A post circulated on Facebook by the American Forest Resource Council omits and shamelessly fabricates information about the Grasshopper Project and settlement in the Mount Hood National Forest.
- AFRC’s accusations deliberately omit key dates. Oregon Wild challenged the Grasshopper Project in June 2023 and settled the case in January 2025.
- AFRC’s headline is that litigation “delayed” wildfire prevention. This is not true. Oregon Wild did not seek a preliminary injunction, and therefore, nothing has prevented the agency from taking steps to lay out timber sales and put them up for bid over the course of the last three and a half years. Since our settlement, the Forest Service has had over 18 months to offer timber sales for bid under this project. They have yet to take even this first step.
- The exact request in our legal complaint: “Enjoin Defendant and its contractors, assigns, and other agents from proceeding with commercial logging prescriptions within stands or units with age classes of 80 years or older, specifically those areas consisting of late-successional, mature, or old-growth forest that provides northern spotted owl habitat, unless and until the violations of federal law set forth herein have been corrected”
- We did not ask the Court to enjoin any non-commercial treatments or commercial treatments in stands under the age of 80. Nothing would have delayed or prevented the Forest Service from proceeding with non-commercial aspects of the project.
- Under the settlement, the Forest Service dropped two old-growth units and committed to diameter limits on trees cut across the rest of the project. This protects the most fire-resistant and fire-resilient trees – many of which will likely survive this fire.
- Oregon Wild’s settlement included a commitment to field visits with the Forest Service to visit commercial units pre- and post-implementation. However, when we tried to schedule those visits last fall, the agency’s general counsel said the Forest Service had not completed pre-sale layouts and was not ready to implement and would reach out once it was. We have yet to receive any communication that implementation is contemplated or underway.
- The two old-growth logging units dropped from the project are west of the current burn perimeter and would not have intersected with this fire.
- AFRC fabricates a statistic that “more than 25 million board feet” have been “destroyed.” There has been no analysis of fire intensity or tree mortality to base any figures on. It will be several months before any type of valid analysis can be conducted.
- A fuels and fire behavior advisory, issued by federal forecasters on July 28, noted that a combination of historically low snowpack and high temperatures laid the groundwork for fires to burn hotter, faster and for longer periods of time than would normally be the case. Oregon snowpack levels and high temps are not a result of litigation.
- Oregon Wild is not opposed to smaller diameter thinning and prescribed fire – especially in fire-suppressed forests that could benefit from ecologically appropriate restoration. However, the original Grasshopper project proposal contained prescriptions that would increase fire risk. Commercial logging that removes canopy cover creates hotter and drier conditions on the forest floor and allows for greater wind speeds, all of which can exacerbate severe fire behavior. Mature and old-growth stands offer greater fire resilience, and often provide refugia for wildlife during and after fires.
- AFRC has been a supporter of the Trump administration’s management of the Forest Service, which has included mass layoffs (the Forest Service has lost close to 6,000 permanent staff, or roughly 16% of its personnel), relocations, and reorganizations, which may have delayed the project. These policy changes have also undermined the effectiveness of the agency and the safety of firefighters and communities.
- Although AFRC touts commercial logging as the sole solution to wildfire, over 2,500 acres of logging have previously occurred in the fire area, including both older and more recent thinning and clearcutting. It is far too soon to determine how or if any of this past and recent logging modified fire behavior either favorably or unfavorably.
