The fight over the future of the last old and mature forests in America intensified Tuesday when the Biden administration called for preservation of old-growth trees.
The administration, after creating an inventory of the nation’s old growth, wants to amend 128 forest land-management plans to conserve and steward 25 million acres of old-growth forests and 68 million acres of mature forest across the national forest system.
For the Pacific Northwest — home to much of the nation’s remaining old forests — an effort is already underway to overhaul and update key old-growth protections in the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994, one of the world’s most ambitious conservation plans. More than 1 million acres of old and mature forest in Washington, Oregon and Northern California that were explicitly set aside for logging within the boundaries of the plan are under scrutiny.