Fact Checking Oregon’s Timber Harvest Debate

With a recent bill by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) to expand forest management in Western Oregon as context, the Oregonian’s PolitiFact recently waded into the conversation about how best to manage the state’s forests by examining recent claims by Gordon Challstrom, a Medford businessman and Republican gubernatorial candidate.

Specifically in question are Challstrom’s claims that "Oregon and the federal government now have more than one million acres of burnt land and millions of trees being left to rot."

In the process of fact checking Challstrom’s statement, the article reveals a lot of information about Oregon’s forests and some of the methods in place to measure the impacts of forest fires.