WA's fight over the old-growth forests of tomorrow

Ty Abernathy tips his head back and judges where this big tree will fall as he starts cutting it with a chain saw. This is a hand faller's work, all eyeballing and experience to land a more than 100-foot-tall Douglas fir without breaking it - or getting killed.

Abernathy pauses to pound a wedge into the cut with a sledgehammer. Open it wider, then cut again, deeper, the saw screaming through the trunk until he feels the tree start to let go. He kills the saw's motor and jumps back. Stands to watch, as with a crack and shudder, the big fir begins to fall. Slowly, it cuts its last arc through the sky where it has persisted through some 100 winters. It tips, totters, picks up momentum.

Its thundering crash shakes the forest floor.

For more than a century, this has been a way of doing business in Washington, cutting forests owned by the state and today managed by the Department of Natural Resources. But in an era of climate warming - and growing climate activism - there is a new war in the woods.

This fight is not over old growth, the trees sprouted before 1850 and never cut since settlers came here. Those ancient monarchs are already protected by state and federal policy spurred by the Timber Wars of the 1980s and '90s that led to protection of more than 6 million acres of old growth (older than 200 years) on federal land in three states within the range of the northern spotted owl.

The conflict now playing out across Washington is over the old-growth forests of tomorrow. These are second-growth forests originating before 1945 and never sprayed with herbicide or replanted to a dense monoculture of nursery-grown seedlings. Today they are diverse, full of life and booming with big Doug firs and cedars just revving up for the long haul. In the right conditions, these trees can live 500, 800, even 1,000 years.

The fight over these forests started in 2021 with a tree sit - the first such protest in an older forest that didn't meet state standards for old-growth protection but wasn't a plantation tree farm either. Channeling climate dread and extinction doom, defenders have been putting these mossy, unprotected stands of trees in the spotlight all over Western Washington. They also did what people usually do when things start getting scarce; they gave them a name: legacy forests, evoking both what they are, and could be. Things have not been the same since.

Suddenly, DNR timber sales that can fetch millions of dollars are being paused, canceled, litigated and protested, throwing the state's timber business into disarray. Log buyers are facing uncertain supply. Mill workers and some local community officials say they want harvest of older forests back on track for the money that grows on those DNR trees, among the most lucrative on the market.

Washington's forest trust lands raise about $180 million a year for schools and local government services including hospitals, libraries, EMS and more, in addition to $63 million used to manage more than 2 million acres of state forestlands and maintain 14,000 miles of roads.

Yet opponents - including some City Council members and county commissioners - say these forests are worth more standing than cut.

A stark example of the logging blowback can be found in Thurston County, where commissioners have asked for a pause on sales in the 110,000-acre Capitol State Forest, southwest of Olympia, to protect big trees for biodiversity and human well-being - and to preserve the carbon stored in these sentinels.

"They are going about their business like it is 1950 and we know nothing about climate change, Tye Menser, chair of the Thurston County Board of County Commissioners, said of DNR officials.

"They are not listening to us. Instead what we get is a reeducation campaign about why we don't understand why nothing can be any different. … It's, ‘You don't really know, and if you did, you would back off.'"

DNR officials also express frustration. They say the agency actually has made changes to its forest practices, lots of changes. Today, the agency sets aside about 48% of the lands it manages, including 1.6 million acres protected under a habitat conservation plan. That brought relative peace in the woods and stability for the timber industry. Until now.

To be sure, state forests managed by DNR are just a portion of the timber cut in Washington. And legacy forests comprise even less, 16,000 to 25,000 acres, or just 3% to 8% of state forests available for logging, according to DNR. Most logging in Washington occurs on private lands.

But DNR forests are special. They are logged on longer rotations, and state timber stays home, unable to be exported as raw logs because of state law. They also stay forests forever, never to be converted to development. Legacy forests are the rarest of these lands, not plantations but true forests. Diverse, alive and beautiful, these are forests highly valuable for habitat, for recreation - and primo, fat cuts.

Todd Welker, deputy supervisor for uplands at DNR, says the goalposts keep shifting in the debate over which forests are too old to be logged.

"First it was pre-1850 [forests], then it was 1900. Then it was forests grown before 1945 and now it's pre-1960 - the narrative keeps changing," he said. "We set aside more than any timber company in the world. And it's never enough."

In months of interviews and field visits to older state forests from South Sound to Hood Canal to the Olympic Peninsula, The Seattle Times explored this controversy.

Loggers explained why they relish their work. Workers at a local mill that buys the trees for their quality fiber talked about their pride in jobs that also support a small-town lifestyle they cherish.

Educators and hospital workers praised an industry that helps pay for everything from a badly needed hospital expansion to a program in which students raise rabbits to sell at the county fair.

In nonviolent protests, opponents of legacy forest cuts are taking the flags and boundary markers off sales to try to foil them. They say they are desperate to save these older forests for the next generation.

The climate crisis has turned up the heat. The ability of forests - especially bigger trees - to take in carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it safely in their leaves, wood and roots makes older forests a climate stabilizer.

Voters statewide will soon have their say, in an election for the position of commissioner for public lands that amounts to a referendum on the fate of these older forests. The lands commissioner holds great influence over state forests managed by DNR. Two candidates face off in the general election. One of them, Dave Upthegrove, has promised to end commercial sales of legacy forests his first day in office.

Evergreen Gold

Mike Sly scopes out the height of the towering Douglas fir, eyeing it for market value. Its trunk is tall, straight and free of scars. Utility pole potential.

"That's poles all day long," Sly says. Each one could be worth $1,000 or more.

This proposed timber sale in the Capitol State Forest, called Evergreen Gold, was full of beauties just like it, as well as glorious red cedars.

A DNR forester had already marked the sale's boundaries, scoping the plot for everything from stream types, which determine buffers where trees are left, to the slopes, geology and archaeology, which can lead to more areas being preserved.

The question now for Sly was the value of what was left.

"It's as much an art as a science, something you learn over time," says Sly, scrambling deftly over logs in spiked boots. He is what is called a timber cruiser, trained to assess forests commercially, for their grade and sort - the possible products that could be made from them. Added up, his estimates determine the stand's cash value and the minimum bid DNR will set for potential buyers.

"You live and die by your cruise," Sly says, sizing up another big Doug fir. "There is huge potential for error, to either under- or overvalue."

Sly is the lead cruiser and marketing manager for the product sales and leasing division at DNR. He was impressed as he took stock, seeing, through his eyes, arrow-straight poles, trees big and strong enough for cross arms on utility poles, or good clean cuts off a lathe for high-grade veneer.

"This is super rare to find," Sly says, admiring a stand of first-rate Douglas firs, "there is hardly anywhere in the world that grows that."

Meanwhile, DNR biologist Alan Mainwaring is looking at the trees from an animal's perspective. "That is just a big old hooter Doug fir," he says, setting it aside for protection. He noted a cedar stump so old it had springboard notches from the first cut on this forest more than a century ago. "There was intensive logging here and, at some point, a fire," he says, reading scars on the stump. But the quality of most of the trees, growing for about 114 years since the last cut, was still extraordinary, he notes. "This is a monster plot."

The cruise report documents a trove of large Douglas firs mixed with red cedars, including 815 utility pole-quality trees - among the most valuable. "Evergreen Gold is aptly named," the report says. It includes nearly 6 million board feet of standing timber, which can produce enough lumber to construct about 729 homes with 2,600 square feet of living space. The trees age from 44 to 114 years. Sale appraisal: $3.5 million. Valuable material for buyers, and a gusher of money for beneficiaries, from the Port of Olympia to the Timberland Library, local school and fire districts, the Capitol campus and more.

Most privately owned industrial timberland owners manage monocrop farms, clear cut about every 40 years to maximize efficiency and profit. Harvest from federal land of old growth was mostly stopped for any commercial purpose in the Northwest Forest Plan, enacted in 1994 on federal lands protecting millions of acres of old growth in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. That leaves DNR land as a preferred source for local harvest of older, larger trees.

It's these older trees that have the strength and size needed for telephone poles. They also have the quality fiber that is used for railroad bridges, engineered wood products and big, architectural-quality beams. The trees from most private timber farms are too small, too young, too weak. Just babies, as far as Doug fir goes.

Big-tree defenders led in part by the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition have been using every legal tool in the public process to fight the logging of these older forests. They have filed lawsuits; built community outreach by organizing community forest walks; packed public meetings; filed dogged public records requests and detailed, deeply researched comments on proposed timber sales; staged protests at the DNR building; launched petitions and letter-writing campaigns; built internet-based rescue missions, illustrated with compelling photos; and made videos of older trees and forests for sale.

For DNR, the instability caused by the conflict has been challenging. It takes the agency about 18 months to prepare a forest for a proposed sale, engineering the logging roads, cruising a sale for merchantable timber, surveying the site for environmental set-asides, flagging the boundaries and surveying the roads for culverts. Those are all sunk costs DNR doesn't get back if a sale is canceled - or even sabotaged.

The Troublemakers

With a rip and a flourish, Tim Wheeler, 84, yanks down the DNR timber sale boundary sign. "They can't speak for themselves," he says of the big trees.

"We have to speak for them or they will be cut down." He defends the American tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience celebrated by Henry David Thoreau. "There are some things more important than obeying a law when they are violating the sacred principle of preserving our forests," Wheeler says.

"I had to think about it, it's a serious thing, taking out a survey marker," says Wheeler, whose great-grandfather cruised forests for Simpson Timber. He eyes a survey stick marking a future culvert for the logging road. He pulls the survey marker up. Uses it as a walking stick to keep right on going.

Today, people are starting to take direct action to save these forests. Calling themselves the Troublemakers, this group de-flagged the Carrot timber sale in the Capitol Forest in February and turned in the flagging material to DNR with a letter taking responsibility for their action. The Board of Natural Resources, which sets policy for DNR and approves timber sales, postponed the Carrot sale - which Thurston County fought in court - the next day. On Aug. 24, the Troublemakers struck again, this time at the Doc Holliday sale, about 21 miles west of Port Angeles.

Doc Holliday is another classic forest in this fight: full of trees 120 to 125 years old, booming to great heights and fat trunks in ideal growing conditions. Too young to fit the state's criteria for old growth. But since it was first logged, this forest has naturally regrown to a splendid diversity. There were dead and downed trees everywhere: moldering old logs and standing snags, teeming with lichen, mushrooms and nest cavities. Open areas, where young trees surged into the gap. Big snaggle-topped old trees of many species, including spruce, cedar and Douglas fir. Even grassy meadows graced with bone-white trunks of alder.

Scientists have learned in forests like these that Swainson's thrush, the songster of Washington's midsummer evenings, and other forest birds gain insurance against food shortages and refuge from temperature stress. That makes older forest environments crucial as the climate warms. Older, complex forests also provide homes for flying squirrels, owls, bears, cougars, fisher cats - so much of the wildlife of the Northwest.

Older forests help moderate climate warming, caused by the burning of fossil fuels that puts carbon pollution in the air. Big, old trees grow more slowly than surging, young trees. Young trees accrue carbon at a faster rate, but big, old trees, because of their massive size, store more carbon overall. They do this just by being trees, silently making food for their growth from carbon dioxide in the air, in a miraculous process called photosynthesis.

Globally, forests suck up about a third of all annual fossil fuel emissions, according to a 2011 study by the U.S. Forest Service. And this is primarily the work of the biggest trees. The largest 1% of trees on average across 48 forest plots around the world held 50% of biomass, according to a 2018 peer-reviewed scientific study. Right here at home, the moist forests of the Pacific Coast are the most carbon dense in the country, according to a 2024 scientific journal, and among the most carbon dense on Earth, scientists determined in 2009.

"This is worth so much more than the sales price," says Troublemaker Cindy Jatul, of Seattle, 68, a former science teacher at Roosevelt High School where she still substitute teaches. "It is worth more standing."

Those are fighting words in places like Elma.

Mill town life

Tyler Christensen, plant manager for Murphy Company's mill in Elma, Grays Harbor, walks the plant, checking the quality of veneer stacked and waiting to be hauled to the company's facilities in Oregon to make plywood and laminated panels. He loves this job at the mill, where he worked his way up from the factory floor over 16 years, doing just about every job.

"I learned the ins and outs, what we make and how we make it. I like the problem-solving, how to make a good product safely, and more efficiently," says Christensen, 37. He can hear the mill from his home and loves this job that pays a good family wage and lets him enjoy small-town life: baseball games with the kids, a 3-minute commute.

On a recent morning, the plant huffs and steams. Logs marked with the red dot of paint that denotes their origin from DNR lands are stacked tall in the log yard, ready to be made into veneer.

Inside the plant, workers pull freshly peeled veneer sheets from the conveyor belt, carrying it from a fast-spinning lathe. The wafer-thin sheets are trucked down to Oregon, where the company turns them into veneer-core panels used in a range of products like quality cabinets.

"We love what we do," said Knox Marshall, vice president of the resources division of Murphy, a family-owned company with about 900 employees in Oregon and Washington. Murphy dates back to 1909 and is led by the grandson of one of the company's founders.

Murphy bought the Elma mill from Weyerhaeuser in 2007 for one reason: It was close to the older trees in the Capitol Forest.

Today, the company has plenty of competition - including wood products from Russia.

Murphy is a regular buyer of DNR wood. The sweet spot for the company is trees about 60 to 70 years old. These are the trees the company needs for the strong fiber to make engineered wood products, including high-quality decorative panels, its niche business.

"We don't want to see it go away, we don't want to see it go to another country," Marshall said of the company's business.

Demand for forest products remains high, and shutting down sales of older trees from DNR forests just pushes buyers to other places, where standards aren't as high, Marshall noted. On Vancouver Island, BC Timber Sales, a government agency of the Province of British Columbia, is still logging old growth.

The legacy forest campaign targets only a small corner of the timber market. But it's problematic for a company like Murphy that has built a business in part on ready, local access to these trees.

Marshall says he is confounded by the controversy over logging on DNR lands that are managed under a habitat conservation plan approved by the Legislature and federal government. Every sale is also reviewed under the state Environmental Policy Act.

"Now it's not good enough?" Marshall said. "At what point is it not OK to use forest products?" Opponents counter that DNR isn't following its own rules for protecting older forests and is relying too heavily on buffer strips rather than intact forest to reach its preservation requirements.

Beyond jobs in the woods and in mills, timber dollars show up in so many ways in timber towns around Washington. Then there is the philanthropy by timber and forest products companies deeply embedded in the communities where they work and their employees live.

Noses twitching, whiskers whisking, bunnies take it in stride as Elma middle school students bring them from the pens where they are being raised and lay the bunnies on their backs, gentling, petting and soothing them until they are so relaxed that some of the rabbits start to snooze.

It took weeks of lessons to teach these kids how to nurture, handle, show and sell these rabbits at the county fair - life skills that will take them far, notes Mary the Rabbit Lady, aka Mary Pederson of Elma. She helps with the instruction in a program for middle and high school students that never would have happened without the support of timber industry money in everything from scholarships to support kids' participation, to buying their livestock - money many students put toward college.

Down the street, Elma's mayor and local residents - including a pet goat on a leash - turn out for a beam-raising ceremony for an expansion of the hospital. Donations from timber companies helped raise $1 million for the project, says Josh Martin, CEO for Summit Pacific Medical Center. Nate Root, chief log buyer for Murphy, is president of the hospital's charitable foundation - and is at the ceremony to sign a beam. "The support of the timber industry is just huge," Martin says.

But even in places like Jefferson, Clallam and Thurston counties, longtime wood baskets, some public officials are starting to ask DNR to cancel timber sales and preserve trees they value more as forests than revenue.

In Thurston County, 15 potential legacy forest sales, if canceled, would cost the junior taxing districts as much as $11 million earmarked for Medic One, the Port of Olympia, four school districts and more, according to an analysis by DNR. Some school district and fire officials say they want these sales to go forward. Thurston County commissioners say they understand but they also hear constituents who want the last of the Capitol Folder's older forests protected.

The commissioners have been pushing DNR to log younger trees elsewhere in its holdings to meet production targets and keep local government beneficiaries of timber revenue financially whole, while a longer-term solution is figured out. Meanwhile, opponents of legacy forest sales - including King, Jefferson, Thurston, Snohomish and Pacific counties - and the state have been battling each other in court, trading wins and losses.

Both industry and legacy forest advocates claimed victory in a recent state Supreme Court decision that affirmed DNR's duty to trust beneficiaries - but also said the agency can interpret that more broadly than just maximizing the cash value of timber sales. "It gave them the doors to walk through and they don't want to walk through them," said Menser, the Thurston County Commission chair. "So that is what is frustrating, when clearly the political climate is changing. The climate climate is also changing."

Fellow Commissioner Carolina Mejia said the new war over timber sales also shows how basic public services need more than forests for financial support. "The timber industry is very important to Washington state and very important to our economy," she said. "But when it comes to funding local entities, we have outgrown the pace of what timber can really give us."

A different approach?

To some, these forests are more than a source of wood products; these forests are relations.

"This is where our ancestors walked," says Skokomish tribal member and elder Rita Andrews, while visiting another DNR proposed sale called Next Contestant on the west side of Hood Canal.

"We take it to heart, we are connected to it - and it knows us," Andrews says of the forest, leaning on a lichened walking stick.

For the Skokomish and other Pacific Northwest tribes, cutting forests as a commodity violates an ancient relationship. Generations of tribal members managed forests here, burning some, stripping bark, modifying the landscape for their needs - but with great care, says Bunni Peterson Haitwas, another Skokomish tribal member and opponent of the sale. "We made sure we didn't gather too much. We wanted it to be here for 1,000 years," Haitwas says.

As they spoke, Chris Reykdal, superintendent of public instruction and a member of the Board of Natural Resources, listened, holding a branch of cedar given to him by the opponents of the sale convened by climate group Mason County Climate Justice. The Board of Natural Resources temporarily paused that cut - which included logging about 70 acres of centenarian lowland forest, lorded over by Doug fir and red cedar. Not old growth, but about the closest thing to it. The board on Oct. 1 approved cutting the forest.

Money from these sales helps fund both local school districts and the state school construction fund. While revenue from timber sales is important in rural junior taxing districts, when it comes to state school construction, timber revenues don't add up to enough to matter, Reykdal said.

"This stuff is now less than 1% of our construction budget in the state," Reykdal said of timber revenue. "It's not particularly material anymore in the grand scheme of things."

He's also very aware of how stressed school-age kids are about climate change and the future of the planet. What value should be placed on the mental health side of the equation, Reykdal asked, or the hopefulness that can come with climate resiliency and natural resources being sustained?

Think about what these forests could be like 50 years from now, even 100 - think generationally about the economic and ecological and even mental health benefits of these forests, he said.

"I'm not saying don't harvest anymore; I'm saying balance those benefits differently," Reykdal said. "Think about it differently.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of old-growth forest protected under the Northwest Forest Plan. More than 6 million acres of old growth was protected across 24 million acres of federal land in three states.

Credits

Reporter: Lynda V. Mapes

Editor: Benjamin Woodard

Graphics: Fiona Martin

Photographer: Erika J. Schultz

Photo editor: Bettina Hansen

Video: Lauren Frohne and Ramon Dompor

Copy editor: Brandon Foster

Design: Frank Mina and Rita Wong

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