July 18, 2023 — In response to a lawsuit Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity and Cascadia Wildlands, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has pulled its authorization of federal disaster relief funding to rebuild Cook Creek Road. The road would have been used for logging in Oregon’s Tillamook State Forest.
May 8, 2023 — The Center for Biological Diversity and Cascadia Wildlands filed a notice of intent today to sue the Federal Emergency Management Agency for funding the reopening of Cook Creek Road in the Oregon Coast Range.
March 23, 2023 — Resolving multiyear litigation over the harms of logging to coho salmon, conservation groups reached an agreement today with the Oregon Department of Forestry to greatly expand stream buffers across more than half a million acres of the Tillamook and Clatsop state forests.
September 10, 2020 — Conservation groups filed a petition today asking the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission to permanently close commercial and recreational beaver trapping and hunting on the state’s federally managed public lands and the waters that flow through them. Beavers are Oregon’s official state animal, but they can be legally hunted and trapped with few limits.
July 26, 2019 — Late Wednesday afternoon after hours of deliberation, the Oregon Board of Forestry voted 5-2 to accept a petition for rulemaking on coho salmon. The petition was brought by 22 different conservation and fishing groups under a rarely used portion of the Forest Practices Act which requires the Board to consider forest protections on private and state land when species are listed under state or federal endangered species acts. The Board is required to identify “resource sites” for listed species and subsequently develop rules to protect these species if threatened by state and private logging practices.
April 24, 2019 — Today, twenty conservation and fishing organizations delivered a rulemaking petition to the Oregon Board of Forestry requesting new rules to prevent logging-related harm to “resource sites” for coho salmon listed under the state and federal Endangered Species Act. Coho salmon, which are split into three evolutionarily significant units in Oregon, were first listed in Southern Oregon in 1997, and soon thereafter along the rest of the Oregon Coast in 1998. The Lower Columbia coho population was listed almost over a decade ago, in 2005.
Suction dredging emerged as a recreational and economic activity when new technology began allowing miners to reach streambeds in deep rivers to mine for gold. Suction dredging uses a vacuum-like motor to suck up streambed material, which is then sifted through a sluice box for gold. California rivers proved especially lucrative for the so-called “New … Continue reading Suction Dredge Mining in California
By Bob Ferris My access point to my career in the conservation field came originally from fish. I caught my first trout on the Eel River in northern California while my family was on their way to visit the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. As we were on our way north, my mother grudgingly … Continue reading Suction Dredging…Sucks
