As part of a team working on a state-wide effort to update Oregon forest practices through a historic agreement with the timber industry, KS Wild and Rogue Riverkeeper are working to fight clearcut logging that leaves behind flammable logging slash, causes sediment that fills salmon streams, and minimizes forest carbon storage that contributes to climate change.
Read MoreThe State of Oregon needs to outline steps to reduce climate change pollution and promote carbon storage in forests. We are asking that the Oregon Global Warming Commission step in and work with ODF to craft realistic solutions to climate change. ODF and the Commission need to begin a science-based process to reform Oregon's forest practices to store more carbon, protect water quality, and prevent pollution.
Read MoreThe U.S. Forest Service is beginning an update of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan that will lead to new forest plans for our region. These new forest plans will significantly impact our region, defining how nearly 8 million acres of national forest in our region will be managed into the future. KS Wild will be engaging in these new plans—with several forest plans in the Klamath-Siskiyou set to be the first out the gates.
Read MoreMuch of the Bear Grub timber sale is located in the so-called “harvest land base” where the BLM has directed itself to log regardless of the impacts to neighbors, wildlife, or watersheds.
Read MoreTo be the eyes and ears of public lands defense requires KS Wild’s ForestWatch staff to be diligent in how we approach the scope of our work. Read about our plans for 2020, which defending public lands in a number of vital ways.
Read MoreInstead of continuing the century-old practice of trying to suppress wildfires, we need to learn from the our native American forebears how to use controlled burns to keep our Klamath-Siskiyou forests healthy and biologically diverse.
Read MoreFor the second talk in KS Wild’s Summer Speaker Series on Fire Management, Dr. Christopher J. Dunn focused on five key things we need to remember in our fire-prone landscape, and a new method derived from his research that may alter how we fight fires in the future.
Read MoreThe Red Buttes Wilderness offers large trees, expansive wildflowers, and crystal clear creeks. Here, Conservation Director George Sexton shares a favorite trail in what was once known as the “Applegate Alps.”
Read MoreKS Wild, the Northwest Forest Worker Center, and Lomakatsi Restoration Project hosted “The Hands that Touch the Land,” a hike focusing on ecological forestry work.
Read MoreWhen the BLM uses taxpayer dollars to plan controversial public lands logging projects, like the Pickett West native forest timber sale, you have a right to know what they are up to. Transparent public lands management is at the heart of how government is supposed to function in our Democracy.
Read MoreThe Klamath National Forest intends to remove 200-400 year-old trees and snags from the landscape to make room for dense timber plantations that offer sparse value to the forest ecology.
Read MoreThe Klamath National Forest proposes to log over 1,200 acres of post fire forests on the Siskiyou Crest. Scroll through this story map for more details on post fire forests and logging in the Klamath Siskiyous.
Read MoreGuest author Pepper Trail portrays 278 years of life, based on the true story of a Ponderosa Pine as told through it's growth rings. Read the life history of this tiny pine’s world, a valley in the eastern Siskiyou Mountains.
Read MoreWhat have we learned since the 2002 Biscuit fire aftermath, and how will it affect land management decisions in the post-Chetco Bar burn area of southwest Oregon?
...with the passage of time it is now possible to look back more objectively at Biscuit fire and the political firestorm that followed in its wake.
Read MoreA forest after fire is not a tragedy; it’s simply a stage in the life of the forest. Post-fire logging is often framed as focused on fire prevention. In reality, important biological characteristics are removed from post-fire forests. Because of this, salvage logging acts as an unnatural human disturbance to the sensitive post fire landscape.
Read MoreFire is so important to the world-renown forest diversity of the Klamath-Siskiyou that it is recognized as the keystone ecological process. Here in the KS, forests with fire are healthy forests!
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Following decades of fire suppression and logging that created dense young forests, a return to ecosystem resiliency requires thinning second-growth plantations, retaining large trees and forest canopy, and returning the role of fire to these fire-dependent forests.
Read MoreIncreasingly timber interests, conservationists including KS Wild, scientists and federal land management agencies are coming together to focus logging activities on thinning previously logged plantations and in fire-evolved forest stands in which fire suppression has resulted in encroachment by less resilient off-site conifers.
Read MoreOn August 5, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) signed a management plan for western Oregon, largely ignoring a formal protest from 22 conservation and fishing groups. The BLM plan eliminates protections for streamside forests, increases clearcutting in wet forests, and removes 2.6 million acres of federally managed public forests from the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan
Read MoreThe 1937 O&C Act overhauled the timber management and revenue distribution scheme. It allowed the federal government to pay fifty percent of gross timber revenues directly to the O&C counties, plus twenty five percent (for unpaid Railroad property taxes) to O&C lands. In 1953 Congress directed 25% of the revenue to road building and other capital improvements on the O&C lands, leaving only 50% paid to counties. These payment schemes tied timber harvests to county revenues and made county government a champion of increased logging.
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