URGENT DEADLINE—DECEMBER 8, 2020:

Please submit letters opposing the transfer of ownership of the Elliott State Forest to Oregon State University’s College of Forestry to landboard.testimony@state.or.us by 10:00 a.m. on Monday, December 7. According to the DSL website, written testimony will be given to the three members of the State Land Board, and will also be posted on the organization’s website. Those wishing to give spoken testimony on December 8 can sign up here. The deadline is the same as for letters—Monday, December 7, 10:00 a.m. Please be aware that the time limit for public testimony is restricted to a maximum of two minutes per person.  

Please send letters opposing the transfer of ownership of Oregon’s first state forest and the State’s last remaining public forest containing old-growth to the State Land Board, c/o the Department of State Lands, by Sunday, November 29, 5:00 p.m.  Letters can be sent via DSL’s online form or via email.

OICR refuses the notion of providing “feedback” on a proposal whose aims, goals, intentions, conditions, and processes we reject entirely.  According to DSL’s website, letters from the public will be used to “assist DSL and OSU [Oregon State University] in identifying areas where additional information, discussion, or consideration may be needed.”  We urge writers to oppose in no uncertain terms the very idea of cutting down one of our last old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and, indeed, in the world under the guise of “research” and the compromised process that made this idea acceptable in the first place.  We're simply out of forests and out of time. 

In public testimony at the Department of State Lands in Salem on Tuesday, December 10, 2019, OICR urges the members of the Oregon State Land Board to leave the Elliott State Forest inviolate and inviolable, with a complete ban on roads and logging.

SOURCES

Friends of OSU Old Growth

Rob Davis, “After logging 420-year-old tree, Oregon State announces new protections for old growth,”The Oregonian/Oregon Live, updated Oct 22, 2019; posted Oct 21, 2019.

George Plaven, “OSU celebrates opening of mass timber research lab,” Capital Press, October 15, 2019

READING

Sir James Frazer, “Departmental Kings of Nature,” The New Sacred Bough, 70-72