Friday, October 25, 2013 from 12:00 to 1:30 pm
Air Date: October 28, 2013
Guest Speakers: Professor Jerry F. Franklin, University of Washington; and Professor K. Norman Johnson, Oregon State University
Roughly half of Oregon’s 61 million acres of land area is forest land. The federal government owns about 60 percent of the forests, the state owns about 3 percent, Native American tribes about 2 percent, and private citizens the remaining 35 percent.
As recently as 1988, the annual harvest from all Oregon forest lands totaled a bit more than 8.6 billion board feet. Now, the state’s annual timber harvest from totals about 3 billion board feet. Over the past two decades, harvest in federal forest lands in Oregon has declined by about 90 percent. Roughly 75 percent of the current annual harvest comes from land owned by private parties or Native American tribes.
These circumstances have prompted considerable debate about whether and how Oregonians can manage forests for sustainable, multiple uses in an ecologically sound way. Today’s speakers look at some ways forestry science can help answer these questions. They are two of the four who originally crafted the Northwest Forest Plan that was adopted in 1994 by the Clinton Administration. Those standards and guidelines governing the management of federal forests in the Pacific Northwest remain in force today.
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