Oregon’s Timber Wars and the Climate Crisis

“There is new crop of forest defense climate activists feeling a new sense of urgency that the traditional environmental advocacy isn’t doing it…”

— Daniel with Cascadia Forest Defenders

The Pacific Northwest has a long history of organizing and direct action around logging and timber industries. From the Wobblies trying to organize the logging sector in the early twentieth century to Earth First!’s campaigns to stop old growth logging to the new generation of forest defenders linking the struggle for wild places and communities to the climate crisis, direct action has always tried to get the goods.

For 25 years, since the epic timber wars of the 1990s in places like Warner Creek, Oregon, Cascadia Forest Defense has been at the forefront of challenging the logging industry, complicit politicians, federal agencies and, in general, capitalism.

In the past month, Cascadia Forest Defense has put up new tree-sit blockades to disrupt logging operations in the Willamette National Forest.

In the latest episode of the Green and Red Podcast, we talk with Daniel, an organizer with Cascadia Forest Defense, about past and present forest defense campaigns, politics around forests, logging and wildfires; the links to the climate crisis and the resurgence of forest defense campaigns up and down the Northern Pacific Coast.

Cascadia Forest Defense is a grassroots environmental organization committed to stopping the destruction of the Earth, particularly in the region known as Cascadia. The organize collective, nonviolent actions to disrupt the ecologically and economically exploitative industrial timber industry and the 1%.