Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance to empire. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the work you see here, receive access to rare private posts with behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.
As I wrote last month: “Walking in an old-growth forest is quite something. Time oozes like molasses. Insects dance in sunbeams. The songs of rare birds trill from snags. Tiny purple and white orchids dot the forest floor. Soil and decaying fallen trees blend together as deep sponge. And the trees themselves: broad, corrugated, fire-scarred, ancient.”
These places are under threat. There is a full-scale assault being launched on forests in the western United States. The legal framework is coming first. The chainsaws will be next. There’s no time for analysis or mourning. It’s time to mobilize and fight.
On Tuesday, August 18th, the Trump Administration announced that it is moving forward with a plan to rescind the “Roadless Rule,” a regulation which has protected 59 million acres of National Forest across the United States — including 2 million acres in Oregon — from most logging projects for a quarter century. The Roadless Rule only exists because 25 years ago, thousands of ordinary people fought like hell to protect forests in a grassroots rebellion against corporate-government logging. It’s time to rise up again.
Fifty nine million acres is equivalent to a square more than 300 miles per side, roughly 60% of the size of the State of California or about the size of Oregon. This comes on top of plans currently in progress at the Bureau of Land Management to quintuple logging on BLM-managed public lands in western Oregon. Similar plans are being prepared in BLM offices across the country.
Once an old-growth forest is logged, it won’t return for hundreds of years – and that’s assuming climatic conditions even allow them to regrow. With the world heading for 4℃ or more of warming by 2100, if these forests are logged, they unlikely to EVER recover to their former condition. And they would far worsen global warming. If the whole 59 million acres were logged, it would release tens of gigatonnes of carbon emissions — triple annual US emissions.
It’s time to act
Big green organizations and other gatekeepers are only good for getting their followers to submit public comments and filing lawsuits. That is fine work. But it won’t be enough. Not by a long shot. People need to begin organizing now to fight for these lands all across the country.
In my area, people are beginning to mobilize by gathering in these threatened forests to directly connect with what is at stake, build knowledge of the lay of the land, and plan opposition. I invite you to join us for an in-person gathering on Sunday, August 30th to visit one of the threatened forests.
DATE: August 30th
LOCATION: ~30 miles from Eugene, OR. Precise location shared upon RSVP.
TIME: Carpools will meet in Eugene at 10:15am. We’ll meet at the site at 11am and you should be back by 3pm.
BRING: Water bottle, lunch or snacks, clothing and footwear suitable for the weather and for hiking. You may also want to bring a camera, notebook, art supplies, a pad to sit on, etc., and a small backpack to carry these supplies.
NOTE: This hike may involve covering between 1 and 4 miles. We’ll make accommodations as much as possible for people’s ability.
HOW TO RSVP: send an email to:
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