Since Gifford Pinchot exhorted his former agency to stop clear-cut logging Oregon’s national forests in the 1930s, the state has been the elephant in the national forest policy room. There’s something about Oregon’s unique combination of timber bounty and forest beauty that catalyzes forest activism. From spotted owls to salmon, toxic pesticides to tree sitting, this rather low-profile and isolated state has galvanized forest policy debates for a century.
Once again, Oregon finds itself center stage as it pleads with Congress for a continuation of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. This law pays federal dollars to counties and schools in thirty states as compensation for national forest land’s exemption from local property tax levies. No matter what the response this time around, it is apparent to Oregon, which receives more than half of these federal dollars, that a long-term solution that does not depend upon Congress’s continued largesse must be found.
During a century of unsustainable timber harvesting, Oregon counties came to depend upon federal land logging revenues to finance everything from public libraries to sheriffs. This house of cards came crashing down in the 1980s when the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management broke federal environmental laws to keep logging levels up. Judges stepped in to stop the illegal logging, and forced politicians and scientists to devise the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. The Plan protects about 8 million acres of old-growth forests, which necessarily dropped logging levels by about 90 percent. Since then, timber revenue–dependent counties have relied upon federal payments, which shift tax dollars from populous states to rural western counties. Like the old-growth logging that preceded it, these federal payouts are unsustainable, too, politically speaking.
In late 2006, an Oregon county commissioner proposed a “bold but reasonable solution” to the county payments Gordian knot. Douglas County’s Doug Robertson suggested selling half of the 2.4 million acres of O&C lands in western Oregon to capitalize a $4 billion fund whose interest earnings would be divided among the schools and counties. Under Robertson’s proposal, the other half of the O&C lands would be conserved for wildlife and recreation purposes.
Robertson’s plan to sell off 1.2 million acres of western Oregon’s federal lands is dead on arrival in this Congress—as well it should be. But land sales are not the only option. What if these 2.4 million acres, which are arranged in a checkerboard of alternating square-mile sections across Oregon’s western half, were divided into two federal land trusts? The “timber trust” would make up the second-growth forests that have resulted from eighty years of primarily clear-cut logging. The “environmental trust” would comprise the old-growth forests and the wild, undeveloped areas that still remain in BLM ownership.
The timber trust lands, if managed sustainably for maximum long-term profit, could earn enough from second-growth logging to cover all of Oregon’s Secure Rural Schools payments. The environmental trust lands would provide ancient forest wildlife habitat, watershed protection and recreation for Oregonians—and the rest of the nation—in perpetuity.
Even Solomon could see that splitting this baby doesn’t have to leave a carcass.