Deane is the instigator of this website and has been working to protect forests in the North American west coast areas since the start of the 1990's.

"At every stage of this 30+ year journey I’ve never stopped reaching out to the other side with well documented references to argue for forest protection. From being a daily commenter on the Society of American Foresters first listserve in the late 90’s, to doing line-by-line rebuttals of timber harvest plans in coordination with lawyers and on to this very day where I’m still an active commenter on https://forestpolicypub.com/ which is a online blog that discusses forestry with retired federal land managers, I've never given up!"

Additionally, Deane's work in assisting canopy biologists has taught him that viewing a forest from ground level offers far less information than what's available higher up.

These high canopy perspectives have helped him to realize that a forest that seems crowded and in need of thinning at ground level is actually quite open and healthy higher up where it only needs branch pruning to prevent understory trees from being shaded out.

His dream is to prove that canopy sculpting is far more effective than logging when it comes to growing an abundance of healthy trees that can sequester and store carbon emissions for centuries to come.

Five years ago he wrote a science fiction version of what this work would look like after it starts to thrive: http://deanetr.com/2018/05/08/windfall-eco-restoration-forestry/

And now rather than simply searching for a landowner who’s interested in funding this dream come true, he's finally found one and is getting paid to prove that pruning rather than logging is the best way to protect a forest.

If this website grows into a thriving community Deane hopes to return to grad school to earn a PHD answering his current research question:

"How can we shift forest management to a diverse range of non-forest harming cultivations and protections that generate more revenue than the revenue generated by cutting down trees for a sawmill?"

Francis is the hardest working forest protection forester in the western central and southern Oregon region. For several decades she has mobilized people to not only speak out for forest protection, but she has also been a great mentor in teaching others how to file comments in order to create successful legal challenges that protect old growth trees and forests.

Many times people who have gone out to groundtruth proposed timber sales with her go home with an unforgettable memory of her quickly finding the biggest trees in the timber sale and screaming out loud all the reasons why these trees are not supposed to be included in the sale and how she's gonna fight them with everything she's got to keep those trees standing.

Her outrage against the loss of irreplaceable forests is infectious and many forest protection foresters got their start from what she taught us.

And you won't be able to read much about Francis by searching for her on the internet. She's a very private person and doesn't like bringing attention to herself.

But if you're in her stomping grounds and you propose to cut down old trees, you can count on her showing up in your public comment records, as well as with the Lawyers who will try to stop you.

Roy Keene was once one of the Oregon timber industry's most coveted foresters. His sharp eye for the most volume on a hillside combined with him knowing the most efficient way to access it made him far more profitable to the industry than most other foresters. But Roy Keene at heart also understood the value of protecting forests too.

Way too many times during the roadless and wilderness designation era the industry would joke amongst themselves how the environmentalists had no idea that all the forests they were giving away to them for protection were the forests that were almost always small stunted trees in areas of mostly rock and ice that the industry didn't have any plans to log anyways. That deception and ridicule didn't sit well with Roy.

So Roy went out to cruise timber for the environmentalists with the intention of finding the very biggest tree forests for protection. When the timber industry saw his maps he gave to the enviros, they realized their best kept secret of where the biggest trees still remained was jeopardized and he was blackballed and had to get a job in real estate because he never was hired to work for the industry again. If you ever have a chance to hike the Boulder Creek Wilderness in the Umpqua National Forests you can realize how good of a friend of the trees Roy really was.

Before his passing, the last editorial Roy wrote to the local newspaper in Eugene, Oregon dispelled the myth that catastrophic wildfire was being driven by not enough fuels management (logging) rather than weather (high winds & drought). In some of his last words in print he said:

"I’ve designed many fuel reduction and restoration projects that benefited from no logging. Several withstood wildfires. An associate and myself consider the degree of logging to be inversely proportional to the degree of true restoration. More logging means less restoration and resilience." https://www.registerguard.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/09/24/guest-view-dont-waste-public-funds-more-logging/3493527001/

Few kids get to grow up having thousands of acres of public land as a backyard. And these days rural kids who have that can no longer go to a local community college and earn a 2-year forestry degree like they once were able to do.

One of the last students to benefit from the teachings of those classes at Oregon's community colleges was Shannon Wilson who back in the early 90's was working his way up the forest service ranks as an employee doing Spotted Owl surveys.

But then he realized that his chain of command in the forest service behaved like common criminals with no moral values other than greed & corruption and he could no longer work for them.

That's when he moved to Eugene, Oregon and began educating people about wildfire ecology and lawless logging.

For a 1/4 century Shannon has been one of the first old time forest protectors that most forest defenders meet when they come to western Oregon to help in our campaigns.

He's often one of the first people to post online about the latest forest issues and he's often one of the last people to continue to speak out long after many forest activists have moved on to other ecological issues.

In a recent interview in the Earth Island Journal he was asked: "Over the decades you’ve watched hundreds of activists come and go, yet you’ve remained involved and engaged. What’s inspired you to keep going all these years?"

His Answer:

"To me it comes down to love. Love for your home, the rivers, the mountains, and every critter that doesn’t have a way to stand up for itself. There are people that inspire me and have inspired me. I’ve made promises to myself and to the ecosystem and to people who’ve passed away, that I’m going to continue fighting for non-human life out there, and for the mountains and rivers, and for the oceans and the fish and everything else." https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/forest_defender_oregon_ecosystem_advocacy/

Before we had an internet, before we stopped answering our phone because of too many robocalls, we had Dr. Rudolph Becking who always answered his phone and always had answers to any forestry question that any young aspiring forest protection student could ask. He'd also be eager to explain the methods by which his answers could be scientifically verified.

In the early 90's when I was helping our lawyers get declarations to protect Marbled Murrelet and Salmon in threatened residual old growth redwood forest on the San Francisco Peninsula Rudy was always there for me.

In most every phone call he explained how to gather the data to create the most compelling arguments, as well as how to do the science to prove the data is valid.

Rudy was not liked by the forestry department at Humboldt State where he was a professor. He was more partial to protection than to the profession.

In the early days when Redwood National Park was barely even an idea, he created a great deal of controversy by supporting his forestry students who were willing to trespass on private timber company lands to document the biggest oldest redwoods that were threatened for logging, which in turn led to National Geographic documenting their efforts and eventually congress protecting these rare remaining forests.

In future posts we'll be covering many stories of what makes Rudy the greatest forester ever when it comes to the objective of forest protection. One example was posted on here last March: https://rfpf.org/2023/03/10/arcata-community-forest/

For decades forest managers of Washington state's public lands have promised to protect a small amount of old growth and legacy forest in their planning documents. But in practice, they do the opposite.

To address this Stephen Kropp helped establish Citizen's for Responsible Forestry (C4RF) and then he helped tp start the Washington Legacy Forest Defense Coalition.

In a recent newsletter Stephen explained the heartbreak of working with top environmental lawyers across state to create strong lawsuits to protect rare older forests only for the state to quickly move in and clearcut the forest in order to nullify judicial review.

How much longer will the judges allow their authority to be unlawfully excluded by this deliberate sabotage of the cases they're responsible for reviewing? Steve explains these ongoing abominations in a recent newsletter:

"I have devoted much of the past three years of my life building a legal case against DNR. …The “About Time” case was scheduled to be heard in the Division II Appellate Court in Tacoma earlier this month, but as the hearing date was approaching, the Murphy Plywood Company cut down all of the trees and filed a motion with the court to dismiss the case. DNR has broken its promise to allow this case to proceed, and is supporting the plywood company’s motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the lawsuit is moot because the trees are all gone. We believe that DNR is supporting the motion because it fears the case would set a precedent, and force them to cancel timber sales that are currently planned in other legacy forests across Western Washington. The Appellate Court is expected to make a decision on the motion to dismiss the case within the next month."

You can follow the outcome of this case here: https://www.wlfdc.org/about-time

When it comes to forest protection in British Columbia in recent years few leaders are more everpresent and persistent than Taryn Skalbania.

She is co-founder of the Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance and never backs down from challenging the industry-captured government's agenda of stall and delay while they keep cutting old growth forest as quickly as possible.

In a recent editorial in early 2023 she explains how this is failing BC's public trust:

"Self-regulation by industry foresters means corporate responsibility is virtually always put ahead of ecological and social responsibility, with unfortunate results to B.C.’s forests.

Self-regulation controls B.C.’s resource industries and has been identified as a major setback as we struggle with declining levels of timber and an increase in climate disruption. Known as “professional reliance,” this model relies on industry consultants, employed by privately owned companies, to determine how resources are managed in our province." https://biv.com/article/2018/01/its-time-pull-plug-self-regulation-bcs-forest-industry

Back in the early 90's in the Santa Cruz mountains of California where clearcutting was banned in 1976, the loggers found a loophole that eliminated environmental review of clearcutting up to 1 acre in rural neighborhoods.

Once the local foresters were seeing how effective this was at getting large numbers of big 100+ year old redwoods to the sawmill they started going door to door with checkbook in hand and the certainty there would be zero oversight.

That's when Betsy Herbert stood up to defend her once quiet shady rural neighborhood that was starting to look like a desert war zone.

Ever since, Betsy has been hard at work speaking out in government meetings and in colleges and serving on many advisory boards, often as the lone environmental voice.

Currently Betsy lives in Corvallis, Oregon where she has been trying to stop the logging of the city's water supply in the Rock Creek watershed. In a copy of her letter to the editor about this logging on her website she says:

"Every large tree preserved for its carbon storage is a tree that also provides natural water filtration, stabilizes soil to hold water and reduce flooding, and supplies fog drip as a priceless summer water source. Drinking water managers know that mature forests provide the most dependable, cleanest water supplies." http://www.betsyherbert.com/newsarticles-blog/2022/4/21/planting-new-trees-is-no-substitute

For decades as a biologist for the Valhalla Wilderness Society in British Columbia Amber Peters has documented the details of BC's interior forests so we are better able to justify their protection.

She was the first person to reply to the idea of RFPF, as well as the first to say, "I'm really looking forward to being involved with this. Time for a total paradigm shift. Trying to fight the system has crushed me and I'm ready to help create new systems that make the old ones obsolete."

In a recent interview at the start of 2023 she speaks about the 168 organizations that sent a letter to British Columbia Premier David Eby emphasizing the importance of more forest protection: https://soundcloud.com/kcrnews/january-16th-2023-kootenay-morning-with-amber-peters

There is no direct correlation between forest protection in one place causing the loss of forests elsewhere in the world. The fact is all the world's forests are being logged as quickly as possible and this tired old timber industry rhetoric speaks to the unprofessional attitude and clear lack of legal and ethical consequences for this timber sale planner's dishonesty.

Truth is the amount of lumber produced in Washington state mostly comes from privately owned forest land and ending the endless overharvesting of forests on state lands would have very little impact on the lumber supply. In some years its less than 10% of lumber produced: https://www.fs.usda.gov/pnw/pnw-datasets/ppet

"The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) is a misleading, corporate-driven marketing program created by big logging companies that fails to protect air, water, biodiversity, and the rights of communities and indigenous people." https://www.stand.earth/page/forest-conservation/primary-and-intact-forests/environmental-leaders-critique-sfi

One of the most common points made in a failed environmental review process is the insistence that everyone has had plenty of chances to comment and the decision has been made, thus all the commenters both in the past and the present have been proven wrong and the plan moves forward despite not having any meaningful public support.

The truth is the comment process is moot because they made the decision of what they were going to do before the public comment opportunities. Under state and national environmental policy laws this is illegal, which is in part why they created the Habitat Conservation Plan in order to front load the decision making process and excuse themselves from addressing public concerns.

Thus, the commenters concerns were not analysed and incorporated into the planning process as required by law, but discounted and excluded because the HCP doesn't allow for any of those types of changes except for on the rarest of circumstances and the state / timber industry will do all it can to make sure those circumstances don't happen.

And where is this reforestation "plan." Where's the lists of trees and plants? And how can we be certain that the forest will be equivalent to the one you cut down? We have 80 years to wait to find out? Does it matter that none of us today will be around to find out if this promise was honest or dishonest?

The definition of thorough review in this case is the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP), which severely limits new information like how climate change is increasing wildfire severity, as well as new discoveries of rare fauna.

This is because the studies were "already done" long ago and these forest are now deemed as sacrifice zones based on the need for "economic certainty" and "no surprises" when it comes to science discovering additional forest protection needs in our climate change era.

If there are rare plants, or unique epiphyte or fungal communities or remnant old growth trees in this harvest area the state / timber industry will not be searching for them, nor will they want to protect them. But in rare cases they have to, so many of us will do all we can in a last ditch effort to find new information to protect this forest.

After decades of arguing for ecosystems / biodiversity the tree farmers are finally trying to speak our language, yet it's still contingent on how it will look after its clearcut, rather than before.

All the while the logging crew has more control over how the clearcut ends up looking than the plan writers who have very little agency when it comes to enforcing the constant overharvesting habits of the timber fallers who are given financial incentives for maximizing harvest volume.

This is yet again an unprofessional way of talking about land protection elsewhere, rather than the egregious lack of meaningful protections in this sacrifice zone.

Despite this area having rare old growth characteristics that could be restored to old growth habitat much sooner than mono-crop tree farms of seedlings and saplings, the timber sale planners have worked hard to ensure that this objective has been excluded from the planning process.

What's more, this 40 percent of DNR trust land that is protected is not just forest land but all kinds of different landscapes, most of which can't be profitably exploited by the timber industry.

With some rare exceptions, the very best sites for growing forests on state trust lands are reserved exclusively for timber industry clearcutting. Areas that are protected for "conservation" are almost always the lowest quality forestland that aren't profitable for logging, as well as less productive growing site that historically have high severity wildfires and aren't capable of growing into old growth habitat.

This means private timber companies get the very best public land for their sawmills and citizens of who own this land get the unmerchantable scraps around the edges.

By the state's own admission this land has been over-harvested, but because of the HCP any concerns about addressing an increase in erosion and regeneration failure, as well a landscape that emits more carbon than it absorbs is no longer relevant.

Instead the plan allows for roughly 1/3 of the forest to be seedling stage, 1/3 to be sapling stage and the other 1/3 to be mature forest ready to clearcut. This is not how healthy forests sustain themselves. This is how sawmills sustain their log supply for the short term at the expense of the public land owner who has to deal with the long terms consequences of deforestation and degradation due to over-harvesting.

"...revenues from state trust lands provide a minimal share of funding for programs such as the Common School Construction Fund; a mere one to six percent in recent years. This is not the future of school construction. It just isn’t,” said Chris Reykdal, Washington State Superintendent of Public Education, at a Board of Natural Resources meeting." https://www.conservationnw.org/washington-state-forests-at-the-state-supreme-court/

This language seeks to generalize the age of the trees to be clearcut and dishonestly discount individual old growth trees, also known as residual old growth because the objective is tree farming young trees on frequent rotation not recovery of old growth habitat, of which less than 2% remains in Washington State.

By their unfair definition the old growth forest no longer exists in this area and as a matter of policy that forest type will never be allowed to return on this public land that has been slated for monocrop high rotation tree farms that are the anti-thesis of re-growing long-lived, fire resistant old growth habitat.

"At issue is whether Washington state must pay billions of dollars to fix or replace hundreds of culverts — large pipes that allow streams to pass beneath roads but can block migrating salmon if they become clogged or if they’re too steep to navigate.

...The Supreme Court in April [2018] heard the state’s appeal of a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That court affirmed a lower court order in 2013 requiring the state to fix or replace hundreds of the highest-priority culverts within 17 years" https://www.heraldnet.com/northwest/supreme-court-tie-favors-indian-tribes-in-washington-state/

"...microclimatic conditions that strongly influence riparian communities and affect stream temperatures are potentially influenced by altered conditions to a distance of two to three tree heights from the edge of the buffer strip. The strategies thus call for maintenance of an essentially undisturbed vegetation community within one or more tree-heights' distance from perennial or fish-bearing streams. The ManTech report further indicates that an extra width of buffer may be needed to protect this core buffer from accelerated mortality due to the presence of the edge." https://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/gtr-168/08-reid.html

What's more the primary source of sediment fouling Salmon survival is not from a lack of buffer on the fish bearing streams, but the level of soil disturbance to an exponentially greater number of denuded seasonal streams, steep slopes and headwalls where the watershed's erosion rates are highest.

Not only is there little to no consequence if these 8 tree per acre end up getting cut down, but the best available science makes clear that these 8 trees growing in the middle of a clearcut will be overly exposed to conditions that are no longer forest like and mortality rate for these trees is often 100% in the first 20 years after harvest.

What's more, for the "safety" of the timber fallers who do the clearcutting and yarding means they can substitute smaller trees out on the edges of the clear cut in order to more efficiently harvest the big ones designated for protection due to greater habitat value.

The historical purpose of the Habitat Conservation Plan was a way by which protection for endangered species could be circumvented much like the carbon credits racket where they broker a trade whereby they are able to destroy a forest / create pollution in one place if they promise to protect a forest / absorb carbon in another place.

The problem of course is that over time this brokering doesn't account for loss of forests habitat due to wildfires, windthrow, droughts and disease.

"Hundreds of exemptions to the Endangered Species Act have been issued nationwide since the mid-1990s, covering some of America's most sensitive lands. The deals being cut are perfectly legal. Many last for decades. And they are helping push creatures to the brink of extinction, conservation biologists and other critics say." http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/media-archive/Flaws%20in%20Habitat%20Conservation%20Plans%20Threaten%20Scores%20of%20Species.pdf