Western Oregon's Forests Hit by a Whopper

Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center
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.

An example of what it looks like immediately adjacent to the proposed WOPR-approved `Edson Regen' Timber sale. In areas like this where private lands have been badly denuded by industrial logging it is crucial we preserve the nearby pubic land to prevent the cumulative effects leading to total ecosystem collapse

By the Numbers

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.

An example of the results from the clear cut practices allowed under WOPR that KS Wild is fighting to prevent.

The BLM's WOPR is a step in the wrong direction for public forest management. The vast forested landscape endangered by the WOPR includes some of the most valuable intact forest habitat left in the Pacific Northwest, and the area is central to the scientific integrity of the Northwest Forest Plan. The WOPR removes BLM forests from the protections designed under the Northwest Forest Plan, which will hasten the decline of salmon, spotted owls, marbled murrelets, and more than 400 other imperiled species while harming water quality.

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



This article can be found online at www.treesfoundation.org/publications/article-358

Forest & River News is produced by Trees Foundation. For more information contact:
Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center
POB 102
Ashland, OR 97520
Phone: (541) 846-9273