Victory! Bark halts the Jazz timber sale

We are thrilled to announce that our tenacious efforts to stop the Jazz Timber Sale have succeeded! On December 5th, 2012, the Forest Service withdrew the Jazz Timber Sale, which would have logged 2,000 acres in the most geologically unstable watershed in Mt. Hood National Forest. This is a huge victory for Bark, our volunteers, and the forest!

Over the past two years Bark volunteers and staff have spent over 600 hours groundtruthing the entire Jazz Timber Sale, getting boots on the ground to inform our position and to use in formal NEPA comments on the sale. We organized communities to submit more than 3,000 comments opposing the sale. Our canvassing team talked with more than 100,000 Oregonians about the threat the Jazz Timber Sale posed to coho salmon in the Collawash River Watershed. We brought dozens of Oregonians into the forests threatened by the Jazz Timber Sale project area on Bark-About Hikes. And we let our congressional delegation know that the Jazz Timber Sale would have resulted in the re-opening of 12 miles of decommissioned roads, a policy that makes absolutely no economic or ecological sense.

Our efforts have paid off. The Jazz Timber Sale has been withdrawn and with it, 2,000 acres of the Clackamas River Watershed have been spared from the Forest Service timber program.