Activists Put a Stop to the White Castle Clearcut

from Forest Defense Now A U.S. District court judge has ruled in favor of Cascadia Wildlands, and Oregon Wild, and primary attorney Jennifer Schwarz in their lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management’s “White Castle” logging project. The legal win for White Castle is exciting news, and we can all breathe a little easier knowing that this forest will not be clearcut. But the battle to save White Castle did not begin in the courtroom; it began in the forest with the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team and later on, the Cascadia Forest Defenders. The White Castle timber sale proposed clear-cutting a 160-acre swath of native forest, calling it a “Variable Retention Harvest.” VRH is a form of clearcutting developed by scientists and marketed as “eco-forestry.” The BLM and the timber industry are using VRH to get around environmental protection laws and fast track clearcutting across the state. Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild has called VRH “a cynical attempt to pass off clearcutting century-old trees as restoration.”  White Castle was designed as a pilot project for VRH. This means it would have been used as a prototype to replicate similar clearcuts on O&C lands and throughout the state. In 2011, the […]