Who’s defending Williams Late Successional Reserve?

Late Successional Reserves are the backbone of the Northwest Forest Plan, set aside to protect older forest and to grow more of it for spotted owls and other old-growth-dependent species. Management inside a reserve is not forbidden. The plan allows thinning where it speeds a young stand toward old-growth structure, and dense single-species plantations often do benefit from it. The line is whether a treatment delays habitat recovery, and BLM crossed it here. The Medford district’s Late Mungers sale proposed 830 acres of commercial thinning inside these reserves, and in April 2025 a federal judge halted it, finding the agency violated its own resource management plan standard barring reserve activities that set owl habitat back 20 years or more. The question in the reserves is never logging or no logging. It is whether the prescription grows the forest the plan promised or cuts it for volume.

1. 1994Late Successional Reserves established under the Northwest Forest Plan
2. 2025BLM advances the Late Mungers sale, 830 acres of commercial thinning in reserves
3. 2025Federal judge halts the sale, finding BLM violated its own plan

No public comment window is open on Williams Late Successional Reserve right now. A call script is ready on the Public Lands Action Network, and the groups above are how the fight gets funded and argued in the meantime.