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Oregon's Heritage Forests at Risk
The Bush administration aimed to eliminate Northwest Forest Plan safeguards from 2 million acres of BLM land in Western Oregon; access to quality hunting and fishing, wildlife habitat, clean water at risk. The WOPR still hangs in the balance.
(UPDATE: 9.9.09) After the Obama administration overturned WOPR in July for being legally indefensible, timber groups announced they are suing over the withdrawal of the plan.
Just before leaving office in late 2008, the Bush administration and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released their final plan for over 2 million acres of western Oregon forestlands. The Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR for short) would have ramped up logging across the landscape and targeted some of our last old-growth forests. This dangerous plan would also have degraded habitat for fish and wildlife and threatened the quality of our drinking water.
Click here to see what other government agencies said about the WOPR (hint: they don't much like it).
Fortunately, the new administration saw through the plan and withdrew it in July 2009, pledging to move forward instead with ecologically-sound restoration projects.
Click here to read the latest news on the WOPR.
WOPR Background
When it comes to the management of public forest lands in our state, most Oregonians think of the US Forest Service.
How much timber does the BLM cut down? Click here for a graph that shows how the BLM has been meeting its own timber targets.
But the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for more than 2 million acres of public land in western Oregon that has historically been covered by the environmental safeguards provided by the Northwest Forest Plan. Logging has severely affected much of this land, but the BLM still manages hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine and unspoiled old-growth "heritage forests."
Tragically, these forests are not protected. Under the Bush administration, logging interests and the BLM worked together to put these heritage forests on the chopping block. The Bush administration settled a lawsuit brought by the logging industry, and agreed to remove BLM forestlands in western Oregon from the Northwest Forest Plan's old-growth reserve system.
New Google Earth maps of threatened WOPR areas courtesy of the Coast Range Association.
Before BLM could open these old-growth forests to logging, however, it was required to complete an open planning process and gather public input. That process reached its conclusion last year and Oregon Wild worked with a diverse coalition of hunters, anglers, conservationists, elected officials, and rural land owners to push for continued protection of these lands. That work paid off in July 2009 when Interior Secretary Salazar withdrew the WOPR, stating that its legal flaws were insurmountable.
Oregon Wild applauds the demise of WOPR: Oregon has already lost nearly 90 percent of its historic old-growth forests. Our remaining stands should be set aside for clean water, carbon storage, fish and wildlife habitat, recreation, and as a legacy for future generations.
Forests that would have been logged under WOPR:
