Take Action for BLM Lands

Representatives Greg Walden, Peter DeFazio and Kurt Schrader recently released a Discussion Draft of the O&C Trust, Conservation, and Jobs Act. The bill would remove federal environmental protections from about 1.5 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands in western Oregon and place these lands in a fiduciary trust. The fiduciary trust will be charged with producing “maximum annual sustained revenues” from these federal lands in order to fund rural county governments. These forests would be managed much the same way industrial private timberlands in Oregon are managed.

Below are some talking points you may want to pull from when writing your letter. We recommend pulling out a few points and expanding on your values and concerns in a unique letter.

• * The O&C Trust, Conservation, and Jobs Act would significantly increase logging on BLM lands by removing reserve allocations and deeming the land “non-federal” for purposes of environmental laws.
• * No other values besides harvest profit would be taken into account in management decisions, including recreation, endangered species, or clean-water.
• * The plan allows counties to sue the trust for not producing profit, minimizing their motivation to incorporate restoration or conservation values into their management decisions.
• * The public process for management decisions would be removed and given to a trust of 7 individuals with no public accountability except to that of the counties, taking the “public” out of public forests.
• * These lands will be managed like state or private forests, where clearcutting and herbicides are common practice.
• * This plan undermines the progress we’ve made to design ecologically based timber sales that produce multiple values form our public lands, like clean water, recreation and timber by-products. Diverse stakeholders have been working towards a collaborative forestry solution, this plan would negate all of our work.