Saving Our Pacific Rivers

We have a new guest blog from the Pacific Rivers Council! Natalie Bennon is a former journalist and grant writer who now does communications and development for the Pacific Rivers Council. Natalie is also the founder and owner of Springtale Strategies. Mountain Rose Herbs is a longtime supporter of Pacific Rivers Council, a non-profit that shares our mission to protect and restore rivers, watersheds, and wildlife.

The Pacific Rivers Council was founded in 1987 by two rafting guides who witnessed first-hand the degradation of Oregon’s rivers...

“It was a moral assault to be out there on the Rogue River or the Deschutes River and see scum, oil slicks, and trash floating down the river. And it turned the clients off,” said Bob Doppelt, one of Pacific Rivers’ two founders.

Today, Pacific Rivers works throughout the Northwest including Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. In Oregon, we are blessed with abundant natural resources. We have beautiful rivers, stunning mountains, and millions of acres of forests. Once upon a time, Oregon led the nation in logging and wood products. But those years are long past. Pacific Rivers is working to protect clean water, healthy rivers, and forests because when left intact, they provide numerous services to people and communities, including clean water and clean air.

Pacific Rivers Council works to protect these resources on federal, state, and private forests lands. In federal forests, the biggest threat right now is proposed logging increases that would reverse many of the protections Americans fought so hard for during the so-called timber wars of the 1990s. These protections have kept the few areas that still have large trees intact, benefiting communities, clean water, our economy, and our high quality of life. To explain the importance of trees to rivers, Pacific Rivers recently produced a video that follows Charley Dewberry, a stream ecologist, and the high school students he works with, scuba diving creeks in the Northwest to count fish and monitor conditions.

In state and private forests, some of the issues are the same, but the game is different. These lands are governed by the Oregon Forest Practices Act, the least protective state forest law on the West Coast. Washington has stronger logging rules. California has stronger logging rules. Oregon falls short, allowing logging closer to streams, dirtying the water, logging on slopes that are too steep with more risk for landslides, lax rules on road building and decommissioning, and an array of toxic herbicides including atrazine, a popular weed poison that kills young salmon and is harmful to humans. Last year, Pacific Rivers produced a video helping educate Oregonians about this issue. The Oregonian has written about the state forest practices act, asking whether it is protective enough of water and rivers.