Martha Wehling

“Martha was an Assistant Attorney General who primarily represented the Department of Natural Resources between 2004 and 2022. She also represented other state agencies, timber companies, local governments, and small forest landowners. In the late 1990s, she moved to Washington for field work in Olympic National Park on the Northern spotted owl, and never left, enjoying the wide variety of recreational opportunities and the diversity of public lands that make Washington such an exceptional state to live in. She is, as is obvious to at least two readers, a huge Arrested Development fan.”

Old-growth, spotted owls, and carbon are iconic representations of Washington’s vast forest lands. Yet management of those lands has been dominated by strife and litigation, most recently in the debate over whether and how to sequester carbon on some of the state-owned and managed public forest lands.¹ This article provides a description of the fundamental legal sideboards that affect the range of management options that apply to the State’s public forest lands.

Continue reading “The Significance of “Trust” (and Bananas) in the Management of the State’s Public Forest Lands” →