GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has withdrawn a timber sale from the former Bush administration designed to cut big old trees in southwestern Oregon.
BLM spokesman Jim Whittington says the Chew Choo sale couldn’t meet new logging restrictions intended to protect spotted owls and no longer makes sense in a down lumber market.
Conservation groups say they hope this means BLM is done trying to log old growth forests.
But the timber industry decried it as a failure of federal forest policy.
The timber was sold in 2006 in an area straddling the Rogue and Umpqua basins near Glendale.
The decision comes as BLM is working on two pilot projects designed to produce timber as a byproduct of thinning to reduce fire danger.