Forest Watch

Kettle Range Conservation Group was fully engaged in challenging individual timber sales in summer 1976. Early in the 1980’s, KRCG successfully challenged the Helen Timber Sale, et al, resulting in a reprieve from logging in the Thirteenmile Basin that would have been roaded, logged and developed had we not succeeded.

Following release of newly revised Colville and Okanogan Forest Plans in 1988, administrative appeals and litigation took on new emphasis as broad-scale logging ramped up. Kettle Rangers and coalition partners challenged the 1988 Colville Land Management Plan (LMP) because of its failure to protect old growth forests and roadless wildlands, but this effort was unsuccessful.

Frustrated by a culture of shallow Forest Service promises, denied meaningful outcomes and frustrated by rubber-stamp timber program, fledgling pro-wilderness and old growth forest activists like Kettle Rangers turned to new strategies to protect and preserve wild forests. Thus was born the Forest Watch movement and Kettle Rangers went to work to safeguard what remained of Washington’s Colville and Okanogan National Forest unprotected wilderness.

Despite over 18 years of collaborative successes by a diverse coalition of forest conservation, forestry experts and sawmill owners who together developed a Forest Plan alternative that included sustainable harvests, protection for wildlands and restoration of old growth forests, the Colville National Forest sold out collaboration in exchange for a return to clearcutting, logging large and old trees that led to a dead end for collaboration.