Northwest Forest Plan committee likely to dissolve

“Everybody was prepped for it, but obviously very disappointed — not surprised, but very disappointed,” said Susan Jane Brown, FAC co-director and principal legal counsel for Silvix Resources. “There was more advice that we could provide to the Forest Service, especially now, given all of the chaos that the agency is facing.”

Driven out of concern for northern spotted owls, the first NWFP came to fruition in 1994, attempting to balance conservation interests with the logging economy. Since then, endangered owl populations continued have their sharp decline, wildfires grew more severe and frequent, timber-dependent communities suffered and Tribes, who were excluded from the original plan, still lacked representation.

In summer 2023, USFS convened the FAC to address those pitfalls and help direct regional forest management for decades to come. As previously reported by Columbia Gorge News, the FAC’s 193 recommendations boldly departed from USFS’s legacy in two critical ways: engaging in meaningful co-stewardship with Tribal partners and harnessing healthy fire to improve ecological resilience.

“That’s a historic achievement,” said Brown. “That’s something nobody, anywhere else, has ever been able to do.”

While USFS isn’t required to adopt any of the recommendations, now it’s unlikely the committee can have a dialogue about them — to push for changes — with the agency, which released its draft plan last November. The draft incorporates language about Tribal inclusion and prescribed fire, but conservationists are arguing it lacks adequate protections for old-growth forests, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

What’s more, Brown said she’s uncertain whether USFS will formally amend the NWFP, as expected in spring 2026, at all, particularly because many of the FAC’s recommendations use vocabulary no longer deemed admissible by President Donald Trump.

In an effort to scrub “wokeness” from the government, words such as “race, “woman,” “inequality” and many others have vanished from government websites, according to the New York Times. Brown reported that she’s been told not to use “climate change,” “wildfire crisis strategy” and “Tribal,” terminology essential to problems the FAC sought to remediate  

USFS has also fired thousands of probationary employees since mid-February and Trump recently directed agencies to increase logging across national forests by sidestepping endangered species protections, a combination of events that, alongside an out-of-date NWFP and federal funding confusion, Brown believes could fundamentally change public lands.

“It’s setting up the agencies to fail so this administration has a tolerable argument that we should divest ourselves of federal public lands — we should sell them off to the highest bidder,” said Brown. “The whole thing disgusts me and makes me really angry as a taxpayer.”

“I think it’s going to get a lot worse. I think this summer’s fire season is going to be atrocious,” she continued. “I think we’re going to kill people, and that blood is on this administration’s hands. It’s not on the Forest Service ... it’s on the leadership.”

Regardless of the outcome, Brown said the FAC feels proud of its work and encouraged folks to contact their local USFS offices to express support for an amended, more just NWFP.