Say No to Blue and Gold Old-Growth Logging Project!

Dear elected officials,

I am writing today to urge you to stop the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)’s Blue and Gold Harvest Plan, located west of Yoncalla in the Umpqua River watershed. This timber sale project targets some of the last fragments of unlogged, mature and old-growth carbon-storing forests in the region. This egregious plan would log and build roads through over 3,400 acres of public forests that currently provide large-scale carbon storage, clean water, and habitat for Endangered Species Act listed species including the marbled murrelet, coho salmon, and northern spotted owl.

President Biden’s 2022 Earth Day executive order directed federal agencies–including the Bureau of Land Management–to “safeguard mature and old-growth forests on federal lands.” This project directly contradicts the President’s order. BLM is even failing to follow its own Public Lands Rule, which established a policy to conserve intact landscapes. The public was first notified of the Blue and Gold logging project in 2019. BLM released a draft environmental assessment for the project in April 2022, just five days after President Biden’s order to protect old growth, then quickly put the project on hold citing a need for internal review. Now, the agency has rushed through a review and signed off on this terrible project a mere three weeks after the public comment period ended.

Coast Range forests, like the landscapes put at risk by this ill-advised project, are some of the most carbon-dense in the world, with the potential to sequester more carbon on an ongoing basis than almost any other ecosystem on Earth. Removing carbon from the forest in the form of large logs not only releases most of what was stored, it also prevents those trees from continuing to take carbon from the atmosphere. It will take decades for the remaining thinned or replanted forests to reach that capacity again – decades we do not have if we are going to mitigate the worst impacts of climate instability.

The BLM should only develop projects that do real restoration work in younger plantations and poorly functioning riparian zones while limiting commercial logging to young, dense harvest land base stands that are under 80 years old. BLM should not be moving forward with projects that will raise fire risk for surrounding communities for many decades. No scientific justification exists for logging our last remaining mature and old-growth forests. The agency needs to reevaluate its age classifications as on the ground field checking in the project area revealed trees up to 600 years old.

I urge you to hold the BLM accountable to the millions of Oregonians who rely on public forest lands for clean drinking water, recreational opportunities, and the carbon sequestration provided by these rare old-growth forests. The agency must consider the best available science to analyze all environmental impacts, and refrain from downgrading or removing habitat for old growth dependent species. The Blue and Gold project is precisely the type of climate and wildfire unconscious activity on public lands that President Biden’s executive order and the resulting processes and rulemakings were supposed to prevent, yet the agency is rushing through with the project despite years of sustained local and regional opposition. Please do everything in your power to ensure the Blue and Gold project is stopped. These forests are worth more standing.

Thank you.