Rain fell steadily on our drive into the mix of public and private lands southwest of Roseburg last month, the clouds and mist casting an eerie feel over the stark clearcuts we drove through on the way to a proposed logging unit in the 42 Divide Project area. In November 2021, the Roseburg District of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sent an initial proposal for the 42 Divide Project out to the public for comments, calling for logging over 5,000 acres of forests up to 200 years old. 

A year ago, Oregon Wild advocates joined activists from across the country and urged the Forest Service to restore protections and end old-growth logging on forests across the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. 

This week, those efforts finally paid off! From the New York Times:

To protect our climate forests, President Biden’s executive order puts an awful lot of power in the hands of the agencies that have spent decades cutting them down. Oregon Wild is leading the Climate Forests Campaign to take that power back.

On Earth Day, President Biden signed an Executive Order that recognized the importance of mature and old-growth forests as a climate solution but stopped short of protecting these forests from their #1 threat: logging across federal public lands.

So what does this order actually do?

What is COP 26 and why is it important?

It’s no secret that Oregon needs to do a better job of stewarding it’s amazing wildlands and waters — this is especially true for its forests. While the overall forest area has remained relatively steady in our state, the same cannot be said for the quality of those forests. They have been logged extensively, and some estimates show that as little as 10 percent of old growth forests remain. This poor management has led to degraded watersheds, impacted fish and wildlife, and millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.