Oregon’s Big Trees Still Need Your Voice
After 25 years of protection from logging, big trees on our public lands are once again threatened. The biggest trees make up only 3% of our forests. We should be protecting them, not cutting them down. Today you have an opportunity to help to save big trees and old-growth on our national forests.
Take Action: Ask Oregon’s Senators to work with the Biden administration to keep protections for big trees and old-growth forests.
This ponderosa pine, with a diameter just over 21", could now be harvested for timber.
In January, just before President Biden was inaugurated, a Trump political appointee in Washington D.C. made the decision to remove protections for Central and Eastern Oregon’s big trees.
This decision would allow for logging of big trees on 8 million acres of National Forests in Central and Eastern Oregon. With a single pen stroke, the Trump administration bypassed a promised public process and decided our big trees can be sold and logged.
Throughout the twentieth century, so many big trees were logged that the many wildlife species that need them were running out of habitat. To respond to the catastrophic loss, in the mid-1990s the Forest Service adopted rules known as the Eastside Screens that protected all trees greater than 21” in diameter on our National Forests from timber harvest.
Watch to learn more.
In 2020, the Forest Service announced it was planning to amend the 21” rule, claiming that big trees need to be logged to mitigate wildfires. We were skeptical about the motivations from the get-go, especially because these big trees are the most naturally resistant to wildfire and keep forest floors wetter and cooler. The recent surprise decision by the Trump administration to make sure this environmental rollback was finalized before inauguration day confirmed our suspicions that this rule change was politically motivated - it was designed to be a giveaway to the timber industry.
Big trees provide homes for wildlife, provide shade, stabilize soils, create moist microclimates, protect water, and store atmospheric carbon.
And if you’re like us, their very presence on the landscape makes you inexplicably happy.
Big and old trees also sequester a significant amount of carbon. While big trees, larger than 21” in diameter, make up only 3% of our forests, they hold 42% of the forests’ carbon.
That means the best thing we can do to help mitigate climate change is to leave these trees standing.
We still have hope that our biggest trees can be saved, but we need your help. The Biden administration can withdraw this Trump decision. In fact, one of President Biden’s first actions in office was to issue Executive Order 13990 to review these types of decisions made under the Trump administration.
We need you to tell Sen. Merkley and Sen. Wyden that strong protections for big trees are essential to mitigating climate change. Take action and ask our senators to work with the Biden administration to keep protections for big trees and old-growth forests.