A view of the Mount Pilchuck fire lookout in Washington. (Credit: Ham Hock / Flickr Creative Commons) Listen (Runtime 1:04) Read It’s bone dry and blisteringly hot across Washington state, […]Read More
On Monday, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) decided to pause an auction of 102 acres of public, forested lands to harvest for timber in King County that had been scheduled for Tuesday.
King County council members wrote a letter to Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz and the Board of Natural Resources last week, urging them to defer the auction. Read More
The Whatcom County Council made no specific recommendations on which county timberlands to conserve for the next phase of the Washington State Department of Natural Resources’ carbon offset project.
In the letter, the council affirmed its commitment to work with the department, and instead of offering recommendations, asked the DNR to provide more information about the Read More
Part of the Box of Rain timber sale that the Washington State Department of Natural Resources approved to go to auction in December. Photo courtesy of the Center for Responsible […]Read More
The Washington Department of Natural Resources violated state environmental laws when it failed to account for climate change, according to a Jefferson County Superior Court ruling.
Last week, a superior court ruled the Washington Department of Natural Resources violated the state’s environmental protection act procedures in its preparation for two timber sales. Read More
Both the timber industry and environmental groups are celebrating the Washington Supreme Court’s decision on public land management last week. The decision affirms the Department of Natural Resources’ authority to manage the trust lands for public benefit.Read More
A case brought against the Washington State Department of Natural Resources has been decided in the department’s favor.Read More
State superintendent Chris Reykdal announced his plan yesterday to change how school construction across the state is funded.Read More
In the last of our series, The Fight for Legacy Forests, NWPB’s Lauren Gallup reports on reactions to the carbon project on state lands, which will protect some older forests from harvest. Read More
Washington is the second largest producer of timber in the United States, according to the state department of commerce, and it is the third largest manufacturing industry in the state. In the seventh story of the Fight for Legacy Forests series, NWPB’s Lauren Gallup visits a timber mill in Centralia to find out what people working in the timber industry think of Read More
This week in the sixth story of “The Fight for Legacy Forests” series, Lauren Gallups reports on how some communities are worried about losing money from timber harvests, which pay for services they need. Read More
NWPB’s Lauren Gallup continues her series “The Fight for Legacy Forests” with reporting on an environmental nonprofit suing the Department of Natural Resources over six timber sales. Read More
Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Sen. Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer joined with colleagues from Washington, California and Arizona Tuesday in sending a letter to the U.S. Department of Interior. In it, they requested an immediate federal review into the previous administration’s decision to remove 3.4 million acres of the Northern spotted owl’s critical habitat in Read More
In rainy Oregon, communities tap a network of streams and creeks to supply millions of residents with cold, clean water. The problem is that the land surrounding drinking water streams is, in many cases, owned not by the towns or the residents who drink the water, but by private timber companies that are now logging more intensively than ever, cutting trees on a more rapid Read More
In the decades since government restrictions reduced logging on federal lands, the timber industry has promoted the idea that private lands are less prone to wildfires, saying that forests thick with trees fuel bigger, more destructive blazes. But an analysis by OPB and ProPublica shows last month’s fires burned as intensely on private forests with large-scale logging Read More
Oregon Forest Resources Institute, created in the early 1990s to educate residents about forestry, has acted as a public-relations agency and lobbying arm for the timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so.Read More
The proposal, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, comes in response to a request from the state, which wants to be fully exempted from a Clinton-era rule that limits road construction and timber harvesting in tens of millions of acres of national forest.Read More
Timber harvested illegally from African rainforests is being sold in the U.S. through Pacific Northwest companies and others are doing the same thing to get hardwood to customers throughout Europe.Read More
In 2013, the U.S. Forest Service was looking for someone to reduce wildfire risk and rehabilitate a stand of overgrown trees on the Colville National Forest in northeastern Washington. Colville-based Vaagen Brothers Lumber submitted the one and only proposal to take on the ‘A to Z’ project. Its future awaits a federal court decision.Read More
