PORT ANGELES — The Elwha Legacy Forest Coalition may not be the Lorax, but they still speak for the trees.
On Tuesday, the state Board of Natural Resources (BNR), which oversees the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), will vote on whether to move forward with three timber sales, totaling 725 acres, that are fully or partially located within the Elwha River Watershed.
To oppose these timber sales and their potential environmental impacts, organizations and citizens bonded together to form the Elwha Legacy Forest Coalition.
The goal of their advocacy, said Elizabeth Dunne, the director of legal advocacy for the Earth Law Center, is to postpone the sales, communicate about a way to permanently protect these parcels from industrial logging and find alternate methods of funding for junior taxing districts.
If the sales are postponed or canceled, junior taxing districts will lose out on an estimated more than $2.7 million of funds that would be distributed between roads, schools, the port, the county, hospitals, a fire district, the library, the pool and more, according to a letter written by the county Revenue Advisory Committee.
These forests in questions have been labelled “legacy” forests by advocates — mature, structurally complex forests that contain a breadth of diversity.
“We can’t lose these forests, because we can’t create any more,” Dunne said. “With climate change, we don’t know if we can get these types of forests.”
The age and diversity of these forests make them important to mitigating climate change, advocates said. The Seattle Times calls trees “among the cheapest, fastest, most reliable forms of carbon storage.”
The Earth Law Center estimates that logging these forests will release more than 31 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air through harvesting and manufacturing.
Advocates also say these parcels are potential nesting sites for the marbled murrelet, a threatened species, and are home to the rare plant species Whipplea modesta.
Although the land up for sale totals about 725 acres, final harvested acres would only be about 490.
That is because the DNR has protection in place for about 229 acres of riparian and wetland, old growth and leave tree areas.
“Whenever and wherever we find it [old growth], it is permanently conserved,” said Duane Emmons, DNR assistant deputy supervisor for State Uplands.
The DNR’s Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) also outlines polices for riparian and wetland management zones, which Emmons said are “much more stringent than state Forest Practice Rules,” the legal standards regulating forest practices on other public and private forestland.
The HCP’s leave tree policy requires a minimum of eight trees to be left per acre, greater than the Forest Practice Rule’s five tree requirement, Emmons said. Those eight trees cannot be trees that were left for other purposes.
Often, trees will be left in clumps to “protect other features not required to be protected under HCP,” he added.
But, Dunne said, “their regulations are not at all adequate.”
Harvesting these trees also could harm the Elwha River flow, Dunne said.
Matt Rosener, hydrologist and owner of North Shore Hydrological Services, said in a declaration that logging these forests would negatively impact the Elwha’s water supply and create erosion, sediment deposit and more.
“Risks to the watershed associated with industrial logging include increases in peak flows and diminished summer stream flow,” the declaration read.
A letter sent to the DNR by the city of Port Angeles noted that the Elwha River is the sole source of water for more than 20,000 city residents as well as more than 25 percent of the county’s drinking water supply.
“Let’s get in front of it and let’s preserve and protect it,” Port Angeles City Council member LaTrisha Suggs said, adding that protecting systems that are already in place would be cheaper in the long run.
Advocates also are concerned that the DNR did not complete a watershed analysis.
Duane Emmons, DNR assistant deputy supervisor for State Uplands, said that although a full watershed analysis wasn’t done, geologists and hydrogeologists assessed the areas and determined there would be no impact to the water supply.
The DNR also examined a water systems study that Port Angeles commissioned in 2018. That report found that logging would not impact the river’s watershed or the city’s water supply, Emmons said.
“You don’t detect a change until roughly 20 percent [of land in the watershed] is harvested,” Emmons said.
The Elwha Watershed ranges over 200,000 acres, Emmons said, with about 85 percent protected by the Olympic National Park. The DNR only owns about 4 percent of that, and its planned harvest for the next five years is less than 0.4 percent of the total watershed, a DNR fact sheet stated.
“I honestly believe, from a science standpoint, that they [the DNR] do a very good job,” Clallam County Commissioner Randy Johnson said.
Advocates disagreed.
“You can’t create more water,” Dunne said. “If the DNR says it’s OK and it’s not, which is what we think … we can’t go back in time and fix that immediately.”
That is especially important, according to a letter from the Earth Law Center and the Center for Whale Research, due to the more than $388 million that the state and federal government have spent on the removing the Elwha River dam and restoring the area.
“You should be acting with caution,” Dunne said.
The Elwha Legacy Defense Coalition was created after individuals noticed the impacts from harvesting the Aldwell plot, which is DNR land located in the Elwha Watershed, Dunne said.
“It might look on paper” like the protected acres are enough, Dunne said, but “when you see what it looks like across the landscape, it is definitely not enough.”
These forests also have cultural significance for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe (LEKT).
Many tribal members hunt and gather medicine, berries, cedar and more from the area, LEKT member Tashena Francis said.
“That whole [Elwha Watershed] forest is important because that’s where we utilize everything that we need to,” Francis said.
“We do not consent to the destruction of our forests,” Francis said in a press release.
To get the DNR’s attention, advocacy groups began a letter-writing campaign that generated more than 5,115 letters.
They also started several petitions, which garnered more than 1,455 signatures, including 315 from LEKT members, Francis said. On Nov. 1, some individuals hand-delivered a petition to the Office of the Commissioner of Public Lands in Olympia.
Some advocates are asking for protection for more than just these parcels. The city of Port Angeles submitted an application to the DNR asking that more than 3,000 acres of Elwha Watershed land be permanently protected through the DNR’s trust land transfer program.
The DNR rejected the application because the program is only for non-productive or underproducing trust lands, such as a wetland or a bog, Emmons said.
“Having an area where we have active and planned timber sales, by definition, means it is not underperforming or non-performing,” Emmons added.
However, Duanne said that just because the land doesn’t meet the DNR’s criteria “doesn’t mean the lands shouldn’t be protected.”
“There could be steps towards the solution, but the first step is making sure they aren’t auctioned off on Nov. 5,” she said.
If the sales are postponed or canceled, many junior taxing districts are worried about the loss of timber sale revenue.
“That’s potential lost income for the fire district if it [the sale] doesn’t go through,” Clallam County Fire District 2 (CCFD2) Chief Jake Patterson said.
CCFD2 typically uses timber revenue for “larger capital items that we don’t have sufficient funding for now,” Patterson said.
That could be things like new gurneys, cardiac monitors and more.
Clallam County also is slated to get a portion of those funds — both for the general fund and the road fund, both of which are under “financial pressure,” Johnson said.
“The loss of those trees is significant, way beyond the dollar value at which they’re being sold off,” Dunne said. “There’s no requirement that DNR generate revenue by harvesting these forests. They can generate revenue in other ways.”
Some suggested options include using Climate Commitment Act funds to replace the loss of sales, harvesting other monoculture forests, soliciting donations and more.
The DNR has protected similar forests in the past, including 69 acres of the Power Plant sale and an area around Lake Sutherland.
This protection was paid for by Legislature-designated Climate Commitment Act (CCA) funds, which allowed the DNR to set aside up to 2,000 acres of land. However, the 2,000 acres have already been identified, Emmons said, so these parcels wouldn’t be eligible for that program.
Additionally, finding replacement land is getting more difficult as the state’s environmental protections ramp up. In Clallam County, protections for marbled murrelet and spotted owl habitats alone have claimed almost 23,000 acres of DNR habitat, Emmons said.
Theoretically, it would not be impossible to set aside these lands and find replacement lands, “but it takes time,” Emmons said, and it would most likely be land that had recently been harvested.
Finding replacement land that is ready to harvest “would cost a fortune,” RAC Chair Connie Beauvais said.
Additionally, Patterson said there’s a complicated conversation going on about which district — or even which county — would get the funds if the alternative land was in a different taxing district or county.
Johnson noted that, whatever happens, this is a complicated issue with many different facets.
“We have emotions, we have science [and] we have dollars that absolutely help our community,” he said.
If the BNR votes to sell these lands, the planned auction date is Dec. 18.
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Reporter Emma Maple can be reached by email at emma.maple@peninsuladailynews.com.
