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The man who helped create the Cascade Siskiyou National Monument weighs in on the new plan to manage it

A landscape view of forested hills. There's a large mountain mahogany tree on the right side. And in the center is a large rock outcropping.
Bob Wick
/
Bureau of Land Management
Pilot Rock as seen from the Pacific Crest Trail in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument

The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the monument, finalized a new resource management plan in early January that outlines how the government will take care of the over 100,000 acres of breathtaking landscape.

The Cascade Siskiyou National Monument covers a large, ecologically diverse region on the border of Oregon and California. In order to learn what environmentalists think about this new management plan, JPR’s Roman Battaglia spoke with Dave Willis, the man who originally fought to create the Monument starting in the 1980s and the chair of the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council.

Roman Battaglia: Before we talk about the new resource management plan that's just been signed by the BLM, I was curious about the previous resource management plan that I believe it was 2008? What were your thoughts on that plan?

Dave Willis: It wasn't a bad plan, and it was done by BLM staff who knew the monument very well, cared about it and gave it their best shot. Wasn't perfect, but I'm sad to say it is better than the plan that BLM just signed. That was written by BLM staff who didn't really know the monument. It wasn't a priority for them. And I'm afraid they were influenced by the BLM traditional custom and culture. You know, the BLM was established by combining the General Land Office, which sold land off and the U.S. Grazing Service, which was controlled by ranchers, and the O&C [Oregon and California] Administration, which had been cutting like there was no tomorrow. And even though that was decades ago, BLM continues to struggle to overcome its beginnings.

RB: What do you think of the new resource management plan that was released by the BLM this month?

DW: Well, it's not for no reason that some clear-eyed critics call BLM the bureau of Beef, Logging and Mining. And in this particular case, I'm afraid that shows up. Some dubious promises are made about studying the effects of cattle, but they haven't done any studies since 2008 that have been worth anything. In fact, they've refused to study using the cover of what's called the grazing rider to renew leases a number of times. The logging is very heavy-handed in this monument plan. If you're a hammer, every problem is a nail. And If you're a chainsaw, every problem is a tree. And for the most part, the BLM is kind of a one trick pony chainsaw, and that shows up in this plan far too much.

RB: So what kind of elements make you say that the 2008 plan is better than the newly-passed one?

DW: The original plan included elements of the Northwest Forest Plan: the Aquatic Conservation Strategy, which required that agency actions not retard water quality and stream health, and the Survey and Manage Protocols, which have been called look before you log, at what the logging will do to species in the monument that the proclamation says should be protected. And this new plan ditches the Northwest forest plan elements. No Aquatic Conservation Strategy, no Survey and Management Protocol. The plan also ditches Areas of Critical Environmental Concern and Research Natural Areas. And that's because they say, "Oh, we're going to manage the whole monument in a way that would protect those." We're dubious that would be the case by so much of what the plan says. In fact, if they manage the whole monument to protect it, we wonder why the plan says they could even trade away monument land inside monument boundaries, so it's no longer be part of the monument. That to us, doesn't sound like managing the whole monument as though it were an Area of Critical Environmental Concern.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Roman Battaglia is a regional reporter for Jefferson Public Radio. After graduating from Oregon State University, Roman came to JPR as part of the Charles Snowden Program for Excellence in Journalism in 2019. He then joined Delaware Public Media as a Report For America fellow before returning to the JPR newsroom.