April 15, 2009
Southwest Oregon is once again the epicenter of a historic and high-stakes national debate about public lands management. In their final days in office, the Bush administration was able to force through the largest change in forest policy in the Pacific Northwest in more than a decade. The Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR), known widely as the Whopper, allows for a massive increase in clearcut logging across 2.6 million acres of publicly‑ owned forests in western Oregon.
Initiated by the timber industry through a shady process known as "sue and settle," the WOPR is a parting gift from their cronies in the federal government, with drastic implications for the future health of Oregon's native forests and threatened species. The plan arose when the Bush administration failed to defend the public interest against a timber industry lawsuit and instead agreed to settle out of court by giving in to the demands of the timber lobby.
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The WOPR increases logging by nearly 400% compared to current logging levels; gets more than 70% of the timber volume from clearcutting; shrinks streamside reserves by 50%; adds 180 million tons more carbon to the atmosphere compared to no logging (equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from one million cars driven for 132 years); and invades the wilderness with 1,300 miles of new roads, including logging roads on steep slopes and across creeks in already severely degraded watersheds. The combination of road construction and clearcutting is a death sentence for watersheds already on the brink of collapse.
When the BLM released the WOPR draft plan in 2007, nearly 30,000 members of the public submitted comments, with well over 90% in opposition. The public overwhelmingly asked the BLM to save remaining older forests, protect clean drinking water, and concentrate forest management on restoration and thinning small trees to protect communities from wildfire. The BLM ignored this common-ground, common-sense approach and moved forward with a divisive proposal certain to face years of heated court battles.
First WOPR Sale Released: A Glimpse of What's to Come
The first major project under the WOPR was announced in February 2009 and it is a 1,400-acre clearcut above salmon-bearing streams in Oregon's Coast Range called the Edson Regen Timber Sale. Currently, the canopy of these mature forests helps protect water quality by moderating the timing and quantity of peak flows and by filtering sediment that would otherwise reach the salmon and steelhead habitat in the Sixes and New rivers.
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These forests currently provide a suite of free ecological services, from filtering clean water to crucial climate change mitigation, and the WOPR plan would reduce this highly functioning ecosystem to biologically desolate, fire-prone fiber plantations.
We Need Your Help
This misguided plan is an awful legacy left over from the Bush administration and it must be stopped. We need your help in speaking up until the WOPR is gone. Our public servants should be advancing broadly supported forest management strategies, like thinning small-diameter trees from the managed landscape rather than clearcutting more of our public lands.
Please visit the action alerts on the front page of the KS Wild website, www.kswild.org, and send a quick, automatic letter to Senator Wyden and the new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, asking them to scrap the WOPR and work toward granting permanent protection for the amazing old-growth forests covering western Oregon's BLM lands.
For more information: www.kswild.org
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2009