Environmental groups are pressuring Governor Kate Brown and the Oregon Board of Forestry to find new leadership on forestry issues and increase protections for coastal drinking water flowing through private forestland.
That push accompanies legislative efforts to tighten rules for aerial pesticide spraying on forests and to enact sweeping reforms to the state’s Forest Practices Act, including restrictions on logging near streams and on slopes prone to landslide.
More than a dozen environmental advocacy groups signed letters to Brown and the forestry board after EarthFix reported in January about how a state publication that identified logging as a risk to coastal communities’ drinking water was shelved. That action came after members of the timber industry and the state’s Department of Forestry disputed the report’s scope, methodology, and some of its findings.
In one letter, environmentalists urged Brown to order the original report be published, to develop policies and legislation to increase drinking water protections in rural Oregon and to appoint a water quality scientist to the Board of Forestry, a specialization its current board members do not have.
“As a state we must not allow corporate lobbyists to dictate what scientific evidence our regulatory agencies are allowed to consider in protecting those values, or allow them to completely capture a major state agency to the point where it advocates against public health rather than for it,” says the letter, which was signed by 11 organizations including the Audubon Society, Oregon Wild and the Center for Biological Diversity.
From Oregon Public Broadcasting: https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-environmental-groups-lawmakers-target-logging-rules-/