmental goals of creating older tree stands that provide habitat and ecosystem health.
The Oregon Board of Forestry is now considering changing the plan to reduce the goals for older-type forests from 40 to 60 percent of the landscape to 30 to 50 percent to allow for more timber harvest and better economic returns on the forestland.
To free up more forestland for logging, the board is also looking at dropping its federal Habitat Conservation Plan, designed to protect species listed under the Endangered Species Act, and replacing it with a state-run Species of Concern Strategy, which would take a new approach to protecting habitat for 40 species, including those listed as threatened and endangered. The resulting level of timber harvest would put state forests at 72 percent of the output they would get under an industrial forest management model. … [more]