Oregon WildBlog

Every summer when I was a kid, my parents would pile me, my older sister, and my younger brother into the back of our Ford passenger van at five in the morning. We would dutifully sleep for most of the four hour drive to my grandparents’ home along a tributary of the Rogue River.

We simply called our summer escape “Trail,” after the tiny town up the road.

Five years ago, Oregon Wild launched round one of our “Welcome to Oregon, Home of the Clearcut” campaign with a billboard attaching those words to an image of a large clearcut. We ended up wading in to a free-speech court battle with the Port of Portland when they refused to run our design in the Portland Airport. After a court victory, we had the chance to try again.

Bombus occidentalis is not your typical bee. For starters, unlike the many buzzing pollinators I observe in my organic yard or on the wildflowers lining the many trails I've hiked over the past year, I've never seen a Western bumblebee. And, while many of our native pollinators are in decline for a variety of reasons, this Bombus is especially rare.

As a recap--in February, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission voted to uplist the murrelet to ‘endangered’ under the state Endangered Species Act, then without any public notice, in June reversed their previous decision. 

In my wanderings in eastern Oregon doing research for the hiking guide “Oregon’s Ancient Forests” I visited some really spectacular landscapes and wild places.

My name is Cameron Brown, and I am volunteering as an intern for Oregon Wild in the Eugene office this summer.

County governments throughout Oregon are helping fund a radical timber lobby group

If you live in Oregon, there's a good chance that your county government is helping fund a lawsuit to overturn the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon. 

My name is Emma Land and I am the Community Outreach Intern at Oregon Wild’s Eugene office. This fall I will be starting my second year as a Master of Public Administration graduate student at the University of Oregon concentrating in environmental policy and sustainability. Last summer I moved from Kentucky to Oregon and decided to make it a month long road trip. I visited 14 states and countless state and national parks and recreation areas.

The White House today announced that Dwight and Steven Hammond, the two Oregon ranchers who triggered the Malheur Refuge occupation, would be pardoned. In a statement, press secretary Sarah Sanders called the punishment of the Hammonds “unjust,” and went on to describe them as “devoted family men, respected contributors to their local community, and have widespread support from their neighbors, local law enforcement, and farmers and ranchers across the West.”

By Doug Heiken