TAKE ACTION: Two minutes can help protect 14,000 miles of Oregon streams.

Photo: Shane Anderson

An important call to action from TU.

The Oregon Board of Forestry (BOF) will soon decide whether to increase Oregon’s riparian buffers. These buffers supply cool water in the heat of summer, water necessary for steelhead, trout, salmon and other organisms important to Oregon rivers and streams.

Currently, Oregon requires only a 20 foot buffer -- far smaller than neighboring states, and according to the science, woefully inadequate as a means of providing the necessary cool water on which these species depend.

LINK

This is Our Watershed

Help Kate and the Rockaway Beach Citizens for Watershed Protection get stricter regulations for aerial chemical spraying near homes, schools and watersheds in Oregon.

TAKE ACTION: Sign the petition

LINK (via: The Cleanest Line)

Feds Rule Oregon's Not Protecting Coastal Waters From Logging

That's Jetty Creek on the right where K8 Taylor's community gets its drinking water. That is a perfectly legal buffer for a fish bearing stream....the logged areas including this wetland shown are sprayed with herbicides.

Hopefully recent action by the state and feds will prevent this type of timber management practices in the future.

A proposed Oregon Senate bill would tighten rules for aerial pesticide spraying on forest land and overhaul how the state responds to complaints of drift and exposure.

LINK (via: OPB)

Federal officials also say Oregon’s logging rules still don’t do enough to protect fish habitat and drinking water. 

LINK (via: Eartfix)

Forests to Faucets "clean water or clear cuts?"

Congress in Oregon is attempting to open up protected riparian reserves on nearly every river in Oregon to industrial clear cut logging. This is also on public lands. The future of Oregon's iconic rivers is on the line.

AWR Responds to Timber Industry Ads: No ‘lawless logging’ in Montana

Recently RY Timber, Pyramid Mountain Lumber, Roseburg Forest Products and Sun Mountain Lumber took out the above full-page advertisement in at least six Montana newspapers, including the Helena Independent Record, Missoulian, Kalispell Daily Interlake, Great Falls Tribune, Montana Standard and Bozeman Chronicle.

The timber industry ads called for scrapping the entire Forest Service public appeals process and exempting many timber sales in Montana from judicial review. These are the same timber companies pushing Senator Tester’s mandated logging bill, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, which would require logging on over 156 square miles of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Kootenia National Forest over the next 15 years.

Mike Garrity – Alliance for the Wild Rockies executive director and a 5th generation Montanan – responds to the Ad in the Montana Standard

(via: A New Century of Forest Planning)

Tillamook Steelhead and Salmon Need Your Help

Logging on the North Fork of the Trask, looking NW across Hembre Ridge towards the Wilson River. How many clear-cuts can you count? This photo was taken last summer. Yet timber interests want to double harvest? Photo courtesy of Jeff Mishler

Oregon's rural counties, backed by the timber industry, have introduced legislation (HB 3072)to help them double timber harvest from the Tillamook & Clatsop state forests. This after state forest managers suggested a reduction of harvest due to unsustainable logging already underway.

You can help!  Become informed by following this and that and thensome.

And, write letters in opposition to HB 3072 to these legislators:

Brian Clem, chair (Salem)

rep.brianclem@state.or.us

Arnie Roblan, past chair (Coos Bay)

rep.arnieroblan@state.or.us

 IMPORTANT: all emails to the above should include a cc: to the Committee Administrator, Beth Patrino

beth.patrino@state.or.us

Stay tuned for more. This will be a tough battle, but one worth fighting.