Photo by Kai McMurtry
By Paul Koberstein
In 1987, I was a young reporter at The Oregonian, freshly assigned to the energy and environment beat. That year, the U.S. Forest Service issued a humongous document known as the “supplemental environmental impact statement” (SEIS) regarding the Northern Spotted Owl. One day that summer, the thick SEIS plopped onto my desk in the newsroom with a thud. Like most people, I had never heard of the northern spotted owl and certainly had no clue that this oddly named bird would become a symbol of the most critical environmental issue in the region and a significant part of my work life for years to come.
At the time, the spotted owl was a pawn in a chess game played by lawyers, government bureaucrats, timber companies, and environmentalists over how the region’s grand, biologically rich forests should be managed. It would soon rule the board.
In the 1950s, the Forest Service began systematically liquidating its old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, feeding dozens of sawmills across the region with a dependable supply of the most enormous logs on the planet. According to Forest Service plans in place in the 1980s, all the old-growth across 24 million acres of national forests in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California was scheduled to be logged by 2023, outside of parks and wilderness.
Logging old-growth forests had only recently become deeply unpopular with the public. Their outcry was matched by scientists who studied the spotted owl for a living. They warned that the Forest Service’s logging program decimated a vibrant ecosystem, sending the owl and several other species – including the marbled murrelet and wild salmon -- into a steep decline. They became known as “old-growth dependent species.”
In 1991, I sat in the Seattle courtroom of federal Judge William Dwyer. Lawyers representing several environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, argued that liquidating old-growth forests was unraveling a vast web of life in the region’s forests. They requested a halt to timber sales until the government devised a plan to protect the spotted owl, the entire ecosystem, and the old-growth habitats.
Dwyer granted their motion, and the Clinton administration responded by crafting what became known as the Northwest Forest Plan. In 1994, the lawyers were back in Dwyer's courtroom, arguing whether the newly minted plan was sufficient to protect the owl and the ecosystem. Lawyers for the environmental groups argued that it was inadequate and should be strengthened. Lawyers for the timber industry said the whole plan was illegal and should be thrown out. Dwyer ruled it was sufficient to protect the ecosystem, but only barely. He required the government to monitor things to ensure the plan was implemented effectively.
“The question is not whether the court would write the same plan,” he wrote, “but whether the agencies have acted within the bounds of the law. On the present record, the answer to that question is yes.”
Photo by Kai McMurtry
Fast forward to 2025, more than three decades later. The Forest Service is updating the plan for the first time. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement came out in November. Public comments are due March 17, and it’s critical that we all submit our thoughts in support of the protections we want to see maintained.
Unfortunately, we will never know whether Judge Dwyer thinks the plan amendment is also within the bounds of the law, as he is no longer with us. But with his words as a guide, we have to suspect he would not. He would find the amended Northwest Forest Plan a weak substitute and tell the government to try again.
Old-growth forests may no longer be the main battleground. In the amended plan, a huge issue is whether to increase logging in mature forests, which will become old-growth within a few decades. Logging mature forests would, among other harms, increase the fragmentation of connected habitats needed by wildlife to survive, especially under changing conditions driven by global warming.
The Northwest Forest Plan’s benefits to biodiversity were significant to Judge Dwyer. Had he considered the plan’s additional benefits as climate mitigation, they would likely have appealed to him, but the issue was not mentioned in the original plan.
Nevertheless, today, the Northwest Forest Plan is seen as one of the first climate mitigation measures ever adopted, though few, if anyone, realized it then. The issue is now a hot topic.
Add your voice by submitting a comment to the Forest Service.
Paul Koberstein is co-author, with Jessica Applegate, of Canopy of Titans: The Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest, which was published in August 2023 by OR Books. This rainforest sequesters more carbon per hectare than any other forest worldwide.
Paul is co-editor of Cascadia Times, a regional environmental journal published in Portland, Oregon. In 2004, he won the John B. Oakes Award for the most distinguished environmental journalism in the United States for a series of articles on the coral reef ecosystem in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the wildlife poaching that was occurring there.