Federal officials are preparing to disband an advisory committee tasked with guiding policies for millions of acres of national forests in the Pacific Northwest, according to two committee members.
Tribal leaders, environmental advocates, timber representatives and local government officials were among the 21 members of the Northwest Forest Plan federal advisory committee. They’ve been meeting in person over dayslong meetings since summer 2023, hashing out how to tackle wildfires, pests and diseases across nearly 25 million acres of national forests in Oregon, Washington and Northern California.
Related: Northwest Forest Plan has left a lasting legacy, despite falling short
On Thursday, officials with the U.S. Forest Service told committee members the agency was likely to dissolve the group in the coming weeks. Some members said they had been expecting this news, given President Donald Trump’s goal of eradicating most of the Biden administration’s efforts.
“We all knew that this was a possibility,” environmental attorney and committee member Susan Jane Brown said. “So everyone’s disappointed, but not terribly surprised.”
The Forest Service pulled the committee together during the Biden administration to help amend the decades-old Northwest Forest Plan, a set of policies that came out of the timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s.
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The committee’s primary task was to create a set of recommendations on how the forest plan should be amended, like how much logging could happen and where, and how to protect endangered species from logging impacts. The committee also focused on how the federal government should work alongside tribes in managing millions of acres of their ancestral lands, something that wasn’t done in the initial plan.
The committee delivered its recommendations to the Forest Service last year.
“It’s always disappointing when a process like this comes to an end,” Travis Joseph, president of the timber association American Forest Resource Council, said. “That said, we did our job. We did what was asked of us.”
The committee still had other tasks on the table. One of them was considering restrictions on commercial huckleberry harvesting in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, the only national forest with a large-scale commercial huckleberry program.
As reported by High Country News, huckleberries are considered an essential first food for the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the Yakama Nation, but tribal members have had to compete with commercial pickers for the few productive bushes they could find. Commercially picked berries often end up in soaps, syrups and candies sold in tourist shops around the Pacific Northwest.
FILE – Sun shines through Douglas fir trees in the Willamette National Forest, Ore., Oct. 27, 2023. Federal officials are preparing to disband an advisory committee tasked with guiding policies for millions of acres of national forests in the Pacific Northwest, according to two committee members.
Amanda Loman / AP
Federal forest policies that forced tribes to stop setting fire to the land — a cultural practice that helped foods like huckleberries grow — and decades of aggressive fire suppression have also hindered huckleberry growth, making the berries difficult to come by.
Even when the committee is officially dissolved, Brown and Joseph said members will likely continue to advocate for forest policies.
“We are now just ordinary members of the public again, and we can submit comments and we can meet with the Forest Service just like other members of the public do,” Brown said. “Many of us have that desire to continue forward.”
The Forest Service included many of the committee’s recommendations in its draft amendment, and the agency is accepting public input on that draft through March 17. Many environmental groups oppose the draft, saying it doesn’t include strong enough protections for old growth forests.
