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by April Ehrlich, Oregon Public Broadcasting, McKenzie Funk, ProPublica, and Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

On Earth Day in 2022, President Joe Biden stood among cherry blossoms and towering Douglas firs in a Seattle park to declare the importance of big, old trees. “There used to be a hell of a lot more forests like this,” he said, calling them “our planet’s lungs” and extolling their power to fight climate change.

The amount of carbon trees suck out of the air increases dramatically with age, making older trees especially important. These trees are also rare: Less than 10% of forests in the lower 48 states remain unlogged or undisturbed by development.

The president uncapped his pen, preparing to sign an executive order to protect mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. “I just think this is the beginning of a new day,” Biden said.

But two years later, at a timber auction in a federal office in Roseburg, Oregon, this new day was nowhere to be seen. As journalists and protestors waited outside, logging company representatives filed through a secure glass door to a room where only “qualified bidders” were allowed.

Up for sale this September morning were the first trees from an area of forest the Bureau of Land Management calls Blue and Gold. It holds hundreds of thousands of trees on 3,225 acres in southern Oregon’s Coast Range. Forests here can absorb more carbon per acre than almost any other on the planet.

A week after Biden’s executive order, the Blue and Gold logging project had been shelved. Now it was back on.

The BLM is moving forward with timber sales in dozens of forests like this across the West, auctioning off their trees to companies that will turn them into plywood, two-by-fours and paper products. Under Biden, the agency is on track to log some 47,000 acres of public lands, nearly the same amount as during President Donald Trump’s first term in office. This includes even some mature and old-growth forests that Biden’s executive order was supposed to protect. An Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis found the bureau has allowed timber companies to cut such forests at a faster pace since the executive order than in the decade that preceded it.

Environmental activists protest outside the Bureau of Land Management office in Roseburg, Oregon, during a timber sale. The auction itself took place behind closed doors and only “qualified bidders” were allowed in. (Leah Nash, special to ProPublica)

The BLM still reports to Biden until Trump takes office again in January, and it’s unclear what changes, if any, the new administration will make. Outgoing presidents often use this lame-duck period to take additional action on the environment and to protect public lands. In a statement, White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández wrote that the “Biden-Harris Administration has made unprecedented progress toward the climate-smart management and conservation of our nation’s forests.” He did not specifically answer questions about why Biden’s actions didn’t slow the BLM’s cutting of old forests — or about any further protections the administration is planning now.

At the timber auction that September morning, the bidders emerged 80 minutes after they started. For $4.2 million, the administration had just sold off the first 561 acres of Blue and Gold, an estimated 83,259 trees.

One of the most accessible patches of forest in the Blue and Gold project is 30 minutes up the highway from Roseburg.

On a recent fall afternoon, Erich Reeder, a BLM wildlife surveyor who had just retired from the agency after 23 years, led the way there. The sun was out as he drove into the Coast Range, but soon after he turned off the highway and followed a single-lane road along the banks of Yellow Creek, trees shaded the way.

Ribbons marked the edge of the area that will be logged. Reeder walked past them and into the forest, stepping lightly through sword ferns and over moss-covered logs, pausing to look down at a paper map or straight up at the varied canopy above.

Erich Reeder, a retired BLM wildlife surveyor, in the forest above Oregon’s Yellow Creek, an area slated for future logging. (Leah Nash, special to ProPublica)

In planning documents for Blue and Gold, the BLM describes this part of the forest as being composed of young, tightly packed trees with no remnants of older forest.

But the trees here did not match that description. They were widely spaced. There were no stumps, no signs of previous logging. The forest was tall and wild, with large branches and multiple layers of canopy and understory. Native tree species including chinkapin oaks, western hemlock, western red cedar and grand fir intermixed with the dominant Douglas fir. Many of the biggest trees had thick, wrinkled bark, indicating old age.

“You’re familiar with tree farms?” Reeder asked, describing the monoculture rows timber companies often plant after clear-cutting. This was the opposite.

For some endangered species, old-growth forest matters immensely. Marbled murrelets, rotund coastal birds sometimes described as “flying potatoes,” nest only in the large, mossy branches of old trees. Spotted owls, which were at the center of the 1990s timber wars in this part of Oregon, require similar habitat to survive.

Old trees also matter for climate change, as Biden noted in his Seattle speech. The larger a tree is, the more carbon it absorbs. Data from the U.S. Forest Service shows that in forests older than 200 years in Oregon, on average, the trees hold more than three times as much carbon per acre as young industrial timber plantations. Ultimately, leaving forests intact keeps more carbon out of the atmosphere than logging them and planting new ones.

Down the hill toward Yellow Creek, Reeder pulled out a measuring tape at the base of one particularly large Douglas fir. Its diameter: 86 inches. If it was chopped down, Reeder could lie across the stump with more than a foot to spare.

In the planning documents, the BLM estimated the trees in this area were around 90 years old.

“Yeah, this is a little bit older than 90,” Reeder said dryly. He put its age at 400 to 600 years.

Reeder, left, and Madeline Cowen, an organizer with the environmental group Cascadia Wildlands, measure an old-growth tree in the Yellow Creek area. (Leah Nash, special to ProPublica)

BLM officials believe federal law forces them to keep chopping trees. It’s part of a balancing act between resource extraction and other priorities, like recreation and conservation. “We are a multi-use agency,” spokesperson Brian Hires wrote in response to questions from OPB and ProPublica. “We are committed to forest health and providing the timber Americans need.”

Across the country, the agency manages 245 million acres, including vast territories of desert and juniper trees, along with rangeland it leases out to ranchers. Among its holdings in Oregon are 2.4 million acres of green forests.

A big portion of these are known as O&C lands because they once belonged to the Oregon and California Railroad until a deal with Congress went wrong. The federal government took them back, resulting in a giant checkerboard of alternating public and private squares. The O&C Act of 1937 says the federal government must manage these lands for “permanent forest production” under the principle of “sustained yield,” helping local economies while also protecting watersheds and providing recreation opportunities.

The timber industry interprets the 1937 act as primarily a logging mandate, and it has sued the BLM for setting aside too many O&C acres for conservation. This view is shared by local counties that historically received part of the BLM’s sales revenues to pay for schools and roads and that still rely on the industry for jobs. Trees cut on federal lands can’t be shipped overseas and typically go to local mills. And “it’s not just the mills,” says Doug Robertson, executive director of the Association of O&C Counties. “It’s everything that supports the mills: all of the manufacturing, the trucking, and on and on.”

But how much logging the O&C Act mandates is subject to debate. The act directs the BLM to set its own quotas for timber sales, and it does so. In 2016, the agency drew up a regional logging plan with annual targets for each district in Oregon’s Coast Range, taking care, in theory, to avoid sensitive habitat for species like the spotted owl. It protected three-quarters of the O&C lands from regular logging, and even in those areas where logging would be allowed, there were new prohibitions against cutting the biggest, oldest trees.

There were problems with the bureau’s approach, however.

It created its logging maps based on a database of tree ages that local staff in Oregon warned didn’t accurately capture the old-growth forest that serves as owl habitat. A leaked 2014 memo by a BLM wildlife biologist suggested that the bureau “field verify all stands” before deciding which areas could be cut, meaning it should visually inspect them instead of relying on data alone.

There’s no evidence agency officials followed this recommendation. They used the database in developing the 2016 plan and again in recent years in deciding which Blue and Gold areas would be up for sale.

The BLM also has tried to avoid detailed environmental reviews as it moves to log in new areas, saying it sufficiently considered impacts in 2016. Over and over, conservation groups have sued to demand full reviews, which can be required by federal law. Over and over, courts have decided against the bureau, in most cases directing it to redo its analysis before logging can continue. The BLM lost at least three such lawsuits between 2019 and 2022, with judges ruling that it failed to take a “hard look” at impacts or calling its decisions “arbitrary and capricious.”

This approach could have ended with Biden’s Earth Day executive order. It called for a national inventory of mature and old-growth forests, an analysis of the threats to them, and future regulations to protect them. But all of these prescriptions ultimately have proved too vague to bring about change.

Unlike the BLM, the U.S. Forest Service, the biggest federal forestland manager in Oregon and the country, responded to Biden’s order by proposing to update management plans for all national forests with new regulations for protecting old growth. These plans outline how a forest will be managed — like logging parameters, species protections, restoration projects and road maintenance. The updates will include a prohibition on cutting old growth solely for commercial reasons.

The BLM, on the other hand, said nothing about changing its current forest plans. Hires, the agency spokesperson, wrote that Biden’s executive order builds on the bureau’s “existing efforts” to protect mature and old-growth forests, offering “further clarity” but not a new direction. The BLM did issue a new rule stating it is “working to ensure” that these forests are managed to “promote their continued health and resilience.” But the rule does not include hard stipulations protecting them from logging — so the logging continues.

OPB and ProPublica compared the agency’s forest database for Oregon to its timber records and found that in the past two years, the BLM oversaw logging in more than 10,000 acres of forest it labeled as at least 80 years old — the age at which the BLM and Forest Service consider western Oregon’s conifers to be “mature”. The average number of acres of older forest logged annually since the president’s executive order is already higher than in any two-year span since at least 2013.

On Dead Horse Ridge, in a part of Oregon’s Coast Range known as Blue and Gold, clear-cut private lands meet forested public lands. Soon, much of this whole area could be logged. (Leah Nash, special to ProPublica)

Last year, a pair of appellate court rulings called into question the idea that the O&C Act is little more than a logging mandate. Judges affirmed the BLM and its parent agency, the Department of Interior, have “significant discretion” in determining how much to cut and where. “The Department’s duty to oversee the lands is obligatory,” reads a 2023 opinion from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “but treating every parcel as timberland is not.”

For now, tree sales set in motion in 2016 are still in motion. The bureau does not expect to revisit its logging plan for Oregon’s Coast Range until 2028 at the earliest. The list of areas to be cut, including Blue and Gold, remains unchanged. And it is likely the incoming administration will look to expand logging on public lands. Project 2025, a transition plan prepared by Trump allies at The Heritage Foundation, mentions the O&C Act by name and recommends that “the new Administration must immediately fulfill its responsibilities and manage the O&C lands for ‘permanent forest production’ to ensure that the timber is ‘sold, cut, and removed.’”

Since Biden’s executive order, environmental groups have sued the BLM at least four more times for avoiding full environmental reviews of logging projects. In two of these cases, the bureau again lost in court. A third case ended in a settlement, with the bureau agreeing to pause operations and redo its environmental analysis.

The newest case, filed three days before the timber auction in Roseburg, is over Blue and Gold.

To give access to loggers within the Blue and Gold project area, the BLM plans to improve “existing roads” like the one pictured here, which would include clearing underbrush and potentially cutting trees. (Leah Nash, special to ProPublica)

Environmental groups in Oregon can’t challenge every BLM logging project. “We just don’t have the capacity,” said attorney Nick Cady of Cascadia Wildlands, one of three groups that filed a joint lawsuit to stop the plan for Blue and Gold. This one stands out, he said, because of the apparent age of the forest.

Blue and Gold is also the only logging project known to have been paused in response to Biden’s executive order, then reinstated.

Heather Whitman, the BLM district manager in Roseburg, says the bureau remade the logging plan for Blue and Gold after she decided to pause it. The project now relies more on forest thinning and less on methods that, to a layperson, can look much like clear-cuts. “Quite a bit changed,” she says.

But Blue and Gold still depends on the same database of forest ages as before, and, as the new lawsuit points out, questions about the data’s accuracy remain. In 2022, the bureau declared the forest above Yellow Creek to be 60 years old. In 2024, after restarting the project, the bureau inexplicably revised the forest’s age to 90 years. A dozen other areas had their ages jump around, too. A handful are said to be younger now than they were two years ago.

After all that, nearly as many acres of Blue and Gold will be logged as would have been before. Roseburg officials wrote that the project must proceed because of their district’s ongoing “need to produce timber volume.”

Trees greater than 40 inches in diameter or older than about 175 years are, in most cases, protected under the BLM’s 2016 management plan for Oregon’s Coast Range. But if logging does go forward here, the intact forests these trees now anchor will be transformed, says Reeder, the retired BLM surveyor. The older trees themselves, more exposed in the landscape, could be more vulnerable to windstorms. The soil around them could dry out.

The BLM estimates that after logging, the risk of wildfires — a focus of Biden’s Earth Day speech — will go down in Blue and Gold in the long term, but that for decades some areas of forest will have a higher fire risk. If burned, the trees’ stored carbon will be released back into the atmosphere.

Because the BLM skipped a comprehensive environmental review of Blue and Gold, it did not look in detail at how the project will affect carbon storage and climate change. The new lawsuit claims that the bureau also skipped detailed analyses of other potential impacts, including heightened landslide risk and invasions of nonnative plants.

The BLM did carry out a quicker initial review of likely impacts to the ecosystem, including hiring a contractor to search the forest for endangered spotted owls. But “it was rushed at the beginning,” recalled Tom Baxter, one of the owl surveyors hired to do the job.

First image: Tom Baxter, who has been a spotted owl surveyor for 14 years, at his home in Dexter, Oregon. Baxter, who surveyed the Blue and Gold project area for the Bureau of Land Management, said the project was rushed and short-staffed, and that the equipment he was given was not high quality. Second image: Spotted owl survey markers in the Yellow Creek area. (Leah Nash, special to ProPublica)

Baxter said the contractor he worked for was called in just weeks ahead of the survey. As a result, his team was shorthanded. Then the BLM had the surveyors fan out across the entire project area, instead of focusing on the parts of the forest most likely to have owls — a “peanut butter” approach that he says spread the team too thin.

“We were wasting our time in places where I knew there weren’t going to be spotted owls,” Baxter recalled.

What the bureau’s initial review does show is that the Blue and Gold project will destroy 119 acres of prime spotted owl habitat and “downgrade” another 1,539 acres. The logging will periodically cloud the waters of Yellow Creek, where threatened Oregon Coast coho salmon go to spawn. And it could kill or harm up to 13 endangered murrelet chicks.

But the BLM, summing up its findings in a notice published two weeks before the first trees went on sale, concluded that there would be “no significant impact” on the environment.

Cady, the Cascadia Wildlands attorney, disagrees. For conservation groups, Blue and Gold is just the latest logging project that Biden’s executive order failed to stop. “There is a massive disconnect between the administration and what’s happening on the ground,” Cady said.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data analysis.

Correction

Nov. 13, 2024: This story originally misstated a logging project’s impact on endangered marbled murrelet chicks. It could kill or harm an estimated 13 of them; it isn’t definitively known that it will kill them.

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