A federal judge has struck down a commercial logging project covering more than 16,000 acres in northwest Oregon, ruling that the Bureau of Land Management did not properly analyze impacts to imperiled species like the threatened northern spotted owl.
The order issued this week by Senior Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon sides with conservation groups that sued BLM in 2022 to block the tree-thinning project, concluding the approved plan violated the National Environmental Policy Act.
Aiken gave BLM and the conservation groups challenging the project — Cascadia Wildlands and its attorneys at the Western Environmental Law Center — 30 days to devise a remedy to address the flaws outlined in the order and to submit it to the court.
BLM has argued that the project — which included trees as old as 130 years in an area that covers seven watersheds and threatened species such as the marbled murrelet and coho salmon — is needed to restore “ecosystem diversity to late successional forests,” according to court documents.
