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Late Friday afternoon, Aug. 5, the Bureau of Land Management announced a Record of Decision for their Resource Management Plan, adopting their Final Environmental Impact Statement. Late Friday announcements are great media timing when you don’t want the issue to get much attention. But by the time the weekend was over a great number of Oregonians were preparing for battle. In fact, the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, and Earth Justice, an environmental group, filed lawsuits the same day. BLM is ready; even before their decision they have budgeted half a million dollars for legal defense. The timber industry is confident they can prove the plan does not allow enough logging. The scientists will also sue, equally confident the plan is biologically flawed. Environmentalists will show evidence that the plan will damage Oregon’s waters and wildlife. Neighboring landowners will sue, finding in the plan potential damage to their lands. And the public, the people BLM works for, will sue, wanting to know why their employees cannot apply appropriate forest management principles to present a realistic and balanced plan. All of these groups filed formal protests against the FEIS last month and one of the legal questions may be how BLM can ignore these protests before making a decision. In the Applegate, the plan takes away protected lands that serve the people of Southern Oregon and visitors far and wide with recreational access. The Dakatubede and Wellington Wildlands qualify as Lands with Wilderness Characteristics, unroaded lands of at least 5,000 acres. In the plan BLM includes “some” of those lands in their harvest base, reducing the acreage of both the Dakatubede and Wellington Wildlands to less than 5,000 acres. Without the LWC protection all of the acreage in those lands is available for logging. The Dakatubede contains numerous popular hiking trails, including part of the Sterling Ditch Trail system. Wellington Wildlands is part of the developing Applegate Ridge Trail, a rare opportunity to take in expansive views of the entire Applegate Valley. Both of these areas are part of a trail system that is planned to provide hiking from Ashland to Grants Pass. BLM officials, of course, defend their plan as both legally defensible and balanced. With numerous and immediate protests from all interested parties, clearly the public does not agree. The plan’s efforts to address timber harvest, recreation, water, wildlife and a host of other resource values appear in isolation, offering a little something to everyone and a whole lot of nothing to the large-scale landscape. The one thing we can agree on is that our public lands can deliver a full range of benefits if managed properly. It seems we can also agree BLM has failed in that mission. There is a new T-shirt on the market from Backcountry Hunters & Anglers: “Public Land Owner.” That’s all of us, owners of 670 million acres of land that belong to every citizen of the United States. We expect that the people responsible for the care of these lands will be able to balance all of the values these lands can deliver to the public for the next seven generations. As owners of these public lands, we should all be disappointed in both BLM’s work and its failure to consider 240 years of experience and ownership by U.S. citizens. We should be more than disappointed, we should be mad as hell. Tell BLM, tell Sally Jewell (Secretary of the Interior), tell your senators and congressional representatives, that this plan is unacceptable. BLM should go back to the drawing board. Jack Duggan is an Applegate resident with a background in forestry and communications.