Bottom Line: The legislative protection of Steens Mountain was incomplete and needs to be completed.

At the turn of this century, the political stars aligned to legislatively protect Steens Mountain for the benefit of this and future generations.

The Biden rule wouldn’t have made any significant improvement to the administration of Bureau of Land Management holdings, regardless of who is ever president.

Bringing back old-growth forests at scale in New England can naturally remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide polluting the atmosphere, carbon that was once safely stored in big old trees.

Both the need and the potential exist to allow vast acreages of New England forestlands to again become old-growth forests.

To be remembered as the greatest public lands conservationist to come out of the Oregon congressional delegation, Wyden needs to step up his game.

Ron Wyden has a way to go to exceed the Oregon public lands conservation legacy of his predecessor, Mark Hatfield, but he can do it before he retires.

58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System are once again in existential jeopardy.

The public lands (and the entire conservation) community is fundamentally mis-organized to address today’s torrent of existential threats to the nation’s public lands.

Both a need and opportunities exist to elevate the conservation status of state public lands.

If currently degraded forests are included in a national monument dedicated to long-term conservation, our grandchildren will be able to see the vast landscape of old-growth Douglas-fir forests that our grandparents saw.

While the number of big trees in the United States has generally been increasing, this increase is from an impoverished baseline and will soon reverse if Big Timber gets its way.

Big old trees play outsized roles in a forest stand in terms of biodiversity, carbon storage, and carbon sequestration.

The excesses of the executive branch will need to be checked by the judicial branch, the legislative branch, and/or the people.

Like bankruptcy, the death of the Northwest Forest Plan has proceeded slowly and might end quickly.

The Trump administration believes that unless it can be sold or collateralized, it has no value.

America’s national forests have lost the greatest inside champion they’ve ever had.

America’s national forests have lost the greatest inside champion they’ve ever had.

Kelp forests are extraordinarily important concentrations of biodiversity and are extremely threatened, along the Oregon coast and around the world.

Many bitter lemons can make quite fine lemonade, but only if the conservation community reinvents itself.