Last July, 21 scientists, loggers, conservationists, and tribal and government representatives were convened for one simple task: decide the future of Northwest forests.

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan was supposed to dictate how 24 million acres of federal forests were managed for the next century. Thirty years in, the plan has failed to meet most of its objectives.

Even though timber harvest has been reduced, endangered species that depend on old-growth forests are still declining. Wildfires scorch the land. And many rural communities near federal forests are struggling to survive.

With the future of Northwest forests in jeopardy, the Forest Service decided to overhaul the plan, and tasked the 21-member Northwest Forest Plan Advisory Committee to agree on recommendations for an amendment.

Amendment announced

On July 16, in a historic display of collaboration, the committee published their recommendations.

The committee is led by co-chairs Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, and Susan Jane Brown, chief legal council of Silvix Resources, a nonprofit environmental law firm. Joseph represents the timber industry, and Brown, the environmentalists.

The pair worked together under U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and their partnership traverses the divide between loggers and conservationists.

“It is no accident that Travis and I are co-chairs,” Brown said. “We disagree about a lot of things, but we recognize the momentous opportunity that we have to make a positive impact on forest management in this region.”

When the original plan was established in 1994, loggers and environments were embroiled in a bitter battle over Northwest forests following decades of unsustainable timber harvest. At the height of the conflict, loggers were slashing millions of acres of old-growth a year as activists were sitting in trees and blocking roads. An industry representative and an environmentalist like Joseph and Brown collaborating would have meant crossing enemy lines.

After the committee was commissioned in July 2023, they were supposed to have two years to agree on recommendations. But, with the presidential election approaching, their timeline was accelerated.

“We’re a part of the administration’s rush to the finish line,” Brown said.

Despite the abbreviated timeline, the pair steered a team of loggers, activists, scientists, Tribal members, and elected officials toward common ground.

184 recommendations

“It’s been a difficult process,” Joseph said. The committee met seven times and spent hundreds of hours deliberating. “But within one year, 21 very diverse people came to a consensus around a vision for our national forest. That’s a historic deal.”

The committee published 184 recommendations; 113 of them are dedicated to Tribal and Indigenous inclusion. The committee had ground to make up since the original plan failed to consult Tribes entirely.

“We hope to correct that and make sure Indigenous voices are not just engaged, but actively involved in management,” Joseph said.

Recommendations call for a “shift in tribal relations,” including contracts and agreements with Tribes, accommodating cultural burning, training on Indigenous culture and treaty rights, and a recurrent emphasis on co-stewardship of forests.

Recommendations also highlight the importance of supporting timber communities. Joseph believes the committee’s forest management recommendations will be the key to realizing the timber harvest targets the plan promised.

“We’re so focused on restoring millions of acres at risk in the Northwest, that it should lead to more timber volume, more jobs and more revenues for counties,” Joseph said.

Committee members agreed that segmenting forests into Late Successional Reserves (LSRs), Matrix land, and Adaptive Management Areas (AMAs)—the foundation of the original plan—was a mistake.

But the Forest Service prohibited them from changing the zoning. “So we said, ‘If we can’t change the lines, we can change the direction of the management within those lines,’” Joseph said.

The 1994 plan left mature and old-growth trees on matrix land available for commercial harvest.

This stipulation prompted a backlash from environmentalists. In a step toward brokering peace, the committee defined old-growth as any stand established before the year 1825, and recommended prohibiting logging in those stands.

Recommendations also emphasize site-specific management, particularly in moist versus dry forest. “Sometimes conservation looks like passive stewardship. Just don’t touch it,” Brown said.

“But sometimes, particularly in dry forests, it’s proactive stewardship, where we’re going to go into those stands.”

The original plan neglected these nuances.

Planning for fire

In many stands, proactive stewardship will mean reintroducing fire on the landscape through controlled burns.

The 1994 plan followed an era of fire suppression that left Northwest forests overstocked with vegetation and susceptible to severe wildfire, and it failed to implement adequate thinning and prescribed burning regimens to address the damage.

The committee provided 26 fire resilience recommendations to change that. “Proactive stewardship looks like cutting trees, and it looks like putting fire back on the ground,” Brown said.

A draft of an amendment is expected by the end of August. The Forest Service ultimately decides whether to include the committee’s recommendations, but many are expected to appear in the draft.

“I’m confident that the Forest Service is very serious about our recommendations and took our deliberations seriously,” Joseph said.

He’s not as confident that the amendment process itself will continue given the upcoming election. A change in administration could kill the amendment, and that would spell disaster for Northwest forests.

“We may never get another shot at revising or amending the Northwest Forest Plan,” Brown said. “And things need to change if we want those forests to persist not only for our generation, but future generations.”

The amendment is a crucial step toward a healthier, more prosperous future for Northwest forests, but it’s not enough.

“We can offer a great plan but there’s still going to be structural systemic issues in the way of actually doing that management,” Joseph said. Laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) prevent work from happening at the pace and scale necessary to make enduring change in federal forests.

“Ultimately, it’s going to be work outside of the amendment and pounding the pavement on Capitol Hill,” Brown said.

The committee is forging a future where change is possible.

“I’m hopeful we can help turn the page to a different narrative, where our forests actually bring people together and we can find common ground on providing all of their extraordinary benefits to society,” Joseph said. “Instead of fighting about our forests, we should be coming together to manage and protect them and make them more resilient.”

Part II of a series.