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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 18, 2012)
NEWS Pedery says are not perfect, but do draw some lines in the sand. He says given the present and expected post- election makeup of the Senate and the House “at the end of the day, if anything is going to happen to resolve county payments, Sen. Wyden is the only person who can do it.” He says that before this Wyden had been qui- et about the DeFazio bill. Wyden’s principles include stable funding for Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has entered the federal forests counties, sustainability, wilderness and permanent land and county funding fray by proposing a forest panel conservation, following federal environmental laws and made up of environmentalists, county offi cials and tim- safeguarding old growth. Wyden also calls for “oppor- ber interests. The panel, which is based on the proposed tunities to fi nally honor unrealized treaty obligations to DeFazio-Walden-Schrader forest legislation, is tasked the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and with coming up with a plan for using federal Bureau Siuslaw Indians, and the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua of Land Management O&C forests to fund payments to Tribe of Indians, understanding that some lands consid- cash-strapped Oregon counties. ered for their reservations Conservation group Or- may not be O&C lands. egon Wild was specifi cally Both tribes have treaties “dis-invited” from being a pre-dating the O&C Lands member of the panel, says Act.” Steve Pedery, the group’s Walden and DeFazio conservation director. He want to not raise taxes and says the enviro groups that ˹ S T E V E P E D E RY, O R E G O N W I L D to log their way out of the were selected don’t have a county funding crunch, lot of history with working Pedery says, but “if the on the O&C lands issue. governor just comes up just with a logging solution and The groups selected include the Wild Salmon Center, doesn’t have the support, it really can’t go anywhere.” the Pew Foundation and Defenders of Wildlife. Among He adds, “Wyden has to have something he can actually the timber interests are Allyn Ford of Roseburg Forest pass.” — Camilla Mortensen Products and Dale Riddle of Seneca Sawmills. No Lane County commissioners are on the panel. Pedery says that fellow conservationist Andy Kerr, who refused to join the panel, summed it up when he said the effort is just “putting lipstick on a pig.” Pedery says, “I can think of some other metaphors, but they are probably not fi t to print.” Oregon Wild and Kerr had Congressman Peter DeFazio’s GOP challenger, Art vociferous objections to DeFazio’s controversial for- Robinson, is back at it this election with some help from est plan, which called to basically split the forestlands a few deep-pocketed, out-of-state friends. A spread of in half, partly for logging (and some clearcutting) and just under 11 percent kept DeFazio in Oregon’s Fourth partly for conservation. Congressional District in the 2010 election. Now the man Pedery wants to call attention to a list of O&C lands behind Citizens United is putting money into the effort to principles recently released by Sen. Ron Wyden, which beat the populist Democratic congressman. PANEL PROPOSED FOR ‘FIXING’ FORESTS ‘I can think of some other metaphors, but they are probably not fit to print.’ CITIZENS UNITED VERSUS DEFAZIO Conservative litigator James Bopp Jr.’s Republican Super PAC Inc. (RSPAC) purchased $139,985 in adver- tising on local television stations KVAL (CBS), KEZI (ABC), KMTR (NBC) and KLSR (Fox) between Oct. 3 and Oct. 12, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) public data records. Bopp formed the PAC with Republican National Committee members Solomon Yue of Oregon and Roger Villere of Louisiana. In the world of campaign fi nance, Bopp Jr.’s shadow stretches farther than most; he is the legal mind behind Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. Bopp is the treasurer and general counsel to RSPAC. Art Robinson is thus far the only candidate anywhere to receive funds from RSPAC, which is 92 percent (about $239,000) funded by a single donor — Bob Mercer — co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies and the same man who spent nearly $600,000 with the Concerned Taxpay- ers of America (CTA) to fund Robinson’s 2010 effort. “Right now it’s the Wild West of campaign fi nance,” DeFazio said in a recent interview. “This is an attempt by the wealthiest, most powerful special interests in this country — individuals and major corporations, to buy our country — it’s unprecedented.” DeFazio has received PAC money too, though from very different sources. According to FEC records, through June of this year 47 percent of his campaign funding came from PACs such as United Transportation Union PAC ($5,000) and American Council of Engineer- ing Companies PAC ($5,000). It remains to be seen whether the television ads will make a difference in the race for the House seat this No- vember, but DeFazio says this issue is much bigger than any single race: “People need to get angry and send a message to Wall Street, send a message to the U.S. Cham- ber of Commerce, send a message to the Supreme Court — that our country is not for sale. We’re not going to let you have it. We’re going to win this election and then we’re going to start to fi x the unbelievable damage you’ve done.” — Shelley Deadmond and Camilla Mortensen You’ve probably never seen a streaked horned lark — a little bird with feather tufts on its head that call to mind the horns of a teeny-tiny buffalo — because they are only about 6 to 8 inches long and there are only about 1,600 of them left in the world. But some of the few little yellowish and brown birds that remain live in the Willamette Valley and they have a liking for airports. The streaked horned lark and a fellow prairie species, the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfl y, have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wild- life Service as additions to the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants this month. To be precise, it’s less that the birds, which once ranged from southern Oregon up into Canada, like hang- ing out with planes and helicopters and it’s more that they like the grass around the airports, according to Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “The lark likes short grass,” he says. “All their habitat has been lost to agriculture, to development and to for- est encroachment because there’s no fi re anymore. Air- ports turn out to be good habitat.” The USFWS proposal also calls for designating 6,875 acres of protected critical habitat for the butterfl y and 12,159 acres for the bird in Washington and Oregon. The lark and butterfl y became candidates for the en- dangered species list in 2001 and lingered there, while their numbers dwindled, for more than 10 years. Green- wald says a 2011 settlement between CBD and USFWS means the agency has to make decisions on endangered species listings for 757 species by 2018. 8 October 18, 2012 • eugeneweekly.com The streaked horned lark and the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfl y are now found only at a handful of scattered loca- tions around the Puget Sound, Olympic Peninsula, Wash- ington Coast, Columbia River and Willamette Valley, according to the CBD. Greenwald says the Willamette prairies are a highly endangered ecosystem, with “only 2 percent left of what they used to be.” He adds, “Protecting these species will protect this really rare habitat.” Native American burning in the valley used to produce the kind of habitat the lark and checkerspot need — the same habitat needed for the already listed Willamette dai- sy, Kincaid’s lupine and Fender’s blue butterfl y. The spe- cies depend on “disturbed” landscapes, according to the USFWS, which says that the largest known populations of streaked horned larks breed in the southern Willamette Valley at the Corvallis Municipal Airport and on the Wil- lamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge Complex. Because the birds like airports and farms despite their use of heavy equipment and pesticides, USFWS is put- ting forth a “4(d) rule,” a special type of rule that can increase or decrease a species’ protections. In this case the agency would like to relax the “take” prohibitions re- lated to airport and agriculture in the habitat area since things like airport maintenance actually seem to benefi t the lark. When a species is “taken” it is harassed, captured or killed. The USFWS is taking comments on the proposed en- dangered species listings through Dec. 10. For more in- formation go to at wkly.ws/1dd — Camilla Mortensen PHOTO BY A ARON BARNA USF WS SAVE BUTTERFLIES AND HORNED BIRDS TAYLOR’S CHECKERSPOT BUTTERFLY
