Opinion | Massive national forest project needs a closer look at impacts, alternatives

Below is an excerpt from Steve Garske’s Bridge Michigan Op-ed on March 6, 2026. Worth a full read here.

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Buried under the snow, the Upper Peninsula’s Ottawa National Forest seems peaceful now. But if the US Forest Service gets its way, the eastern end of the Ottawa will be the site of a massive timber sale.  

The proposed Silver Branch Vegetation Management Project is the largest of a series of sales being planned for the Ottawa. This massive logging project would encompass 127,828 acres (200 square miles) of national forest land, which is more than 10 times the area of the City of Marquettte. This amounts to over 1/8 of the entire 1 million-acre Ottawa!  

The project would clear-cut 25,000 acres and select-cut another 70,000 acres, including a proposed addition to the Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness with broad support from UP residents and beyond. The project also shares a significant border with the existing wilderness area, a deep canyon that draws visitors from across the UP, the state and beyond. This project would have “an estimated 30-year implementation time frame for vegetation management, and longer for some resources” with soil recovery “potentially extending an additional 25 years beyond that.”