In the “flood the zone” manner of the second Trump administration, numerous conservation rollbacks, overhauls, and downright destructive legislation are now threatening our public lands, all at once. Some are in Congress and some are being driven by agencies managed by the administration, so who you connect with or what agency you may make remarks to varies from issue to issue.
Basically, everything bad we gamed out and imagined would occur on the conservation front in 2017 when Trump first took office with a fully Republican Congress is playing out now in highly-concentrated, firehose fashion. The regime knows they have limited time to affect maximum destruction on our public lands. Same with Congress. Given the “flood the zone” approach, I realize it’s hard to focus or prioritize matters, which is why I wrote a related piece of priorities a few weeks ago and followed it up with this.
Americans don’t really understand how thoroughly our post-1945 conservation legacy is being threatened, and in danger of being eradicated or sold off entirely. We’re on the verge of losing the Roadless Rule, the Northwest Forest Plan, the Wilderness Act is being threatened, the Tongass rainforest in Alaska is set to be logged into oblivion, enforcement of long-standing and effective federal policy like the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) has become optional at best, and the Environmental Protection Agency is once again run by fox in the henhouse polluters and coal barons entirely desecrating the agency’s honorable mission. Privatization is one goal, but another goal simply appears to be the rudderless cruelty of imposing destructive overhauls disguised as bureaucratic policy modifications. They are all unprecedented. They all must be stopped. They all set calamitous precedents.
All are important, so please share this far and wide:
- No Chilean Mine Poisoning of the Boundary Waters Wilderness — Please email and call your U.S. senators NOW and urge them to Save the Boundary Waters NOW and vote NO on House Joint Resolution 140, abbreviated as H.J. Res. 140. If you have friends and family in other states, please encourage them to submit comments and contact their U.S. senators too. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar must hold the line on this. The House of Representatives made unprecedented use of the seldom-used Congressional Review Act (CRA) in January to overturn a 20-year ban on toxic copper mining near Minnesota’s iconic Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, an extraordinary wildland and one of the nation’s most beloved angling and boating locales. The plan calls for a lease on adjoining public lands in the Superior National Forest to a Chilean mining firm, which is expected to mine raw materials and metals to be sent to China — not much of a return for the U.S. taxpayer for the destruction and poisoning of the Boundary Waters. The measure passed the House on Jan. 21st and is now before the Senate.
- Tell your Senators to Vote NO on Steve Pearce for BLM Director — Steve Pearce has made a career working as an enemy of public lands, and is one of the foremost advocates in government for selling off Americans’ public lands to mining and logging interests eager to privatize them and engage in destructive resource extraction without any public oversight. He’s up for a confirmation vote in the Senate this week as director of the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), so PLEASE let your U.S. senators know you oppose his nomination, and that he is an unacceptable candidate. As noted by the Conservation Lands Foundation, Pearce has profited into the millions from the oil and gas industry, and while his deep political and personal financial ties to oil and gas should’ve immediately disqualified him, his nomination was nevertheless approved by the House and passed out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Every U.S. senator must be contacted to prevent Steve Pearce’s nomination, and a good tool to use is this Conservation Lands Foundation action alert. The Senate has no business approving this man to serve as the director of the BLM — an agency responsible for managing public lands for the benefit of all Americans — when he doesn’t even believe in the idea of public lands being held in trust for the American people in the first place. This is not the guy to have in charge.
- Eradication of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — I wrote a piece about this last week with a letter everyone should feel free to copy, paste, and use in an email. Utah Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy of Utah’s 2nd congressional district introduced a long-threatened joint resolution to gut the management plan of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument using the same Congressional Review Act (CRA) used in the Boundary Waters case. If enacted, the results would establish a terrible, frightening precedent for Republicans to decimate long-standing conservation policy across the country, and would be very bad for habitat, species, and public access. The CRA would only require a simple majority vote to eradicate Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and prevent the BLM from ever issuing a similar plan to restore the Monument in the future, thereby undoing protections for the endangered species and fossils that Grand Staircase-Escalante was established to protect in the first place. Along with my essay, you can also utilize these action alerts from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) or the Conservation Lands Foundation to submit comments — but it needs to be done quickly!
- HR 655 and the Mt. Hood National Forest — Introduced by Congressman Cliff Bentz, this bill quietly passed the House on Dec. 9th and is now before the Senate. If passed, it would transfer 150 acres of federal public land, including much of the Dog River watershed, from the Mt. Hood National Forest to the City of The Dalles in the Columbia River Gorge, home to a growing Google data center campus with skyrocketing water demands. A coalition of organizations led by WaterWatch of Oregon sent a letter to Senators Wyden and Merkley last month asking them to prevent the bill from passing the Senate. There is an opportunity for pressure as Sen. Wyden serves as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which HR 655 has to pass out of before it goes to the full Senate. We NEED Oregonians to email Senators Wyden and Merkley NOW, along with concerned friends and family around the country emailing their U.S. senators, to let them know we don’t want our federal public lands being sacrificed and given away all to supply data center water to the largest corporation in the world!
- Stop Old-Growth Logging Now Underway in the Rogue Basin — First, conservation partners like our friends at KS Wild began to be locked out of public Bureau of Land Management meetings in the BLM’s Medford District Office where timber sales were being bid upon and discussed. Then the BLM illegally used heavy equipment to block access to illegal old-growth logging sites on publicly-funded BLM roads with signs that claim roads are for “logging use only.” The BLM, of course, says they’re not logging old-growth. Ground truthing shows otherwise. So does the Medford BLM’s ESA consultation documents, which shows the agency is cutting over 3,000 acres of late-successional forests in the Last Chance timber sale, an 8,000-acre area in the Grave Creek watershed that provides vital spotted owl nesting, roosting, and foraging habitat. While the Murphy Timber Company filed a declaration they wouldn’t begin logging until April, ancient trees are already coming down as 28 miles of new logging roads are being built through otherwise roadless, wild public lands — a harbinger of the destruction that will descend upon Western Oregon BLM forests should the agency’s “update” to their Western Oregon Resource Management Plans move forward (as I mentioned above, you have until March 23rd to comment on that). Please send this letter to a BLM public affairs specialist to share your concerns over the BLM’s destruction of ancient forests and public lands that belong to all Americans. You can also mail a physical letter, preferably hand-written, to the BLM Medford District Office at 3040 Biddle Road, Medford, OR 97504.
- Bureau of Land Management “Maximum” Old-Growth Logging — Thank you everyone who took action on this during March! Sadly, this deadline has now passed, but your comments were overwhelming. In February the BLM announced an unprecedented update to their Western Oregon Resource Management Plans that governs the agency’s 2.5 million acres of forests in 17 Oregon counties, including the checkerboarded Oregon and California (O&C) Railroad lands that have been left alone for decades, but today sit alongside growing communities and in backyard greenbelts throughout Western Oregon. Few if any sawmills are still in operation that can process the wider old-growth and mature trees targeted by this unnecessary and destructive revision — the worst I’ve ever seen proposed in Oregon, by the way — which means the timber cut will likely be simply put on a boat and shipped overseas. Not much return for the U.S. taxpayer who owns these public lands. Sadly, this cut will destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of recovering mature and old-growth forest on BLM lands in Oregon like Mary’s Peak, Alsea Falls, and the Valley of the Giants that have evaded the saw for decades, and will be an extinction-level event for species like the delicate marbled murrelet and northern spotted owl. We’ll let you know what happens — hopefully nothing at all.
If you have questions about any of these or related matters, please feel free to contact me.
Bald eagle photo courtesy of the National Park Service, Mt. Hood National Forest photo © 2024 Tommy Hough, all rights reserved.
