The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan

May 5, 2023

The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth Ecosystems

Photo by Brittany Mason

Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.

In the 1900s, federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest involved logging old-growth forests for a steady supply of timber. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, young scientists discovered that logging was damaging to northern spotted owls, salmon, and the forest ecosystem. Environmental activists used this new information and laws like the Endangered Species Act to obtain court orders to stop logging on federal land. This caused a struggle to balance conservation with employment. The Northwest Forest Plan was then created to prioritize conserving old-growth forests, streams, and their species and ecosystems.

In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and effects of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates short commentaries and histories from key figures—including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.

Sustainable Northwest and the Oregon Historical Society are hosting a free event in Portland on May 7th from 2-3:30pm with authors Norman Johnson and Jerry Franklin to discuss their new book.

How a grad student’s finding that northern spotted owls needed huge home ranges encompassing large amounts of old forest set off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate both conservation of the owl and continuance of the old-growth logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people.
The struggle that ensued, including years of controversy and debate, the federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States, leading to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP)—the first large-scale ecosystem plan for federal forests in the United States.
The Plan’s ups and downs over the last 30 years as managers adapted their implementation of the Plan’s conservation strategies to a changing environment, social protest and litigation, and federal elections every two or four years
Recommendations for the future including the need for policies that clearly distinguish between those forms of old growth that can be reserved and those that need active management to save them, the need to prevent an influx in barred owls from encroaching on spotted owl habitat, and the need to incorporate Indigenous voices as agencies work to modernize the plan — sources of knowledge and wisdom that were largely missing from plan development.