Save South Deer Campaign Launched at BLM Auction

While the massive Applegate area timber sales received no bids at the BLM Auction Sept. 29th, other sales in Southwest Oregon did sell. One of them, the controversial South Deer logging project in the Illinois Valley, made history when the BLM took the unprecedented step of accepting Orville and Mary Camp?s Natural Selection model of forestry as an official alternative to the standard industrial logging the BLM promotes in their Environmental Assessment for this sale.

Though the BLM offered up over 600 acres for the Camp?s to implement their innovative forestry practices on, this amounts to only 7% of this timber sale, and the Camp?s have filed official protests contesting the project.

?When it comes to forest health and real fire safety, big business and big government literally can?t see the forest for the trees,? said Orville Camp, the fourth generation Illinois Valley logger who developed the Natural Selection Alternative. ?They need to recognize that other species create and sustain natural forests and that there is nothing humans can do to improve on this. Sustainability necessitates retaining natural forests. The most fire resistant forest is a natural old-growth forest with a closed canopy that prevents high fire hazard fuel buildups below.

?Opening up the canopy encourages high fire hazard fuel conditions. Under the BLM alternative, canopies will be opened up to meet a timber sale, and natural forests will be converted into unnatural tree plantations with the ongoing costly struggle of trying to keep nature from restoring it. Taxpayers will be subsidizing the same out-dated destructive forestry management practices that turned our beautiful valley into a tinderbox in the first place.

?It?s a vicious cycle initiated by profit driven corporate stockholders and fueled by government land managers under the guise of federally mandated fire hazard reduction. I have lived and worked in the forest all of my life, and I can tell you that Bush?s so-called Healthy Forests Initiative is a misleading misnomer of mythic proportions that is bad for forests and bad for communities. This administration and its corporate constituents are playing on the public?s understandable fear of fire. What they are not telling us is that private corporations will reap huge profits at the expense of forest and community health putting our communities at even greater risk and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. The Illinois Valley, Deer Creek in particular, is struggling to recover from over a century of unsustainable forestry practices, and our community is committed to working with the BLM to heal not harm our valley.?

Friends of Deer Creek Valley is a community coalition committed to working with federal land managers and private land owners to create a sustainable local forest economy by restoring natural forests to late-successional old-growth conditions.

To arrange a tour of local forest land that has been using the Natural Selection Alternative for 39 years, please contact Mary Camp on (541) 597-4313 or email MaryC@RogueRiver.net.

For more information, please visit SaveSouthDeer.org.

So. Oregon Old Growth to be Sold Off Sept. 29th!

Friends of Southern Oregon?s forests are asking you to join us for a festive rally on Sept 29th outside the BLM office in Medford while they sell off vast areas of our public forests to the highest bidder inside.

The Medford BLM (Bureau of Land Management) is moving forward with their largest sale of old growth forests in years. They are auctioning off thousands of acres of low elevation public forests across the Applegate and Illinois Valleys, the Cascade Foothills, as well as forests around Glendale and the Rogue River- for pennies on the dollar.

Carpools will be leaving from Evo?s Coffee Lounge in Ashland and the Ruch Country Store in Ruch at 7:45 am SHARP! It is important to be at the BLM office at 3040 Biddle Road by 8:30 am- in time to greet the bidders as they arrive.

Residents of the Applegate and Illinois Valleys will be joined by supporters from Eugene, Ashland and across southern Oregon for a peaceful, theatrical rally that will include our own mock-auction where we will be selling off other pieces of America?s heritage at dirt cheap prices!

This is a rare chance to spend just a couple of hours to show your opposition to old growth logging while the decision makers and logging companies are gathered together behind closed doors spending taxpayer money to subsidize the destruction of our last native forests.

This is an important and historic moment for the future of Oregon?s remaining intact forests- please come out and bring a friend to have your voice heard!

Organizations sponsoring this event include the Little Applegate Neighborhood Network, the Oxygen Collective, KS Wild, Cascadia Wildlands Project, TELAV, Sisters of the Siskiyou and Orville and Mary Camp.

Contact Laurel@o2collective.org to find ways to contribute and get involved or to find out more about the threats to our forests and efforts to save them, visit www.kswild.org and www.o2collective.org.

More information on individual timber sales below:

MEDFORD BLM 2005 OLD-GROWTH TIMBER BONANZA

?The projects I've been out on, they are leaving all the big trees and going in for the smaller ones - that is standard practice out there now."
BLM Director Kathleen Clarke misleading the Medford Mail Tribune on August 27, 2002.

While the Bush-appointed BLM National Director would like you to believe that the BLM doesn?t log old-growth anymore, the timber planners in the Medford BLM have been busy targeting thousands of acres ancient forests in Southwest Oregon for logging.

The Medford BLM has planned a number of controversial old-growth timber sales in Southern Oregon despite requests from numerous communities to spare their watersheds and ancient forests from destruction. Citizens from the Applegate Valley, Ashland, Cave Junction, O?Brien, Glendale, Grants Pass, Medford, Takilma, Williams, and Wolf Creek have all asked the BLM to save our remaining ancient forests and focus logging and restoration on the second-growth tree plantations that dominate the landscape.

All of these requests have fallen on deaf ears. Simply put, the BLM does not care what you think about their old-growth logging program.

While the BLM?s own inventory indicates that out of 2.6 million acres of Federal lands within the Rogue Basin, 770,000 acres consist of dense young second growth fiber farms. Instead of targeting our last ancient forests, the BLM should repair the damage that it has already done.

Rather than bring communities together to restore the forest, the BLM has proposed the following timber sales that will log our ancient forests and divide our communities. The BLM has responded to community requests for protection of these forests, and for more time to comment on these timber sales, by claiming that they intend to offer all of these timber sales to the timber industry by the end of the 2005 fiscal year and that environmental impacts and community concerns will not alter their plans in the slightest.

Please stand up with your neighbors to demand that the BLM provide sustainable jobs in the woods repairing the consequences of their past logging and fire suppression policies. The old-growth that still stands belongs to all of us, not just the BLM?s friends in the timber industry.

Medford BLM Timber Sales for the Fall of 2005:

Bald Lick Timber Sale
Applegate Watershed, Ashland Resource Area.
77 logging units across 2,126 acres totaling 13.8 million board feet.
Requires 4.5 miles of new road construction.
The BLM refuses to agree to a diameter limit to save big trees, and also insists on building new logging roads into currently roadless forests.

China Keeler Timber Sale
Applegate Watershed, Ashland Resource Area.
33 logging units across 1,082 acres totaling 6.1 million board feet.
Requires 0.7 miles of new road construction.
The BLM refuses to protect large trees in Spotted Owl habitat in this forest.

Deadman?s Palm Timber Sale
Applegate Watershed, Ashland Resource Area.
22 logging units across 1,283 acres totaling 5.6 million board feet.
The BLM refused to survey for rare old-growth species before authorizing logging in this delicate watershed.

Camp Cur Timber Sale
Central Big Butte and Lost Creek Watersheds, Butte Falls Resource Area.
39 logging units across 800 acres totaling 6.2 million board feet.
This timber sale calls for ?regenerating? (clearcutting) older forests and removing forest canopy in important wildlife habitat.

Slick Sand Timber Sale
West Fork Evan Creek Watershed, Butte Falls Resource Area.
20 logging units across 223 acres totaling 1.8 million board feet.
Slick Sand would ?regenerate? (clearcut) older stands and log many large trees.

Pickett Charge Timber Sale
Pickett Creek Watershed, Grants Pass Resource Area.
15 logging units across 337 acres totaling 2.7 million board feet.
The Pickett Charge timber sale targets unusually botanically diverse old-growth forests.

South Deer Timber Sale
Deer Creek Watershed, Grants Pass Resource Area.
21 logging units across 377 acres totaling 3.1 million board feet.
The BLM refuses to protect Spotted Owl and Bald Eagle habitat in these forests.

West Illinois Timber Sale
West Fork Illinois Watershed, Grants Pass Resource Area.
614 acres of logging producing 4.3 million board feet across an undisclosed number of logging units.
Important salmon and steelhead spawning area.
This watershed contains more rare and endemic plants than any other watershed in Southern Oregon.

Five Rogues Timber Sale
Graves Creek Watershed, Glendale Resource Area.
664 acres of logging by regeneration, group select, selection cut and commercial thinning. Approximately 115 acres of regeneration logging will completely remove spotted owl habitat, and 549 acres of suitable habitat will be downgraded through commercial thinning and selection cuts. Construction of a helicopter-landing pad would occur inside of a riparian reserve and 1.1 miles of new road would be built to access timber.

Willy Slide Timber Sale
West Fork Cow Creek Watershed, Glendale Resource Area.
52 acres of regeneration logging, 6 acres of selection logging, 139 acres of thinning are proposed. The project would remove 27 acres of suitable spotted owl habitat, while downgrading 9 acres. It would remove or downgrade a total of 161 acres of spotted owl dispersal habitat. 1.5 miles of new road would be constructed in this Key Watershed for salmon recovery.

For more information on these and other old-growth timber sales please visit www.kswild.org

Support Klamath River Natives and Residents

Support the Klamath River Native Americans and other area residents in their call to remove Klamath River dams!
September 25 and 26th: Ride the bus to Portland!

Oxygen Collective invites you to join us on our bio-diesel bus for a quick trip from Southern Oregon to Portland with members of the Karuk Tribe from the Klamath River to support them in their efforts to restore the once-great salmon runs of the Upper Klamath. We will be traveling north on Sept 25th and back south on the 26th, attending a night of speakers and film screenings sunday evening, and participating in a colorful demonstration for the return of the salmon monday morning.

Please RSVP to laurel@o2collective.org so we know how much space we need to reserve!

More info:

The Klamath-Salmon Media Collaborative invites you on Sept. 25, 6 p.m. to
a film night we are hosting in Portland at the Hollywood Theatre. We will
show Salmon on the Backs of Buffalo and other short films made by Klamath
River community members about the fight to remove the Klamath Dams (owned by Portland based Pacific Power), the 2002 fish kill, traditional management and culture of Klamath River tribes, and about the incredibleendangered fish of the River. There are also going to be speakers from the tribes on the Klamath River. These four tribes used to all have
subsistence fisheries in the Klamath Basin before the Dams went in and
blocked hundreds of miles of salmon spawning and rearing habitat. The
Chinook and Coho salmon are now at under 8 percent of their pre-dam population,
this sustenance is no longer available for many tribal members and the
once booming fishing industry has collapsed. At risk is not only a
fishery, but also the physical health, the spiritual well-being and
cultural survival of the Klamath Basins original inhabitance

We are coming to Portland since Pacific Power's headquarters are located
there. And we hope to drum up support to stop Pacific Power from killing
more fish. We want to bring the salmon home to the upper Klamath Basin.

Medford BLM to Auction Off Applegate Old Growth Sept 29th