Whether you live in a city, a small town, or even if you get your water from a well like I do, one of the biggest threats to drinking water in the Pacific Northwest is industrial logging.

(A hugely notable exception is portland, which as my guest will touch on in the interview, does not allow logging in its drinking water source, the Bull Run watershed.  Portland’s water also happens to be famous for its purity and taste, probably a coincidence though…)

However, by law, Oregon’s drinking watersheds have no special protections to safeguard them from being polluted or destroyed by industrial logging, and many watersheds are in the hands of large timber corporations whose executives could not care less about our drinking water.

One of the worst examples of this dynamic is Jetty Creek, which is the sole source of drinking water for Rockaway Beach on Oregon’s North Coast.

We at the Coast Range Association have long supported and assisted the work of North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection, and I’m excited to be able to highlight their work fighting to safeguard drinking water for their communities.

They are a great example of a grassroots organizing campaign based around a local issue that also connects their struggle to the broader justice movement.

Before we get to that, I wanted to give a very quick update on our campaign to protect the Siuslaw National Forest, or as some folks have called it, the Siuslaw Strategic National Carbon Reserve.

Many of our listeners already know that the Coast Range is the most productive temperate rainforest in the world in terms of its carbon sequestration potential.  Basically, the trees grow really big, really fast, and can live for a very long time if we don’t cut them down.

As the only National Forest in the Coast Range, the Siuslaw not only provides critical habitat for endangered species, it can either serve as a carbon sink or a carbon bomb, based on the management practices of the Forest Service.

And as we’ve discussed in depth on previous episodes, the Forest Service is in the middle of dual processes amending its management practices.  So what could possibly go wrong, right?

The Coast Range Association is engaged in a summer of action to protect the Siuslaw, and we need your help.  Whether you can come out into the woods with us, help organize events, table at farmers markets, or don’t know what to do, we can use your help!

We’ll have more updates as our campaign progresses, but for now, go to coastrange.org and click the Siuslaw National Forest Action Page to learn more and sign up, and you can email me at [email protected] anytime.

Show Notes:

Siuslaw National Forest Action Page: https://coastrange.org/coast-range-association/siuslaw-action/

North Coast Communities For Watershed Protection: https://healthywatershed.org/

Save Mothball Hill campaign: https://www.change.org/Save-MothballHill-DavisRidge-SloughHill-from-Clearcutting

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