When the first English colony was established at Jamestown in 1607, the Douglas fir seedling was about eight years old, growing on a hillside 20 minutes northwest of what is now Corvallis.

It climbed slowly for decades, competing for sunlight. While some forestland in the area was burned by the native Kalapuya people and converted to prairie, the fir and others around it were in a wetter part of forest and free to grow. If fire came through, it didn’t kill them.

By the time of an 1826 Pacific Northwest exploration by the famed botanist David Douglas, the fir species’ namesake, the tree already was a giant more than 200 years old.

There it stood for generations -- until May, when the chainsaws came.

The seedling that sprouted in 1599 in Oregon State University’s McDonald-Dunn research forest was cut down by the public college, along with other trees more than 250 years old. The decision netted $425,000 for the university’s College of Forestry. School officials say the revenue will fund teaching, research and outreach, but it happened at a time when the university’s forestry school has accelerated other timber cuts and dipped into its reserves to fund $19 million in cost overruns on a major construction project.

A 420-year-old log left by an Oregon State University timber harvest. The school's foresters cut 16 acres of old-growth, which its interim dean now says was a mistake. (Photo courtesy Doug Pollock/Friends of OSU Old Growth)

The forestry school’s interim dean, Anthony Davis, has since acknowledged his mistake in approving the 16-acre cut known as the No Vacancy harvest. He has temporarily halted all logging of trees older than 160 years on the university’s 15,000 acres of research forests.

“Harvesting this stand did not align with the college’s values,” Davis wrote in a July 12 letter to the school community, first reported by the Corvallis Gazette-Times. “Moving forward, we have learned from this matter.”

The felling of the old growth trees raises questions about Oregon State’s land stewardship at precisely the wrong time. Top state leaders are weighing whether to hand over management of the 82,500-acre Elliott State Forest to the university’s college of forestry, a transfer that would quintuple Oregon State’s forest holdings.

Records reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive cast doubt on the university’s justification for cutting what it knew were trees as old as 260 years. Records also show the university recently allowed a separate clearcut seven times bigger than permitted under its own management plans.

Taken together, the cuts threaten the credibility of a school that has deep ties to the timber industry but says it can be trusted to do more than maximize timber production in the Elliott.

Norm Johnson, a retired Oregon State University professor who helped develop the landmark Northwest Forest Plan, looks at trees in the university-controlled McDonald-Dunn Research Forest that was temporarily pulled back from a planned clearcut. (Rob Davis/The Oregonian)

“I don’t know why they’re so blind to the magnificence of these trees,” says Norm Johnson, a retired Oregon State forest ecology professor who helped develop the Northwest Forest Plan, the Clinton-era blueprint that ended the 1980s timber wars in federal forests. “It’s just very discouraging. And it raises all sorts of concerns about management of the college forests.

“They made it a much heavier lift for the college to get the Elliott.”

♦♦♦

The old-growth clearcut might have gone unnoticed.

Doug Pollock, 55, a former Hewlett-Packard sustainability engineer who lives in Corvallis, remembers getting a notice on May 6 that the university planned to log the nearby McDonald-Dunn stand, a spot he explored frequently with his family. The notice arrived one day before the university closed the forest to the public.

Surely, Pollock remembers thinking, they won’t cut the giants.

“It was just this alley of big, majestic trees,” Pollock said. “You just assume that old growth trees like this would be protected in the management plans at OSU.”

Doug Pollock, a former sustainability engineer, started the group Friends of OSU Old Growth after discovering a 16-acre grove of trees -- including one that was 420 years old -- had been cut in May. (Rob Davis/The Oregonian)

Those plans protect 350 acres of Oregon State’s old growth -- 2 percent of its holdings. Those holdings include tracts in places including Columbia County, Gaston, Corvallis and Union County.

Johnson, the retired Oregon State professor, fought unsuccessfully to have the protected areas include the 16-acre grove that became the No Vacancy timber sale.

But even though the trees weren’t protected, Johnson said, the university’s forest managers waited to harvest them. Through decades when old growth was flying off federal land, the school left the old growth grove alone.

“They knew it was special, they knew it was different,” Johnson said. “You got these really old trees here, which are of themselves magnificent, but there’s a stand of them. It’s just remarkable.”

Old-growth trees cut by Oregon State University's College of Forestry in the McDonald-Dunn Research Forest northwest of Corvallis. (Photo courtesy Doug Pollock/Friends of OSU Old Growth)

Pollock discovered the trees had been cut while out on a run. He was devastated.

Pollock started asking questions of Brent Klumph, the college’s forest manager. In a May 30 email, Klumph told Pollock that the planning process for the harvest started two years ago “when we first started to notice mortality within the stand.”

The interim dean, in his public letter, said the decision to clearcut the trees was “based on recent evidence of a decline in stand health” and was intended to turn the old-growth grove into land that generated timber.

The No Vacancy harvest clearcut 16 acres. Oregon State foresters who approved the cut knew some trees were at least 260 years old. (Rob Davis/The Oregonian)

But the university’s own records raise questions about that justification.

In 2018, a survey known as a timber cruise estimated that 4 percent of the harvested lumber would come from dead or dying trees.

“Almost none of it is dead and dying,” said Johnson, who reviewed the cruise at The Oregonian/OregonLive’s request.

“This stand was not unhealthy in an ecological sense,” Johnson said. “In fact, it was the opposite.”

When the trees were finally cut this year, the school’s intent, Davis wrote in his letter, was to turn the stand into “a timber-generating future condition.”

In other words, the giants were taking up space that could be used to plant trees for harvest.

Anthony Davis, interim dean of the Oregon State University School of Forestry, surveys a 16-acre old-growth clearcut in a university research northwest of Corvallis. (Rob Davis/The Oregonian)

Surveying the sun-baked clearcut this week, Davis said the school was using the No Vacancy cut as a learning opportunity for its participation in the Elliott State Forest discussion.

“I actually think accountability and trust partly come from transparency and being able to say we wouldn’t do this again,” he said, “because we’ve now had a chance to realize that runs counter to some of the values which weren’t being amplified, that weren’t articulated.”

Davis said he should have sought more information about the ages of the trees before approving the cut. He was clear that responsibility stopped with him.

“We should have acted differently on this stand,” he said.

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Oregon State’s College of Forestry, university officials often proclaim, is the No. 2 forestry school in the world. (As ranked by the Center for World University Rankings in the United Arab Emirates.) It is home to preeminent scientists conducting groundbreaking research.

It also has strong financial links to the timber industry. Numerous faculty positions are endowed by timber companies and their executives, including the deanship, funded by a $5 million gift from Allyn Ford, the former CEO of Roseburg Forest Products.

The forestry school’s management decisions have drawn nationwide scrutiny.

In 2006, Hal Salwasser, then the school’s dean, led a contingent of professors who tried to suppress the publication of a graduate student’s work in Science, the nation’s preeminent scientific journal. The student, Dan Donato, had found salvage logging after wildfires doesn’t help forests recover and could increase fire risks. The finding ran counter to the industry’s position.

A year later, two landslides from clearcuts logged on university-owned land on U.S. 30 west of Clatskanie sent a wall of mud and debris into Woodson, a small nearby community. No one was killed, but the slides damaged homes and vehicles.

More recently, $6 million in accelerated timber sales from the school’s forest near Clatskanie are being used to help defray cost overruns for a School of Forestry construction project, the Oregon Forest Science Complex. Costs ballooned on the $60 million building, meant to showcase the potential for a pricey building material made in Oregon known as cross-laminated timber.

A stump left in a clearcut of old growth trees in Oregon State University's McDonald-Dunn Research Forest. (Rob Davis/The Oregonian)

And for a decade, the school has been ignoring its own management plans for its research forests. The plans were suspended in 2009 by Salwasser amid the Great Recession. Debora Johnson, a former Oregon State forestry information manager, studied satellite photographs of university land where clearcuts were supposed to be limited to one to four acres. She found some clearcuts that were far larger.

In an interview, Davis said the school was following its management plan as it drafts a new one in what will be a years-long process.

But in mid-June, the university began another nearby harvest that doesn’t adhere to the plan. The 31-acre cut, called the Maple Syrup harvest, is happening in an area where no clear cut is supposed to be larger than 4 acres.

Davis clarified his statement about the school’s management plan in a subsequent interview. “We use it as the basis for our decision-making,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we follow it to a T.”

♦♦♦

The proposal to give the Elliott State Forest to Oregon State, an idea first floated by state Treasurer Tobias Read, is being shaped while major changes take place at the university. School president Ed Ray is stepping down next June; a search is ongoing for his replacement. The search for a new dean of the forestry school is also underway. Davis, the interim leader who took over after the 2018 death of Thomas Maness, is not applying for the role.

After the forest was nearly sold to a timber company, drawing a massive outcry, state lawmakers in 2017 approved $100 million in borrowing to begin the process of decoupling the forest from its ownership obligations as a holding in Oregon’s Common School Fund. The state is constitutionally required to use the land as an asset to fund classroom education. Historically, that meant cutting trees and selling the timber.

The state still needs to come up with another $121 million to fully buy out the forest from the Common School Fund.

In Read’s plan, Oregon State could use the forest for research, while conserving high-quality habitat and selling timber from lower-quality habitat to pay the school fund obligation. Asked whether Read trusts Oregon State’s word, Read’s spokeswoman said he doesn’t want to see similar mistakes happen in the state forest. About 40 percent of the Elliott is older forest beginning to develop old-growth characteristics.

“Mistakes happen, and this was clearly a mistake. An unfortunate one,” said Read’s spokeswoman, Amy Wojcicki. “The important question is what can OSU and those working on the future of the Elliott learn from it.”

Doug Pollock walks through a grove with old-growth trees that had been slated to be clearcut. The university temporarily paused logging of trees older than 160 years after the No Vacancy harvest cut trees as old as 420 years. (Rob Davis/The Oregonian)

The college is expected to bring a plan before the state land board -- Read, Gov. Kate Brown and Secretary of State Bev Clarno -- in December. Some environmental groups, including the Wild Salmon Center, were already pushing for legally enforceable covenants as a way to limit Oregon State’s discretion.

In a July 22 letter to the university’s forestry dean, Vicki Walker, the director of state lands, said she appreciated the university’s “vocal recognition of the mistake” made by cutting the old growth.

“I am encouraged with your leadership in addressing the regrettable loss of these incredible specimens of Oregon old growth,” Walker wrote. “The lessons learned from this recent incident in the McDonald forest reinforce the need for transparency and an open dialogue as we balance the needs for public access, recreation, wildlife habitat and timber management.”

— Rob Davis

rdavis@oregonian.com

503.294.7657; @robwdavis

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