by Ann Vileisis
SWO Mineral withdrawal bill hits dead end
It is with great disappointment that I report that the Southwest Oregon Watershed and Salmon Protection Act (SOWSPA)—the legislation to make permanent the temporary 20-year mineral withdrawal for the headwaters of our wild rivers—did not make it across the finish line to become enacted as law in the last Congress. I know many of you have been wondering about it.
As I’ve reported in previous Storm Petrels, this bill was a high priority for Congressman DeFazio and also for our Senators, who had put it forth in the Oregon Recreation Enhancement Act. On the House side, the bill had already passed the entire body of lawmakers, and on the Senate side, the bill had been reported favorably out of committee with a bipartisan vote –and so we’d been told it was all queued up and ready to become part of a public land omnibus (package of bills combined into an act) at the end of the session. We were very hopeful, and all eyes were on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources (SENR) Committee to develop an omnibus bill.
However, no public lands bill ever came together. Exceedingly close elections in Alaska and Georgia meant control of the Senate remained up in the air until early December. This left too little time for negotiations. Higher priority bills to fund the federal government and defense took precedence. And perhaps most significant was the threat of “poison pill” amendments. West Virginia Senator Manchin kept trying to attach riders to any moving bills to weaken environmental safeguards for the benefit of the fossil energy industry (dubbed Machin’s “dirty deal”) while Senator Daines of Montana tried to push a bill that would have undermined the Endangered Species Act. Given these larger factors, there was just no way to advance a public land bill through the closely divided Senate.
And so where does this leave the headwaters of our cherished Wild and Scenic Illinois and North Fork Smith rivers and Hunter Creek and Pistol River? Fortunately, owing to our successful advocacy back in 2015-2016, we still have the 20-year temporary administrative mineral withdrawal in place –so there is more time for Congress to act to make it permanent. The purpose of the temporary administrative withdrawal depends on the bill being introduced again into the House and Senate again in the new session.
We will no longer have our longstanding champion Rep. Peter DeFazio to help us, and the headwaters of the Wild and Scenic Illinois River are now in the district of Rep. Cliff Bentz, who has already voiced more interest in boosting mining in southwest Oregon than in conservation. I trust that Senator Wyden and Merkley will help, and I hope that we’ll soon have a chance to help educate our new Representative Val Hoyle about why protecting the headwaters of our South Coast’s wild rivers is so important. That said, given the current chaos in Congress, it looks like we may be in for a long wait until there is another opportunity to pass this bill.
Securing the permanent mineral withdrawal to protect our region’s finest wild rivers and their clean water and salmon runs from the irreversible risks of mining must remain a high priority for conservation in our region. The surface strip mining needed to extract nickel from our local mountains would require removal of massive amounts of overburden for relatively small amounts of minerals—with untenable risks for our local watersheds. Clean drinking water and adequate flows in our rivers are going to be more and more precious as climate change ratchets up stresses on our aquatic ecosystems.
Our nation should prioritize research into alternate battery metals for the electric vehicles that we’ll need to transition to a clean energy economy. For example, researchers are already investigating sodium and saline—minerals that are far more common, less costly, and less irrevocably damaging to obtain than those that require strip mining. European nations are farther along in working toward a “circular economy” with metals recycling baked into manufacturing planning from the outset. We will never get to these much-needed innovations if our economic system allows wrecking whole landscapes—including some of America’s last best rivers and salmon streams—as a legitimate activity. Clean energy cannot be called “clean” if it depends on destructive mining. This nineteenth-century thinking needs to change as we aim to tackle twenty-first century challenges.
Rocky Habitat conservation advances
In early December, I testified on behalf of KAS to the Oregon Policy Advisory Committee (OPAC), in support of proposed Rocky Shores designations. There were six areas proposed along the entire coast for Marine Conservation Areas (MCAs), including Cape Lookout, Cape Foulweather, and one in our area at Blacklock Point, which is contiguous with parts of Floras Lake Natural Area. The Blacklock MCA is intended to protect unique rocky habitat and nearshore kelp areas that are adjacent to the Floras Lake Natural Area. I am pleased to report that OPAC voted to recommend all six areas as MCAs.
Developing a strategy to conserve the important values of our state’s Rocky Habitats is a key part of Oregon’s Territorial Sea Plan. The public process to nominate and designate suitable areas has been going on for several years now. Rocky habitats are unique and important areas for marine life—think tidepools filled with snails, limpets, sea stars, mussels, barnacles, nudibranchs, and all manner of beautiful algae, plus shorebirds, including Black oystercatchers and turnstones and surfbirds! These rich ecosystems can also be extremely vulnerable to visitation and overuse, which has already resulted in unfortunate habitat degradation along the North Coast.
The newly designated MCA sites will get added to the list of Rocky Habitat areas already designated last year, including the Cape Blanco Marine Research Area and the Coquille Point Marine Garden, and will be recommended for final approval by the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) this spring. As the designations suggest, different areas are intended to have different emphases—some research, some public education with the aim of both reducing impacts and also helping the public to understand the unique values that rocky shore habitats provide.
How these newly designated areas will be managed will depend on LCDC rulemaking that is yet to come. The Blacklock MCA will bring no explicit change of rules in terms of harvesting marine life but will hopefully help to marshal more resources to study and protect its important values into the future.
Update on Floating Offshore Wind development
In January, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) completed its qualification review and finally announced the results of its “call” for nominations for floating wind energy development off Oregon’s Coast. Four multinational corporations put forth qualified nominations: Avangrid, Ocean Winds, Bluefloat Energy, and Mainstream Renewable Power. Their nominations cover the entirety of both the Brookings and Coos Bay call areas.
With nominations now reviewed, BOEM will continue with its own evaluation of potential impacts of energy projects on the nominated areas, which entails “suitability modeling” to determine which parts of the call areas are most suitable for future wind energy development. We hope they will also consider input from all other Oregon stakeholders before they identify Wind Energy Areas (WEAs) –the subset of the call areas—that will be considered for leasing to these private companies.
Down the coast in California, BOEM is much further along in its process of leasing offshore areas for wind energy development, which enables us to see what will be coming in Oregon. Having identified California WEAs last year, BOEM hosted its first West Coast wind lease sale in early December. Five companies won leases for five areas that will cover more than 370,000 acres—almost 600 square miles—off the coasts of central California near Morro Bay and of northern California, near Eureka, with the promise of generating 4.6 gigawatts (GW) of energy. The leases give developers the right to assess the WEAs in a proprietary way so they can propose more specifically how they will seek to further develop them in the future.
The auction drew bids much lower than recent lease sales on the East Coast, reflecting the greater uncertainties on the West Coast—with still unproven floating technologies in deeper waters, the lack of a clear plan to offtake the energy, and the need to build ports, a supply chain and a workforce. The average price offered to the government by the wind companies was $2,028 per acre in comparison with the $8,951 per acre price of lease areas off New York and New Jersey last February. Interestingly, none of the companies that won the California leases are the same as those now seeking leases in Oregon. With its great demand for renewable energy and enormous population centers, California has already boosted its offshore wind energy goals to 25 GW by 2045, aiming to see more call areas identified for consideration soon.
With California racing ahead to adopt FOSW technology and other regions proceeding apace with OSW development, Oregon, coming a little later to the game, will hopefully have the benefit of learning from the mistakes of other places. Already BOEM’s suitability modeling is apparently becoming more robust and, in Oregon, will be used ahead of leasing instead of afterwards. Oregon’s outstanding marine natural resources certainly merit careful consideration. We should avoid and minimize impacts not only to fisheries but also to the seabirds and marine mammals that depend on the rich upwelling waters of the West Coast’s California Current large marine ecosystem.
As longtime KAS members know, our group has been engaged in the public process for wind energy siting at both the state and federal level—advocating for earlier consideration of impacts to birds, fish, and wildlife and for a cumulative impacts assessment given the multiple wind energy areas and projects now under consideration for development from California through to Washington. The next opportunities for public input will be after BOEM identifies Oregon WEAs later this year. Please consider attending the upcoming presentations sponsored by KAS in Brookings and Gold Beach on February 9 to learn more about this important topic for our region.
Elliott State Research Forest update
A bit north of our usual beat, KAS has long supported the goal of greater conservation of the important old-growth forest habitat remaining in the Elliott State Forest, located north east of Coos Bay. Longtime KAS members will recall that these valuable forests were being steadily logged-off to support the state school fund despite their irreplaceable habitat for marbled murrelets and other forest dependent wildlife. A big chunk of the state forest lands was even sold off with the express purpose of avoiding habitat protection laws that apply to public lands –until a deal was finally reached to de-couple the forest from the school fund and find a new path to provide for public benefit as a research forest. In early 2021, the Oregon Legislature established the Elliott State Research Forest (ESRF) to be managed by Oregon State University (OSU).
Over the past couple of years, there has been a concerted planning effort with OSU and an appointed advisory board to set up the ESRF. Now comes the test –will it will truly be managed as a living laboratory that helps to conserve critical natural habitat values? In December, the Oregon Land Board appointed a new group of nine stakeholders to the Elliott State Research Forest Authority Board, which will now work with OSU to oversee the research and management of the ESRF. Representatives from Southwestern Oregon include Teresa Bird, an ecological consultant who has conducted numerous murrelet surveys in the Elliott (and who is a KAS member!), and Jack Williams, a fish biologist who has served in the past as chief scientist for Trout Unlimited and as Supervisor for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. Bob Sallinger, who has worked as Portland Audubon’s Conservation Director for several decades, has also been appointed to represent conservation interests.
In addition, the state has recently put forth a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for the federally threatened and endangered species that inhabit the ESRF. The HCP must be approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service and will become the binding document that outlines specific protections for these species, including marbled murrelets, northern spotted owls, and Oregon Coast coho. KAS recently submitted comments and joined with other Oregon Audubon chapters in pressing the federal agencies to require better mapping, larger buffers, and greater protections for known occupied marbled murrelet nest sites and also provisions to improve aquatic habitat in the ESRF.