The dissent over harvesting older forests on state trust lands grew last week when the Chehalis Tribe joined environmental groups in asking the Washington state Department of Natural Resources to pull out of a 95-acre timber sale in southeast Grays Harbor County.

The sale, located 15 miles west of Oakville, was auctioned for $1.5 million. Environmental groups identified the sale as part of a dwindling group of century-old forests, coined “legacy forests” with mature characteristics apt for harboring biodiversity and as carbon sinks.

For several years the groups have tracked, and pushed back against, similar timber sales in Southwest Washington, fearing the region will lose remaining patches of the older forests by the end of the decade.

The Chehalis Tribe, whose traditional lands stretch from the Pacific Cascade Region to South Puget Sound to Grays Harbor, requested that the sale in Grays Harbor County, called “Mm Mm Good,” be “halted and removed from consideration for future harvest so that legacy forests may be preserved.”

“Legacy forests play a critical role in preserving the genetic, biological, and ecological legacies of the authentic forests that our ancestors would have recognized,” states the letter, signed by tribal Chairman Dustin Klatush. “These forests hold special cultural, historical, and spiritual significance for both tribal members and non-tribal members.”

The letter was delivered to the DNR’s board of natural resources and Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz on Dec. 12, two days before the Dec. 14 auction. The agency’s board approved the sale for auction in early November.

Kenny Ocker, a spokesperson for the DNR, said the agency notified the tribe about its intention to harvest the Mm Mm Good sale, and the tribe did not object during multiple environmental review processes. Ocker said DNR has a “strong working relationship with the Chehalis Tribe, including taking members of the Tribe to harvest cedar bark before a recent sale in the Lower Chehalis State Forest,” which is located in Grays Harbor County.

“We are working to meet with the tribal government to discuss our sustainable management of state trust lands regarding the concerns that they have raised, and we look forward to continue working with them going forward,” Ocker said in an email.

Jeff Warnke, a spokesperson for the Chehalis Tribe, said the tribe will likely continue to support preserving older forests in the future.

Plantation landscape

The DNR manages more than two million acres of state trust lands in Washington for long-term timber production, habitat and clean water. Money from the timber harvests, which span 21 counties in Washington, goes to schools, counties, state capitol construction and other services.

The Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, an environmental nonprofit, has challenged the DNR on dozens of state trust land sales in the past several years over its harvest of “legacy” forests — defined by the group as forests where selectively logging occurred prior to World War II and were never replanted or sprayed with herbicides, giving them genetic and structural similarities to old growth that once covered Western Washington.

Stephen Kropp, who founded the coalition, has worked to map older forests and tracked state timber sales. He argues the DNR is not on track to meet a 70-year commitment to maintain 10-15% of older forests in each of its planning units across Western Washington.

“They’re cutting down all the forests they need to protect in order to meet those targets,” Kropp said.

Grays Harbor County is covered with timber plantations, and 6% of land in the county contains old growth or “legacy” forests, most of which are in the southern Olympic Mountains.

About 8%, or 7,000 acres, of DNR’s managed forest land in Grays Harbor County contains older forests, which the group estimates, based on GIS mapping and planned timber sales, will be nearly gone from state lands in the next 10 years. If left standing, Kropp argues, they’ll mature further into old growth forests in a few decades.

“This forest constitutes the closest thing that remains to old growth in the North River watershed and much of Southwestern Washington,” Kropp wrote to the DNR during environmental review on the Mm Mm Good sale.

The DNR has maintained that it’s on track to meet the 10-15% older forest commitment. To ensure revenue is flowing to beneficiaries, state law requires the DNR to set a sustainable harvest goal for each decade, which it must also balance with habitat conservation requirements.

Because habitat plans emphasize connectivity between older forests landscapes, the agency has prioritized conservation on state lands that abut federal lands like national parks and national forests, where more older forests remain intact.

“We have more conservation there (near federal lands) because our conservation has a greater impact,” Ocker said. Southwest Washington, with a history of harvest and largely absent of federal lands, is “an area where management is less ecologically impactful in comparison.”

County commissioners view the sale

The Chehalis Tribe wasn’t the only entity with eyes on the Willapa Hills in the week before the sale.

Grays Harbor County Commissioners Kevin Pine and Jill Warne visited the sale site on Dec. 8, accompanied by Lee First of the Twin Harbors Waterkeepers, an environmental advocacy group focused on clean water. After learning about the capabilities of large trees to reduce drought and flooding, First earlier this year partnered with the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, a nonprofit at odds with the DNR over older forest management, and began leading educational tours.

In other counties the DNR has paused sales at the request of county commissioners. A few weeks before the tour, First and other advocates asked Grays Harbor County Commissioners to do the same.

“Please tell DNR to cancel the sale of Mm Mm Good, Deposto and Misty,” First told commissioners at a regular meeting. Deposto and Misty are other sales of concern for environmental groups in Grays Harbor County.

But the Dec. 14 auction date passed without such a letter from the Grays Harbor commissioners.

In an interview, Pine said he was “supportive of the cause” and “not against DNR taking another look at it.” But all three commissioners cited the potential hypocrisy lying in fact that Grays Harbor County has its own timber lands.

“Our county, being the only county that operates and cuts timber, would reach out to the state and say stop, or don’t cut your timber,” said District 3 County Commissioner Vickie Raines in an interview. “That’s one bit of a hump I need to be able to get over.”

A shift for small schools

Of the The $1.57 million in revenue generated by the sale of Mm Mm Good, about $400,000 will go to the state’s Common School Trust, which supports K-12 schools statewide; another $400,000 will go to the state’s Capitol Grant Trust, which supports facility maintenance of buildings on the capitol campus in Olympia; $195,000 will be split between local jurisdictions like the Oakville School District, the county government and others; a fraction will go to prisons; and about $400,000 will return to the DNR to cover the costs of the sale.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal has said schools have become less reliant on timber harvest, with logging now accounting for less than 2% of the state’s school construction budget. But a change in policy last year made state trust revenue easier to access for small, rural districts.

According to Tyler Muench, a policy coordinator for OSPI, state trust lands in Grays Harbor County produced $34 million for the statewide K-12 school account, but only about half of that returned to school construction projects in Grays Harbor County. The state Legislature put the funds into an account where they could be captured by passing school district bonds, which rural districts consistently struggle with.

Last year, OSPI asked the Legislature to quit funding the school construction account with timber harvest revenue. Instead, the Legislature moved the timber money into a grant program only accessible to districts with fewer than 1,000 students that provides modernizations and repairs worth up to $5 million.

“We more than tripled the amount of revenue that will be available to small school districts because of superintendent Reykdal’s plan,” Muench said.

‘A hopeless waste’

When Washington became a state in 1889, the federal government granted it millions of acres for the purpose of funding schools and state universities. Later, in the 1920s and 30s, another 500,000 acres came from the counties, which had acquired a mass of delinquent lands through tax foreclosures after private owners harvested timber and abandoned their parcels. Unable to manage the mass of lands, most counties agreed to put them in the trust of the state.

Grays Harbor County, though, did not. A century ago, county commissioners chose to maintain management of county forest lands for its own revenue.

Another 130,000 acres of cutover land from Oakville to Montesano — what the Montesano Vidette newspaper later described as a “hopeless waste” — was sold to Weyerhaeuser and would soon be the site of a new experiment.

In 1941 the timber company dedicated the Clemons Tree Farm, with the intention of growing trees as crops, quickly and for maximum profit. The Montesano newspaper reported the tree farm as the first of its kind in the nation.

According to Ocker of the DNR, most of the Mm Mm Good sale, which the DNR acquired in the 1980s, lies within the footprint of that heralded tree farm.

Remnant foundations of fire lookouts and the logging road built on an old railroad are the only evidence of that early experiment. Regional DNR foresters say it’s hard to determine the exact origins of the forest, but that some trees, the eldest now 80-90 years old, likely grew back on their own through the first logging cut while others might have been planted in early experiments.

“There’s certainly some natural regeneration that happens,” said Brady Dier, a forester in the Pacific Cascade Region. “It was early days of hand planting, so who’s to say how much success there was with it.”

Natural regeneration and management histories are important factors to consider when evaluating the ecological capabilities of a forest, said Jerry Franklin, a forest ecologist with the University of Washington and leading authority on sustainable forest management. Forests that grew back after a natural disturbance, like fire or wind events, retain wood and vegetation from the previous generation, providing habitat and making them more resilient to disturbances in the future, while intensively logged forests were stripped of those traits.

Older forests that were harvested previously, Franklin said, “are impressive in terms of the amount of biomass they’ve accumulated and the habitat they can provide, but I think those need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and it really is a matter of public policy rather than anything related to science.”

Franklin added that the DNR is “very much on the frontier of applying ecological forest management practices on the lands they are harvesting,” citing the agency’s policy of variable retention harvest, or leaving clumps of trees scattered throughout a logging area.

After the harvest of Mm Mm Good, the DNR will replant the area with Douglas fir, Western red cedar, and could see natural regeneration from trees left on the landscape, Ocker said.

The DNR also has a policy not to harvest old growth trees (defined as forests dating to before 1850), doesn’t cut trees with a diameter larger than 60 inches and leaves 200-foot buffer zones around salmon bearing streams.

About half of DNR’s forest lands in Western Washington are already in conservation status.

“There’s no other landowner that comes close to providing the level of conservation on their landscape that we do while still providing for and supporting a viable timber industry,” Ocker said.

Future plans

To some extent, the DNR has explored ways to generate revenue on state trust lands with ways other than timber harvest. Last year the agency launched an initiative to move 10,000 acres of forests with high carbon sequestration and habitat potential — some of which was slated to be logged — into a carbon credit offset program. Lands in the Capitol State Forest in Grays Harbor County were among the first forests chosen for the program.

Kropp and the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition also has alternative ideas for the future of state lands in Grays Harbor County. The coalition is drafting a proposed plan to create two large forest reserves on state lands in the county, with the goal of connecting a network of century-old trees as a refuge for biodiversity.

In addition to their hydrological benefits, First, of the Waterkeepers, sees the old trees as a draw for tourism.

“I think if more people could get up there to see these places, they would have something to say,” First said.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.