The Federal assault on Pacific Northwest forests January 7, 2026
Monday, December 22, 2025
The League of Women Voters of Snohomish County is hosting a presentation on the federal assault on PNW forests on Wednesday, January 7, 2026 at 6pm at Third Place Commons 17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake Forest Park.
"We'll unpack the ways the federal administration is trying to open protected PNW forests to unprecedented logging - and look to the history of PNW forest defense for lessons for how we can respond effectively to this threat to our forests, climate, and communities."
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8 comments:
Meanwhile we continue to decimate out urban tree canopy.
We have two ways to deal with our dense second-growth forests. We can either go in and responsibly thin them, netting wood that will help us to build homes in our communities; or we can declare them to be protected wilderness unavailable for any logging, and watch them explode into infernos during a future forest fire season.
Many of our sickest forests were originally logged a century ago and have had time to fill with lots of moderately sized trees. Tons of sequestered carbon. By harvesting some trees while leaving others, we make the forest healthier for the remaining trees which can now have the space to proceed to old growth. It's a lot better than sitting back and watching all that carbon vaporize straight back into the atmosphere in September of 203X.
12:53 AM Agreed. It's downright foolish the way way we maintain forested land. We can either let the trees rot, blow down, or burn down but for some reason never ever use them in a purposeful way.
I agree. Thin them out or end up like California, burnt homes.
Environmentalist want a big house in the woods with no neighbors.
If we want to protect our forests, we need to use less wood. Many environmentally sound alternatives to using wood exist (like plaster strawbale) to build homes, yet there are no tax credits or other incentives to encourage their use, as there are for energy efficiency, solar panels, etc. How can we continue to criticize the cutting down of our forests without talking about wood and how we could use less of it? People have been building homes without wood for thousands of years. There is no NEED to cut down so many trees. But this, we don’t talk about.
Forests don't need to be 'used' to be useful. Each tree is doing a ton of work just standing there. There are lists of benefits they provide to us. A mind shift is badly needed.
And...people have been building homes for thousands of years using wood (Japan is a good example- an island state with limited resources). The current mass-timber movement in the sustainable architecture industry is a movement that looks to build with wood responsibly, using laminated timber. Wood is a resilient, earthquake resistant product (and fire resistant, if using heavy timber- which creates a fireproof "char" around itself when it burns). It also "embodies" carbon (retains sequestered carbon) when used as a building material. Re: forest thinning, I recommend The Last Fire Season, by Manjula Martin
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