Across the Pacific Northwest, one of North America's most important tree species is dying at an alarming rate. This spring, as in years past, Douglas-fir leaves are turning yellow, red and falling to the ground in the forests of southwest Oregon.
Experts believe a combination of factors is behind the phenomenon, including insect invasions, drought and rising temperatures due to climate change. Decades of fire suppression have upset the ecosystem's natural balance, exacerbating the problem.
“Drought, heat and climate change are causing widespread tree death, and there's no clear way to put the genie back in the bottle,” says Rob Jackson, an ecologist at Stanford University's Doerr School of Sustainability, who studies the effects of climate change on forests and grasslands. “We're setting forests up to die.”
Oregon's crisis shows how crucial forest management is as climate change alters the natural world. Foresters say they often need to cut down Douglas-fir trees, dead or alive, to minimize wildfire risk, promote forest health and help ecosystems adapt to a changing climate. Their plans also include selling some of the salvageable timber.
But the plans have irritated some environmentalists, who distrust government agencies and accuse them of prioritizing logging over environmental protection.
“Environmental groups are understandably skeptical, and they should be,” said Mindy Crandall, an associate professor of forest policy at Oregon State University. “Federal agencies have not listened to the public for too long.”
The distrust highlights a challenge: With forest health declining across the West, how can the agencies, which manage much of the land in the western half of the country, juggle the competing imperatives of conservation, resource extraction and fire safety?
Douglas fir is an important tree species for the region's vast and ecologically diverse forests, essential for the survival of a wide variety of plants and animals. It is also one of the most important timber trees in the country, and is widely used in residential construction and as a Christmas tree.
In southwest Oregon, more species died between 2015 and 2019 than in the previous 40 years combined. Deaths were concentrated in areas at the lower end of the range of elevation and precipitation suitable for Douglas-fir growth, but have spread since 2020. Fewer than 5,000 acres of dead land were confirmed in the state in 2021, but in 2022, that number has increased to more than 350,000 acres.
The Biden administration formally strengthened the Bureau of Land Management's environmental protection authority this year, giving the agency more latitude to prioritize environmental issues among its other responsibilities, and experts including Dr. Crandall say the bureau and other federal agencies have become more impartial over the past few decades and more explicitly concerned with climate change.
But environmental groups have long had doubts about nearly a century of government-approved logging.
Nathan Gehres grew up in southern Oregon's Applegate Valley in the 1980s, when the region was riven by conflicts over conservation, known locally as the Timber Wars, as environmentalists fought to limit logging projects backed by the U.S. Forest Service and the BLM.
“Some people call them the Bureau of Timber and Mines,” said Gehres, who now works for the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council, a nonprofit that aims to build consensus on natural resource management. “They've made mistakes in the past, and I don't think there are many government agencies that haven't made mistakes in the past. But three-quarters of the Applegate Valley is also federal land, so they're a critical partner.”
The BLM is proposing a multiyear project called the Strategic Action Plan for Safety (SOS) to cut down both live and dead trees across about 5,000 acres of agency-managed land in the Applegate Valley region, which officials say poses the greatest safety risks in the event of a wildfire.
Because it would be too costly to cut down only the dead trees, the live trees will likely be sold for timber, “to self-fund the costs” of leaving the forest, said Elizabeth Burghardt, a district manager for the Forest Service.
The BLM is trying to reach out to the community: Burgard's team recently invited residents on a site tour to inspect dying trees in an effort to demonstrate the severity of the crisis, ease skepticism, and convince locals of the urgency of the problem.
Luke Ruediger, a resident of the area and conservation director for the environmental group Klamath Forest Alliance, said he participated in the site visit and tried to remain open-minded about the BLM's intentions, but while he was shocked by the forest's decline, he said he was concerned the BLM would use the situation to justify selling more timber for commercial purposes.
Ruediger acknowledged that the region's fire danger needs to be addressed, “but this region has a history of harsh forest management,” he said, “a history biased toward the timber industry.”
Dominic DellaSala, chief scientist for the forest advocacy group Wild Heritage, who visited the forest with Ruediger and witnessed the Douglas-fir die-off, said he remained skeptical of the EPA's motives. “The EPA will cherry-pick the science to suit their desired outcome,” he said.
“We need to address climate change, which is a big part of what's causing this,” Dr Della Sala added, “and we need to reduce the pressure on the forests from these logging activities.”
Bureau of Land Management representatives said the SOS plan is specifically aimed directly at improving firefighter safety, and based on 15 years of monitored interventions, the agency is confident the plan will be successful, said Jenna Volpe, a fire ecologist with the agency.
“When the BLM sells commercial timber, our primary goal is forest health, and the economic value of the trees is a byproduct of that,” said Kyle Sullivan, a spokesman for the agency's field office in Medford, Ore. “This is something a lot of the public doesn't necessarily understand: Our commercial timber sales are actually aimed at forest health.”
Sullivan said the primary goal of the SOS program is to remove dead and dying trees, not cut down healthy trees for commercial purposes.
Researchers in Oregon and across the country stressed the need for the BLM and other landowners to manage the decline of Douglas-fir. The BLM isn't alone in addressing imperiled trees: The City of Ashland, Oregon, is also working to remove dead and dying Douglas-fir trees to manage public safety risks and improve forest health.
Researchers say that as forest health deteriorates, if left unchecked, they often become more susceptible to severe wildfires and more vulnerable to drought stress and disease.
Instead, it will become increasingly important to manage forests to make them safer, more climate-resilient, and even more sustainable. That could mean thinning to reduce tree density in certain areas, removing dead trees, and planting species that can tolerate hotter climates.
While it might seem intuitive to remove human interference and allow forests to somehow regain balance, the researchers say that after centuries of human interference, forests can't actually right themselves.
“We really need to reduce tree density,” says Dr Crandall of Oregon State University. “We've tampered with natural systems so much over the last 150 years, primarily through fire suppression, that we've thrown forests completely out of balance.”
But getting there will be a challenge for federal agencies, said Rachel Hamby, policy director for the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan environmental group.
“They have to try to make everybody happy, but in the end they make nobody happy,” she said.