In one area of the Pacific Northwest, one of North America’s most important tree species is dying at an alarming rate. This spring, as in recent years, Douglas fir needles are turning yellow, turning red and then falling to the ground in the forests of southwestern Oregon.
Experts blame a combination of factors, including insect attacks, drought and rising temperatures caused by climate change. Decades of fire suppression have exacerbated problems by disrupting the natural balance of ecosystems.
“Droughts, heat and climate change are largely killing trees, and there’s no clear way to put that genie back in the bottle,” said Rob Jackson, an ecologist at the University’s Doerr School of Sustainability. from Stanford, which investigates the ways in which climate change affects forests and grasslands. “We are preparing our forests to die.”
The crisis in Oregon shows the critical importance of forest management as climate change alters the natural world. Foresters say that in many cases they need to cut down Douglas fir trees, alive or dead, to minimize the risk of wildfires, promote forest health and help ecosystems adapt to the changing climate. Their plans include selling some salvageable lumber.
But those plans have hit a nerve among some environmentalists, who distrust government agencies and accuse them of favoring logging over conservation.
“I understand why environmental groups are suspect, and they should be,” said Mindy Crandall, an associate professor of forest policy at Oregon State University. Federal agencies “did not listen to society for too long.”
The mistrust exemplifies a challenge: How do those agencies, which control much of the land in the western half of the country, navigate competing conservation, resource extraction and fire safety mandates as forest health declines across the country? West?
Douglas firs are a keystone species for the region’s enormous ecologically diverse forests, critical to supporting a wide range of plant and animal life. They are also one of the most important timber trees in the country, and are widely used for home construction and as Christmas trees.
Across southwest Oregon, more species died from 2015 to 2019 than in the previous 40 years combined. The deaths, although concentrated in regions at the lower end of Douglas firs’ elevation and precipitation range, have been widespread since 2020: while fewer than 5,000 acres of land in the state exhibited tree death in 2021, that number increased to more than 350,000 acres. in 2022.
This year, the Biden administration formally strengthened the Bureau of Land Management’s conservation authority, giving the agency more freedom to prioritize environmental concerns in line with its other mandates. And experts, including Dr. Crandall, said the bureau and other federal agencies had become more impartial and clearly concerned about climate change in recent decades.
But environmental groups still harbor deep-rooted suspicions from nearly a century ago of government-sanctioned forest clearing.
Nathan Gehres grew up in southern Oregon’s Applegate Valley in the 1980s. At the time, the region was torn in a conservation battle, known locally as the Timber War, as environmentalists fought to limit logging projects sponsored by the US Forest Service and the BLM.
“I know people who call them the Bureau of Timber and Mining,” said Gehres, who now works at the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council, a nonprofit group that tries to develop consensus solutions for natural resource management. “They have made mistakes in the past and I think there is almost no government agency that has not made mistakes in the past. But also, three-quarters of Applegate Valley is federal land. And that is why they are an extremely important partner.”
The BLM is proposing a multi-year project called the Strategic Security Operations Plan, known as SOS, to cut down both live and dead trees. The trees stretch across about 5,000 acres of land the agency manages in the Applegate Valley region that officials say are most likely to pose safety risks during wildfires.
Because it can be very expensive to remove just dead trees, live trees will most likely be sold as lumber, “paying their price” to get out of the forest, said Elizabeth Burghard, the office’s district director.
The BLM is trying to reach out to the community. Ms. Burghard’s team recently invited residents on a field trip to view the dying trees in an effort to show the community the extent of the crisis, ease skepticism and persuade locals of the urgency of the problem.
Luke Ruediger, a resident of the region and conservation director for the environmental group Klamath Forest Alliance, attended that excursion and said he tried to keep an open mind about the BLM’s intentions. But while he was surprised by the forest’s deteriorating health, he said he remained concerned that the agency could manipulate the situation to justify selling more timber for commercial purposes.
Ruediger acknowledged the fire danger in the area needed to be addressed. “But there is a history of intensive forest management here,” he said. “There’s kind of a history of bias toward the timber industry.”
Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forest protection advocacy organization, visited the forests with Ruediger to witness the extinction of the Douglas fir and also said he remained suspicious about the agency’s motives. “What the agencies will do is choose the science that fits the desired outcome,” he said.
“Climate change needs to be addressed, because that’s a big part of what’s driving it,” Dr. DellaSala added. “And the pressures on forests through these types of logging events must be reduced.”
Bureau of Land Management representatives said the SOS plan was aimed squarely at increasing safety, especially for firefighters. And based on 15 years of monitoring interventions, the agency is confident its plans can be successful, said Jena Volpe, a fire ecologist with the office.
“When the BLM conducts commercial timber sales, our primary goal is forest health, and the economic value of the trees is a byproduct of that,” said Kyle Sullivan, spokesman for the bureau’s district office in Medford, Oregon. “That’s something that a lot of the public doesn’t necessarily understand. Our commercial timber sales are really geared toward forest health.”
Sullivan said the main goal of the SOS program was to remove dead and dying trees, not harvest healthy trees for commercial purposes.
Researchers in Oregon and across the country stressed that the BLM and other landowners must manage the decline of Douglas fir. It’s not just the BLM that deals with trees in crisis. The city of Ashland, Oregon, also has operations underway to remove dead and dying Douglas fir trees to manage public safety risks and try to improve forest health.
As forests become less healthy, researchers say, leaving them intact will in many cases make them more prone to severe wildfires and more vulnerable to drought stress and disease.
Instead, it will be increasingly important to manage them to increase security, improve climate resilience and even create sustainable forms of extraction. That may mean thinning to reduce the density of trees in a given area, removing dead trees or planting species that are more resilient in a warmer climate.
While it might seem intuitive to remove human involvement and allow the forest to restore some kind of balance, the researchers said that after centuries of human intervention, forests can’t actually correct their course on their own.
“There is a real need to reduce tree density,” said Oregon State’s Dr. Crandall. “We have modified the natural system so much over the last 150 years, mainly through fire suppression, that the forest is completely out of control.”
But getting there will be a challenge for federal agencies, said Rachael Hamby, policy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation group.
“They have to try to make everyone happy and then they end up not making anyone happy,” he said.