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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. So we are going to be taking a look at what Trump is doing to the management of federal public lands. And we're going to be doing it through the lens of our friend, probably our best friend as an organization goes, the Klamath Siskiyou Wildland Center, KS Wild, based out of Ashland, Oregon. And joining me is KS Wild's Executive Director, Michael Dotson. Welcome to the Econews Report, Michael.

MICHAEL DOTSON:

Thanks for having me, Tom. It's great to be broadcast across Northwest California, across the border from where I'm at today now.

WHEELER:

So Michael, you are the executive director of KS Wild. Do you want to give us the KS Wild elevator pitch, who you are, what you do, what you work to protect?

DOTSON:

Yeah, for those not familiar with KS Wild, we are the Klamath Siskiyou Wildland Center. We've been working in Southwest Oregon and Northwest California's public lands for the last 30 years. Clearly from the work that was done prior to the Northwest Forest Plan, we do have a long history as well with other activist groups before us, groups like the Siskiyou Project that used to be around here. We actually merged with them back in 2011. So a much longer history, I would say, than just our 30-year anniversary that we have next year.

But as you know, Tom, we work alongside groups like EPIC and other conservation voices, whether that be forest, rivers, wildlife, even recreation groups. We wanna make sure that we have good federal land management. These are Forest Service lands. And in Oregon, we have a lot of Bureau of Land Management forest lands. So we cover about eight million acres in the Klamath Siskiyou area, five national forests, a couple of BLM districts. And yeah, we organize communities to speak up for their backyard public lands, advocate for wildlife, fight resiliency. I think, as you know, we also, when projects are proposed that are detrimental to clean water or wildlife or climate impacts, we litigate. We try to prevent those worst projects from damaging our public lands and clean water and biodiversity.

We have probably, across this region, the vast majority of our supporters are based here in Southwest Oregon, usually Josephine and Jackson County. But yeah, KS Wild has been around long enough to have supporters over on the coast where you are. And also, I think 30 or so states represented in our donor and supporter roles. So definitely an area, this part of the world, where the biodiversity is world-renowned and we want to protect it.

WHEELER:

Well, so we had the great honor of getting to work in the Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion, some of the most biodiverse, as you say, in the United States. And I have the great privilege of getting to work with KS Wild. We at Epic share some areas in common. And so a lot of what we do is often in partnership with folks at KS Wild. And I would say that we've developed this really wonderful relationship where we can just trust each other's work. And so our colleagues, George Sexton and Kimberly Baker, are frequently partnered together on writing comments and taking the lead for some projects and passing off responsibilities. So it's a really great and wonderful relationship. And I would encourage folks, if you are excited about public lands and their protection in Northern California and Southern Oregon, to give my friends KS Wild a look. Michael, where can folks find KS Wild on the internet?

DOTSON:

Yeah, our website, kswild.org. We also have some social media presence. We use Facebook and Instagram these days. My communications manager is somewhat nervous of TikTok, so we haven't gone that far yet.

But yeah, I think a big part of our work, Tom, is to make sure whether it's maybe an older generation that still likes to read their news via print, we also do a quarterly newsletter. We'll often send those to a lot of the cafes, restaurants, other places throughout the region. If you sign up to be a member, if you make a contribution to KS Wild, one of the perks of membership is we send that newsletter to you. It's a quarterly basis, so four editions a year, and it's quite extensive in terms of just diving deep into our issues, which include working with groups like you, EPIC, Climate Fourth Alliance, Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center. These groups are all small but mighty, and I think together, Tom, like you talked about, we're able to accomplish a lot for our public lands and wildlife through those partnerships. It's definitely a lot of work to cover, what is it, maybe 5 million acres of federal land there in the Northwest California corner. But for the 13 years I've been on staff, I've seen those relationships blossom and be productive when it comes to defending our forests and wildlife.

WHEELER:

So this week's show, we're focusing on the Trump administration and efforts from the Trump administration to increase extractive uses of federal public lands. And we're giving a particular eye to that Northern California, Southern Oregon area in which KS Wilde works. So at the beginning of the Trump administration, or Trump's second term, I should say, he put out an executive order that called for all parts of his government to take a look at regulations that they are in charge of and figure out ways by which they can, among other things, increase the cut, the amount of logging that occurs on federal public lands. And I bet that you are seeing it in your area of the world. And one of the consequences of this executive order is a move from the Forest Service to rescind the 2001 roadless rule. So we've covered the roadless rule on previous shows, but let's try to collectively remember what it's about. So Michael, what does the roadless rule do and why is it important for our wonderful area of the world?

DOTSON:

Yeah, it's a great question, Tom. The Roadless Rule was established near the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, an effort to look at these wilderness quality lands, right? These aren't actually capital W congressionally designated wilderness areas, but they are often adjacent to and nearby these places. So it's almost an extension of some of our most wild landscapes. And I think across the country, there's roughly, including Alaska, I think it's close to 50 million or a little bit over 50 million acres nationwide. The vast majority of those roadless areas are, of course, in the Western US, where we have a lot more of the wide open expanses.

What's happening right now from the Trump administration, Tom, is not the first time the Roadless Rule has been attacked. From what I recall, George W's administration made attempts, and they were beaten back in the courts. I think there are some examples of places like Idaho and Colorado that tried to strike some sort of compromise, and they have these individual state rules. But yeah, what the Trump administration is doing is essentially saying, the Roadless Rule is a one size fits all approach to forest management. And so we need to roll that back, which is kind of a one size fits all approach to roadless management. Here in the KS, the Klamath Siskiyou, I think we've got over a million acres of roadless areas spanning the Klamath Drainage, the Smith River Drainage. Up here in Oregon, there's roadless areas in the Illinois, the Chetco, and the Rogue watersheds along the Siskiyou Crest. So special places like McDonald Peak, the North Fork Smith, the South and North County Kalmiopsis, all of these roadless areas just have these special values, whether it's habitat for endangered species, headwater streams for cold water tributaries to feed wild salmon and steelhead fisheries.

Even places like the Kalmiopsis, where the roadless areas have a unique geology, so it doesn't necessarily make them thick, dense forests, but they are home to a lot of rare and endemic plants that grow nowhere else in the world. And so yeah, KS Wild is working with groups like you, national partners, partners from across the Pacific Northwest, to make sure the Trump administration understands the value that these forests have as roadless areas for habitat. And I think their decision document is probably no surprise to many of us when we looked at this and it was predetermined that we're gonna do this.

And it's just telling to see, I think 99% of the comments that they received in the scoping period before this were in support of keeping the roadless area. And I think almost every single tribal comment, maybe but one or two, but the vast, vast majority of tribal comments are also about preserving the roadless area. So yeah, I think going back to what you're talking about, this seems to be, the Trump administration is saying this is gonna help local decision makers do better at managing their lands. And yet at the same time, they're pointing to a document that Trump signed saying expand logging. So I don't think they can have it both ways. You can't tell us this is for local decision makers to be better while also pointing to a presidential proclamation saying do more logging.

WHEELER:

So, Michael, you work in a fire-prone area of the world. Your offices, I'm sure every summer come fire season, you're having to breathe in smoke from both prescribed burns and from natural wildfires. The Trump administration claims that rescission of the roadless rule is necessary to deal with a backlog of work to address fuel loads in our national forests. I think that groups like ours are skeptical of this rationale. Can you talk about how you conceive of the relationship between roads and fire and your perspectives on the need to open more roads to combat more fire?

DOTSON:

Yeah, great question, Tom, and you're right. I think if you work on public lands or natural resource issues these days, the number one issue seems to be fire, especially here in the Klamath and the Rogue, where we are in a Mediterranean climate. We are in a fire-prone area. I mean, fire has been here for thousands of years, and we've lived alongside it. People have. And so, yeah, it's unfortunate to see the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies, pun intended, fan the flames and use fear of fire to claim that this is what that decision is about. And again, fire in your backyard and fire in your home is scary. Our community, our staff, we've seen firsthand what fire in your backyard looks like, the Alameda fire. We had several staff evacuated, and that wasn't even a forest fire. That was an urban wildfire.

So I think when the Forest Service is saying that we need to do more roads and manage roads better for the wildfire issue, I think it's just, it's a misconception. We do know about, right, the research is coming out saying more roads lead to more human encroachment, and more human encroachment leads to more wildfire starts. I think 85% of wildfires are human-caused in these parts.

WHEELER:

In California, it's 95%, which is.

DOTSON:

So there you go, yeah. I mean, even when you talk about the placement of roads, like a road on a mid slope is not going to do a whole lot to stop a fire if it's wind driven. So what I know right now is I believe there's about a $7 or $8 billion backlog that the Forest Service has right now with their current road system. And I would say before we start adding more roads and we start thinking about more human encroachment, let's maintain and take care of what we've got. And from what I see happening in places like the Mid-Klamath, there's MIKWIC, the Sandman River Restoration Council working with the tribes on the Klamath River. There's a lot of work being done with existing infrastructure and existing roads through the use of pods and strategic planning to make sure that if a fire does arise, it can be addressed.

So yeah, I take it with a grain of salt that we need more roads to address the wildfire issue. When the current roadless rule allows the agency to do that work already, that would help promote fuels reduction, whether it's controlled fire or cultural burning, those things are already allowed. And I think we should be looking at those types of activities if we truly care. We also, if we're talking about fire, we probably shouldn't be firing 25% or 30% of the Forest Service before fire season. So again, I think a misconception that we need to build more roads to address fuels and forest fires.

WHEELER:

So you raised the troubling backlog of deferred maintenance by the Forest Service on its road network. The Forest Service's own road network is already over 370,000 miles of forest roads, many of which are in poor condition. These poor conditions mean that sediment pollution is fairly routine here in our neck of the woods, in the salmon bearing streams of Northern California and Southern Oregon. In the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board's jurisdiction, which includes much of the Klamath-Siskiyou region, 61% of watersheds are already listed as impaired under the Clean Water Act because of sediment pollution, and the number one source of sediment pollution is roads.

So going back to the Bush administration, the Bush administration recognized that the Forest Service had too many roads in the first place and were overtaxed and overstretched in their management, and so created something called the Travel Management Rule that the Trump administration is now also proposing to eliminate. Michael, do you want to talk a little bit about the Travel Management Rule?

DOTSON:

Yeah, it's a really important tool when it comes to forest management, definitely not my strongest area of expertise, but KS Wild over the last 10 or 15 years, working with groups like yours and others, every forest is required to come up with a forest management plan, right? Part of that management plan is to create a motor vehicle use map and other guidelines that help put sideboards on where travel and transportation happens on the forest. It's essential, I think, to good planning for us to know where it's appropriate to have that sort of travel. I think it's also important for us to understand that the agencies also have to protect natural resources.

And so I think what we're seeing here with the travel management rule is upending a guideline that has been really helpful at controlling and containing unfettered use of motorized vehicles in places where they probably don't belong. I think somewhere they said that 430 million acres of public lands are governed by this travel management rule. This is, of course, on the heels of trying to roll back the roadless rule so these two come together. And what it does is it just dismantles the safeguards that I think helps keep the public safe, the forest accessible, and frankly promotes what I think is good multiple use mandates. Places where people can go escape the hum of an engine or the exhaust smells and enjoy their forests and trails in a quiet manner. And I think we're losing out if this rule along with the roadless rule were to be implemented. There's not a lot of sideboards keeping people from driving wherever they want.

And I think that travel management rule, we see this happening in places right now in the Chetco River watershed. One of our colleagues was up there recently and we're seeing a lot more illegal use, illegal trails being made. And the agency is just throwing their hands up and saying well there's rules coming out there's not a whole lot we can do right now. And so I think we're already seeing some concerning behavior just with this rule being in a draft phase. I think we're going to see more problems in the backcountry if this travel management rule were to be repealed as well.

WHEELER:

Absolutely. I think of a field trip that I was on once on the Smith River where there was a user generated road which is another way of saying an illegally created road by OHV users that helped to spread Port Orford cedar root rot. We have roads and we have travel restrictions for a reason because these are sensitive natural resources and it only takes one Yahoo with a four-wheeler riding through a fen or a wetland to permanently alter the ecological capacity of those regions. So it's concerning.

I will also say that I love e-bikes. I love folks riding to places in town on their e-bikes but part of this proposed revision of the or proposed yeah revision of the travel management rule appears to be to allow more e-bike use out in the wildlands and frankly I don't really want to be on a hiking trail and be run over by a 75 pound person going ham on their e-bike. I think that there are right places and wrong places for these things to exist and I am concerned by the Trump administration.

DOTSON:

Yeah, if you take that travel management rule, Tom, and look at even what's in the roadless rule rescission documents, they make it clear, right? This is really about the people that will benefit are motorized vehicle users, the people that will suffer in one way, and have a lessened experience with those looking for quiet, passive recreation, foot-powered recreation. So I hear all those concerns. I think what we see on the Oregon side is a really popular trail, like the McGrew Trail, a really popular OHV trail, that the Forest Service was very diligent a few years ago with their travel management, saying, we don't want to have overuse in this area, given sensitive plants, like Port Orford. We don't want to see the spread of Port Orford root rot disease. And they actually did a really good job of saying, we're going to have some level of special use on the McGrew Trail.

And I kind of worry about what forest plans will look like if there are no guidelines or guardrails using a transportation term to prevent places like the McGrew Trail from being overrun again.

WHEELER:

All right, let's get into some specifics of how we're seeing the Trump administration now implement individual projects in your neck of the woods. So as you say, KS Wild's watch is over five million acres of public land. This includes both Bureau of Land Management land and Forest Service land. And I know that your staff has been hard at work, that the projects are becoming bigger and more impactful. Do you want to tell us about a couple that you all are working on these days and how they might be an example of this trend under the Trump administration to have more impactful projects?

DOTSON:

Yeah, another great question, Tom. I think it's not only seeing projects that do harm to clean water or fisheries or wildlife habitat, for say spotted owls or red tree voles. I think one of the most concerning things we're seeing from the Trump administration is the erosion of the public participation, the public engagement process, right? What used to be opportunities for the public to engage substantially are now going away. I think the roadless rule is a great example. I've learned recently that when the roadless rule was being formulated all those years ago, there were over 600 public hearings. And even when the Bush administration was trying to repeal it, there were hundreds of public hearings. Not a single public hearing is being held for this roadless rule. Maybe one, I think, for a tribe in Alaska. And the comment period was originally 30 days and the vast majority of the other ones were three or four months.

So I think besides what we're seeing on the ground with environmental impacts and more intense logging, I think the biggest concern for all of us is that they are taking away the public's ability to participate in decision and decision-making for our public lands. There's a couple of projects, for those of your viewers in California that aren't always familiar with public lands in Oregon, we have a unique arrangement in Western Oregon from the coast, the Cascades, the lower elevation public lands are managed by the Bureau of Land Management and not the Forest Service. The BLM is Department of Interior, Forest Service is Department of Ag. So they actually have two different mandates. And even though they're neighbors here, it's actually really hard for the two of them to work together and do projects together. So we've got one agency, the Forest Service, who seems to be doing a lot of the right things with forest resiliency and fire resiliency and fewer commercial timber sales.

But for us, one of the biggest issues, I think, under the Trump administration, the second version is a real effort to get more and more old growth logging done in Western Oregon's BLM forests. So we work in places like near Grants Pass, there's a project now called Last Chance. Not only are we seeing Northern Spotted Owl habitat being taken out, but we're also seeing stream buffers shrinking. We're seeing the agency ignore buffers for clean water tributaries that provide cold water for salmon and steelhead. We're seeing in places like the Applegate where heat domes and drought is really changing the ecosystem of that lower elevation dug fir. And instead of thinking about succession and what it means for climate change on these forests and maybe adapting, we just keep going back doing the same old, same old, which is cut and replant in zones that probably are places that we shouldn't be replanting commercial forests in the future.

I think the biggest thing for us coming up that is really the most concerning piece, the BLM in Western Oregon is looking to overhaul their Western Oregon Resource Management Plan. This is a management plan that covers, I think, a couple of million acres, all the way from Curry and Josephine and Jackson County up through counties that touch the Columbia River. So 18 Oregon counties have BLM forests and the agency has made it clear, the goal of this management plan revision is to quadruple or quintuple logging. You can't do that, Tom, without overlooking protections under the Endangered Species Act. You can't do that without ignoring the Clean Water Act. I mean, they're talking essentially about the sole purpose for these forests is timber production, not water quality, not wildlife habitat, not recreation, but timber production. And I think that goes against everything that we hear about with multiple use. It is being tipped in the favor of the timber industry. And I think that's probably for us, not just a single project, but just the overhaul of the Western Oregon Forest Management Plans that give us probably the most heartburn coming into the fall and winter of this upcoming season.

WHEELER:

Michael, unfortunately, we're nearing the end of our program. I think that we could probably go for another hour talking about all the things that KS Wild is doing, but just maybe curious. This is this is our second tour through a Trump administration. This one seems particularly bad. It seems more impactful than than Trump's first term. Have you learned any lessons about how to be most effective during a Trump term? What are what are the things that environmental organizations or activists should be doing to best protect public lands?

DOTSON:

Yeah, gosh, Tom, that's a really great one. I think what I'm being inspired by and what I'm seeing work right now is an example of what's happening in Cave Junction in the Illinois Valley around some mining. Here, the Trump administration is trying to fast track every project imaginable that comes with mining or the new green energy, critical minerals, rare earth minerals. And what I'm seeing is people not putting faith in their politicians to save them, but really organizing at the local level. And what we're seeing in places like Cave Junction is we have a dysfunctional Congress. Let's not let that stop us from doing what's right.

And so KS Wild is working with some local community activists out there. And we're really just trying to find other avenues for protection. Under the Clean Water Act, states have authority to designate certain waterways under certain water quality standards called outstanding resource waters. These people are lobbying their city council for support. They're going to their chamber of commerce asking for support. And they're starting at the grassroots. They're starting a campaign to say, we want to build something from the bottom and actually work with entities that have the authority that isn't the federal government to actually get some stuff done in the interim and not wait around for Congress to change or the White House leadership to change.

So I kind of keep pointing to examples like that where I don't want Trump to get in my head. And so instead of letting that happen, I'm organizing with people at the local level. And we're hosting petitions, hosting potlucks, just building a community presence. So no matter what comes our way, there's widespread support from businesses and fishing people and tree huggers and hunters, people that may not always get along, but they all love their backyard public lands and the access that they have. And that's sort of what I've been learning about this time.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, the good news is that this too shall pass, right? Yeah. And we have midterm elections coming up that could change the dynamic. And we'll be watching those closely, I'm sure. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show, telling us about Southern Oregon. Once again, where can folks find out more information about KS Wild?

DOTSON:

Yeah, go to our website, www.kswild.org.

WHEELER:

Pretty easy, all right. Well, thank you, Michael, and thank you for all the good work that KS Wild does for Northern California and Southern Oregon.

DOTSON:

Hey, thanks, Tom.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.