Curtis Blankinship reports on the Oregon Wild forest campaigns with 350, EEFF

Presenter: There was a mini-fest at the Art House, and KEPW-Whole Community News was there. Robin Bloomgarden:

Robin Bloomgarden: Thank you for supporting environmental film, local filmmakers, and grassroots advocacy. We’ll feature a forest advocacy letter-writing workshop focused on protecting public lands and forests through community action. We are excited to see you and honor Earth’s bountiful, beautiful forests. To all things wild and free: Blue skies. 

Presenter: At the Eugene Environmental Film Festival mini-fest,  Curtis Blankinship: 

Curtis Blankinship (KEPW, Talk Is Cheap): This week, an environmental film mini-festival happened here at The Art House and I can’t thank The Art House enough. If you’re not supporting the Eugene Art House here, you should, for all the great programs they have going on over there.

Presenter: From Oregon Wild, Chandra LeGue:

Chandra LeGue: I’m Chandra LeGue, I’ve been working for Oregon Wild here in Eugene for a little over 20 years, which is why so many of you look familiar out there.

So I’m really excited to be partnering with Eugene Environmental Film Festival and 350 Eugene again for tonight’s mini film fest, focusing on forests, which are a personal favorite ecosystem of mine, as many of you might know.  Yours too? Yeah. Favorite ecosystem? Yeah. 

For those, I don’t know, out there and those of you who aren’t super familiar with Oregon Wild, we are a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization that was founded in 1974 right here in Eugene. Yeah. Michael’s like, ‘Yep, because I was there.’  

Oregon Wild works statewide to protect and restore the wildlands, wildlife, and waters that make Oregon so special.

So across those five decades, I guess technically six decades now, we’ve successfully fought to protect nearly 2 million acres of wilderness, over 2,000 miles of wild and scenic rivers, countless endangered wildlife and vast stretches of old-growth forests and other essential ecosystems across the state.

We have staff, we have members who give us money, we have volunteers, and we have advocates that agree with what we do. And with all of that help, we advocate for Oregon’s ecosystems through education, public communications, direct lobbying, grassroots activism. And we partner, like we are tonight, to elevate allied groups and their voices.

So whether it’s in the courts or in the court of public opinion, we’re here to fight for the wild, especially—again, favorite ecosystem—the forests that filter our water, store tremendous amounts of carbon, provide homes for wildlife, and offer some of the best places to get outside and fill our souls.

And boy, do we have our work cut out for us right now.

So it seems like every day the current Trump administration opens up some new threat to Nature and to public lands and environmental laws, policies, and agencies that help protect and restore them. It can be really confusing and overwhelming to try to keep track of these attacks.

So I apologize if you’re trying to keep up. That’s what I have to do. It’s probably intentional to have all of these attacks being so coordinated. At Oregon Wild, we’ve worked hard to and try to distill information to make it less overwhelming. 

We have a variety of guides on social media and on our website in like a PDF form, reports and such to try to spell out these various threats to public lands.

Just calling out the attempts to sell them off, to gut protections for endangered species, efforts to basically dismantle the Forest Service and other land management agencies that we’re seeing and all the tons of actions that have been taken to make it easier to log mine and develop the forest and landscapes that we love in the works.

Right now, there’s proposed legislation to ‘Fix Our Forests.’ It’s called that. There’s a bill in Congress called ‘Fix Our Forests’ by logging them more. There are revisions to management plans that could open up mature and old-growth forests to aggressive logging.

And that’s including here in Western Oregon under the Northwest Forest Plan and our BLM lands and also in Eastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains. And then there’s the proposal to repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule that protects large wild landscapes across the country from development. 

Okay. I know that’s a lot. I promise I’m not turning the page to list more threats. I’m not one to leave you on a down note.

So instead, I want to impress on you that there are a lot of ways that we can work to counter these efforts to grab public lands for private gain. In fact, many, many thousands of people have already gotten involved, written comments, pushback, done all sorts of things. 

So Oregon Wild and many of our conservation partners, including 350 groups here in Eugene, like Cascadia Wildlands, are weighing in on proposals that allow for public comment. (They don’t all allow for public comment.) And we’ve been helping everyone who cares about these lands to also weigh in. 

So, for example, this winter, the Bureau of Land Management announced plans to revise forest management plans on the 2.5 million acres that they manage here in Western Oregon, with the purpose of complying with Trump’s maximum logging mandate.

The public had just 30 days to comment, and we saw a response to our alerts and to media that came out about it that was far above our expectations. Tens of thousands of public comments were submitted opposing this aggressive increase. (cheers) Yeah. Thank you. You did that.

This is in part because these are forestlands that are close to where people live in the Coast Range and the Cascade foothills in Southwest Oregon. They’re where we get our water, where we walk our dogs, where we forage for mushrooms. People know these lands. They are our backyard forests.

And the proposal said that the agency was going to revisit protections for old-growth forests and special areas that were set aside for ecological reasons. And people just did not like to hear that. 

So we expect a more detailed proposal from the BLM and another public comment period this summer. And I hope that when that happens, you all speak up for threatened places like Alsea Falls and Crabtree Valley and McGowan Creek.

Another effort that we have a big say in is defending the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects places like Mount June, Iron Mountain, and Joseph Canyon. Since 2001, this rule has kept damaging roads and commercial logging out of remaining wild landscapes across the country, including 2 million acres here in Oregon.

And that effort to repeal the policy began last summer, and it just had a short three-week comment period in the summer over the Labor Day weekend. The Forest Service received 600,000. Yeah. And you want to know how many of those opposed repealing this rule—99%.

Yeah. People did not like this idea. People like the roadless rule. It, you know, it keeps these, these forests protected from increased logging keeps roads out that lead to more fire starts. And it maintains drinking water protections and recreation that we all love. 

So we can expect a public comment period on the roadless rule repeal very soon. Some of you are probably like, ‘Didn’t we already do that?’ We thought that the rule that the comment period was going to happen in March and then April, we had some big events over at Gratitude Brewing if you were there. 

But they still haven’t opened the comment period. So we’re still waiting on that. And there’ll be another opportunity to weigh in.

So. Also: We’re urging our congressional representatives to pass legislation that could add protections for wild, roadless lands and waters. We don’t have to just sit back and push back against the bad ideas. We can advance good ideas. So the Roadless Area Conservation Act would make the roadless rules protections a law, so it would be harder to overturn. 

And the River Democracy Act, which was championed by Sen. Wyden, would designate over 3,000 miles of Oregon streams as wild and scenic rivers with protected buffer zones. Yeah, it’s a great bill. We’ve been working on it for years now. 

So, even if Congress in all its high functionality doesn’t pass this bill this year,  it’s still important for our representatives to support them.

So after the films tonight, we are going to be writing postcards and letters to our senators and our representative—Rep. Hoyle—in Congress. They don’t have all the power and people have some power. The administration has some power, but they do have a strong voice. And so they need to hear from people who love Nature and public lands and want to see them protected rather than exploited.

So please join me in the courtyard. And even if you can’t stay for very long, check out the resources and information that we have out there and in the lobby. And thanks again to 350 and to Ana (McAbee) and the (Eugene Environmental) Film Festival, for having us here tonight. And I really hope you enjoy the films.

Presenter: That was Chandra LeGue at the EEFF mini-festival, with reporting by Curtis Blankinship. You can hear Curtis on ‘Talk Is Cheap’ every Saturday at 4 p.m. on KEPW 97.3, Eugene PeaceWorks Community Radio.