A More Than Just Parks Investigation
BLM Announces Plan to Fell
Oregon's Last Great Forests
2.5 million acres. One billion board feet per year. Thirty days to respond.
See the places on the chopping block. Fly over the forests they want to fell.
The Plan
They Want to Go Back to the 1960s
On February 19, the BLM, now run by officials whose careers were built opposing their own agency's mission, announced they want to harvest 1 billion board feet of timber per year from Oregon's O&C lands.1 That's four times current levels. That's 1960s-era clearcutting, before we knew better.2 Before we decided these forests were worth more standing.
Annual timber harvest, BLM O&C lands. They want to erase 30 years of protections overnight.
The Scale
What Does 1 Billion Board Feet Look Like?
Every year. Not a one-time cut. Every single year, indefinitely. Sources: Congressional Research Service R42951; BLM Western Oregon Plan EIS, Feb. 2026.
The Kill Zone
An Area Nearly the Size of Yellowstone
Look at the red overlay on this map. That's 2.5 million acres of western Oregon, nearly the size of Yellowstone National Park, where the BLM wants to unleash industrial logging.3 The highlighted parcels are real federal land data. Every one of those patches is a potential clearcut.
$66 million. That's what they want to sell these ancient forests for. That's 25 cents per American. The price of a gumball for an irreplaceable ecosystem.
1,000 years to grow.
One season to destroy.
Every place you're about to see is on federal land, managed in your name, with your tax dollars. And every one of them is now on the chopping block.
See It From Space
Old Growth vs. Clearcut
This is what BLM's "management" looks like from orbit. Drag the slider to compare intact old-growth forest with an adjacent clearcut on the same O&C lands.
Satellite imagery: Esri/Maxar. Left: intact old-growth canopy at Opal Creek. Right: O&C lands checkerboard south of Eugene, where clearcut squares alternate with surviving forest. This is what "management" looks like.
On the Chopping Block
Valley of the Giants
Walk into this grove and the world changes. The canopy is so high and so dense that the light goes green. The Douglas firs here are over 200 feet tall, wider than a car at the base, and some have been growing for over a thousand years. Fifty-one acres of living cathedral, one of the last old-growth groves left standing in Oregon's Coast Range.
The BLM's plan would allow logging right up to the grove's edge. Once the surrounding forest is stripped, the Giants lose their windbreak, their moisture, their microclimate. You don't need to cut the last trees to kill a forest. You just need to cut everything around them and let the wind do the rest.
Explore on BLM.govOn the Chopping Block
Sandy River
Born on Mount Hood's glaciers, the Sandy is one of Oregon's last free-flowing rivers. Coho salmon and steelhead have spawned here for ten thousand years. Their survival depends on one thing: cold, shaded water.
The BLM wants to let loggers cut to within 25 feet of the riverbank.4
Twenty-five feet. That's the width of a two-lane road. Remove the canopy that close to a stream and water temperatures spike 10°F. For salmon, that's not a discomfort. It's a death sentence.
Wild & Scenic River on BLM.govOn the Chopping Block
Mary's Peak
The highest point in the Coast Range. Up here, in old-growth canopy 200 feet above the forest floor, a seabird called the marbled murrelet builds its nest, sometimes 50 miles from the ocean.
This bird has survived for millennia by doing one impossible thing: raising its young in the oldest, tallest trees on Earth. There is no Plan B. There is no alternative nesting site. When the old growth goes, the murrelet goes with it.
Its population has already fallen by half. This plan would finish the job.
Explore on USFS.govOn the Chopping Block
North Fork Clackamas
Forty-five minutes from Portland. That's how close this is. The old-growth forest along the North Fork Clackamas isn't some remote wilderness abstraction. It's the drinking water supply for hundreds of thousands of people.
Old-growth forests are the most effective water filtration systems ever devised. Their root networks, moss carpets, and decaying wood regulate flow, prevent landslides, and keep water pure. No engineered system comes close.
Clearcut a watershed and you don't just lose trees. You lose clean water. You gain mudslides, sediment-choked streams, and treatment costs that dwarf any timber revenue.
Wild & Scenic River on Rivers.govOn the Chopping Block
Alsea Falls
This waterfall cascades through old-growth Douglas fir that has never been logged. Not once. Not ever. In all of human history, no one has cut these trees.
The surrounding O&C lands are one of the last intact low-elevation forest ecosystems in western Oregon. "Intact" is the word that matters. It means the web of life here: the fungi networks, the canopy layers, the deadfall nurse logs. All of it is whole. It took centuries to weave. It can be unwoven in an afternoon with a feller buncher.
Explore on BLM.govOn the Chopping Block
Upper Molalla River
The Molalla's upper reaches are one of the last corridors connecting the Cascades to the Willamette Valley. Winter steelhead, spring chinook, Pacific giant salamanders: they all depend on this unbroken thread of old-growth to move, breed, and survive.
Cut the corridor and you cut the connection. Populations that can't reach each other can't breed. Genetic diversity collapses. The slow extinction begins, quiet enough that no one notices until it's too late.
Explore on BLM.govOn the Chopping Block
The Most Carbon-Dense Forests on Earth
Measured, peer-reviewed fact: Pacific Northwest old-growth stores more carbon per acre than any terrestrial ecosystem on the planet,5 more than the Amazon, more than the Congo, more than anything.
Every tree felled releases centuries of stored carbon. Logging these forests doesn't just destroy habitat. It accelerates the climate crisis at precisely the moment we can least afford it.
This investigation took months of research, FOIA requests, and satellite analysis.
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The Lie
"It'll Reduce Wildfires"
This is the line they keep repeating. It is a lie.
Peer-reviewed research, not opinion, not politics, measured science, consistently shows that logged forests burn more severely than unlogged forests.6 Old-growth trees have thick bark, high canopies, and moist understories. They're natural firebreaks. Clearcuts and young plantations, by contrast, are tinderboxes: dense, dry, and uniformly flammable.
Call it what it is: liquidation disguised as reform, pushed by officials whose careers were built opposing the very protections they're now dismantling.
The Body Count
Four Species. Thirty Years of Protections. Gone.
Get Out There and Raise Hell
They've given you 30 days to say something about it. There will be no public meetings. Your comment becomes part of the legal record. It is not symbolic. It matters. The BLM is counting on nobody paying attention. Prove them wrong.
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Your Comment Matters
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Public comments become part of the legal record. Courts review them. They are not symbolic. Pick what matters most to you and we'll help you write it.
Tip: Personalize this comment with your own experience. Unique comments carry more legal weight than form letters. You can also email your comment directly to [email protected]. Reference NEPA number DOI-BLM-ORWA-0000-2026-0001-RMP-EIS.