Officials in Oregon say they need to cut trees, including some healthy ones. The reaction shows how complex land management has become as forest health declines.

The USFS and BLM have a real history of managing land to maximize profits, rather than for conservation. This created a lasting mistrust, where even when they’re likely doing the right thing, they get significant opposition.

Actually changing that is going to require showing people examples of how risk reduction measures like this improved peoples lives, and demonstrating transparent good-faith decisionmaking repeatedly.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    20 days ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The distrust exemplifies a challenge: How do those agencies, which control much of the land in the Western half of the country, navigate competing mandates for conservation, resource extraction and fire safety as forest health declines across the West?

    This year, the Biden administration formally strengthened the Bureau of Land Management’s conservation authority, giving the agency more latitude to prioritize environmental concerns in concert with its other mandates.

    At the time, the region was torn apart in a battle over conservation, known locally as the Timber Wars, when environmentalists fought to limit logging projects sponsored by the United States Forest Service and the B.L.M.

    “I know people who call them the Bureau of Lumber and Mining,” said Mr. Gehres, who now works at the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council, a nonprofit group that tries to develop consensus solutions for natural resource management.

    Ms. Burghard’s team recently invited residents on a field trip to view the dying trees in an effort to show the community the extent of the crisis, alleviate skepticism and to persuade locals of the urgency of the problem.

    does commercial timber sales, our primary objective is forest health, and the economic value of the trees is a byproduct of that,” said Kyle Sullivan, a spokesman for the bureau’s district office in Medford, Ore. “That is something that a lot of the public doesn’t necessarily understand.

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