Forests Go Missing in Idaho, Oregon and California

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No Trees Left to Hug

I worked in television in the 1990s.  I was doing an interview one morning with the owner of a country store.  During a break, we walked outside and he gestured to a forest to the south.  “I read in Atlantic Monthly that there’s now more forestland in the east than the west,” he offered.  It sounded counterintuitive, but it was true.  Not much has changed in 30 years since that conversation.

I found a map on Instagram that offers where we’re at today.

Now I grant that a lot of what we have in the west is desert and high desert, but less than half of Idaho, Oregon, and Idaho are forested.  A contrast to what you see in New England, New York, and parts of the Deep South.

A few years after the TV interview, I saw a photograph from the 1890s.  From Pennsylvania.  A clear-cut hillside.  A second picture showed the same hill a century later.  Covered in trees.  The eastern states recovered as the economies moved on from farming.

Blame the Environmentalists

You’ll hear some of the tree-huggers on the left blame logging in our part of the country, but I’m not so sure.  A friend who grew up in Idaho always says that if you don’t clear some of the growth, you give fuel to rampant wildfires.

I don’t blame new housing starts either.  There’s still a lot of wide open space in northern California, eastern Oregon, and the Idaho panhandle.

Environmentalists didn’t reforest the east.  It was the organic free market at work.  Government policy has interfered with that approach west of the Great Plains.  It’s time to get them out of forest management.