Environmentalists groups in Oregon are staging tree sits over the logging and sale of old growth forest trees.

Last Monday, activists began occupying trees in Southern Oregon’s Wolf Creek area that are slated to be logged under the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Poor Windy Forest Management Project, which would cut down nearly 15,000 acres, almost 4,000 of which are old and mature-growth forests.

Sam Shields, a community organizer involved with the sit-in, said logging of forestlands in the Pacific Northwest has been a contentious issue for decades. Shields is part of a coalition of community members, conservationists and environmentalists who are concerned about deforestation across the state.

“Many formal nonprofits are litigating and writing to legislators to try to change policy,” Shields said. “We, the community members most impacted, are putting our bodies on the line to ensure that while these other methods are being taken, logging does not move forward.”

According to a 2018 study, 36 million trees were cut down annually over a five-year period in the U.S. Old-growth trees are being threatened in North Carolina, Vermont, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, California and Oregon, according to a 2022 report by multiple environmentalist groups detailing the ten worst federal projects across the U.S.

Activists said mature forests gather and hold large amounts of carbon and are a cost-effective way to mitigate climate change. Old-growth trees are also more resistant to fires and warming climates. Studies have found that forests in Oregon are among the most carbon-rich in the world and logging is the state’s largest source of carbon emissions.

Although these forests are located on federal public lands, they are in danger as agencies move forward with logging and timber sale projects across the state, Shields said. Poor Windy is their current focus because it is one of the first projects “where there’s chainsaws on the ground,” he added.

In addition to the Poor Windy project, there are two others in Oregon groups are particularly concerned about: the Flat Country Timber Sale in Willamette National Forest, which would clear 2,000 acres of older forests; and the BLM’s Integrated Vegetation Management Project, which would cut down 20,000 acres of trees that are more than 150 years old.

“The Western Oregon BLM office often puts logging above wildlife, watersheds, recreation and other forest values,” Climate Forests Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups, said in a statement. “Nearly 1 million acres of mature and old-growth trees are at grave risk of being logged unless the agency stops targeting these trees for industrial logging.”

Old-growth trees are more resilient but the vast majority in the U.S. have already been logged. Those that are left are mostly on federal public lands and surrounded by private thickly-packed plantations that are cleared every 40-60 years and are therefore less resistant to fire.

Last week, oral arguments began in a federal courthouse in Medford, Oregon, against the integrated vegetation BLM project that would “aggressively log forest stands located within… areas purportedly set aside for forest conservation,” according to KS Wild, a nonprofit that aims to protect green spaces in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of southwest Oregon and northwest California.

The projects, which have already been approved, would eliminate essential habitats the threatened northern spotted owl and other species use for nesting, roosting and foraging, environmentalists said. Advocates said the logging will impact fire-resilient trees and sediment will compromise freshwater resources and areas where the Pacific salmon spawn.

The first commercial timber sales of the Penn Butte and Late Mungers wildlands are scheduled to begin May 15. Thousands of acres of land have already been logged under these projects, inspiring protests in the community.

Activists described the BLM as a “rogue agency completely out of step” with commitments from the federal government to protect old-growth forests. Community members believe the agency is moving quickly on logging projects to avoid new regulations.

KS Wild and other environmental organizations in late March filed a legal complaint against the Medford District BLM’s efforts to log forest areas outside Oregon’s Gold Hill and Rouge River communities. Conservationists said these lands are healthy older forests designated for recreation, conservation and water protection. They believe the land management bureau’s aim is to increase commercial timber volume without regard to those concerns, however.

“While it is refreshing that BLM has abandoned this fake pretense and admitted that it is timber volume driving the more aggressive logging being proposed, it does not make this logging any less illegal or worrisome,” said George Sexton, KS Wild conservation director, in a statement.

Though the project includes prescription burns and restoration logging that could increase fire resilience in the area, conservationists worry over what they claim is “the heaviest of the commercial logging proposed by BLM,” which would negatively impact the ecosystem and go against commitments to preserve wildlands.

Environmentalists also pointed to the disconnect between the agency’s continued logging and President Joe Biden’s commitment to “conserve and restore America’s mature and old growth forests.” In 2022, Biden signed an executive order creating a nationwide plan with efforts to conserve and restore old-growth forests across the National Forest System.

It also included plans to update the Northwest Forest Plan for the first time since 2007 to protect mature ecosystems in some federally-managed forests in Washington, Oregon and California. These forests contain about one-quarter of all the remaining old growth found in national forests across the mainland U.S. and are a “key climate solution,” absorbing carbon dioxide equivalent to more than 10 percent of annual U.S. emissions, White House officials said.

But activists say the Biden Administration has not upheld its promise.

“Public forests are needed for public benefits, like carbon storage and wildfire resilience,” Francis Eatherington, a longtime forest activist and Douglas County resident, said in a statement. “Instead they are being logging for private profit, lining the pockets of the timber millionaires at the expense of rural Oregonians.”

The U.S. Forest Service and the BLM manage a combined 32 million acres of old growth lands and about 80 million acres of mature forests across the country — about 63 percent of all forested lands managed by these agencies.

“By protecting these forests and keeping them standing, we are ensuring that they can protect our communities from the climate crisis, from increasing wildfire risk, from increasing drought — all the massive benefits that they provide to folks living in the area,” Shields said.