It is a lot of fun to be part of a movement.

A phenomenal community of people have been coming together in the forests of the BLM’s Umpqua Sweets timber project.

This past weekend I joined a group of Roseburg locals for a hike organized by Instagram artist and backwoods explorer Chris MacKenzie through some of the old-growth groves in Umpqua Sweets units. Chris has a knack for finding the big trees. He sniffed out this big lady alongside the river.

The four kids along for the hike definitely added to the spirit!

One great thing about kids is their perspective is so free and open, they notice things that adults never would. Like the fact that the base of this ancient big leaf maple is large enough to house two.

You don’t have to be a kid to have fun in the forest. I learned a new flower and made a new friend on this hike.

Another long-time champion of Oregon’s forests, Steve Cole, has recently put together some incredible online education tools about the Umpqua’s forests. His online visual teaching tool, the “Umpqua LSOG Project,” gives historic perspective on the forests of the Umpqua.

A great photographer and skilled with satellite maps, Cole recently applied his talents to Umpqua Sweets project. Check out the drone footage from his fieldchecking trip this fall. Wow!

Cole also found even more old-growth in the riverside unit, and caves and a spire in the Eye of God rock arch unit.

The backwoods of the Umpqua are like a true love: the closer and longer you look, the more beautiful they become in your eyes.

P.S. If you haven’t already, weigh in with your concerns to BLM HERE.

Catch up with the series, and stay tuned!

Umpqua Chronicles Vol 1: Down by the Riverside

Umpqua Chronicles Vol 2: Into the Woods

Umpqua Chronicles Vol 3: The Eye of God

The post Umpqua Sweets Chronicles Vol 4 – Community first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Cascadia’s forests have a mystic aspect. All the things you know, or think that you know, about the forest are nothing as compared with the layers and layers of wonders to be discovered.

Sometimes you’ll be hiking along, thinking about one thing, and then— wham!— the landscape hits in some unexpected way and everything shifts. Like the world gets suddenly somehow bigger and richer. That was my experience field-checking what we’re starting to call the “Eye of God” unit, one of several atrocities in the BLM’s latest Umpqua Sweets timber sale.

We’d gotten an anonymous tip about an exceptional feature in one small corner unit of the BLM’s Umpqua Sweets sale that we ought to see. I heard it was a difficult spot to get to, so waited to be joined by other WildCATs before striking out into the back woods.

The landscape on the upper part of this sale, up the drainages off the North Umpqua east of Glide, is steep, rocky and unstable. Ancient volcanic activity, heavy rain, and dynamic forests play a role in all kinds of fascinating, beautiful, and unexpected landforms.

To access the unit we walked up the route of the proposed road construction. Following stakes and flagging, we grew more and more upset to find the road routed through a gorgeous grove of five-foot diameter old-growth. Our skepticism turned to anger on discovering other old spur roads through old clearcuts going to the same location. Is this really necessary?

We struggled to follow the stakes and flagging as the the terrain got steeper. Stopped by a jumble of moss-covered boulders, we scrambled straight up the rock, ending at a sort of clearing atop a bluff.

Sheer cliffs dropped off, offering amazing sun-drenched views.

From the top of the bluff we were able to make our way down towards what looked like a less-preciptous bench.

Then, there on our right, through thick trees, barely visible beneath sweeping moss and trees, right at the top of a proposed clearcut, appeared an… opening, an arch of sorts, rising out of the earth.

A rock archway, covered in moss and fern like a jungle ruin, rose inexplicably from the ground. Peering through it —through the land, through the eye of the earth— we could see the canopy of the green forest beyond.

It looked to me like the top of an eyelid rising from the earth, looking down on the green forest below.

Going closer, the full size and magnificence of the arch became more clear. These photos can’t do it justice. Thick forest and steep ground make any full view impossible. It’s a place that can’t really be captured in an image. You have to experience it.

The arch is nested in the center of the headwaters of a natural drainage. It is as though, here, this is where the flow begins.

Oh, the inadequacy of the modern perspective!

The logging unit follows a perfect square dictated by the checkerboard township and range pattern of ownership. That square happens to overlap with the arch headwaters drainage, also capturing a ridge on one side with another sheer cliff dropping off. We scratched our heads, guessing how loggers would make their way in their tree-cutting robots through the boulders and cliffs.

That blank stone eyelid sees more, and more accurately.

King Timber

That care-less-ness is not an accident. The irrational and oddly counterproductive approach is demanded by the timber industry. The industry position, aggressively pursued by their lawyers in court cases, is that the land is “timber-dominant.” They take the position that no other interests or user groups can interfere with that pre-eminent objective.

The way BLM is operating under their new plan is cynically mechanical. The Umpqua Sweets project, which would log all sorts of special places without considering any of it significant, is a good example of their approach.  The map says harvest land base; therefore, if that place comes to attention, the only possible decision is to regeneration harvest it.

The maps only show logging units, land ownership, logging roads and major drainages, all on the township & range grid system. Things like the massively popular Swiftwater pullout, immediately upstream and on the haul route for the proposed riverside logging, are invisible. Houses, whole neighborhoods, aren’t seen. Smaller streams don’t exist, except incidentally where they can be noticed changing timber designations with riparian reserves.

It is a cold, robotic, uncaring view of the land.

The logging units in Umpqua Sweets were not created by human hands. Literally. They were spit out by a computer given crude instructions for finding available targets for logging.

“Mystic archway” is not an entry on that spreadsheet. Things like this don’t exist.

We are going to have to speak up to keep these natural wonders from being erased.

The post Umpqua Chronicles Vol 3: The Eye of God first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

The trees through parts of this unit were exceptional. This is a dinosaur forest: big, primeval, and green. Fatty douglas fir and swampy ancient cedar droop with moss and lichen. The steady hush of Rock Creek mixes with the breeze through the high forest canopy.

This is old-growth. On the chopping block. On public forests. In 2019.

On top of the primary industrial logging unit, here too the agency proposes stream-side logging for the purpose of riparian restoration. What about this ancient grove of huge trees needs restoration is a mystery.

It is commonly believed that public agencies don’t log old-growth anymore, and for the most part, in our area, since the Northwest Forest Plan was passed, that is true.

The BLM’s new management plan leaves them some wiggle room, and Umpqua Sweets suggests they are taking advantage of it.  The BLM’s rule protecting old-growth is that a tree can’t be sold if it is (1) bigger than 40″ in diameter, and (2) BLM determines that it was born before 1850.

I measured a bunch of trees well over 40′ diameter in the unit, and wondered if BLM will protect them.

What we also found are lots of trees that fell just below the 40″ threshold, including many that must be old growth. They seemed especially common among the slower growing species like cedar, which were well-represented here especially closest to water. I measured one tree in this unit that was as close to 40″ as it could possibly be without hitting the line.

Maybe with another year or two it can put on the extra centimeter girth and live a few centuries more.

Not-a-Clearcut

The BLM says they don’t clearcut anymore. It’s all “regeneration harvest” and “ecological forestry” now.

There is some truth in what they say. Some truth. But more falsehood.

About a mile further up the road from the Rock Creek unit you pass through a section of BLM-owned land that was logged just this year. The sweet smell of wood chips and sap, and of sunshine striking bare earth, is on the wind.

Trucks of men were just pulling out of bark-strewn parking areas as I pulled in. The stripped hillside was strewn with fallen logs.

There are definitely trees left standing, including most or even all of what little legacy old-growth had been there before. That is meaningful progress as compared with private landowners, which ravage their land with bulldozers and chemicals and laboratory trees.

But as compared with other public land agencies like the Forest Service, or even compared with the BLM itself just a few years ago, these logging methods are incredibly intensive.

The logic of this kind of forestry is to “regenerate” a new stand of fast-growing Douglas fir by clearing out the old forest. It is “regeneration” only and exactly to the extent that it is “clearing.” It is regeneration in the sense that death begets life.

It used to be they called this exact same method a “clearcut with reserves.” That was an honest description.

Looking at the fresh logged unit, it’s a clearcut. Less bad than some others, but still a clearcut. It sure isn’t a forest!

A few trees are standing, but there were so many more trees knocked over and hauled away. On a hot sunny day, the air felt like a field or a parking lot, not a forest. The standing trees aren’t enough to ever touch one another. Many of them will blow down. The ground and plant ground-cover was profoundly impacted. It is compacted flat in some places, and ploughed up in others, with massive machine-piles of slash that will be burned. The smells, while sweet and familiar, were of a construction project or a farm, not any wild place.

Call it whatever you want. It is destruction.

And in 2019, it should not be happening in our old-growth forest.

*It is not too late to TAKE ACTION to help convince BLM to consider a conservation alternative. And stay tuned for part 3, in which we head up into the hills and discover the Eye of God.

The post Umpqua Chronicles Vol.2 – Into the woods first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Is old growth clearcutting on public lands making a comeback on the North Umpqua River?

Thus seems to say the BLM in its latest timber sale announcement, called “Umpqua Sweets.” While BLM’s official announcement is itself so vague and legalistic as to melt into nothing, recent groundtruthing of their proposed logging units reveals this sale to be a major disaster.

It would commercially log some two-thousand acres, including hundreds of acres of some of the most beautiful and prized forests left. There are dozens of aspects to this story; dozens of features and perspectives. The BLM proposes logging right along the North Umpqua river, has many units of old-growth, and has been heedless of exceptional wildland treasures. The project has some hopeful aspects, proposing fuel treatment for forest fires on specific routes and near homes, and riparian restoration of several kinds. Both of those are legitimate and important issues, and Cascadia has urged BLM to collaborate to expand and do even more of those actions. But in the context of the commercial timber sale units we’ve checked in the field, they appear frequently opportunistic.

Umpqua Sweets could be a poster-child for the regent binge of BLM timber sales under its new management plan. It puts timber values above everything else, using whatever rationales come handy to get out the cut, at massive waste of human and natural energy.

This is the first is a series of posts relaying remarkable aspects of the truth from the ground on this sad proposal. Do not despair, A C T. There is still time to convince the BLM to seriously look at a conservation alternative, but that is going to take a major groundswell of grassroots pressure. We’ve prepared a comment to BLM for you HERE that you can personalize. By all means pursue whatever means seem right to you.

Learning to Speak Bureaucratese

The official project announcement isn’t much to look at. In two pages of text and a map it shows the areas proposed for some kind of logging. It doesn’t point out any of the obvious conflicts with other values that we discovered on the ground.

As an attorney I admired the skilled craft behind the stilted legalize, because it very efficiently covers just about every possibility for commercial logging. It gives the required legal notice, without particularly alerting anyone to anything.

Forests are both young and old (from 41 to 160 years old), and in lands allocated for everything from timber harvest to old-growth reserve. The project “purpose” includes just about every conceivable rationale BLM has for logging: generating timber volume, adjusting age class, restoring streamside riparian areas, and managing fire. The map isn’t of the general area, as you’d expect if so many options really were on the table, but of specific proposed units, “fuels treatment” areas, and 12 miles of proposed new roads.

Paperwork can have a way of hiding the truth as much as reveal it, so we’ve headed down to work in the woods for a few days and see what things are like in the forest. I made a couple trips, and several locals and WildCAT fieldchecking volunteers have also followed up with on-the-ground information.

The land itself shows that with Umpqua Sweets, the BLM is making a play to bring back old-growth logging, functionally like clearcutting in most ways, and seemingly heedless of the environmental knowledge gained over the last several decades, and with a sort of institutionalized contempt towards the Wildlands values that you and I (and even most BLM and timber industry workers!) hold dear.

The BLM is all about clearcutting now; the rest be damned.

A World Class River

The first logging unit you see driving into the sale area from the west is unit 26-3-11A. This is a 120-year-old stand of healthy douglas fir growing up the slope on the south bank of the North Umpqua River.

On paper, according to BLM, it isn’t much to look at.

The river there is the North Umpqua. The bridge over the river, the haul route for this project, you might know as the Swiftwater pullout, boat ramp, and hugely popular (by Oregon standards) day use area.

On paper it may look boring and inocuouos, but on the ground

On the ground it looked…wait, are you kidding me? Am I unconsciously exaggerating? Is the map wrong? My pocket spy satellite says it should be right here.

Wildlands don’t lie. It’s true, they are planning to log right alongside the North Umpqua River. The cutting would be visible from some of the epic swimming holes and fishing rocks along the river banks there.

Generally world-class rivers like the North Umpqua have the highest possible protections. It is a wild & scenic river, a Class I watershed, widely recognized as critical for ESA-listed salmon and steelhead, etc etc..

As it turns out, for BLM, those protections don’t add up to much.

This particular unit is just downstream of the section that is Wild & Scenic (it ends at the Swiftwater) so that unique law doesn’t seem to help here. Under the new management plan this location has low visual protection. Picture it, BLM officially can do no wrong in terms of wrecking scenery.

Stream buffers are the big protection for rivers and streams. The North Umpqua, being a fish-bearing river, gets the maximum “no-cut” buffer it could in BLM’s world— which is one full site-potential tree height from the water’s edge. (The idea is they aren’t supposed to cut any tree that could fall into the water even when it grows up, if it grew up. They don’t plan to let them grow up.)

So that’s a little over a couple hundred feet of buffer from the river’s edge. Say they even went crazy and called it 300 feet, under the new BLM plan commercial logging is allowed even inside that buffer up to 120 feet. And creating snags or tipping trees over is allowed even inside that.

Whatever buffer, we will all see this logging from the highway and from the river. Heck, they see it from the scenic pullout just to the south. I stood at the top of this unit and from there you could see the road alongside the river, could hear the angry rush of the North Umpqua rapids.

The BLM is not supposed to be targeting reserves for timber generation.  Yet, the BLM state office has in fact issued direction to each field office to turn out certain volumes of commercial timber from reserves, and to do it fast.

Technically riparian logging is allowed only for the purpose of stream restoration. For Umpqua Sweets, at this unit and elsewhere (more on that later), it looks like the BLM has mapped a lot of riparian reserve for commercial logging where it has commercial potential, without regard to whether that makes any watershed sense.

The agency claims restoration is part of its purpose. And, no doubt, the skilled folks who work for BLM would love to engage in stream restoration. We’re totally onboard with that! Things like tree tipping and snag-creation especially don’t haul out wood volume, so there is little incentive to over-do it. But don’t be fooled by the word, this is no restoration project.

Outer riparian reserve thinned trees go to the mill just like the harvest unit trees do. But, because it’s not (wink wink) really for commercial reasons, riparian reserve logs don’t count against the BLM’s annual sustained yield limits.

It seems darn funny, doesn’t it, that the places the agency targets for “restoration” seem to be such convenient commercial logging units.

This stand, according to the BLM computer, is 120 years old. Born in 1899. That’s closer to being old-growth than needing restoration.

When I first went there with my daughter, a bald eagle flew over us.

It didn’t land here. Maybe that’s why they say it’s not worth protecting.

And we’ll have lots more to say about old-growth later.

NOTE: While the official scoping period closed September 25, they are still doing their analysis and it is not too late to let BLM know you are watching, and to share any special part of the ground truth that you might have.

The post Umpqua Sweets Chronicles Vol 1: Down by the Riverside first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Contacts:
Larry Edwards, Greenpeace 907-752-7557, ledwards@greenpeace.org
Gabe Scott, Cascadia Wildlands 907-491-0856, gscott@old.cascwild.org
Oliver Stiefel, Crag Law Center 503-227-2212, oliver@crag.org

[ANCHORAGE, AK] — A unanimous verdict of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has invalidated four U.S. Forest Service (USFS) logging projects in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest national forest, ending a ten year legal battle. Greenpeace USA and Cascadia Wildlands filed the suit in 2008.
The decision permanently stops four timber sales that would have clearcut 1,700 acres of old-growth rainforest — habitat that is critical to deer, which are the primary prey of the rare Alexander Archipelago wolf (or “Islands Wolf”), and vital to subsistence hunters. The lawsuit focused on all three — deer, wolves, and hunters.

“But the victory is for more than deer, wolves and hunters,” said Larry Edwards, a representative of Greenpeace and resident of Sitka, Alaska. “It also protects many other kinds of wildlife in those areas, diverse forest uses, and carbon that is stored in the soil, trees and vegetation. As a far-north coastal rainforest, fires are rare and very small here, and as a result the Tongass is world-renown for storing carbon in its soil, trees and vegetation.”

At issue in the litigation was how the Forest Service determined impacts of the logging projects on Sitka black-tailed deer, and consequently wolves and hunters.

The Court concluded that the agency’s modeling of deer winter habitat “does not accurately measure forest structure [and] was too unreliable to be used.” It also said the “USFS failed to explain why it was authorizing the projects despite lower-than-recommended deer habitat capabilities.” (The recommended minimum capability is specified in the Tongass Forest Plan.)

In voiding the agency’s approvals of its four projects, the court noted that in “over a decade of litigation… USFS has been given multiple opportunities to correct flaws in its project analysis and ignored the court’s guidance.”

“The Forest Service was handed a clear message today that it cannot fudge the science in order to give its projects an ‘easy pass’ and sell excessive amounts of timber from a planning area,” said Chris Winter of Crag Law Center, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys. “The Islands Wolf is a rare species in Alaska’s rainforest, and it’s vital that the agency follow the best science on how to protect it and how to provide for the needs of deer hunters.”

“The Forest Service has scheduled two of the projects in our lawsuit to be logged in 2019. The court’s verdict invalidating the decisions comes just in time.” said Gabriel Scott of Cascadia Wildlands.

“The Forest Service greatly overestimated the habitat available for deer, and consequently underestimated the impacts of logging, not just in the four projects in this case but in every one of its timber project decisions made between 1996 and 2008,” Edwards said. “This justified logging which should never have happened. Greenpeace and Cascadia have demonstrated, with the agency’s own documents, that its computer models were flawed. For recent projects the USFS has corrected those errors, but it refused to do so for the earlier ones,” he said.

Attorneys representing the plaintiffs were Chris Winter and Oliver Stiefel of Crag Law Center based in Portland, Oregon, and Rene Voss of Mill Valley, Ca. Plaintiffs are grateful to the McIntosh Foundation for supporting the Islands Wolf litigation from the beginning.

The four timber projects, named from north to south are:

Scott Peak, NE Kupreanof Island (near Petersburg)
Overlook, Mitkof Island (the island Petersburg is on)
Traitors Cove, Revillagigedo Island (the island Ketchikan is on)
Soda Nick, Prince of Wales Island (just north of the village of Hydaburg)

Together, the four projects would have cut 33 million board feet of timber from 1,700 acres of old-growth forest, and about 14 miles of logging roads would have been constructed.

The post Press Release: 9th Circuit Voids Old-Growth Timber Sales on the Tongass first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

by Gabe Scott, In-house Counsel

Lone Rock Timber and BLM, shame on you.

In what looks like a classic timber grab, Lone Rock Timber has demanded rights to log a swath of huge old-growth trees on public, BLM land. Claiming they need a road to access a part of one of their active clearcuts, Lone Rock marked to cut a wide swath of public old growth, and BLM rubber stamped it.

The context is that legacy of frontier land fraud—the checkerboard O&C timberlands. This particular travesty is located up Susan Creek off of the famed North Umpqua River east of Roseburg. The area is naturally spectacular, but the backcountry above the river is largely a giant tree farm for corporate forestry. Every other square-mile section is owned by BLM, the rest by private timberland owners, in a checkerboard pattern. All of it is managed for forestry, and most of it has been clearcut.

The private owners are logging now on a forty-year rotation.

The forest on the chopping block is a 70-150 ft wide swath — about 4 acres — through the kind of ancient forest we dream about. Right up against truly savage clearcuts a mile-square and more, the public stand remains a deep, dark, ancient forest. It’s the sort that, when a grouse hoots, it carries and echoes in that haunting way. My mind longs for a wolf, or at least an eagle or even a raven to call, but none does. This cathedral is an island in a sea of clearcuts.

I counted at least fifteen giant old growth trees marked to cut within Lone Rock’s claimed right-of-way. Fifteen great big mothers, some of whom probably beat Columbus to America.

That’s giving benefit of the doubt on every marked boundary tree, many of which were themselves ancient. And that’s not mentioning the snags, and the many old-but-not-ancient trees, and the gorgeous madrones and great big alders and unexpected, emerald-green meadows.

And in return, Lone Rock accesses a tiny sliver of plantation abutting that beautiful stand. I counted rings on one typical stump —yep, forty on the nose.

Lone Rock and BLM claim they have the legal right to do this because they want a wide road and big turnaround to more easily access one of their active plantation clearcutting units. There is a rock outcrop, they say. It’s hard to get around with these new machines, they say.

Big hole in their story—the trees they can’t get to, they were able to get to to clearcut forty years ago. That’s how it’s plantation now.

Further investigation by intrepid sleuths uncovered Lone Rock sharing maps of existing roads to the very stand.

I visited the site last Thursday and what I saw was a company going hogwild, clearcutting the snot out of a hillside, having no trouble at all yanking the cut trees onto trucks to haul to market. I saw these roads with my own eyes. I listened to their machines work all day tearing up the hill just below the stand they say they can’t access.

How a logging company that logged a stand forty years ago thinks they can’t do it today is an interesting story. If you wonder where the logging jobs went, here’s your answer.

Forty years ago they had cable yarders and tractors and skylines and choker setters and fallers who would scramble around the hill in cork boots to do the job.

Now it’s done by a couple guys pulling levers in air-conditioned boxs. Logging by machine is more profitable. What used to take a crew now only takes one.

Progress!

The public accommodates that job-killing mechanization by letting them plough more and more roads through our old-growth reserves. But sure, go ahead, blame the spotted owl for economic trouble in timber country.

Lone Rock can cry us a river about access to their land.

Those very same right-of-way agreements lock us, the public, out of accessing our land. The deal is so slanted that even BLM employees in the field couldn’t take a spur to a nice spot for a picnic—they can only drive the roads when they are working on a logging project.

They say this is just the way it is, but that answer is not good enough for us.

Cascadia and other local activists have been dogging this outrageous proposal. We’re doing what we can to save this forest, but honestly it is an uphill fight. Presence of spotted owls, wet weather, better access in other ways… none of it seems to matter at all to them. We’ve implored BLM officials directly, but they claim their hands are tied by reciprocal right-of-way agreements.

We hold out hope that Lone Rock will do the right thing and log their trees the old fashioned way. But, if the best we can get out of this situation is to learn a lesson, then lets learn the lessons.

The lesson is that BLM’s interpretation of these reciprocal right of way agreements on tens of thousands of acres of public and private forestry land amounts to a blank check for private logging companies. All the careful forest planning BLM does, can be undone in a moment at the whim of a logging company who claims they want to build a road. The situation is rich with potential for fraud, and BLM is uninterested in policing it.

The sad legacy of the O&C land frauds continues.

(All photos of the contested area by Cascadia Wildlands)

The post Blog: Old Growth Timber Grab on the North Umpqua first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

The post On Westerman, Walden, and Kids: Contemplating Oregon’s Fire Season from Drake Peak Lookout first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Several things about this historic victory make it especially sweet. Ecologically it protects one of the most magnificent places on earth, a vast wild wetland on Cascadia's northern edge. Better, it does it in a precedent-setting way that puts the region’s indigenous people in charge. Personally I am proud that we Cascadians played a big part creating the conditions where this victory could happen. And, most of all, let us be inspired by the example of our close partner and good friend Dune Lankard, the Eyak native whose visionary leadership and sheer determination has achieved what few believed was possible.

To the north is the largest protected wilderness in the whole world: from here into the Yukon territory all the way down to Glacier Bay. To the east is the largest ice-field outside the poles. The ice is moving, glaciers sliding forward and melting back, uncovering infant land. To the west is the Copper River Delta, and beyond that Cordova and Prince William Sound. This is the largest contiguous wetland in Cascadia, home to the world-famous Copper River salmon fishing fleet, and incredible concentrations of swans, geese and shorebirds.

The conservation deal announced yesterday is precent setting for it’s unique mix of conservation and indigenous control. The Native Conservancy is a new idea, the brainchild of Dune Lankard, that was critical to the deal working. Formulated as a sort of friendly amendment to the Nature Conservancy, the idea is to incorporate social justice for indigenous people into long-term land conservation.

When I first arrived there was the coalfield, an oilfield, a deepwater port, a road across the Delta and another one up the river, cruise ships and a Princess lodge, all interlocking. None of these threats alone could gain traction, but any two or more of them would forever destroy the wilderness. Dune and I spent countless hours together on the basketball court scheming the demise of this web of threats. For the next nineteen years, Cascadia and Eyak worked together on the campaigns. Together we stopped the road across the Delta, the deepwater port at Shepard Point, and oil drilling at Katalla. 

The post Reflections on the Enormous Victory in Northern Cascadia and Coming Full Circle first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

The post Lawsuit Launched to Protect Washington Rivers, Salmon from Destructive Suction Dredge Mining first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago is made up of thousands of islands large and small. Small boats and floatplanes are the dominant modes of transportation.

Old-growth clearcutting is ongoing this summer on the Big Thorne timber sale, Prince of Wales Island.

Virgin old-growth forests are being mowed down on the Cleveland Peninsula, on privately-owned ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) corporation land.

Our Alaska legal director inspects old-growth spruce in a fresh clearcut, Big Thorne project on Prince of Wales Island.

Return to the Tongass Expedition Report

The post Tongass Groundtruth Expedition: 2016 first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.