VALE, Ore. (AP) — Green has returned to the landscape in far southeastern Oregon, where the Long Draw fire burned across nearly 900 square miles of grass and sagebrush territory in July, killing livestock and damaging the prospects of ranchers...

A wildfire burning in southeastern Oregon has become largest blaze in more than a century.

Like silent sentinels guarding the legacy of the 2002 Biscuit fire, blackened trees tower over the budding bright green conifers growing up from the forest floor.

When forest harvest levels fell 82 percent on public forest lands in the years after passage of the Northwest Forest Plan, forests became a significant carbon “sink” for the first time in decades.

Forests in the lower 48 states can sequester up to 40 percent of the nation’s fossil fuel carbon emissions, a larger amount than previously estimated – unless a drought or other major disturbance occurs.

Soil erosion may be a bigger threat to forests in southern Oregon than wildfire, according to a study that reconstructed a 2,000-year history of forest fires in the Siskiyou Mountains.

Wildfire names follow some logic - sometimes.

The Oak Flat fire is burning in the Wild Rivers Ranger District about 20 miles southwest of Grants Pass, near the edge of the massive Biscuit fire in 2002.

This is the 100th anniversary of the Aug. 20-21 firestorm that ended the era when wildfires were often allowed to burn themselves out.

Environmentalists are welcoming the sound of chainsaws helping to reduce fire danger and restore ecosystem balance while some Oregon sawmills have adopted green certification because it makes sense for their struggling bottom line.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say there is peace in the valley, but we are closer than ever before," said Shane Jimerfield, director of the Siskiyou Project, a local conservation group that grew out of logging protests.

Bush administration efforts to boost salvage logging after wildfires took a tumble today when a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that had stopped harvest of burned trees in an old-growth forest reserve on federal lands in southern Oregon.