Collaboration between government agencies and a mining company has transformed a dangerous but valuable property

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By Kendra Chamberlain. November 18, 2024. The bats of Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge have a new roost to call home this winter.

An orphan mine, located on protected land around Bear Lake in southeast Idaho, was sealed up years ago to protect humans from wandering in. That meant the mine was also off limits to wildlife like bats.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USWS) partnered with Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, the Bureau of Land Management, Idaho Department of Lands and the mining company Synesco to open the mine entrance so that bats can roost in the mine’s long, twisting tunnels.

The mine was officially opened to bats on Oct. 21.

Today, bat habitat is at a premium. North America’s 154 species are facing extreme population declines due to habitat loss, the scourge of White Nose Syndrome, climate change and even wind turbines.

That’s made old mines an attractive prospect for bat conservation efforts. Orphan mines are being repurposed across the country for bat habitat.

But USFWS biologist Daniel Nolfi told Columbia Insight the Bear Lake project was especially intensive because it required reopening a mine that was no longer accessible.

The entrance was excavated and then fit with a gate to keep humans out, but allow bats in. Synesco owns the claim on the mine and covered the cost of the project.

Mines may also help stave off the spread of White Nose Syndrome (WNS), a disease that has ravaged bat populations across the United States.

WNS infects hibernating bats, rousing them from their sleep and causing them to burn all their stores of fat before winter’s end. Infected bats—often entire colonies—die of starvation.

The disease was first detected in New York in 2006, and has since spread west from state to state, killing an estimated 6.7 million bats along the way.

The fungus that causes the disease, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, or Pd, was first detected in Idaho’s Minnetonka Cave in 2022. That cave is right next door to Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

“Research suggests that the temperature of hibernation sites may affect the severity of WNS,” Nolfi told Columbia Insight in an email. “Artificial habitat, such as mines, allow for more intensive control measures for WNS. Opening mines to bats can be done in such a way that desired temperature conditions are created, potentially leading to reduced WNS impacts to the bats that use these habitats.”

Nolfi said up to eight different bat species use Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge, including little brown bats, an endangered species that has seen significant population declines across North American due to WNS.

USFWS’ Idaho office is engaging other mining companies for similar projects on both federal and private land in southeast Idaho, a region known for phosphate mines.

“The goal is to evaluate opportunities to provide bat habitat while maintaining closures for human safety,” said Nolfi.

Federal law gives mining interests an advantage in determining the best use of public lands in the Stibnite mining area

By Kendra Chamberlain. October 2, 2024. A proposal to build and rebuild open-pit mines in Idaho’s historic Stibnite mining district is moving forward, even as the U.S. Forest Service acknowledges it could have lasting, negative environmental impacts on the area. 

The Stibnite mining district, located at the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River, was critical to the United States’ war effort in the 1940s as a rich source of gold, silver, antimony and tungsten. Operations ended in the 1990s and the site was abandoned. 

Perpetua Resources is hoping to reopen the mines, and build a few more, to resume extracting gold, antimony and silver. The Canada-based company, formally named Midas Gold, has been fine-tuning its proposal to the Forest Service for over a decade, as previously reported by Columbia Insight. 

The proposal has faced significant opposition from the Nez Perce Tribe and groups like Idaho Rivers United, American Whitewater and Idaho Conservation League. 

Last month, Forest Service released a final Environmental Impact Statement and a draft Record of Decision approving the mining proposal. 

Activity in the historic mining district, located in the Payette National Forest and the Boise National Forest, decimated the local environment, notably blocking fish passage and polluting surface waters.

Opponents of the project say the area needs more environmental remediation, not more mining, to help restore protected fish species in the area. 

Litigation expected

The Stibnite site is located next to the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

The area is also spawning habitat for bull trout and chinook salmon and includes treaty-reserved resources for the Nez Perce Tribe.

 

“The Forest Service is stuck in a hard place here,” Idaho Rivers United Conservation Director Nick Kunath tells Columbia Insight. “They need to do this analysis and are mandated to manage these resources, but they’re also governed by some incredibly old laws that essentially determined that mining was the best use of our public lands more than 150 years ago, and still have to treat these projects as such.”

The reference to “old laws” means the General Mining Law of 1872, which establishes hard rock mining as one of the most important uses for public lands in the United States.

Perpetua Resources’ proposal would nearly double the footprint of the existing mining site. But the company says it will remediate some of that legacy pollution, including restoring 450 acres of wetlands, filling in a mine pit and rebuilding sections of the river. 

Still, the project is expected to have significant, long-term impacts on the surrounding environment.

The USFS draft decision notes that despite the mitigation plans promised by Perpetua Resources, the no-action alternative would be the “environmentally preferable” action.

The agency also conceded that water temperatures downstream of the mining site may be impacted if the modeled temperature mitigation measures do not work as hoped. 

“When we look at even in the best case scenario that they’re really putting forward in this analysis, it’s more than 100 years before they think stream temperatures might come back to baseline levels,” says Kunath.

Opponents of the project are reviewing the draft decision and submitting objections.

The Forest Service will need to respond to those objections before releasing its final decision. Given the strong opposition to the proposal, it could be years before Perpetua Resources would be able to begin work. 

“I can’t confirm if [Idaho Rivers United] is going to litigate—or anybody else—but certainly Perpetua expects litigation, and so does the Forest Service, with a project as controversial as this,” says Kunath. 

Why does the public put up with corporate welfare, wildlife slaughter and other government policies it so clearly opposes?

By Nick Engelfried. July 11, 2024. With a little imagination, Douglas Creek Canyon near the central Washington town of Palisades can call to mind the Inner Northwest before colonization.

Orange and yellow lichens encrust the basalt canyon walls. Sagebrush clings to the lower slopes, especially those too steep for people or livestock to reach easily. Cottonwoods and willows form a green corridor along the creek itself, which carved out the canyon over centuries.

Goldfinches sing from treetops while turkey vultures soar over cliffs.

Prior to colonization, the bio-diverse shrub-steppe of which Douglas Creek Canyon is part covered almost a third of Washington, creating habitat for animals like pygmy rabbits and sage-grouse that are now at risk of extinction.

Elk and pronghorns grazed native bunchgrasses and were hunted by wolves.

Today, a fraction of this ecosystem is left intact.

Over two-thirds of the shrub-steppe has been destroyed, mostly by agriculture, while much of what remains is degraded.

Many casual observers don’t notice the damage precisely because it’s so ubiquitous.

“Most Western lands are now so degraded, the average American thinks that’s what they’re supposed to look like,” says Erik Molvar of the Idaho-based Western Watersheds Project. “But when the first white explorers arrived here, they recorded grass growing up to their horses’ bellies, not the desertified remnants of those ecosystems we see today.”

Compared with many parts of the shrub-steppe, Douglas Creek is in fair shape. In places, sagebrush intermixes with rabbitbrush and bitterbrush, members of the native shrub community.

But many gentler canyon slopes are covered in invasive cheat grass. In some areas, almost no native plants grow.

Given time, and the removal of pressures like livestock grazing, this spot could revert to something like its pre-colonial state.

Perennial grasses could return, making shade that inhibits cheat grass. Sagebrush could spread into gullies where it’s now absent.

Tall grass and shrub communities would create animal habitat while discouraging wildfires.

Perhaps most importantly, the deep roots of native plants would pump tons of carbon underground.

Millions of acres in the dry West, much of it on public lands, are similarly ripe for restoration, with big payoffs for wildlife and the climate.

Yet, federal and state agencies funnel money into programs that actively inhibit natural processes in these places.

From subsidizing grazing to exterminating predators, taxpayer dollars support private interests at the behest of ranchers and agribusiness.

“The livestock mafia has set itself up for business in the West,” says Molvar. “And it’s become a political machine that’s very good at perpetuating its interests on public lands at the expense of other uses.”

Taxpayer-funded killing

Wolves in the Inner Northwest. Beavers on agricultural lands. Historically important salmon streams.

Each of these is an animal or ecosystem adversely affected by taxpayer-funded programs that support agricultural interests.

There are numerous ways government actions benefit cows, sheep and crops. But one of the most direct is killing wild predators who interfere with livestock.

“Since the first European settlers set foot on this continent, they viewed predators as a threat to species humans hunt for game or raise for food,” says Camilla Fox of the California-based Project Coyote. “Public attitudes, science and ethics have evolved since then, but federal practices and policies haven’t kept up.”

In 2023, the federal agency known as Wildlife Services killed over 375,000 native wild animals, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

These included tens of thousands of coyotes, hundreds of cougars and black bears, and 305 gray wolves, a species that remains endangered over much of its range.

Most of this taxpayer-financed carnage takes place far from the public eye.

“The vast majority of people have never even heard of Wildlife Services,” says Fox. “Of those who have, many confuse it with the Fish and Wildlife Service.”

While the USFWS works to restore endangered species, Wildlife Services deals with conflict between people and animals, often by killing the creatures in question.

“Wildlife Services’ role is not to manage wildlife populations, but to minimize damage caused by wildlife,” the agency told Columbia Insight in an email. “Wildlife damage management protects resources and safeguards human health and safety in a responsible and accountable manner.”

Still, critics say Wildlife Services, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, too often bends to the farming and livestock industries.

“Having a federal agency whose mandate is to mitigate friction between wild animals and livestock creates a conflict of interest,” says Fox. “Its main stakeholders are ranchers and farmers raising livestock in places where there are wild animals. That creates a built-in structure giving agribusiness an outsize influence.”

Wildlife Services doesn’t only kill predators. It also takes out birds that feed on grain and beavers whose dams are unwelcome by landowners.

In 2019, the agency killed over 360,000 red-winged blackbirds.

Traps set for predators may kill or maim pets and endanger people.

A notoriously opaque agency whose activities are difficult to track, Wildlife Services exemplifies how government programs can serve small groups of stakeholders at the expense of public resources.

However, some of the most managed animals in the Pacific Northwest now fall under the jurisdiction of not the federal government, but states.

This is increasingly true when it comes to one of the country’s most contentious predators: wolves.

Wolf politics

In 1947, a hunter collected a state bounty for shooting the last known gray wolf in Oregon.

The species was already virtually extirpated from Washington, and not until the 2000s would wolves start making their way across the Idaho border to re-establish themselves in the two states.

Soon after, Oregon and Washington created state-run apparatuses dedicated to preventing wolves from preying on livestock.

“It started with just trying to keep track of their whereabouts,” says Jay Shepherd of the Bellingham, Wash.-based nonprofit Conservation Northwest, who worked for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife when the first wolf was confirmed to have returned to the state in 2008.

Shepherd was assigned to monitor the animals in eastern Washington.

“Then we started getting calls from people saying they saw a wolf, or one attacked their dog,” he says. “Some of it was just nervousness. But as time went on there were conflicts, especially with cattle.”

Wolves in western Washington are listed as endangered by USFWS, which plays the lead role managing their populations there.

But in the eastern third of Washington, where most packs occur, wolves have been federally delisted and are now managed entirely by the state.

The scale of resources devoted to keeping wolves from livestock speaks to how agricultural interests determine the contours of debate about wildlife, partly by tapping into culture wars grounded less in economics than an idealized image of the past.

“There’s this prevailing romanticism of the cowboy myth in the West, and a desire to keep it alive by supporting ranching,” says Western Watersheds Project’s Molvar. The cowboy era, when large cattle drives occurred across much of the West, is generally considered to have lasted from about the end of the Civil War into the late nineteenth century. “Ranching has borne little resemblance to it since. The cattle industry plays the myth for all it’s worth, though, because of the political benefits.”

Livestock interests’ ability to align themselves with a fondly remembered era has helped cement a base of support beyond those who benefit directly from ranching.

“Early on after wolves returned to Washington, we encountered lots of really angry people,” says Shepherd. “Some weren’t even involved with agriculture themselves, but still wanted to vent about wolves.”

As packs became re-established, many ranchers came to accept wolves’ presence, even if grudgingly. Today Shepherd rarely encounters the kind of vitriol stirred up when wolves first reappeared in the state.

However, WDFW still puts immense effort into preventing wolf-cattle conflicts.

“Our focus is on nonlethal deterrents,” says Seth Thompson, assistant regional wildlife program manager for WDFW.

Methods the agency promotes include flashing lights and flagging used to scare predators away from cows. In many cases, ranchers pay to install deterrents on their land, while more expensive equipment may be supplied by the state.

Range riders, often employed by nonprofits, also help by scaring wolves away from cattle.

These strategies are largely effective. But when depredations do happen, wolves can be killed.

“To go lethal, there need to have been at least two nonlethal deterrents in place before a depredation occurred, and at least three depredations in 30 days or four in 10 months,” says Thompson.

Last year, WDFW authorized killing two wolves for preying on cattle. Another was killed in the act of hunting livestock.

Wolves are not, by any measure, a major source of livestock mortality.

Washington has around 1.17 million cows, of which 13 were confirmed or suspected to have been killed by wolves in 2023.

The predators are also believed to have killed two miniature donkeys and one alpaca.

Still, for some people wolves symbolize tensions between private interests and wildlife conservation.

This can obscure the fact that while large predators are a visible casualty of agribusiness influencing the management of public resources, they’re arguably not the most important.

“Cattle have an extensive presence on public lands,” says Shepherd. “There are lots of reasons to be concerned about that, and focusing solely on wolves means wolves will take the brunt of people’s anger. And the truth is, other impacts from livestock may be even more crucial.” 

Socialist ranching

“Before colonization, the Inner Northwest was much more ecologically productive than now,” says Molvar. “You had seas of sagebrush mixed with tall perennial bunchgrasses providing habitat for species like sage-grouse.”

Visual cover from shrubs and native grasses gave sage-grouse and rabbits a refuge from predators. These small creatures formed a link in a food web that included animals from wolves to elk.

When cattle and sheep arrived, they razed perennial grasses, creating openings for invasive, highly flammable cheat grass.

Meanwhile, the hooves of livestock destroyed natural soil crusts that inhibit weeds from germinating.

Cows wade in streams, causing erosion and polluting salmon habitat.

And livestock consume native plants at a rate that’s unsustainable in a dry landscape.

“An average public lands grazing lease authorizes livestock to remove 50-60% of available forage in a year,” says Molvar. “That leaves behind a degraded ecosystem.”

This grazing is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, with ranchers paying as little as $1.35 per month to keep a cow and calf or five sheep on BLM land.

By contrast, last year’s average monthly grazing rate for private lands was $16 in Washington and $19 in Oregon.

Nor do livestock on public lands benefit consumers by significantly lowering meat prices.

A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Management found less than 1.6% of grazing in the U.S. occurs on public land. 

While this is a tiny percentage of overall meat production/grazing, the amount of public land being grazed is enormous—well over 225 million acres, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. While they don’t manage as many acres for grazing as the BLM, the USFWS, Forest Service, National Park Service and Department of Defense also allow grazing on their lands.

“Very little beef is from cattle who set a hoof on public lands,” says Molvar. “Which raises the question, why allow grazing there, given the ecological impacts?”

The cattle industry claims grazing has a positive effect on the landscape.

“We always say ranchers are the original environmentalists, and we stand by that,” says Chelsea Hajny, executive vice president for the Washington Cattlemen’s Association. “There are a multitude of benefits to grazing, from reducing fire hazards to adding manure to the soil. We’re so prone to fire in Washington State, and cattle remove forage that otherwise creates fuel.”

Environmental groups dispute the notion that grazing reduces wildfire risk.

“Cattle are a number one cause of the cheat grass explosion, which has led to an increase in unnaturally large fires,” says Molvar.

By removing livestock from public lands, the United States could make progress toward the goal captured in the Biden administration’s America the Beautiful plan, of protecting 30% of the country’s lands and waters by the year 2030.

A 2022 paper in the journal Bioscience examined ways to help actualize this “30 X 30” goal by protecting core areas on Western federal lands. The authors identify livestock grazing as by far the largest direct threat to biodiversity in these places, with 48% of imperiled species there being affected.

The study recommends retiring existing grazing allotments.

It also suggests focusing on the restoration of two key species—gray wolves and beavers, both of which are targeted by agencies like Wildlife Services—whose activities in the ecosystem produce a cascading series of positive effects.

Washington’s Douglas Creek Canyon is the kind of landscape that could produce immense biodiversity and climate benefits if allowed to regenerate.

On both sides of the creek, barbed wire fences mark the boundaries of land that is or was formerly used for cattle, and the prevalence of cheat grass speaks to decades of grazing.

Some private land around the canyon is now protected.

For example, the Nature Conservancy’s Beezley Hills and Moses Coulee Preserves are located nearby.

However, the heart of the canyon is on BLM land.

In March, the BLM released a Greater Sage-Grouse Resource Management Plan that could limit grazing in the imperiled birds’ habitat across 10 western states, including Oregon. Washington is excluded because sage-grouse there occur mostly on private land.

Meanwhile, the BLM continues leasing land to ranchers throughout the West at rock-bottom prices, and agencies like Wildlife Services employ an approach to predator control resembling something from a previous century.

“The emphasis on lethal, indiscriminate killing of predators needs to change,” says Project Coyote’s Fox. “Not just from an ethical and humane standpoint, but based on what science tells us is effective. We need North America’s wild carnivores for healthy and diverse ecosystems.”

The use of public lands for subsidized grazing, and the continued persecution of wildlife, reflect an attitude on the part of responsible agencies that regards the public commons as a resource to be exploited by private business.

“One of most insidious ideas is that public lands should be viewed as agricultural land whose purpose is to maximize livestock production rather than ecological health,” says Molvar. “You have lands where cattle and sheep have become the dominant use, destroying wildlife habitat, recreational uses and the reasons the public values these places.”

To use older trees to fight climate change, we need to know where they are. But new maps created by the Forest Service aren’t that detailed

By Nathan Gilles. April 18, 2024. It’s said that the map is not the territory.

This statement, say critics, is especially true of the maps created by the U.S. Forest Service to inventory the nation’s largest carbon sinks: its mature and old growth forests.

In April 2023, under pressure from the Biden administration, the Forest Service completed its first-ever nationwide inventory of mature and old growth forests found on federal lands.

This inventory of older trees is part of an ambitious Biden administration plan to harness the power of our nation’s forests as a nature-based solution to the climate crisis.

The idea is simple: rather than cut older trees down, the Biden administration is proposing we leave many of them standing, allowing them to do what years of scientific research has shown older trees do very well: take climate change-causing carbon out of the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.

Announced in December 2023, the awkwardly named “Land Management Plan Direction for Old-Growth Forest Conditions Across the National Forest System” has been widely lauded by environmentalists and many scientists as a long-overdue step to help address the nation’s over-sized carbon footprint.

The nationwide forest plan is expected to lead to revisions of local forest plans throughout the country, including the Northwest Forest Plan governing Washington, Oregon and sections of Northern California.

But whether the nation’s older trees will be enlisted in the fight against climate change and spared the chainsaw could depend on knowing where those trees are.

And that, according to both critics of the Forest Service and the Forest Service itself, is not something the Forest Service’s inventory and mapping can do, because these maps are just not detailed enough to be used for management purposes on a stand-by-stand basis.

A study written by Forest Service scientists and published in August 2023 in the journal Forest Ecology and Management hints at this fact.

The study’s authors write that although the maps they created contain “a high degree of accuracy. … Identifying mature and old-growth forests in a stand management context will likely require additional measurements, adjustments to criteria at local scales, and incorporation of social and traditional knowledge within a consistent definition framework.”

In other words, the maps show the forest but not the trees, per se.

‘Low-res’ maps

The Forest Service’s mature and old-growth inventory used data on trees collected at individual forest plots that are part of the agency’s Forest Inventory and Analysis, a long-term scientific monitoring effort designed by the Forest Service to assess the health of the nation’s forests.

Data from the FIA program goes back decades. These data, and the FIA program generally, are widely respected and used by scientists both in and out of the Forest Service.

Nonetheless, FIA has its limitations, according to Richard Birdsey, retired Forest Service scientist turned senior scientist at the nonprofit Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Based in Massachusetts, the Woodwell Climate Research Center funds scientific research related to climate change. Many of its scientists have been critical of the Forest Service and its practices.

“The FIA data is adequate for looking at large areas, maybe a whole state or a group of national forests. But there’s just not enough FIA sample plots in the typical old-growth stand to characterize it or monitor it carefully,” says Birdsey, who in addition to spending 15 of his 40 years at the Forest Service working on the FIA program has also conducted his own analysis of the carbon-storing potential of America’s older forests.

“[FIA is] a terrific program and really is a backbone for policies,” says Birdsey. “But it’s a little less effective when trying to monitor what’s happening at smaller scales or at the project scale. And that’s where a lot of public interest is.”

Here’s the problem. While the Forest service has 355,000 FIA plots (on public and private lands) in forests across the United States, the FIA plots themselves are small, covering approximately two-and-half acres each.

The plots are also miles away from each other, with one plot every 6,000 acres, or nine square miles, of forested land.

This leaves big gaps in the available data set, gaps that need to be filled with scientific guesswork that has to come from other sources of data.

What you get from this is a big picture look at the forest, but not a detailed one.

And this, says Birdsey, is exactly what the Forest Service ended up producing in 2023.

The Forest Service mature and old-growth forest inventory maps were created at what’s called a “fireshed” scale.

Firesheds are 250,000 acres each, or roughly 390 square miles.

This means a single 390-square-mile fireshed gets a single classification, for instance, “Moderate Mature, High Old Growth” or “High Mature, Moderate Old Growth,” as can be seen on an interactive online map displaying the agency’s mature and old-growth data.

By most scientist standards, this “resolution” is considered “low” or “coarse,” according to Birdsey and other scientists.

This low resolution has been widely criticized not only by scientists but also by environmentalists hoping to protect mature and old-growth forests, says Steve Pedery, conservation director at the Oregon-based environmental nonprofit Oregon Wild.

“The Forest Service maps did give a total picture in terms of the volume [of mature and old-growth trees], but they were so vague that you couldn’t actually identify any particular specific stand of old-growth anywhere,” says Pedery.

Pedery says the low-resolution maps could make protecting older trees more difficult.

For its part, the Forest Service admits its maps are vague and can’t be used to manage individual stands, but the agency doesn’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, according to Jamie Barbour, assistant director for adaptive management at the Forest Service’s Monitoring and Analysis Team, which oversaw the implementation of the mature and old-growth inventory.

“We didn’t want to create the impression that we knew exactly where these clumps of old forest were because that would have ramifications that might not be very useful,” says Barbour, adding that the agency wanted only “to present an idea of where large accumulations of older forests were.”

Asked what he meant by “ramifications,” Barbour responded, “People misinterpret things. If we’re saying that a specific small area is mature old growth and it’s not, then that could lead to disputes about how to manage it.”

Barbour says high-resolution mapping of mature and old-growth forests should ideally happen at the local level. Though, he says, the Forest Service is also exploring using a NASA-led effort called “GEDI,” a project that is literally out of this world.

GEDI: Monitoring old-growth from space

“GEDI” stands for the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation—which, yes, is a reference to “a galaxy far, far away” and is pronounced “Jedi.”

Befitting its namesake, GEDI uses a high-resolution laser system known as LiDAR to map the Earth’s surface.

The project’s LiDAR system is located on the International Space Station.

The GEDI system can observe “nearly all tropical and temperate forests.”

The project’s goal is to “provide answers to how deforestation has contributed to atmospheric CO2 concentrations, how much carbon forests will absorb in the future and how habitat degradation will affect global biodiversity,” according to its website.

The NASA-led effort has been used to map old-growth trees in Australia but was not used as part of the Forest Service mapping project, despite the fact that GEDI data for U.S. forests were available at the time.

However, GEDI might be used by the Forest Service to continue monitoring older forests, at least according to promotional material posted by NASA on its website and on YouTube.

This material suggests that adding GEDI to the Forest Service’s mapping effort will “soon” enable the public to “view some of these [old-growth] forests like never before” and help “fill in those spatial gaps” that FIA data and the Forest Service’s current inventory was unable to fill.

Exactly if and when GEDI will be used by the Forest Service is unclear.

GEDI project lead, Ralph Dubayah, professor of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, couldn’t be reached for comment.

The project’s LiDAR system is also currently not in use on the ISS. Instead, it’s being stowed away to make room for a Department of Defense project, according to Barbour.

GEDI data won’t provide a complete picture of what’s out there, says Barbour, but echoing NASA’s promotional material, he says it could help fill in the gaps between FIA plots.

‘Mature’ trees needs protection, too

Beverly Law, a retired forest ecologist at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry and leading researcher on how to harness the carbon-capturing power of older trees, says she was also disappointed with the Forest Service’s inventory of mature and old-growth trees.

In 2018, Law came under fire from the timber industry following the publication of her study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study demonstrated that the state of Oregon could sequester more carbon and slow climate change if it slowed the rate at which it harvested its forests.

Law is impressed with the Biden administration’s efforts to push the Forest Service in the direction of carbon storage.

But she worries about how the plan will be implemented by an agency that historically has had to be ordered to conserve rather than log the nation’s trees.

“It’s the best move that’s been made by any administration, ever,” says Law of the old-growth forest plan. “But the devil’s in the details in how it’s carried out.”

In February, Law was one of over 190 scientists who study the carbon-capturing potential of older trees to sign an open letter to the Biden Administration requesting it immediately “direct the Forest Service and BLM to suspend all timber sales in mature and old-growth forests, and refrain from proposing new timber sales in these forests” until the environmental impact statements required by law to implement the old-growth forest plan are completed.

One of those devilish details Law and others are concerned about is the possibility that the Forest Service is now trying to sidestep its obligation to protect both mature and old-growth trees.

As critics pointed out in December 2023, when it was published, the Land Management Plan Direction for Old-Growth Forest Conditions Across the National Forest System, while creating nationwide protections for old-growth forests, fell short of also providing broad protections for mature forests.

Because many mature tree stands are now old enough to be carbon-capturing powerhouses in their own right, and because many are now just decades away from being classified as old-growth, many scientists, Law among them, argue that the lack of protections for mature trees is a major loss both for trees and for fighting the climate crisis.

Leaving out mature trees, they say, also violates the intent of the larger push to use the nation’s forests to sequester carbon, a push that doesn’t originate with the Forest Service but with two executive orders issued by the Biden Administration.

The first executive order, EO 14008, was signed shortly after President Biden’s inauguration in 2021. It directs federal agencies to protect 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030.

The second executive order, EO 14072, was issued in April 2022 and directs the Department of Agriculture (which contains the Forest Service) and the Bureau of Land Management to create a national inventory of mature and old-growth forests found on federal lands as part of a larger effort to use these forests to, among other things, “retain and enhance carbon storage.”

According to the Forest Service’s own estimates, while old-growth forests cover just 17% of the federal lands they inventoried, mature forests can be found on 45% of surveyed lands.

Barbour, however, takes issue with claims that his agency is no longer concerned with mature forests as a way to fight climate change.

“We would like to manage [forests] for a suite of conditions, some of which are older forests, and we’re trying to understand where we can maintain forests for a very long period of time,” says Barbour.

Barbour says ultimately the goal of carbon storage needs to be balanced against the need to “provide economic opportunities in rural communities” through ongoing forest management.

As for the Forest Service’s inventory of mature and old-growth forests, Law, who helped design the Forest Service’s FIA program, says one important question is why it took so long for the Forest Service to develop official mature and old-growth maps when the scientific community more generally has been doing this kind of analysis for decades.

“We’ve been waiting for this since before [President George W.] Bush, and even now it’s like, what the heck took so long?” says Law.