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

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

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

Two national monuments in Utah have been restored, but it isn’t over.

Upon the election last November of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., as the 46th president of the United States, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief for the environment, the body politic, and the republic. Goodbye, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

The Elliott State Forest (ESF) was about to be sold to a timber syndicate that would promptly liquidate almost all of its remaining old trees. Reaction to the State Land Board’s 2016 plan to sell the Elliott State Forest to a timber syndicate. Source: Francis Eatherington.

This is the second of two Public Lands Blog posts that examine the management (and mismanagement) of more than 2 million acres of federal forestlands in western Oregon, administered by the Bureau of Land Management. Part 1 examined the history of rampant clear-cutting of old-growth forests and vast windfalls of revenues to local counties as a result. Part 2 examines the current threats to these public lands from the timber industry and local counties, and the opportunity that could present itself to secure permanent comprehensive congressional conservation of these imperiled lands.

We don’t have one national election for president in 2020. Rather we have fifty-one elections (in fifty states and the District of Columbia) that will decide the next president of the United States. Today, we can predict with certainty the total number of votes that will be cast for the presidency: 538.

Trigger warning: Dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, liberals, leftists, and/or the excessively woke may find this post hazardous to their hopes, dreams, stereotypes, and/or prejudices and may wish to seek refuge in a safe space.

There is white liberal guilt aplenty about the treatment of Native Americans in Oregon (and rightfully so). The Democrats who supported this legislation came down on the side of Native Americans and, in this case, against nature. As for the Republicans who supported the bill, it was more a matter of it being a politically elegant way to effectively privatize the lands.

We live in a polarized nation divided between rural and urban with the suburbs and exurbs swinging toward the Democrats, allowing that party to retake the House.

In August 2017, President Trump announced his intent to “enhance and modernize” the NEPA regulations, and CEQ responded with a list of actions the following month

This is part one of two parts. Part 1 examines how the courts are changing and public lands conservationists must rely less on litigation to achieve our goals.

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Grants of Clemency (Full Pardons) for Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., and his son, Steven Hammond. The Hammonds are multi-generation cattle ranchers in Oregon imprisoned in connection with a fire that leaked onto a small portion of neighboring public grazing land. The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges.

The Bundy band represents both an existential threat and an existential opportunity for America’s public lands. This is the fourth of four Public Lands Blog posts that examine the government mishandling of the Bundys, the Bundys’ legal troubles, the Bundys’ legal troublemaking, and the opportunities for the conservation community to apply political jujitsu on Bundy et al. to advance the conservation of America’s public lands

This is the second of a two-part examination of proposed oil exploitation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

While climate change is an existential threat and the world must move rapidly from nonrenewable carbon fuels to carbon-free renewable energy sources, the public lands need not be industrialized to save Earth as we know it.

The Trump administration is moving ahead with its intention to review and rescind national monument designations for some public lands. Now a leaked memorandum from Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke shows that he will be pointing to unproclamations of portions of national monuments by previous presidents as precedent.

The Chetco protection provision has yet to pass but has been reintroduced in various forms in every Congress since then. The freestanding bill or its legislative language has been included in sixteen pieces of congressional legislation since that time. Yet Congress still has not gotten its act together to save the Chetco from suction-dredge gold mining.

In a tepid effort to express support for the conservation of the Owyhee Canyonlands, Oregon’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, introduced legislation (S.3048, 114th Congress, the Southeastern Oregon Mineral Withdrawal and Economic Preservation and Development Act) that would permanently withdraw the area from certain forms of mining and would do other things.