Despite a 2017 ruling by the Obama Administration to put a 20-year moratorium on mining in the headwaters of the North Fork Smith River and Illinois River, a new mining company has emerged with plans to mine for nickel in the Baldface Creek watershed. Read more about KS Wild’s work protecting this region from mining here.
Read MoreThe US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released the first ever national inventory of mature and old-growth forests. Want to know what this all means for the protection of forests in the Pacific Northwest?
Read MoreSummer is here and our PLAY (Public Lands and You) Stewardship Program is working hard to protect and restore the important Eight Dollar Mountain Botanical Area for the fifth consecutive year.
Read MorePrescribed fire can have many benefits. It can reduce fine fuels, brush and small trees and reduce subsequent fire severity. It can help forests become more resilient in the face of climate change. Read more about prescribed fire policy at this KS Wild Blog Post .
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Make your voice heard: Join your local community in Curry and Josephine County to speak out to Senator Merkley! Now is a critical time for southern Oregon to engage and support issues that matter to our forests, environmental laws, and communities.
What have we learned since the 2002 Biscuit fire aftermath, and how will it affect land management decisions in the post-Chetco Bar burn area of southwest Oregon?
...with the passage of time it is now possible to look back more objectively at Biscuit fire and the political firestorm that followed in its wake.
Read MoreFollowing decades of fire suppression and logging that created dense young forests, a return to ecosystem resiliency requires thinning second-growth plantations, retaining large trees and forest canopy, and returning the role of fire to these fire-dependent forests.
Read MoreIncreasingly timber interests, conservationists including KS Wild, scientists and federal land management agencies are coming together to focus logging activities on thinning previously logged plantations and in fire-evolved forest stands in which fire suppression has resulted in encroachment by less resilient off-site conifers.
Read MoreUnlike most of North America, we are extremely fortunate to live in a region in which five major wildland complexes have thusfar survived the pressures from logging, mining and road construction. It is our job and responsibility to protect these special places for the those who come after us and for their intrinsic value.
Read MoreWe are celebrating the recent victory to protect some of our most prized rivers from proposed industrial strip mining for a period of 20 years. We are hopeful that this victory will stand, even in the Trump administration.
Read MorePart of our work at KS Wild is to track management decisions by the US Fish and Wildlife service to list at-risk species as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In continuing a 22-year battle to protect their declining populations, we filed lawsuit with three of our conservation allies to list the Pacific fisher. Other species we continue to fight for include the Siskiyou Mountain Salamander, the Wolverine and four species of Lamprey.
Read MoreThe history of the 2.5 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in western Oregon dates back to how the west was settled. One of the biggest obstacles to westward expansion was transportation. Moving goods from one place to the next and encouraging people to move thousands of miles across a rugged, wild landscape was a challenge without the infrastructure and modes of transport we enjoy today.
Read MoreWhile most Americans cherish the idea that public lands belong to and benefit all of us, corporate timber, mining and grazing interests have long sought to privatize public lands in order to maximize profits to their respective industries. While subsidized logging, mining and grazing occur on the vast majority of public lands, these extremists bristle at the idea of there being any rules regarding their exploitation of our forests and rivers.
Read MoreThe forests of the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains are dependent upon fire. For millennia, lightning storms have ignited blazes that sparked the unique plant communities, tree composition and biodiversity that define the region. Our forests are evolved to accommodate the regenerative force of fire.
Read MoreThe mountains of the Kalmiopsis emerged from the ocean floor as result of geological uplift (rather than volcanism) and have been subject to folding and faulting ever since. As a result, the unique soils are packed with heavy metals including nickel, iron, chromium, and magnesium that make life hard for most plant life. To survive in this environment plants have had to evolve and adapt to get by in circumstances that would normally kill most flowering species. More than any other wilderness in the region, the Kalmiopsis is the home of oddball survivors.
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