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Three organizations, saying that 250-year-old trees are being illegally cut, have taken legal action against the Bureau of Land Management.
Conservation groups are asking for a federal judge to stop what they call an illegal logging operation in an old-growth forest 45 minutes southwest of Eugene.
Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon Wild and Umpqua Watersheds filed a motion Tuesday, May 12, in an ongoing lawsuit in the Eugene division of U.S. District Court against the Bureau of Land Management, alleging the agency violated three environmental laws through its Blue and Gold timber project.
They are asking for a restraining order and preliminary injunction that pauses work until the court rules on the broader case over the legality of the project, which is located in northern Douglas County near the Lane County line near Sutherlin in the Umpqua River watershed.
The long-controversial Blue and Gold project, first proposed during the Biden administration, covers about 3,225 acres in the southern Oregon Coast Range — including sections of old-growth forests, where many trees are more than 100 years old.
BLM manages the land under the Northwestern and Coastal Oregon Resource Management Plan, which is intended to balance timber harvesting with protections for water quality, wildlife habitat and other natural resources.
The plan operates in accordance with multiple federal laws, including the O&C Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
Under the O&C Act — named for lands once owned by the Oregon and California Railroad — 18 western Oregon counties receive a share of timber revenue generated from BLM land sales.
According to Cascadia Wildlands, organizers recently found, in the project area, freshly cut tree stumps measuring up to 67 inches in diameter. The group argues the BLM resource management plan protects trees larger than 40 inches in diameter and established before 1850. They estimate some of the trees cut were about 250 years old.
In the complaint, attorneys for Cascadia Wildlands, including Nick Cady, argue BLM failed to properly identify protected trees and lacked sufficient justification to remove them for operational or safety reasons, such as road construction.
The groups first sued the agency in September 2024, alleging BLM misrepresented the age of parts of the forest to facilitate logging.
“The Bureau of Land Management initially denied that this old-growth forest even existed in the project area, but this was proven untrue by our volunteers and agency whistleblowers. After being caught in that lie, BLM pivoted and assured the Court that the agency would take measures to protect these unique legacy trees,” Cady said in a statement Tuesday.
“This unsurprisingly was also a fabrication; the BLM simply cannot be trusted to oversee our public forests,” he said.
The lawsuit comes as BLM revises its broader forest management plan under pressure from the Trump administration to increase timber harvest levels. Administration officials have pointed to logging levels from the 1960s and 1970s, when widespread clear-cutting reshaped federal forest policy.
BLM did not immediately respond to requests for comment. American Forest Resource Council, also named as a defendant, did not have a statement as of Tuesday, a spokesperson said.
