Coast Range Association
The answer to the logging trust proposal is shared responsibility for
for county support. CRA and five
other organizations offer a solution.The image below is a link to the report.
Three new maps available detailing the DeFazio-
BLM fiduciary trust logging proposal.
We now have three maps that illustrate how the DeFazio, Schrader, Walden BLM lands logging scheme may look like.Originally, DeFazio's staff proposed a 80 year cut off for what gets cut. This resulted in approximately 900,000 of BLM forest lost to quasi privatization and clearcut logging. The latest word is that a more realistic plan (from the idiots in the House) will call for a 120 year age cut off. This resulted in approximately 1,100,000 of BLM forest lost to quasi privatization and clearcut logging.That's 200,000 acres of never cut native forest. Last but not least is what the flat-earth fools in Congress really want. Everything less than hard core old growth (150 years+) is lost.This resulted in approximately 1,300,000 of BLM forest lost to quasi privatization and clearcut logging.
Each of the three maps are available for down load below as pdf files. The maps were produced by Oregon Wild for public use.
Map of 80 year stands lost Map of 120 year stands lost Map of 150 year stands lost
Click on each map to see the large pdf version of each possibility.
UPDATE: The Situation on BLM lands
There are over 1.5 million acres of Coast Range BLM forestland. They are managed under the Northwest Forest Plan.
Peter DeFazio is under intense pressure from mill interests and county officials over the end of federal payments to Oregon's timber-legacy counties. A Cato Institute inspired proposal has been offered to split the approximately 2.4 million acres of BLM forestland into two parts. Half the land will continue to have conservation protections and half the land will be quasi-privatized through the creation of a fiduciary trust. The trust arrangements will designate the purpose as timber management for revenue to the counties.
Our assessment of BLM lands under a fiduciary trust is that there will a the rapid liquidation of standing timber volume toward a financially efficient ratio of forest capital to profit (income). Under full regulation, the trust manager will likely practice a fifty year rotation for high site lands.The fiduciary trust proposal for BLM forests is essentially a Wall Street eocnomic scheme to privatize public goods.
As originally proposed by the Association of O & C Counties, a huge amount of native and old growth forest would be lost to Wall Street like management objectives of the proposed fiduciary trust. The big winners are the centralized, automated lumber mills who thirst for mid-size saw logs. These are logs larger than plantation logs (<30" dbh) and smaller than the 50"+ old growth logs of yesteryear. The DeFazio-Schrader-Walden trust scheme could open up a huge swath of biologically rich, native forest in the 60 year to 149 year age class - the kind of forest that extensively exists on BLM lands. Within the matrix of BLM native forest and plantations are tens of thousands of acres of old growth in small patches sprinkled throughout the forest. These old growth stands and patches are tragically at risk from the trust proposal.
DeFazio's staff say only 870,000 acres of stands less than 80 years of age will be given away (Good Grief!). At the same time, somewhere in the range of 240,000 acres of Late Successional Reserve areas will lose their integritydue to the proposal.
The DeFazio proposal is bad enough, but the real question is this: how much further in the mud will the proposal get once it is taken over by committee leaders in the house and processed through their flat earth, reactionary world view?Make no doubt about it, the emergency red light is flashing over the BLM fiduciary trust scheme because politicians in Washington D.C. are caught up in dead-end thinking and dead-end policies.
Google Earth Views of federal forests
Using Google Earth and the Coast Range Association KML files you can virtually fly throughout Western Oregon and discover native and old growth forests. We currently have all Bureau of Land Management older forests mapped in Google Earth. We identify old growth and native forest using three different colors.
Red tint: Old growth forest (over 150 years of age)
Brown tint: Mature forest (100 to 150 years of age)
Green tint: Native forest (60 to 100 years of age)
Use the link below to go to the CRA's Google Earth - native forest & old growth website.
http://coastrange.org/wordpress/
The Northwest Forest Plan
We have placed two special Google Earth views of important Northwest Forest Plan areas: Late successional forest reserves (LSRs) and key watersheds on our Google Earth website (the link above). The LSR layer appears as a green tint overlay. We use a blue tinted overlay to show the key watersheds. Key watersheds and LSR forest areas act as the backbone reserve areas for endangered species recovery in our region.
Background on Coast Range public forests
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The public forests of the Coast Range are owned by the federal government and the state of Oregon. Federal lands make up about 40% of the region and lie within the Siuslaw National Forest and lands owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). State forests make up about 10% of the region mostly within the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests. Significant state owned forestland also lies within parcels in Lincoln and Lane counties as well as the Elliott State Forest in Coos County.
Go to the CRA's state forest page: http://coastrange.org/state_OR.htm
