WOPR of a plan stopped!

Today, Secretary Salazar and the Department of Interior withdrew the WOPR, the Western Oregon Plan Revisions, a plan fraught with deep legal difficulties and tainted with bad science. The logging plan would have led to wide-scale logging in Oregon forests and harm to endangered northern spotted owls and salmon.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the Bush plan could not stand up to legal challenges under the Endangered Species Act. “There is broadening agreement that it is time to reevaluate the logging of old growth forests on BLM lands,” said Secretary Salazar. “There is also agreement that logging should not occur in areas that would put water quality at risk, and we should fully consider advances in forestry and increased knowledge of species’ needs over the last two decades.” Salazar directed the Bureau of Land Management, ­in coordination with the Fish and Wildlife Service­, to help protect jobs and timber infrastructure in the region by identifying identify ecologically sound timber sales under the Northwest Forest Plan that can get wood to the mills over the coming months.

In the same announcement, Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks Thomas Strickland said that the federal government will also ask the District Court to vacate the Fish and Wildlife Service's 2008 revision of the critical habitat for the spotted owl, on which the WOPR was in part based, because Interior's Inspector General determined that the decision-making process for the owl's recovery plan was illegally influenced by Bush administration politics.

With the withdrawal of the WOPR, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) forests in western Oregon will again be managed under the Northwest Forest Plan, which guided BLM timber sales from 1994 until December 2008. Conservation Northwest encouraged citizen action against the plan, together with the Siskiyou Project, Cascadia Wildlands, and many others.

Listen to NPR coverage of this story.