King County Superior Court rules that DNR violated SEPA by

failing to disclose and mitigate the climate impacts of logging mature 'legacy' forests

According to Claudia Newman, who litigated the case for plaintiffs, "Instead of facing the reality that logging century old, structurally complex forests and replacing them with early-stage tree plantations causes significant adverse climate impacts, DNR tried to convince the court that these actions have no climate consequences whatsoever. We are grateful to Judge Ballinger for recognizing reality and ordering the agency to consider employing climate-smart, sustainable forest management tools for future harvesting projects.”

DNR's position throughout this litigation mirrored timber industry tactics in the range of false and misleading claims made about climate change, its management activities, and plaintiffs' goals. In particular:

• DNR deception: Plaintiffs hold "extremist" views that are contrary to the international community.Truth: Plaintiffs are asking DNR to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions and other climate impacts associated with its deforestation activities and develop alternatives to lessen the impact. The international climate community is firmly supportive of efforts to curb deforestation and find alternatives - like partial cutting and preservation of primary forests -  to prevent any further loss of forest cover and carbon dense stands.

• DNR deception: Our lands are capturing far more carbon than they release.Truth: The only comprehensive inventory of forest carbon stocks and fluxes across the landscape has found that DNR's lands are not accumulating carbon at all because so much is being lost by logging operations.

• DNR deception: Since our lands are capturing more carbon than they release there are no climate impacts from logging.Truth: Even if DNR lands were net positive on carbon accumulation, it does not mean that logging projects have no climate impacts. This is analogous to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management saying that new oil platforms have no climate impacts because the ocean still absorbs more CO2 than is released by this new fossil fuel infrastructure. The reality is that since logging, as with drilling, is not part of nature's carbon cycle any emissions generated by these activities are helping to drive up CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

• DNR deception: We carefully considered the climate impacts of logging in programmatic documents from 2019 and so don't need to do anything further at the project level.Truth: Programmatic documents don't emit carbon, logging projects do, and SEPA requires consideration of actual, on-the-ground effects. Moreover, the 2019 documents considered only a small fraction of what might be emitted by its logging program and failed entirely to consider other climate impacts, such as increases in surface temperature caused by stripping forest cover.

• DNR deception: Storing carbon in wood products is better than storing it in forests.Truth: This ‘furniture’ theory has been thoroughly debunked. Each ton of carbon stored in wood products comes at a carbon cost of 20 or more tons CO2 released by logging, manufacturing, and disposal of wood products in landfills. There is no net carbon storage in wood products, just a net release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In addition, forests can accumulate and store carbon for hundreds of years while most carbon stored in wood products is released into the atmosphere in a few decades.

• DNR deception: Through our standard practices, we are protecting fish, wildlife, water and forest productivity from climate change.Truth: By converting natural forests into tree plantations DNR is making state forestlands more susceptible to wildfire, drought, water shortages, heat waves, invasive species, flooding, landslides and other climate stressors.

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For access to all pleadings filed in this case, please visit the Wishbone litigation project page here.