Pacific Northwest Forests
For decades the Pacific Northwest has taken center stage in debates concerning logging, primarily on federal lands. In particular, controversial logging of mature and old-growth forests began in earnest during the post-WW II logging and housing booms. In just five decades, logging had reduced the region’s irreplaceable old forests to 15-20 percent of their historic range.
By the 1990s, high rates of logging on National Forests and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands resulted in the listing of the northern spotted owl as a federally threatened species. Additional concerns over the viability of hundreds of other old-forest dependent species ushered in the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, which greatly slowed logging on federal lands.
