In 2019, conservation activist and longtime Washington state resident Stephen Kropp did something he’d never done before: he explored a forest managed as state trust land by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. “It was this beautiful, old stand of trees, the kind of thing you’d expect to see in one of the state parks and not on the state trust lands, which are managed primarily for timber production,” Kropp recalls. DNR manages roughly 2.4 million acres of state trust forests in the state of Washington, which are run for timber production. Revenue from the sale of the timber goes to various public trustees, including counties and school districts. Kropp says the trees he saw were older, “mature” second-growth trees that had grown naturally without human intervention. Explore the latest news about what’s at stake for the climate during this election season. The forest he visited also had many of the same “structural” features as an old-growth forest: dark forest floors (the result of closing canopies), as well as standing dead wood and large logs that provide habitat for plants and animals. In the following years, Kropp visited similar forests on state trust lands. He became concerned that few of these types of forests were left, especially at lower elevations. He decided that the forests needed saving, and for that he needed to raise public awareness. The problem was, he didn’t know what to call these types of forests. They needed a name, and the catchier the better. “It occurred to me that I needed a way to succinctly describe these forests in a way that was compelling and that conveyed the importance of protecting these forests. 'Naturally regenerated second growth, mature forests that preserve the biological, functional and structural legacies of the forests they replaced’ was not a very efficient way of describing the forest,” says Kropp. He settled on “legacy... |