Coast Range Radio

Historic LA wildfires are still smoldering, the Oregon legislature is back in session, a massively controversial plan to drastically amend the northwest forest plan governing management policies on over 20 million acres of our most precious forests barrels forward, and that little matter of he who shall not be named returning to power and confirming that, like most sequels, this one will be worse,...

This is our first episode of 2025, and while we brace for the tidal wave of insanity coming our way on the federal level, we are also preparing for Oregon’s biennial legislative session. If you don’t know, Oregon only has full legislative sessions in odd years, meaning that 2025 will be a big year for Oregon politics and policy.  Oregon’s session runs from late January through late June, but most...

Today’s show is the second part of a recent talk by conservationist and author, George Wuerthner, on the failures and fallacies of some of the ingrained beliefs around wildfires and wildfire suppression. George Wuerthner is a well-known ecologist and author who has dedicated his career to studying and advocating for wilderness and wildlife conservation. He is the author of nearly 40 books on envir...

Our last episode was a great discussion with a Forest Service scientist and a forest ecologist with the Nature Conservancy about the effects of various fire treatments on subsequent fire behavior.  While I appreciated their perspective and research, I wanted to bring in a different viewpoint on fire and forest ecology. It’s important to remember that western forests have existed and thrived long b...

Like it or not, fire politics affects every aspect of public forest policy and the rural landscape, and that is not changing anytime soon. But is science or politics guiding the policy?  Are management decisions being made with forest ecology and community resilience as the top priorities, or are certain actors using fire as a smoke screen to score political wins, enrich wealthy mill owners, and p...

As we all collectively live through the unfolding trauma of the 2024 election results, I am going to share a conversation I had yesterday with two of my colleagues in the climate justice world that I found really helpful in starting to process what this election could mean for climate justice and our movement, and how to engage in these early stages. I’m joined today by Brenna Bell from 350pdx and...

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.  We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis”. Those are the opening sentences of the 2024 State of the Climate Report , led in part by scientists at Oregon State University.  I’m willing to bet that not...

Oregon Rural Action and Food and Water Watch recently conducted a rare flyover of Threemile Canyon Farms, one of Oregon’s most notorious factory cattle farms, also known by the simultaneously anodyne and horrifying technical name: confined animal feeding operation, or CAFO, in Morrow County. In conjunction with that, both organizations have released detailed, interactive maps highlighting the exte...

Freshwater, i.e. non-salinated water, is arguably the most precious resource on earth, and in Oregon, by law, all water belongs to the public.  However, if you examine who actually controls water usage in Oregon, you might come away with a very different impression. Water rights, and the laws that govern them, are incredibly consequential for both humans and ecosystems, and will only become more s...

Today’s episode is part two of my interview with Rand Schenk, author of a great new book on history of the Forest Service, its founder, Gifford Pinchot, and over 100 years of forest management and mismanagement in the Pacific Northwest. The book, “Forest Under Siege: The Story of Old Growth After Gifford Pinchot”,  chronicles the Forest Service’s progressive populist origins, how it abandoned its...

Today’s episode is part one of a two part interview with Rand Schenk, author of a fascinating and timely new history of the Forest Service, its founder, Gifford Pinchot, and over 100 years of forest management and mismanagement in the Pacific Northwest. The book, “Forest Under Siege: The Story of Old Growth After Gifford Pinchot”,  explores the Forest Service’s progressive populist origins, how it...

Whether you live in a city, a small town, or even if you get your water from a well like I do, one of the biggest threats to drinking water in the Pacific Northwest is industrial logging. (A hugely notable exception is portland, which as my guest will touch on in the interview, does not allow logging in its drinking water source, the Bull Run watershed.  Portland’s water also happens to be famous...

The Coast Range Association is a founding member of the brand new Oregon Ocean Alliance, which has formed to more effectively advocate for Oregon’s ocean and coast ecosystems.  In a future episode, I’ll be talking with some of the other founding members about our mission and goals and all of that good stuff. The reason I bring it up today is that one of our top ocean priorities is protecting and r...

About a year and half ago, we did an episode on a Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, timber sale in Southern Oregon called Poor Windy, as part of our Worth More Standing series highlighting some of the biggest threats to mature and old growth forests on public lands. Recently, community activists set up a tree sit in an old growth grove that was targeted for logging within the Poor Windy sale, and...

Today, we’re going to go deep on an incredibly important subject, albeit one with a somewhat less than stirring name if you aren’t already familiar: The northwest forest plan The northwest forest plan sets the overall management strategy for 17 National Forests across a staggering 24 million acres of federal lands in Washington, Oregon and northwestern California, and the forest service is in the...

It is important to celebrate our victories, and today we get to talk about two of them! The Oregon Board of Forestry (BoF) recently voted to approve its first ever Habitat Conservation Plan on State Forests, and a bill to fully fund and strengthen Oregon’s Marine Reserve Program sailed through the recent legislative session. To talk about these victories and get updates on what’s ahead for both of...

We often think of the land and the sea as separate worlds that have little to do with each other.  But that barrier is much more fluid and interconnected than many people realize. We’ve talked on this program before about what folks call the ‘Land-Sea Connection’, and today we’re going to talk about the ‘connection’ piece of that equation, estuaries! Estuaries are where the land and sea meet and i...

On today’s show, Canopy of Titans: the Life and Times of the Great North American Temperate Rainforest ! Canopy of Titans is a new book written by journalists Paul Koberstein and Jessica Applegate which shines a light on the critical importance of protecting the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Paul and Jessica spent years reporting and researching for this book, traveling from the...

Where I live in the coast range, I am surrounded in all directions by industrial timber plantations for miles in all directions. Now, I have no problem with logging.  I think silviculture is a good and noble profession.  But it is plain for anyone to see that the short rotation, financialized plantation management practiced by the Wall Street investors who own the vast majority of private timberla...

For those of us who work to make a positive impact on the world, there is often a default towards focusing on big national and international level issues. Between the rapidly worsening climate crisis, national campaigns to preserve Mature and Old growth forests, decarbonization and electrification fights, never-ending election cycles, on and on,  it’s easy to forget that there are important local,...

I don’t have to tell anyone reading this that here in the west, wildfires are a fact of life. I’m also sure that most folks are already aware that the climate crisis, combined with more and more homes being built in and around forest lands is creating an escalating cycle of devastation in fire prone communities. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on politicians and agencies to act, or at lea...

This is our first episode of 2024, and I can’t think of a better guest to start the year off with than State Representative David Gomberg. Representative Gomberg represents House district 10, which encompassess Lincoln County, as well as parts of western Benton and Lane counties, and happens to be my State Representative. Among many other positions, he serves as co-vice chair of the powerful Ways...

It’s dark, it’s cold, and it’s very rainy.  We may be a couple weeks from the solstice as of this recording, but for my money, we’ve definitely entered another coast range winter. I love to use this time of year to reflect and take stock, so I figured it was a great time to invite the Coast Range Association’s Executive director, Chuck Willer back for our annual year in review episode. You can fin...

I recently had a great interview with Brenna TwoBears from the Indigenous Environmental Network, but I couldn’t fit our whole conversation into our last full episode. Brenna came on to talk about IEN’s ongoing fight to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, and how you can take action by submitting comments to the army corps of engineers by December 13th .   But we also covered a lot more ground, a...

Today, we have not one, but two amazing guests talking about two important and timely topics: the Dakota Access Pipeline fight, and the recent Elliot State Forest drama. Bob Sallinger joins to walk me through the bombshell that Oregon State University just dropped on the Elliott State forest process, and why them walking away might actually be good news. But first, we’ll hear a short excerpt of my...