102-acre King County timber sale paused as politicians air climate concerns - The Seattle Times

102-acre King County timber sale paused as politicians air climate concerns | The Seattle Times

EAST KING COUNTY — Wading through green waves of sword ferns that rolled into the distance and lapped at the roots of mossy tree trunks, Jim Oliver stopped below a particularly broad Douglas fir. Forty-nine inches in diameter at breast height, according to his measuring tape.

“That’s as big as a tree can get in 100 years,” or close to it, Oliver said, letting his gaze climb 200 feet skyward, into the sun-dappled canopy of a public forest outside Duvall that narrowly avoided a timber sale this past week.

More than 100 acres managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources were scheduled to be auctioned for logging Tuesday with a $1.62 million minimum bid. But DNR hit pause at the last moment, shelving the Wishbone sale of 4.7 million board feet of timber Monday night after environmentalists sued and seven of nine Metropolitan King County Council members shared concerns.

It’s not the first time DNR has halted a sale under pressure from local officials and environmentalists who oppose state-sanctioned commercial logging of what they call mature or “legacy” forests. Organizations like the Center for Responsible Forestry, where Oliver is a coordinator, have waged campaigns against multiple auctions in recent years, scoring a few other modest wins.

But it’s the first time Seattle-area politicians have gotten directly involved in a sale, advocates say, and it’s a dramatic example of how dynamic such battles can be, with the reprieve from Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz coming just hours before the auction was supposed to occur.

Another high-profile sale, of 126 acres near Port Angeles, went ahead Wednesday despite local opposition. Franz, who leads DNR, launched a 2024 bid for governor in May, giving the debate even more political juice.

Under an antiquated system, state timber revenue helps fund schools, county governments and other services. Of the 102 acres in the Wishbone plot, 15 are on lands managed for King County. Most money from the Wishbone sale would flow to a fund for building projects at the state Capitol in Olympia.

“Our vision is to work with DNR on a strategy to preserve these mature, legacy forests,” King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove said after the Wishbone pause. “These are forests on their way to becoming old growth.”

The Snoqualmie Indian Tribe added its voice with a written statement Friday, calling for the auction to be delayed “until the climate impacts of cutting a mature forest can be fully assessed.”

DNR is describing the sale near Cherry Creek in the Snoqualmie River watershed as postponed rather than canceled, saying it was properly vetted and could still happen at a later date. Meanwhile, the environmentalists fighting it say its suspension is a sign their movement is gaining momentum.

“I think it’s a victory, because this type of forest is just so vanishingly rare,” said Tacoma-based advocate Stephen Kropp, who started the Center for Responsible Forestry and directs the Legacy Forests Defense Coalition.

Special place

In some ways, the Wishbone battle is like other skirmishes against DNR sales of mature forests. The territory was logged by hand in the 1920s and 1930s, so it isn’t a pristine “old-growth” forest. Yet it wasn’t subjected to chain-saw logging and it’s grown naturally for about a century, leading some environmentalists to argue it and similar forests should be protected.

They say such forests promote biodiversity, provide animal habitat and combat climate change better than forests that were logged more recently and subsequently regrown as homogeneous tree plantations. The latter are much more common on DNR lands, especially near Puget Sound, Kropp said.

In this case, the ecological region between Lake Sammamish and the Cascade Mountains has been extra “hammered” by logging, including all around the Wishbone territory, he said.

The Legacy Forests Defense Coalition and two other groups sued last month, accusing DNR of failing to disclose and mitigate the Wishbone sale’s climate impacts and to consider alternatives, like thinning plantation trees rather than logging mature ones. Environmentalists won a similar case in Jefferson County last year, but not until sales there went through and trees were cut.

“We believe it is critical for the [DNR] to bring an end to the logging of these forests,” that store carbon, cool their surroundings, support plants and animals, and guard against fires and floods, Upthegrove and six colleagues wrote in a July 20 letter, asking Franz to defer the Wishbone sale.

The signers included Councilmember Sarah Perry, who represents Duvall and the forest in question. It’s mostly fir trees, but Oliver also pointed out cedar, hemlock, maple, cottonwood and alder trees of varying heights as he bushwhacked through Wednesday, plus huckleberries, gooseberries and devil’s club plants. Huge stumps with ax notches left by early 20th-century loggers and tree snags bent at odd angles are homes for bugs and birds.

When you enter a mature forest, you instantly sense that it’s special, said Brel Froebe, interim executive director at the Center for Responsible Forestry.

“This feels like a place that’s alive,” he said. “Biodiversity is a sacred thing.”

DNR already conserves about half of the 2 million-plus acres of forests it manages, including almost all pre-1900 acres and most from before 1945, said Duane Emmons, the agency’s assistant deputy supervisor for state uplands, using data points that Kropp, with the Legacy Forests Defense Coalition, asserts are misleading overestimates. What gets protected is partly dictated by DNR’s habitat conservation plan, designed to shield at-risk animals like the northern spotted owl. However, some pre-1945 acres are appropriate for certain logging, Emmons said.

The 102-acre Wishbone sale was narrowed from a potential 250 acres to protect sensitive zones, Emmons said. If it is allowed to move forward, it will get a “variable retention harvest,” in which eight trees are left alone for each acre cut; it will also be reseeded with multiple species, rather than treated like a “true plantation,” he said.

Trees used by the Snoqualmie Tribe for cedar bark stripping will be among those left alone, Emmons added, saying DNR worked with the tribe to facilitate stripping for cultural purposes ahead of the sale. The tribe has done stripping in the vicinity in recent years but didn’t know a sale was imminent, said Jaime Martin, the tribe’s executive director for governmental affairs.

DNR’s forests are trust lands, granted to the state by Congress long ago to fund public institutions like schools or managed by DNR on behalf of various counties. For decades, DNR has engaged in harvesting based on the understanding that it’s required to produce revenue for its beneficiaries. Some counties and rural communities depend on the money and have supported the logging, while other jurisdictions have been less enthusiastic.

DNR timber sales generated about $188 million in revenue last year.

Timber politics

Few of the roughly 100 sales that DNR schedules each year are in King County and none received much public attention until recently, Kropp said.

That’s starting to change, he said. Environmentalists repelled DNR sales in Thurston and Whatcom counties in 2021 and 2022. The Washington Supreme Court ruled last year that DNR can, but isn’t constitutionally obligated, to harvest forests on trust lands, giving Franz more leeway. She announced a plan in 2022 to preserve an additional 10,000 acres of forests by leasing trees to polluters as carbon credits rather than selling them as timber.

Franz wrote to all nine King County Council members on June 7, touting DNR’s management of trust lands generally and inviting them to collaborate on local solutions. There are ways for counties to repossess trust lands and ways for DNR to safeguard forests using strategies like replacement purchases, she noted. Earlier this year, the state Legislature allocated $70 million for such purchases, with the aim of protecting up to 2,000 more acres.

The debate isn’t over, of course. Pro-logging interests, including Lewis and Skagit counties, have jammed Franz’s carbon-credits plan with a lawsuit, and a bill that could have unjammed it didn’t pass the Legislature this year.

The American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, pushed back Thursday against the campaign to stop the Wishbone sale. In a statement, the group’s president, Travis Joseph, said such efforts will force developers to “use more carbon-intensive building materials like concrete and steel,” push the state to “import more lumber and wood products from faraway countries” and reduce funding “for essential public services.” DNR’s Emmons echoed those points, also warning about potential job impacts for rural communities.

Environmentalists targeted Wishbone after identifying King County as a likely ally, said John Talberth, president at the Center for Sustainable Economy, which is part of the lawsuit against the auction. The lawsuit put the sale on Upthegrove’s radar, along with a deluge of emails from constituents, he said.

In a letter Tuesday, Franz agreed to defer the Wishbone auction and meet with the council members.

“While I believe that our forests with high ecological and cultural values should be conserved and managed to maximize their benefits, I also believe our working forests can and should continue to power our economy by providing a reliable, local, long-term timber supply as well as quality, family-supporting jobs for our communities,” Franz wrote in her Tuesday letter.

Kropp said the activists need to keep pushing: “That’s the reason DNR is doing anything at all to protect these legacy forests. It’s all political.”