By: Aidan Bassett (he/they)
Hey fellow Cascadians! The team at Cascadia Wildlands (CW) has had a busy summer fighting to protect our beloved forests, field checking proposed timber sales, and advocating for climate action across Oregon. We’ve also had a series of important legal victories, one of which — concerning a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposal called the Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM) Program — gives us a powerful new legal precedent for our future work. You’re probably wondering how we got here.
Here’s a legal history lightning round: In 1994, the federal government adopted the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), which allocated federally managed forest lands to various purposes. The key categories are matrix (also called Harvest Land Base, or HLB), where agencies like the BLM have a free hand to aggressively log to maximize timber production, and Late Successional Reserves (LSR), which are older, more mature areas of forest that can and do serve as habitat for threatened species like the Northern Spotted Owl. These categories are crucial for us at CW because they determine what the BLM can and can’t do in different areas of forest.
In other words, these seemlingly arbitrary boundaries turn out to be some of our strongest tools for protecting healthy forests and vital habitat. And that’s why it was such a threat to promising owl habitat in LSR areas when in 2016 the BLM finalized a plan — the 2016 Southwestern Oregon Resource Management Plan (RMP) — that would supplant the NWFP and help the BLM undermine hard-won forest protections.
Welcome back to the present. In theory, plans like the 2016 RMP are only acceptable if they balance various interests (e.g. timber production, habitat conservation and promotion, etc.) as well as the NWFP does. In reality, the BLM has treated the 2016 RMP like a get-out-of-jail-free card, claiming it allows aggressive logging methods even in sensitive LSR areas. And that’s what gave rise to our IVM Program lawsuit.
We challenged several aspects of the IVM Program, but perhaps our biggest win involved a rule called the “20-year standard.” Because forests need time to mature into the older, more complex ecosystems that Northern Spotted Owls require for their habitat, the 20-year standard requires that the BLM not delay that development process by more than 20 years whenever it logs in LSR. While this standard contemplates logging in reserves that were previously off limits under the NWFP, the 20-year standard is the crucial bulwark against overly aggressive logging in the reserves under the 2016 RMP. This standard protects owls by ensuring that LSR areas can’t be set back too far from becoming robust owl habitat.
So how did we “win” on the 20-year standard, and why will this decision be so significant in the future? First, a judge rejected the BLM’s argument that, in essence, the 20-year standard only applied when the BLM wanted it to — and that if the BLM wasn’t trying to promote owl habitat, then it was fine if the BLM’s logging delayed LSR development by more than 20 years. (This is known by the technical legal term of “trying to have your cake and eat it, too.”) Second, this ruling against BLM’s interpretation of the standard will apply to all future cases with similar facts and contexts.
In fact, this decision affirming the 20-year standard has already impacted other timber sales such as the BLM’s proposed Rogue Gold project near Gold Hill and Rogue River. Without legal cover to pursue their most aggressive logging, the BLM will be required to leave precious LSR areas more intact for years to come. Across Southwestern Oregon, because of our win in IVM, more century-old trees will sway in the wind and more threatened owls will sleep peacefully in their canopy — thanks to the contributions of supporters like you. Thank you.