Oregon forests recently got a big win in court. Earlier this month, a US District Court Judge ruled that the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, had broken the law during the planning of its so-called “Blue and Gold” timber sale, and threw out the entire project. The “Blue and Gold” is a nearly 3,500 acre tract of mature and old-growth forest on the eastern slopes of the Coast Range between Eugene and Roseburg. I actually visited the Blue and Gold forest a couple years ago. It was immediately ...

Unless you frequent the same activist email listservs I do, you may have no idea that, completely aside from the Trump administration’s assault on public lands, there is a bill quietly making its way through congress that would privatize and clearcut over one hundred thousand acres Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Seems like a pretty obvious bill for environmentalists and allied congress people to oppose. But there’s a twist. The bill, called the Alaska Native Landless Equity Ac...

How did the majestic forests of the Pacific Northwest come to be? That may seem like an esoteric question, but if we want to know how to protect and steward them as we enter the chaotic era of the climate crisis, it’s a question worth asking New research by University of Oregon researcher James Johnston is upending a big part of the conventional wisdom around the key role fire plays in the lifecycle of our forests. James is an Assistant Research Professor in U of O’s Institute for Res...

As I’m recording this in mid-April, we are coming out of the one of the warmest and driest winters on record in the Pacific northwest, and snowpack is at catastrophically low levels. Add in the Trump administration’s intentional sabotage and decimation of FEMA, the Forest Service, NOAA, and other federal agencies, and it is hard not to think that we are in for an unprecedented fire season. Aside from the threat of homes and communities burning, and smoke potentially blanketing vast swaths o...

I’m so excited to be back with a new interview after taking a little time off. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of bad news to come back to, but as ever, I am inspired by all the great work being done by activists and organizations to fight for a better world. One of those people is Len Montgomery, Director of Environment America's Great Outdoors Campaign and one of the leaders of the coalition to protect the Roadless Rule. Len has been working tirelessly to hold the line against the Trump...

Dr. Robert Michael Pyle is a pioneer and legend in invertebrate conservation research and advocacy, as well as an accomplished author and poet. In 1971, he founded the Xerces Society, which has grown into the most influential invertebrate conservation organization in the world. He is also the author of many books of prose and poetry, and a great storyteller. This is part one of our conversation, part two will be out next week. This episode was researched and co-hosted by Coast Ran...

The word fascism gets tossed around a lot these days, but what does that term even mean, and what does it mean to call, for instance, the Trump regime fascist as opposed to, or in addition to, authoritarian, or autocratic? And what about terms like eco-fascism or petro-fascism? Last fall I interviewed University of Oregon Professor Sarah Wald and we touched on the term ‘eco-fascism’. That sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole on that term and the dangerous myths that many environmen...

Today I’m featuring the second half of my conversation with author, speaker, entrepreneur, and wearer of many more hats, Jamie Workman. Jamie is most recently the co-author, along with Environmental Defense Fund executive director, Amanda Leland, of the new book, “Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions”, which highlights the under reported success of collaborative, rights-based management in restoring decimated oceanic ecosystems, and the human communities who ...

Of all the myriad harms modern society is inflicting on our oceans, overfishing is right up there with climate change itself as one of the biggest threats to both marine ecosystems and the billions of people who rely on seafood as a major source of nutrition and income. The authors of the new book, “Sea Change: unlikely allies and a success story of oceanic proportions”, argue that there is a proven policy that has been working around the globe to rebuild fish populations while also creating ...

I have been a vocal critic of the so called “Fix our Forests Act” or FOFA, that is making its way through Congress. I think it is a cynical, bad faith bill that at best, doesn’t address the wildfire issues it purports to solve, and could actually make those issues much worse. Combined with the attempt to repeal the ‘roadless rule’, which protects vast swaths of public lands from road construction and extraction, and the Trump administration’s Executive Orders on dramatically increasing timber...