Saving the nation’s oldest forests remains a priority among a wide range of forest policy groups — but there are cracks in that support, an industry survey suggests.
Attendees at a forest policy conference, including environmental groups, forest owners and government employees, agreed that the U.S. should seek to reverse the loss of old-growth areas and recognize federal land as the forefront of that effort.
But a quarter of respondents said they disagreed with that position and less than half said they were “strongly” supportive — the weakest showing for any of the 16 resolutions adopted at the American Forest Congress organized in July by American Forests and other groups in Washington.
The old-growth issue has proved complicated since the Biden administration tried — and failed — to restrict logging in areas it defined as old growth, a term that itself stoked arguments among conservationists, timber interests and others.
