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