By Wednesday night, the public’s window closes on a Forest Service plan that could shape nearly five million acres of eastern Oregon and southeast Washington for decades. If you want to be heard now is the time.
The proposal would more than triple projected timber sales, cripple a rule that has kept many of the region’s biggest old trees standing, plan for more than 700,000 acres of roadless forest as though their national protection disappears, and send roughly 51,000 more loaded logging-truck hauls out of these forests every year. And the Forest Service is giving the public a Wednesday deadline while parts of its own analysis for protected species including Chinook, steelhead, bull trout and wolverine – a key part of this plan – still remain unfinished.
These are some of Oregon’s great forests. The Wallowas. Joseph Canyon. The upper John Day. The deep river country draining toward the Snake. Old ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and western larch that’s survived generations of logging and …
