Rob, I suggest the first step would be finding 2 or more Oregon elected legislators who have family owned property in the area. That would be the best step to begin locking the sale up from the loggers and developers.

So Obama has kind of done the right thing here by calling for a time out on logging projects in roadless areas. But the Forest Service is still moving forward with these bad projects. Sounds like Congress should step in and protect this area.

Good to see most of Oregon's Ds supporting protection for roadless areas...why doesn't Wyden support this? J

I'd completely support this.

Nothing to do with locking anyone out of anything, these are publicly owned lands and ought to be managed for the long-term. These roadless areas have survived the 20th century and today remain pristine, and they ought to stay that way. Particularly given their proximity to Crater Lake, Mount Thielson, and Mount Bailey.

Senator Wyden has been an outspoken champion on Wilderness protection. Seems like a perfect opportunity for him to step up with a Wilderness plan that protects Crater Lake National Park from noisy helicopter tours, while protecting the surrounding forests from misguided logging plans.

You can whine and cry but until you are willing to confront the evil in the street in front of their homes, you won't get jack squat.

Find out who owns this D-bug outfit, who it's investors are and then go to one of the hot sites that will provide you with not only their home and office listed and unlisted numbers, but a google map location, and the names and numbers of their close numbers.

Nice don't cut it. I did the demos against the war in the 1960s and got a FBI file and a free trip to Vietnam out of it.

I cried when I saw that the assholes had clearcut a stretch of timber alongside the previously untouched and now ruined pristine forest on the Umpqua River highway.

I called everyone that I knew in California when some greenmailer started cutting down as many of the northern California Redwoods as he could, to force the state to pay him 10 or 20 times what he paid for it.

Go to their homes, lobby their neighbors about what evil people live in the neighborhood. Mug their children for their lunch money. I don't care but get this obscene thing stopped.

The beautiful Umpqua National Forest and its rare spotted owls are under assault. In the D-Bug Project the government bureaucrats changed the definition of "suitable habitat" for the spotted owl in order to hide the fact that they are logging more than 2,000 acres of old forests.

Now the same bad actors on the Umpqua Forest are working on a new Cow Creek Project that will log 6,000 acres of spotted owl habitat. All based on fire fear-mongering. These old forests can take care of themselves!

It's not just about owls. They are just an "indicator species" that tell us we've logged too much and protected too little. These old growth forests provide not just habitat for endangered birds, but also salmon habitat, clean drinking water, recreation, and they keep carbon out of the atmosphere which helps maintain a livable climate.

Still looking for leadership in Washington...

Rob,

despite being hailed by environmentalists like Oregon Wild, the Clinton roadless rule unfortunately contained a loophole allowing for roadless area logging in the name of forest health and reducing fire risk. Is that the loophole the Umpqua National Forest is using for D-Bug?

From the Roadless Area Final Rule, adopted Jan. 12, 2001, activities allowed in roadless areas includes:

'Forest health treatments for the purposes of improving threatened, endangered, proposed, or sensitive species habitat or maintaining or restoring the characteristics of ecosystem composition and structure, such as reducing the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire effects, will be allowed where access can be gained through existing roads or by equipment not requiring roads.'

Given this, the logging wouldn't necessarily be prohibited if it was being done to reduce fire risk, but building new roads would be. Emotional arguments aside, how are they justifying the roadbuilding?

Regardless, the notion that the Forest Service would be using stimulus dollars to build (or rebuild) roads into roadless areas is a travesty.

It's true. The Roadless Rule's protections fall short of the gold standard of Wilderness protections.

(As an aside, despite Oregon’s green reputation we lag behind our neighbors with only 4% of our state protected as Wilderness. California has protected 15% of the state, and the progressive bastion of Idaho has protected 8%.)

Taken as a whole, I’d say the Rule has worked. Despite 8 years of efforts to undermine it, nationally, only 7 miles of roads and 535 acres have been logged in roadless areas since 2001. But 8 years of battling over the Rule has left a mess.

Folks like Clifford Dils in the Umpqua National Forest are using that fact to exploit common sense exceptions built into the rule to justify destructive projects like this. The Oregon Wild Dbug website has some information about this: check out the links at the bottom.

Dils has essentially said "we need to log the forest to save it. Some day", the logic goes, "pine beetles might come in and cause 'unnatural' conditions. If we cut down the trees, there will be less of them for the beetles to kill.

There are lots of places where restoration thinning makes sense, and quite frankly, is needed. This isn’t one of them. Check out these pictures - logging for forest health here is like proposing a health care plan that directs limited resources towards healthy young olympic athletes.

In any case, yes, the Roadless Rule does include some common-sense exceptions. That’s part of why it was so popular.

The Rule protects 58.5 million acres (including about 2 million in Oregon) from commercial logging and road-building. Protecting 58.5 million acres as Wilderness would have been a pretty heavy lift.

Roadless protections on the other hand are a no-brainer. That’s why it’s so disappointing that some of our leaders haven’t stepped up to make them permanent.

I think it would be wise to completely ban federal logging, that way more people in rural Oregon can be without a job. Although Oregon has an abundant resource, I think we should let Canada, Russia and other states harvest trees and provide jobs to their citizens...There is no way you can sustainably harvest trees, they don't just grow back you know. There's also no way you can balance protecting Oregon's treasures while practicing sound and sustainable forest management. It's a much better approach to just ban logging completely! If you ask me, people who make their living off the land are bastards anyways and shouldn't have jobs to support their pathetic lifestyles. Keep the trees in Oregon and the jobs out!

Paul..but we love Christmas Tree farms!

I love Oregons beauty as much as the next guy but folks rural Oregon is struggling .The housing market will do better and there are ways to harvest the timber without clear cutting. We need a proper balance.

Hey Paul, I have to admit, I'm a fan of the occasional tidbit of insightful witty sarcasm.

Divisiveness, cynicism, and the tired old environment vs. the economy debate...not so much.

Oregon does have a model of sustainable forestry in the Siuslaw National Forest. That forest hasn't had a timber sale appealed since 1997, and they consistently produce as much timber as any other National Forest in western Oregon.

It seems reasonable to say that there are some places in Oregon where commercial logging and road-building just aren't appropriate & I'm not alone in thinking the pristine backcountry around Crater Lake is one of those places.

I'm also not ashamed that I think Crater Lake is valuable as more than an economic resource. Even in those terms, Crater Lake is a lot more valuable as it is - not surrounded by more clearcuts, asphalt, and buzzing helicopters.

Our National Forests already have more than twice as many roads as the entire US Highway System and face a maintenance backlog measured in the tens of billions of dollars. Oregon alone has enough roads to drive right past the moon.

Especially in today's economic climate, I don't think it makes sense to be spending our resources to build more roads to nowhere at taxpayer expense. Especially when those roads are being used to destroy some of our last most pristine backcountry.

Give the article a read.

Ironically, the major objection I have to these sorts of protection schemes played out in another similar area within hours of the post on Crater Lake.

Oregon has several volcanic craters. Crater Lake isn’t the largest by a long shot. The one closest to Crater Lake is the Newberry Crater east of LaPine. On Thursday evening, hours after this post, what appears to be a lightening caused fire was found on the northwest slope of the Newberry Crater in an area that has taken some insect damage. It initially went to 10 acres, but they were about to get four 20-person crews in, and as of the last news report I have heard, they have a line around the fire at 24 acres. But the Newberry Crater National Volcanic area is threatened by this fire. – Just like a fire on the slopes of the crater at the lake would.

For several years now, we have had annual fires – big fires – in the Santiam Pass area. This year’s fire is close by on Black Butte. In every case, these fires are made worse by a lack of proper forestry management. Insect kill trees were just left, adding to the fuel load. Heavy loads of otherwise dead trees and brush were not dealt with. Black Butte Ranch has now been twice threatened with destruction, and the nearby town of Sisters had some suburban areas threatened.

Doubly ironic, the Metolius area is just around the corner of Black Butte from where this year’s fire has been going on.

Over-protecting an area can really damage an area.

I for one really like Crater Lake. I’d sure hate to have it destroyed by misdirected caring. When I drive through the Santiam Pass, as I do on average six times a year, I see an area damaged in parts for a generation, and in parts forever, due to poor forestry management practices – triggered not by science, but by the belief that participating in the management of a forest is bad for the forest. Leaving things alone isn’t always a good idea.