The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan

Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dead owls and threatened biologists. Dying timber towns. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and 1990s, a flashpoint for a web of environmental, economic, cultural, and political issues. The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), officially adopted in 1994, was central to these controversies: it arose out of the environmental mandates of the EPA and imposed rules about forest harvest and species protection. Widely considered one of the most important federal forest policies and a landmark in ecosystem management, the NWFP was intended to protect the region's remaining old growth forests and sensitive wildlife species, which came to include broader habitat protection goals. Based on a series of studies and hearings that started in 1993, the Northwest Forest Plan was the result of research by a multi-disciplinary team known as the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team, and spearheaded by the so-called Gang of Four:  K. Norman  Johnson, Jerry F. Franklin, Jack Ward Thomas, and John Gordon. The Northwest Forest Plan: A History, written by two of the "Gang," provides an in-depth history of the Northwest Forest Plan, in which the authors describe its causes, development, adoption, and implementation.