This is the first of two Public Lands Blog posts that consider the desire of the Forest Service to amend a provision of the “Eastside Screens,” standards designed to protect public forests east of the Cascade Range. Part 1 examines the history, science, and politics leading up to the adoption of the Eastside Screens and their implementation since then. Part 2 will suggest what the Forest Service could do to improve the Eastside Screens, in both the short and long term.

Though it’s a hell of a long shot, I propose a huge national park in northwestern Oregon that won’t fully flower for at least two centuries after its establishment. To create the park, the federal government should acquire vast ecologically and hydrologically significant tracts of state and private timberland and reconvert them to federal public parklands. 

Total suppression was neverpossible. Large wildfires have always ended either because they ran out of fuel or, most often, because the weather changed. (How many times have I read a newspaper quote from a fire boss or the fire’s public relations flack to the effect: “We had the fire under control, but then the weather changed.”

While lots of serviceable hiking guides to Oregon’s wild trails exist, this one focuses on old forests. Oregon Wild popularized the term ancient forests ca. 1984, when the organization was known as the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC).

The public lands conservation community has long been wary of the existential threat to the nation’s public lands posed by a fringe group of right-wing crazies who seek to privatize public lands (perhaps via a brief period of state or county ownership).

Real standing forests are vital to the conservation and restoration of biological diversity and watershed integrity (not to mention re-creational reconnection to nature). They are also “the only proven system that can remove and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the scale necessary to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius this century,” says the Dogwood Alliance in their excellent call to arms

The authors of Ecological Forest Managementhave thrown down the gauntlet. The battle between traditional production forestry (PF) and ecological forest management (EFM) for the hearts and minds of forestry students everywhere, for the profession of forestry itself, and for the acceptance of the public has been joined.

Familiar to many modern-day Oregonians as C.E.S. Wood, “Ces” was a poet, author, anarchist, lawyer (who defended Margaret Sanger against obscenity charges for selling the booklet “Family Planning” in Portland and also collected a $1 million [~$26 million in today’s dollars.]

Part 2: Simply an Excuse and a Mandate to Clear-Cut

In 1986, Congress enacted the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act to, among other things, “establish a national scenic area to protect and provide for the enhancement of the scenic, cultural, recreational, and natural resources of the Columbia River Gorge.” In 2017, Representative Greg Walden (R-2nd-OR) proposes to throw it out the window.

Part 1: It’s a Beautiful, Natural, and Necessary Thing That Nature Changes

Everyone—including many a card-carrying conservationist—just needs to take a deep breath. Yes, there was a relatively large forest fire mostly on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge. However, the clearing of the smoke gave proof through the day that our gorge was still there.

The Elliott State Forest is not, in fact, public land. Rather, it is trust land with public value and public access, so the public generally considers it public land. The legal distinction is vitally important in this saga.

Until the latter third of the nineteenth century, forests in the United States were considered inexhaustible—not renewable, but inexhaustible. But by the 1880s, with watersheds on public and private lands were being decimated by unrestrained logging and grazing, an emerging conservation movement was beginning to convince the public—and would eventually convince Congress—that something needed to be done.

Big Timber in Oregon is so 20th Century. It used to be that timber jobs were above the state’s median wage; now they are below it. Today, only 1.3 percent of Oregon’s jobs arise from falling trees. That number will continue to decline in relative terms as Oregon’s economy continues to grow, and it will continue to decline in absolute terms as the timber industry continues to automate.

Though we’ve burned through one-sixth of the current century, Congress has yet to enact any sweeping and bold public lands conservation legislation in the new millennium. There’s still time though, and a crying need.

The climate, the oceans, species, watersheds, ecosystems, landscapes, cultures, and economies that depend on federal public lands all depend upon the 45th president of the United States having a bold public lands conservation agenda.

Republican legislator, lawyer, chief justice, granger, sportsman, conservationist, explorer, and scholar John B. Waldo read and quoted Thoreau, Shakespeare, Emerson, Aurelius, Goethe, and Wordsworth. He made twenty-seven summer sojourns in Oregon’s Cascades.

Presidents matter when it comes to federal public lands. Let’s examine the policy positions, party platforms and statements of the two 2016 major party candidates. Image Wikipedia: Wild horses run through Tule Valley, Utah. Notch Peak and the House Range in background.

A Maine Woods National Monument would be the embryo of a Maine Woods National Park that could grow in size and allow the trees to again grow as tall as they used to. Image by: Raphael Assouline @raph_asln

The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe. Image by: Hendrik Cornelissen @the_bracketeer