Stand up for our forests! Sign the petition now to call for stronger protections under the Northwest Forest Plan!

We, the undersigned, urge you to strengthen and expand the protections afforded by the Northwest Forest Plan to safeguard our drinking water, wildlife, and mature and old-growth forests. The Northwest Forest Plan has conserved millions of acres of our national forests and any amendment must recognize the critical role these public lands play in providing clean water, mitigating climate change, and protecting biodiversity. 

The Northwest Forest Plan was enacted to halt and reverse the devastation caused by past logging and road building practices, which were driving the extinction of old growth-dependent wildlife, polluting our water, and destroying ecosystem function. The Plan has largely been successful, but in light of the climate and extinction crises and its failure to incorporate Tribes, it must be strengthened and expanded to meet the Forest Service’s obligations to Tribes and to protect our last remaining mature and old-growth forests and the benefits they provide to all of us. 

Unfortunately, the Forest Service’s Proposed Action (Alternative B of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement) would remove important protections for species and ecosystems that the Plan was developed to protect, harming our region’s wildlife, watersheds, and resilience to climate change.

• We reject the Proposed Action because it fails to protect the Pacific Northwest’s biodiversity and ecosystems. The Proposed Action would substantially weaken the Plan’s ecosystem and wildlife protections by opening to logging over 800,000 acres of previously protected older forest stands and creating new loopholes to allow the logging of older trees that do remain protected. This significant increase in logging ignores the Forest Service’s duty to protect species listed under the Endangered Species Act, and would drive northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets, salmonids, and other old-growth dependent species toward extinction. Instead, the Forest Service must protect all remaining mature and old-growth moist forests in the Plan area to preserve ecosystems, save more carbon-storing trees, and improve fire resilience..
• We oppose the Forest Service’s exploitation of wildfire fear that would allow for logging that could reduce the landscape’s resilience to wildfire. The logging that could occur pursuant to the Proposed Action and Alternative D under the guise of “fuels reduction” largely represents a handout to the logging industry and could make wildfires worse by removing older, fire resilient trees. It would also cause harm to biodiversity and watersheds. The Forest Service should instead focus its limited resources on logging small, young trees in commercial plantations nearest to communities, prescribed burning, and on promoting community resilience through home hardening. 
• The Forest Service should modify and select Alternative C to better protect ecosystems, increase carbon storage, and meaningfully incorporate Tribes into forest management. While Alternative C is more protective of ecosystem function than the Proposed Action, it fails to incorporate the tribal involvement provisions contained in the Proposed Action and should be modified to include the same robust commitments to Tribal stewardship contained in the other action alternatives. Alternative C should also be modified to prohibit post-fire salvage logging, which harms an ecosystem’s regeneration processes, pollutes our water, removes important habitat features, and reduces carbon storage. Salvage logging should be prohibited in dry late-successional reserves except in the rare circumstance where it is warranted, such as for the removal of roadside hazards.

The Northwest Forest Plan is critical to the health of our ecosystems and communities, and any amendments must maintain and strengthen its ecosystem-based conservation goals while meaningfully incorporating Tribes. We urge the Forest Service to use a transparent, science-based approach that reflects public values, Tribal perspectives, and the interests of future generations.