American Forest Resource Council responds to lawsuit against the Dabbler timber sale

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The American Forest Resource Council responded to a lawsuit filed by the Friends of Clark County and Legacy Forest Defense Coalition to stop the proposed Dabbler timber sale by suggesting the arguments made by the two environmental groups are wrong.

In December, the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition and Friends of Clark County filed a lawsuit in Superior Court, alleging multiple violations to the Forest Practices Act by the Washington state Department of Natural Resources as well as DNR’s own Habitat Conservation Plan and Policy for Sustainable Forests in regard to proposed harvest and sale of 140 harvestable acres of 156 in total. The sale would fetch over $3 million, the American Forest Resource Council believes, with funds benefiting a local school district, ambulance service and other beneficiaries.

Matt Comisky, the Washington state manager for the American Forest Resource Council, said he wished more people would consider what makes up the stand of trees that exists today.

“Let’s just say, just because there’s 12 110-year-old trees scattered out across 90 acres doesn’t mean that’s high-quality Spotted owl habitat,” he said, hypothetically. “It means you have 12 trees that survived the last logging operation or survived the last windstorm or survived the last major wildfire that have now made it into this 65- to 80-year-old timber stand that’s now going to be logged.”

Comisky compared the issue to lawn care.

“It’s really no different than your lawn,” he said. “If you work really hard at taking all the weeds out but you miss one or two dandelions, are those old growth dandelions when you go to cut your lawn next time, or are they just the ones that you missed, and so they finally grew big enough that you could see them?”

Should the Dabbler timber sale be approved, 140 harvestable acres out of 156 in total, managed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR), would be sold. The land is mainly composed of Douglas fir trees. The timber value was appraised at $3,141,000, but the American Forest Resource Council estimates the auction sale could reach a higher value. Through taxing districts, the sale could provide Battle Ground Public Schools an estimated $677,463 and North Country EMS $150,843, along with other beneficiaries, previous reporting by the Reflector states.

Opponents such as the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition argue against the sale.

“The Dabbler timber sale targets forests that are over 120 years old, featuring diverse canopies and critical habitats for species like the Northern Spotted Owl,” LFDC Director Stephen Kropp said in a release regarding the lawsuit. “Logging these forests violates DNR’s own policies, which require protection of older forests to achieve long-term conservation and biodiversity goals.”



However, DNR states in its Dabbler Timber Sale fact sheet that all harvestable units are 29 to 80 years old. The average diameter of Douglas fir trees in the sale is 23 inches.

“There is a contract clause preventing harvest of any trees with a diameter over 60 inches unless for safety reasons and felled trees shall remain on-site,” the fact sheet states.

Nick Smith, public affairs director for the American Forest Resource Council, said the sale complies with DNR policy and is consistent with the Habitat Conservation Plan designed by state and federal scientists that is expressly built on the concept of providing an agreed-upon amount of Northern spotted owl habitat by landscape.

“The talking points coming from the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition and all these folks are just fundamentally wrong, and they’re part of a typical playbook that I’ve seen coming out of these groups,” Comisky said, adding he believes some groups are either unintentionally, or in some cases intentionally, misreading 1997 Habitat Conservation Plan and the 2006 Policy for Sustainable Forests about harvesting timber. “The average diameter [of Dabbler timber] is 22 inches. These aren’t big 4- to 6-foot-diameter trees. And it all basically comes down to, [in] my opinion, most of these people just don’t want trees cut, and therefore they read what they want to read out of the HCP, and they’ve never really taken time to really learn and understand what the HCP is. They even go so far as to dismiss the letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service.”

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) letter to Angus Brodie, DNR deputy supervisor for state uplands, in 2021, stated that, based on DNR’s research and monitoring, “it is the USFWS’s opinion that WDNR’s management activities are in compliance with the HCP through implementation of the conservation strategies and species-specific conservation measures.”

The Dabbler tree stand in question is situated not too far west of the 1.3-million-acre Gifford Pinchot National Forest, where a large swath of old growth forest will remain untouched.

“The state of Washington has roughly 23 million acres of forested land,” Comisky said. “About 11.5 million of that is available for active forest management, which means we can do the math. There’s about 11.5 to 12 million acres of forest that we will never touch. Most of that is on federal lands. You know, 50% of the state trust lands are already off limits to logging.”

According to a species map on eBird, managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, no documentation indicates the Northern spotted owl has lived within 20 miles of the Dabbler timber sale area between the years of 1900 and 2025.

“There’s over a million acres [in Washington state] of designated critical habitat for the Northern spotted owl that is actually not habitat for the species,” Smith said. “I mean, that’s a significant amount of acreage of forest land that has not been inhabited by the bird or not and probably never will be, at least in the next few generations.”