Oregon
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Recently I drove up the Lostine River corridor and hiked the trail in the Eaglecap Wilderness giving me a good opportunity to review a Forest Service proposal to log the river corridor. The agency is using a stealth method of approving the proposed logging called a “Categorical Exclusion”. The CE allows the FS to proceed…
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Whenever I am driving around Central Oregon in summer, I see the Deschutes River being sprayed in the air by thousands of sprinklers used by farmers and ranchers primarily to grow forage for livestock like irrigated pasture, alfalfa, and hay. Because of these water withdrawals for irrigation, the aquatic ecosystem of the Deschutes River…
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National Forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service. The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are “unhealthy”, and that they need to be “restored” due to “beetle infestations” and “insect and disease.” All of this is euphemism to drastically ramp up…
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In Victory for Conservation Groups, Court Orders Better Protections Before Reinstating Grazing Permits PORTLAND, Ore.— Conservation groups scored a victory in federal court Tuesday on behalf of the Oregon spotted frog, which is protected as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. The court found that the U.S. Forest Service’s allowance of grazing on the 68,000-acre Chemult Pasture,…
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PORTLAND, Ore. – Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit environmental group, has launched a legal challenge to a management plan for five National Wildlife Refuges in the Klamath Basin of Oregon and California. The lawsuit, filed last week in Oregon, cites failures by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect sage grouse and rare native…
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Carter Niemeyer, with his wife Jenny, has written his second book on his career restoring wolves to the Northern Rocky Mountains. The book is Wolf Land, in paperback and download. It is fourteen unnumbered chapters of his memoirs of wolves and wolf incidents. It is full of action and kept my attention. I read it in…
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It’s been a month-and-a-half since occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon ended. Most of the Malheur occupiers and many of those who planned and directed the earlier 2014 standoff with federal personnel at the Bundy Ranch near Mesquite, Nevada, are now in prison waiting trial. What kind of activists were the…
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One result of the Bundy Gang take-over has been the abundant media attention to their assertions of government “overreach” and “aggressive enforcement“ of environmental regulations that, according to Bundy and Gang, has driven ranchers, miners, and loggers from the land. Unfortunately the media have been slow to counter such assertions. The reality on the ground…
