Noah Greenwald’s Jan. 11 opinion piece demanding the governor set aside 9,500 acres of Oregon’s older forests in the name of wildlife habitat is a frustrating example of outdated, and frankly dangerous, anti-forestry rhetoric.

This same hands-off approach to our forests is part of the reason we are losing millions of acres of forests to catastrophic wildfire at an increasingly alarming rate, harming local economies, wildlife habitat, air quality and forest health.

The biggest threat to Oregon’s old growth forests is wildfire. In the last decade, wildfire has scorched over 6 million acres of land, including tens of thousands of acres of old and mature forests, far more than the 0.03% Greenwald is opining about.

In a 2017 assessment of the marbled murrelet (a threatened bird species on Oregon’s coast that utilizes older forests for nesting) in Oregon, biologists concluded wildfire posed a significant threat to the species and noted the 2002 Biscuit Fire alone resulted in the loss of over 14,000 acres of prime murrelet nesting habitat.

It’s also important to acknowledge older forests are not the only type of habitat Oregon’s wildlife requires. Some songbird species are in decline because their habitat needs — young forests with open canopy — are disappearing. Even before logging ever took place in Oregon, the state wasn’t one big old-growth forest. A U.S. Geological Survey report from 1902 mapped roughly one-third of Oregon’s forests in a completely burned-over state — clearly a far cry from an old and mature state.

Greenwald’s own employer, the Center for Biological Diversity, is one of many environmental groups that routinely sue to stop proposed forest management projects intended to increase wildfire resiliency and protect existing wildlife habitat. These lawsuits are designed to drag out, delay and stop fuel treatments in the name of wildlife habitat, despite research that clearly shows these treatments work.

Ironically, while the lawyers bicker in the courts, often those very same forests get consumed by catastrophic wildfire, sending the habitat being fought over up in smoke.

It’s worth putting this narrative in context. Oregon has 30 million acres of forests. Sixty percent of those acres are owned by the federal government with little to no harvest, most of which is already — or destined to become — old and mature forest if it doesn’t burn first. Of the 40% of the forest not federally owned, the state owns 3%. Recently, the Oregon Board of Forestry voted to move forward on a habitat conservation plan that sets roughly half of those acres aside for wildlife habitat.

The purpose of a habitat conservation plan is specifically to allow forest management activities like harvest to take place without concern because you’re doing so many good things for wildlife across the entire forest. Now, after that plan has moved forward, the Center for Biological Diversity is demanding an additional 9,500 acres be included to prevent “species extinction” — even though we’ve already dedicated over 18 million acres of Oregon’s forests for wildlife.

The reduction in harvestable acres resulting from the state’s habitat conservation plan will have a huge economic impact on local communities. The counties that use the revenue from timber harvest for services like health care and road maintenance and the Department of Forestry itself will lose millions of dollars annually due to the habitat conservation plan set-asides. As a former Oregon Department of Forestry  employee, it’s heartbreaking to know my former co-workers — many who help fight wildfire in the summer — may lose their jobs because of this plan.

And the kicker is that the department’s own modeling projects the habitat conservation plan will over-deliver on habitat for the northern spotted owl and red tree vole by year one and will over-deliver on habitat for the marbled murrelet by year four of a 70-year plan. There is absolutely no need to dedicate additional acres for these species at the expense of local economies.

If there is something we need Gov. Tina Kotek to focus on, it’s making our forests more wildfire resilient by encouraging active management activities. Otherwise, we’re sentencing the existing old-growth acres we do have to death by wildfire — at the expense of natural resource-dependent communities like mine.

Ty Williams is a retired district operations coordinator from Oregon Department of Forestry’s Astoria District. He is a lifelong Clatsop County resident.