Conservation Groups Challenge Feds’ Illegal 42 Divide Logging Plan in Western Oregon

For immediate release: January 21, 2026

Contacts:  

Roseburg, Oregon — Today, a coalition of conservation organizations filed suit challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) “42 Divide Forest Management Plan” (42 Divide) near Camas Valley, Oregon. The agency proposes to aggressively log thousands of acres of diverse forest stands, even though more than half the land is in reserves set aside for habitat conservation. The area targeted for logging covers nearly 7,000 acres of public lands within the checkerboard of public and private lands in Douglas County, already heavily impacted by private industrial clearcuts. 

The forests and waterways within the project area are home to federally protected northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, Oregon Coast coho salmon, and BLM designated sensitive species western pond turtles. The targeted area contains healthy, diverse stands of mature forest, including Douglas fir, cedar and madrone, and is home to a great diversity of plant, animal, and fungal life. Not only will the project negatively impact these species, the BLM itself recognizes that it will increase fire risk in the area by creating hundreds of tons of post-logging slash.

Heavy thinning and clearcutting will make these forests more vulnerable to wildfire. Logging removes large trees with thick bark and protective forest canopies. This tends to make the forest hotter, drier, and windier, drying out fuels and driving more extreme fire behavior. Logging also stimulates the growth of hazardous surface and ladder fuels. Despite community concerns, BLM wants to conduct logging that makes wildfire risk and hazard worse for surrounding communities for decades. 

“Our organizations are challenging 42 Divide out of great concern that it does not advance BLM’s purported purposes of restoration and resilience, instead threatening imperiled wildlife, increasing fire hazard, and decreasing these forests’ resilience to disturbance,” said Peter Jensen, staff attorney with Eugene-based Cascadia Wildlands. “The fish and wildlife within the area, as well as the communities in and around these public lands, are put at greater risk by BLM’s timber-centric agenda and disregard for ecosystem needs, public outcry, and federal environmental law.”

The lawsuit alleges the project violates federal law and the agency’s own regulations by failing to protect older forest stands in late successional reserves (LSRs). Late successional reserves are designed to protect remaining older, structurally complex forest–the highest value spotted owl nesting and roosting habitat, and to promote forests maturing into the types of habitat essential to spotted owls where the forest does not currently function as such. BLM’s analysis and ultimate conclusion that this project would not significantly affect the environment failed to address key issues, omitted necessary analysis of critical resource issues and wildlife management concerns, and ultimately left more questions than answers and more controversy than collaboration with the public. 

”BLM continues to wrap large logging projects targeting mature and old-growth forests in a veneer of ‘restoration’ and “resilience”, despite the research showing the logging would negatively impact protected wildlife and increase wildfire risk, and despite the clear legal mandate to protect these forests,” said Brenna Bell, senior staff attorney, Crag Law Center. “It should not require legal action to get this federal agency to follow its own management plan and manage public lands to benefit more than just the timber industry.”

BLM first proposed the 42 Divide in November 2021, subsequently issuing draft planning documents and pausing the project a few times, most recently for further study and endangered species analysis before ultimately issuing the December 2025 decision. The conservation organizations, along with local community members, engaged at every public comment opportunity, voicing their concerns. To the agency’s credit, BLM deferred over 400 acres of logging in occupied northern spotted owl habitat, but myriad other concerns raised by the plaintiffs and community members remained unresolved. 

“In such a diverse and important ecosystem, home to sensitive and imperiled wildlife species, BLM must do better,” said Janice Reid of Umpqua Watersheds. “The agency must conserve and protect imperiled wildlife species and their habitats, and demonstrate compliance with federal environmental laws before authorizing such large-scale industrial forestry practices on public lands.” 

“The BLM continues to shirk its obligations to the public and the law in its pursuit of large commercial logging projects,” said John Persell with Oregon Wild. “Aggressive logging in these protected areas not only endangers fish and wildlife, but it also adds to the cumulative destruction of the landscape already ravaged by the surrounding private-land clearcuts. Public lands are supposed to be a refuge from this kind of destruction, not an extension of it.”

The organizations are represented by attorneys from Crag Law Center and Cascadia Wildlands.