Yes, the professional litigants from Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands are protesting a BLM-approved logging operation on 135 acres of replanted forest in the Coast Range. The second-growth Douglas firs were planted by civilian volunteers in the aftermath of the Tillamook burns, which ravaged much of the Coast Range forests in the 1930s. The plantings were done with an eye toward eventual harvest, and as sections are now becoming overgrown, they are in need of thinning that will improve forest health: variable retention harvest, as it's known, is designed to leave many trees standing in order to naturally reseed and regenerate the forest while creating additional wildlife habitat as the young trees grow.
Nope, say the litigants: they claim that regeneration harvest is just another term for clearcut. They want the trees left alone because they "think public lands have higher and better uses."
Which is another way of saying that they want to hike around from time to time as they munch their granola bars and pat each other on the fanny because they're saving the planet. Or as Oregon's former First Squeeze put it, "I don't work for gov. Kitzhaber; I work for the Earth!" Of course, she's now one of the subjects of two federal investigations, so....
