Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden’s plan to change how federal agencies manage public forests includes a couple of worthwhile ideas.

It’s sad, though, that the Democratic senator, who has been in office since 1996, unveiled his proposal 12 years after Baker County’s last sawmill shut down, and after most of the county’s loggers and log truck drivers have left the once-thriving business.

For Baker County, Wyden’s effort in many respects arrives too late to reverse the trend.

Nonetheless, if Wyden’s concept becomes law and that’s at least a year, and a new administration, away then the Forest Service and BLM might make substantial progress during the next decade in their campaign to revive millions of acres of forest, including tens of thousands of acres in Northeastern Oregon, that are overcrowded with trees and brush and thus vulnerable to tree-killing insects, disease and wildfire.

What we especially like about Wyden’s proposal is that it’s much more aggressive, compared to current legislation, in streamlining forest restoration work such as cutting smaller trees.

For instance, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act that President Bush signed into law in late 2003 allows the Forest Service and BLM to approve forest-thinning projects of up to 1,000 acres without having to write multi-hundred-page environmental studies that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a few years to finish.

Wyden wants to do something similar, but increase the size threshold to 25,000 acres.

Such projects would require the endorsement of an advisory committee whose members would include representatives from environmental groups as well as the timber industry.

That’s not the imposing obstacle it was several years ago, however.

The recent deal that environmentalists forged with mill officials and the Forest Service to allow limited logging of trees burned during 2006 fires in Grant and Harney counties, for example, proves that in today’s political climate, with old-growth trees essentially off-limits to loggers, compromise between traditional timber foes is possible.

Wyden wants to ban logging of trees older than 150 years in eastside public forests, but that’s basically a moot point the Forest Service stopped cutting live trees larger than 21 inches in diameter (many of those trees are younger than 150 years) in eastside national forests 15 years ago.

The bottom line is that Wyden’s proposal, though clearly a concession to environmental groups, wouldn’t steal any logs from sawmills east of the Cascades.

Wyden also recommends fixing the problem in the last federal energy bill, which didn’t include material from federal forests in its definition of biomass that’s eligible for tax credits.

In addition, the senator suggests the government allot as much as $50 million per year for forest restoration work.

Wyden’s plan is no panacea it doesn’t, and can’t, guarantee that there will be any loggers left to cut the trees and haul them out of the woods, for instance.

Nor does the senator propose to insulate logging jobs from lawsuits. But then it’s unlikely that any law which denied Americans access to the legal system would survive a court challenge.

The problems that plague public forests in Northeastern Oregon and in many other parts of the West are well-documented. For most of a century we’ve mistreated the forests by allowing logging that was not always environmentally sound, and by putting out fires that would have helped rather than hurt the land.

Forest managers know how to fix those problems, but so far they’ve produced more pages of studies than they have treated acres of land.

Senator Wyden’s proposal could reverse that ratio in favor of acres over pages.

Or, as we like to think of it, saving trees in two ways.