Federal judge blocks old-growth logging project on Oregon coast

(CN) — A federal judge has blocked a proposal to allow logging on 3,200 acres of public land in Western Oregon.

Conservation groups said the plan would have felled thousands of acres of old-growth trees, some of which have stood for more than 200 years.

“Wild, ancient forests like those targeted for logging in the Blue and Gold project are exactly the type of places our public land agencies should be protecting to provide clean drinking water, refuges for imperiled wildlife and natural fire resilience,” John Persell, a senior staff attorney with the group Oregon Wild, said in a written statement. “Instead of managing for these values for the whole public, the BLM and the Trump administration are trying to exploit these precious and rare forests for maximum, short-term benefits of just a few logging corporations.”

According to its own resource management plan for the area, the Bureau of Land Management or BLM must protect trees that are more than 40 inches in diameter and that were established before 1850.

According to the plaintiffs, some of the trees in the project area are Douglas-firs “ranging from 200 to 600 years old or older.”

In a ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai found that the Bureau of Land Management had submitted “inaccurate and misleading” data regarding the age and size of trees it was allowing to be felled over the next three to 10 years. Instead, the numbers presented by the government in their environmental analysis were for “stands” of trees, groups of trees with average sizes and ages estimated.

“Nowhere are individual protected trees mentioned, nor are the measures that BLM will take to identify and protect them,” the Joe Biden appointee wrote. “Significant evidence, both created by BLM and submitted by plaintiffs during the comment process, establishes the existence of protected old-growth trees throughout the Plan Area and contradicts BLM’s simplistic representations.”

“BLM did not adequately respond to or discuss any of that contradictory data,” Mustafi added. “BLM acknowledged that ‘stand structure varies throughout the analysis area’ but did not describe that variety in any sufficient detail.”

The agency, Musfari went on, “did not grapple with any of the data before it that contradicted its simplistic description of the stands in the Plan Area.” The agency also “failed to take a hard look at the Blue and Gold Plan’s effects on old-growth trees that BLM is explicitly required to retain.”

“In sum, BLM failed to provide ‘a convincing statement of reasons” as to why the potential effects of the Blue and Gold Plan are insignificant,’ Mustafi wrote.

Three nonprofits — Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild and Umpqua Watershed — had sued the BLM in 2024 in an effort to black the logging project. This week, the groups filed a motion for a temporary restraining order after volunteers photographed the logging of old-growth trees, some of them said to be more than 250 years old.

“The Bureau of Land Management initially denied that this old-growth forest even existed in the project area, but this was proven untrue by our volunteers and agency whistleblowers,” Nick Cady, legal director at Cascadia Wildlands, said in press release issued Wednesday before the ruling.

“After being caught in that lie, BLM pivoted and assured the Court that the agency would take measures to protect these unique legacy trees,” Cady added. “This unsurprisingly was also a fabrication; the BLM simply cannot be trusted to oversee our public forests.”

Instead of ruling on the motion for a temporary restraining order, Mustafi ruled on a motion for summary judgement, blocking the logging plan.

A Department of Justice attorney who represented the BLM in this case did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

“These remaining parcels of old-growth forests in the Coast Range are critical for the habitat values they provide, the clean water they filter and the carbon they store to help mitigate climate change,” said Janice Reid, conservation chair of Umpqua Watersheds, said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, the Bureau of Land Management has shirked its legal duties to protect the old-growth, so this court decision is very welcomed.”

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