Two years ago, President Joe Biden said he wanted to protect old growth forests. We wanted to know how it was working in Oregon, where most of the country’s remaining old growth forests are.
OPB teamed up with ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism, to report on how Biden’s executive order for protecting mature and old growth forests was being implemented. We focused on lands owned by the Bureau of Land Management, because it oversees 2.4 million acres in Oregon, some of which are mature and old growth forests, and it allows logging on some of its lands.
Left: OPB's April Ehrlich. Right: ProPublica's McKenzie Funk
Leah Nash, special to ProPublica
Our reporters visited a timber auction, hiked a forest that was being sold for timber, and did numerous interviews that included current and former Bureau of Land Management staff, agency contractors, forestry scientists, environmental advocates and county leaders.
They also read hundreds of pages of documents from agency management plans, lawsuits over timber sales, scientific studies and agency reports.
To estimate the number of acres of mature forests being logged, our reporters obtained a database of the BLM’s forest inventory, which includes characteristics of various stands of trees such as their age. Reporters also obtained a database of BLM’s logging operations. With input from data experts, they matched logging records with the forest inventory to determine estimated forest age at the time of harvest.
As part of the reporting process, OPB and ProPublica detailed their findings in questions to the BLM and the White House and requested interviews with both. Both provided written responses to the questions, which are included in the article.
This story was edited by Steve Suo and Charles Ornstein of ProPublica, with additional editing support from OPB’s Courtney Sherwood. Peter DiCampo of ProPublica and Kristyna Wentz-Graff of OPB provided visual editing. It was produced for the web by OPB’s Sukhjot Sal.
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