With six decades of American conservation in the crosshairs of a cabal that has made no secret of its hatred and hostility toward America’s outdoors and conservation legacy, we need you to submit remarks on an ongoing basis to the Bureau of Land Management.
Among the many assaults on public land being led by the Trump administration and GOP Congress this spring, one of the most audacious has been the Bureau of Land Management’s announcement it will “revise” plans that guide the management of the Bureau of Land Management’s 2.5 million acres of federal public lands in Western Oregon, including significant stands of mature and old-growth forests — the last refuge of the endangered northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet.
The goal is clear: to pointlessly maximize “timber production” at the expense of long-standing and effective conservation strategies, and other scenic, recreation, endangered species, and habitat values. Cut it. Cut everything.
The deadline to comment on this matter, unfortunately, closed back on March 23rd. I posted a video to Instagram that week to alert supporters about the need to submit email comments ahead of that deadline.
Amazingly, the video continues to have life online with multiple shares and over 3,700 views, though someone recently indicated the deadline was May 23rd, not March 23rd. Someone may have also manipulated the video I’d posted in March to indicate that. But however you made it here, I’m glad you did because your support is still needed, and valuable!
You can still copy, paste, and modify the message below and send it to your two U.S. senators, your U.S. representative, and directly to the Bureau of Land Management at BLM_OR_Revision_Scoping@blm.gov. Address it to Steve Pearce. Mr. Pearce, sadly, is a long-time conservation and public lands opponent who was recently confirmed by the Senate as the Trump administration’s new BLM Director.
The letter follows:
Dear Mr. Pearce,
Please consider my comments on the proposed revision of the Bureau of Land Management Western Oregon Resource Management Plans.
The initial proposal notice for this revision suggested a need to increase federal timber production levels by logging BLM forest lands. This is entirely unnecessary. There are already thousands upon thousands of acres of privately-owned and managed plantation forests throughout the Pacific Northwest and western U.S. that have more than adequately supplied timber resources for domestic needs AND international markets for decades — even before the advent of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994.
Little if any timber inventory is needed from publicly-owned forests like those managed by the BLM, including the checkerboarded Oregon and California (O&C) Railroad lands, and few if any sawmills are in operation today that can process the wider, old-growth and mature trees that appear to be targeted by the administration with this unnecessary revision.
As you’re aware, the proposed action will reduce overall protections for these BLM-managed forests, including old-growth stands and other areas previously set aside for conservation. The revision also proposes shrinking logging streamside protections to less than 100 feet, a distance scientifically insufficient to protect endangered fish like coho salmon and steelhead, and a matter that has been thoroughly litigated and won by conservation interests over the last several decades.
This proposal will impact the forests my family, friends, neighbors, and I care about and value for far more than timber production. To that end, any management plan revision conducted by the BLM must do the following:
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- Strengthen, rather than weaken, protections for old-growth trees, stands, and riparian areas.
- Preserve and enable MORE old-growth by protecting mature trees and stands.
- Not expand clearcut-type logging practices that reduce carbon storage and vital wildlife habitat.
- Close loopholes that exist in the current management plans that result in ongoing loss of habitat for imperiled species.
- Ensure that management of these public forests that belong to the American people do not increase fire hazards, increase the spread of invasive weeds, or cause damage and erosion to soil.
- Not allow for more road-building, but instead close and decommission unneeded roads to protect water quality and reduce wildlife risks and ignitions.
- Exercise authority and discretion to conserve and protect these forests consistent with federal court decisions.
- Maintain and strengthen protections for all existing Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACECs).
- Meaningfully engage tribal governments and Indigenous communities to ensure their interests are considered.
In short, the proposed plan revision would double down on the most destructive aspects of public lands management across even more of our American public lands landscape, further prioritize resource extraction over the long-term health of our forests and communities, and put wildlife habitat, salmon recovery, drinking water, and nearby communities at even greater and more unnecessary risk.
Sensible and effective conservation management since the advent the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994 has largely resulted in a state of positive recovery for both forests and species, and environmental stability and consistent property value for homeowners and communities that have long lived alongside O&C and other BLM-managed lands.
Professionals with the Bureau of Land Management know these destructive proposals will harm our otherwise manageable, current environmental state in Oregon and around the west. Given that there is zero demonstrated economic, scientific, or conservation need for this pointless revision, it will result in abject, extinction-level destruction, along with decades of resulting litigation.
I urge you and the BLM to reconsider this destructive and pointless move.
Thank you.
Our friends at Oregon Wild shared this interactive map that can help you find threatened Oregon BLM lands you may know and love like Crabtree Valley, the Molalla River corridor and Table Mountain, Marys Peak, Valley of the Giants, Alsea Falls, the Rogue River corridor, and other areas. The Coast Range, Cascade foothills, and Siskiyou Mountains from Portland to Ashland — some of the most biologically productive lands in the Pacific Northwest — are all at risk and can expect to be impacted.
Background and Details
Many, but not all, of these BLM-managed lands are referred to as O&C lands, which are a wildly checkerboarded series of timber parcels throughout Western Oregon originally granted to the long-defunct Oregon and California Railroad to build a railroad between Portland and San Francisco. The land was reappropriated back to the federal government by Congress in 1916, and since then the 18 Oregon counties where O&C lands are located have received payments from the federal government of 50 percent of timber revenue from those federal public lands. During the Great Depression and subsequent New Deal in the 1930s, this was considered highly progressive policy, and became an important source of income for schools, police, and other county services.
Now, the Bureau of Land Management’s intention to open up millions of acres of forests in Western Oregon for “maximum” timber production is simply stated to “advance Trump administration priorities,” and includes wild, largely-untouched areas home to federally protected, vulnerable species like the aforementioned northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet. This demonstrates, once and for all, “the gloves are off” as far as the Trump administration is concerned. They simply loathe the idea of America’s conservation legacy and seek to do away with the idea of public lands entirely in favor of privatization.
Nothing illustrates this destructive approach more clearly than Interior Secretary and oil executive Doug Burgum, and his clueless statement back in March at a BlackRock Infrastructure Summit that we Americans who value conservation, wildlife, endangered species, biodiversity, and preserving the ecological integrity of our federal public lands aren’t “financially literate,” as though We the People don’t already make tough kitchen table decisions about money every day. Burgum and his oil, gas, and timber resource extraction cronies and oligarchal sheisters, who lavishly spend our tax dollars while serving as apologists for industrial destruction will never understand the idea of the “public good,” or that the rest of us aren’t interested in private golf resorts and drive-in hunting preserves on privatized land dissecting habitat and wildlife corridors.
We want our public lands wild, free, open, and with the priority on conservation, as the 2024 Biden-era Public Lands Rule made clear (it’s since been rescinded by the Trump regime). Building and growing takes work and care. Leaving natural cycles and spaces alone takes maturity and restraint. But the hateful, oligarchic, billionaire class that currently controls our nation’s executive branch — including Burgum, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steven Miller, Russell Vought, et al — despises the outdoors, loathes the idea of public lands held in trust for the American people, and anything less than the nihilistic destruction of forests, species, ecosystems, and landscapes that otherwise make America great is not only unacceptable to them, but counterintuitive. They destroy because they’re incapable of understanding anything other than immediate destruction and profit.
“Notice of Intent”
The Bureau of Land Management issued a notice of intent on the “revision” in February, in which surviving officials at the BLM not purged by DOGE or installed by the administration proposed “new updates” to the Western Oregon Resource Management Plans (you can see the public comment portion on this specific plan closed at the end of March) that have governed logging and conservation on the BLM’s 2.5 million acres of forests in 17 Oregon counties for decades, but are now in the hands of extraction oligarchs. They were last updated in 2016, and amazingly, left alone throughout Trump’s first term. The notice kicked off a monthlong public comment period that closed March 23rd, and the agency has made it clear it “does not expect” to hold any public meetings in advance of releasing its proposal.
As the team at Oregon Wild note, “The stated goal for [this spring’s BLM “revision”] proposal is to return to ‘maximum’ logging that ‘aligns with historically higher levels.’ In other words, a return to the days of clearcutting old growth and other forests at unsustainable levels that destroy fish and wildlife habitat, dirty streams, increase fire hazards, reduce resilience to climate change, and scar the hillsides that surround rural communities.”
In particular, two logging projects are happening imminently: the East Applegate Ridge Trail in the Holcomb Hollow timber sale, and the long-threatened Morgan-Nesbit project in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest (non-BLM) in June, a tragedy as that area is not only an ancient “dry” Oregon forest of Ponderosa, but it marks the only natural wildlife corridor between the Wallowa Mountains and Hells Canyon.
Since neither the BLM or U.S. Forest Service are holding public meetings over their sea changes in resource management, we must continue to submit comments in opposition in overwhelming numbers to not only the BLM, but our federal elected officials — that is your U.S. representative and your state’s two U.S. senators.
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Photos and graphics © 2026 Tommy Hough all rights reserved.