How the BLM promotes logging with euphemisms and greenwashing
Written by:
Marty Paule
To justify industrial logging on our public lands, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) uses language that attempts to gloss over the environmental destruction left in the wake of its projects. Using a mixture of glib assurances about the beneficial outcome of their timber sales and a repertoire of euphemistic phrases, they aim to convince us that (a) BLM knows what it's doing, and (b) its management of forest health is based on science and land stewardship.
BLM just announced plans to log a billion board feet of forest in southwest Oregon, taking us back to harvest levels of the early 1960s. Expect a barrage of deceptive language.
For example, consider the language BLM uses to describe logging projects where a forlorn handful of trees per acre may remain. “Group selection logging,” “regenerative harvest,” and “variable retention harvest” are all attempts to rebrand what are essentially clearcuts.
BLM uses “active forest management” and “stewardship” as umbrella terms to cast a positive light on projects it claims will reduce fire risks and tree diseases. In reality, too many BLM projects achieve exactly the opposite by encouraging the rapid growth of ladder fuels after logging.
BLM describes commercial thinning projects, purportedly about removing overgrowth and snags, as “forest restoration.” But in reality, many of these projects include significant logging in healthy, mature forests.
“Ecosystem health” and “forest health” are often invoked to justify heavy logging in healthy forests that contain snags, downed wood, and beetle-killed trees. The terms imply that the existence of dead and dying trees in the forest is unhealthy, as opposed to being part of natural forest cycles.
The agency often uses the terms “wildfire mitigation” and “fuel reduction” to play on our legitimate fear of wildfires. But too often these terms are used to justify logging far away from homes, in deep forests full of commercially valuable trees.
Salvage logging: BLM uses this term to describe its current SOS and Doug Fir Mortality projects—another euphemism, since most of the logging is actually occurring in green, mature stands. By its own admission, BLM says it’s necessary to underwrite salvage logging by generating income from commercially valuable, living timber. And to add insult to injury, BLM is looking the other way while local contractors sell off large quantities of oak and madrone—species not permitted in the SOS contracts.
The phrase “designation by prescription” suggests a carefully designed project. It actually means that BLM leaves the decisions of which trees to remove up to the logger, setting up an obvious conflict of interest. With no commercial value, dead trees offer no incentives to BLM contractors.
Having waded through many BLM documents that justify industrial logging, I find that the terminology often sounds more like that of an environmental organization than that of an agency determined to log the remaining forests of the Applegate Valley. Feel free to use your own language to let the BLM office in Medford know what you think about the agency's deforestation programs.
Marty Paule
Applegate Siskiyou Alliance
Photo 1: BLM calls this Group Selection Logging. Part of the Sterling Sweeper Timber Sale—what was once a clearcut has since grown back into dense brush and stands of highly flammable young trees. Photo: Luke Ruediger.
