Defending wild places
“I believe that our wild lands hold intrinsic wonder, beauty, and value, and that they have a right to exist free of extraction. At Landwatch, we act as the voice for the wild lands and the wildlife they support.”
The view from Lookout Mountain in the Ochoco National Forest: Joan Amero
In 2021, our monitoring and commenting on Forest Service projects got results. The LandWatch legal team succeeded on a lawsuit to keep excessive and illegal logging and roads out of delicate ecosystems in the Ochoco National Forest.
Wildlife in the Ochoco National Forest: US Forest Service
The Ochocos are a treasure in our Central Oregon landscape. They host a mix of pine forests and high desert terrain, canyons and striking rock features, and the lush headwaters of the Crooked River. If you have ever been to the Ochocos on a crisp high desert night, camped out near a meandering creek and seen the stars blaze, then you’ve felt the special kind of serenity only found remote public lands. These same stream banks are critical spaces for the life cycles of elk. It is here they rut, calve, and raise their young. These waterways hold native inland fish, like the Redband Trout, that rely on the clear, clean, cold water to flourish in the home they have known for millennia.
The balance of these aquatic systems is so important that the Forest Service in the 1990s created a system to protect the temperature and quality of their features called INFISH (Inland Native Fish Strategy). INFISH’s aim is to keep the negative human impacts of logging and other projects from further degrading aquatic ecosystems.
Ponderosa Pines in the Ochoco National Forest: US Forest Service
That's why, when Central Oregon LandWatch heard about the proposed off-road vehicle (ORV) route system through 137 miles of these pristine landscapes, we knew we had to act.
We joined a lawsuit in 2017 with several concerned environmental organizations to challenge this proposed Forest Service project, which would disregard its own management plans by saturating old growth forests with too many roads, especially roads along precious riparian zones and wetlands. The courts agreed with our objections and ordered the Forest Service to create a less invasive plan. This halted any work on the project until a new, compliant plan was created.
Directly after this judicial opinion stymied the harmful trajectory of the ORV project, we saw the same type of threats surface again in the very same area. The proposed Black Mountain Project placed riparian areas under threat with the proposed development roads and the introduction of more logging in sensitive wildlife habitats. The continued disregard for these landscapes, the forests, the habitat, and the health of the streams and their creatures, solidified the importance of monitoring and challenging the Forest Service when harmful projects surface. So, we partnered with Oregon Wild and litigated again.
In June of this year, we succeeded in reaching a settlement with the Forest Service!
Meeting our terms, around 1,000 acres were saved from commercial logging as a result of this settlement. These wins represent more to us than just a particular landscape; they represent a future where the needs of the forest and its creatures, and the needs of the streams and wild lands, are taken into account by those who steward these forests.
This success, and our willingness to strategically litigate, remains important in the year to come. Illicit timber sales continue to emerge and the tactics to skirt old growth forest protections will not end. That is why Central Oregon LandWatch will continue to monitor proposals in all of our region’s wild lands. With the threat of climate change and climate-driven wildfire across Central Oregon, we know that careful management of our wild lands is critical. We will continue in our watchdog role to review, comment, and litigate when needed, against harmful encroachment into wild spaces.
This article was originally published in our semi-annual print newsletter.
Support our Wild Lands Program
Central Oregon LandWatch and its supporters have defended the region’s wild lands for decades. We keep a close eye on projects that encroach on these spaces and fight for their right to exist with as little intervention as possible. We continue to advocate for the preservation of our wild lands for their inherent value, and for the wildlife habitats and ancient forests they host.