If you’ve ever stared up in awe at the towering colossus of a centuries-old Douglas fir tree in Washington or Oregon, you likely have the Northwest Forest Plan to thank for its existence. Adopted in 1994, after years of contentious battles over the logging of old-growth forests, the landmark landscape plan covers 24.5 million acres in 17 national forests across Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. While it’s not perfect, the plan has helped conserve old-growth forests and restore watersheds across the Pacific Northwest.

Now, 30 years after its creation, the plan is getting an update to address the urgent issues of wildfire and climate change and to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and perspectives—something that was absent from the original plan. The US Forest Service has convened a Federal Advisory Committee to help guide the process, and stakeholders are working busily to advocate for the forest protections. 

For some people, it may be surprising to remember that not so long ago, old-growth forests were seen primarily as a lumber resource and future board feet. After the Second World War, industrial logging ramped up across the densely forested Pacific Northwest as the trees there fed the post-war economic boom. 

“They were literally cutting like there was no tomorrow,” says Bill Arthur, a long-time Sierra Club member and current chair of the organization’s Snake/Columbia River Salmon Campaign. “And then tomorrow caught up with us.”

In the 1980s, it became clear that the paper and timber companies’ clearcutting was not going to stop until all the old growth was gone. Grassroots environmentalists starting showing up in the woods to physically protect trees from chainsaws; forest defenders blocked logging roads, chained themselves to logging equipment, and, in general, did whatever they could to slow the pace of destruction. Meanwhile, more established environmental groups started showing up in court to try to halt timber sales via litigation. At the same time, new scientific findings were revealing that old-growth forests were not “biological deserts,” as some foresters had once believed, but complex ecosystems well worth preserving. 

The emerging research also revealed a vital connection between old-growth stands and the well-being of the northern spotted owl, which had been identified as an “indicator species” for old-growth ecosystems. Protect these stands, the thinking went, and you’d protect not only the bird but the many creatures that depend on the trees. The northern spotted owl became the symbol of the political and legal contest over the fate of Pacific Northwest forests. For forest activists, the bird was a kind of mascot. For loggers, it became a target of vitriol. 

“This little bird carried a big responsibility,” Arthur says. Things came to a head in May 1991, when a federal judge, William Dwyer, blocked timber sales across the Northwest to protect the owl. That decision catapulted the issue into the national political debate, and the question of how best to manage Pacific Northwest forests became a major issue in the 1992 presidential election. 

After Bill Clinton won the White House, the Clinton administration ushered in a new era of forest management. Clinton appointed Jack Ward Thomas as Forest Service Chief—the first biologist to ever lead the agency—and called on the battling stakeholders to come to the negotiating table and come up with a plan for managing Pacific Northwest forests as a whole. 

“At one point there were literally 300 scientists—forests ecologist, fish biologists—locked up in the convention center in Portland,” Arthur remembers. Led by the “Gang of Four”—a quartet of scientist that included Thomas, Jerry Franklin, Norm Johnson, and John Gordon—they hammered out the first science-driven landscape-level management plan ever created for a national forest.

For many people, the issue had come down to loggers versus owls. Even 30 years later, many people seem to believe that the Northwest Forest Plan shut down all logging on federal forests in the region for the sake of an owl. In fact, the plan’s aim was to protect enough old-growth habitat within the range of the spotted owl to meet legal requirements. It divided federal forestland into distinct land designations, each with a different management approach. The 7.4 million acres of old growth and recovering younger stands were designated “Late Successional Reserves” where logging would be prohibited. The same was true of Riparian Reserves. But another 4 million acres of “Matrix Lands,” a quarter of which were old growth, were to be managed for “multiple uses,” including timber harvest.

It was a true compromise, in that neither the logging industry nor conservationists got everything that they wanted.  

“When the plan was adopted in 1994, everyone hated it, and everyone sued,” says Susan Jane Brown, an attorney who represents forest collaboratives—groups of stakeholders who work together on science-based, sustainable forest management—on today’s federal advisory committee.

The ink was hardly dry on the Northwest Forest Plan when a Republican-led Congress placed a so-called rider on an appropriations bill that temporarily exempted salvage logging—harvesting of dead and downed trees after wildfires—from environmental reviews.

Suddenly, old-growth timber sales were back on the table. But environmentalists were armed with broad support and new tactics. Protest camps like the 11-month blockade at Warner Creek, east of Eugene, made national headlines and groomed a generation of environmental activists.

After the salvage rider expired, environmental groups successfully rebuffed attempts to eliminate or change two core provisions of the plans—the Survey and Manage Program, which requires that areas in Matrix lands or elsewhere are surveyed for sensitive species before they can be logged, and the Aquatic Conservation Strategy, which provided another layer of protection to streams and wetlands by restricting new roads, decommissioning old ones, and requiring larger buffers around streams.

“It was an interesting time to be a baby lawyer,” says Brown, who spent the next several years litigating timber sales that threatened to clearcut old growth in Matrix Lands. Other environmental groups focused on how to implement the plan to achieve the best protections for old growth.

“The good news is we ended up with hardly any of the old-growth forest being logged in the 30 years since the Northwest Forest Plan [was adopted]” says Mike Anderson, senior policy analyst for the Wilderness Society and a member of the Federal Advisory Committee. “Most of that million acres is still out there, though some of it has burned in wildfires.”

While the Northwest Forest Plan led to a virtuous decline in logging in old-growth stands, it was accompanied by an unfortunate economic decline in logging-dependent communities, which truly suffered. For those who saw their jobs disappear with the closure of lumber mills, it didn’t matter that the timber corporations’ unsustainable rates of tree cutting had logging communities on a pathway to crash someday anyway. Many logging town residents blamed urban environmentalists and the spotted owl. In some rural communities, the pain endures, feeding the deep political divisions that plague the country today.

But the plan’s many environmental benefits are hard to deny. Since the plan’s adoption, logging on federal forests in the Northwest has declined by nearly 80 percent. The check on logging and the plan’s Aquatic Conservation Strategy have helped restore water quality in streams and wetlands region-wide, as a 25-year monitoring progress report shows. Stream temperatures are staying cold despite the warming climate, and the amount of fine sediment in streams—a consequence of roads and erosion—has decreased. Many culverts and other fish barriers have also been removed.

Now, the new realities of climate chaos require the 30-year-old plan to be updated. Drought and wildfires have escalated. Many runs of salmon and steelhead are now listed as endangered. And the spotted owl is struggling in the face of a newer threat: competition from barred owls, which have been expanding their territory in the Pacific Northwest. 

“The terms of the debate have changed quite dramatically,” Anderson says. “Now it’s fundamentally about climate change, wildfires, and engaging tribes and their Indigenous knowledge in coming up with better solutions for addressing a future of climate change in the region.”

The Federal Advisory Committee announced last summer is a diverse group of 21 members representing scientists, state and local government, conservation groups, the timber industry, and the public. One-third of seats are held by tribal members or people work for tribes. Initially, the committee divided into six subcommittees focused on old-growth, biodiversity, fire, climate change, communities, and tribal inclusion. 

Ryan Reed, at 23, is the committee’s youngest member. He brings the perspective of a young Indigenous person and wildland firefighter who has witnessed firsthand the consequences of mismanagement and climate change on the mid-Klamath watershed in Northern California.

“I'm a true believer that indigenizing our management of these landscapes is going to be essential to the sustainability and longevity of these ecosystems,” Reed says. Indigenous leadership will be essential for increasing the role of fire as a tool for mitigating catastrophic wildfires, he adds. “We are already doing it in our communities. We have the knowledge; we have the practices; but we don't have the access.”

Anderson says that some of the proposals are likely to make some old-growth advocates uncomfortable. “A big issue with the plan is how to manage especially the drier forests in East Cascades, California, and Southwest Oregon so they’re less at risk with high-intensity wildfires,” he says. Both he and Brown see a need for careful thinning around older trees in before fire can be reintroduced safely. They are both also pushing for a moratorium of all old-growth logging in Matrix Lands.

“One is a passive management approach; another is an active management approach,” Brown says. “Both are necessary, in my view, to steward those forests based on the different ecological settings that we find them in.”

There has never been a better case for protecting all old growth, says Alex Craven, forest campaign manager at the Sierra Club. More people—including the highest reaches of the Biden administration—are starting to value these forests not just for the habitat they provide, but for their role in storing carbon. “Thinking about the role of ecosystems and nature-based climate solutions has really come to the fore more so in the last few years to a decade,” Craven says. There’s also a growing awareness of the critical need to protect watersheds as the climate warms—not only for fish but for the human communities that depend on them for their drinking water supply. 

“We talk about the Northwest Forest Plan affecting landscapes, but really, the downstream and climate impacts transcend those boundaries,” says Craven.

Brown says the “culture of turnover” in the Forest Service is preventing the agency from restoring and stewarding forests. Staff typically move from forest to forest as they move up in rank, she explains. “They don’t stay long enough to know the ecology or social ecology of the place you’re supposed to be steward.”  

Reed wants to help address another workforce issue: the huge need for personnel, especially wildland firefighters, who can help reintroduce fire to landscapes. The key is not just straight recruiting but finding ways to involve younger and marginalized people into decision-making.

“We need to develop, and work with, and partner with people to create avenues for younger people to be involved in these processes and be a part of these decisions, because they’re the ones that are going to have to emerge as the leaders to handle these issues,” says Reed, who cofounded the Fire Generation Collaborative to help educate and recruit young people into fire and advocate for policy.

Later this month, the advisory committee will deliver its initial set of recommendations to federal officials. Then, this summer, the Forest Service will release a draft environmental impact statement, giving the public a chance to comment on how best to protect and manage the forests so that those awe-inspiring Northwest trees will stay standing for generations to come.