Paving the Road to Hell

by Sharon Blick on April 22, 2023​​​​​

In honor of Earth Day today, let me tell you a story about good intentions. 

First, there is the problem:  Oak and prairie are some of the most imperiled habitats in Oregon.  Prior to European colonization, there were approximately 2 million acres of oak and prairie habitat in the Willamette Valley.  The last 170 years resulted in conversion of most of the valley to urban and agricultural land use.  In addition, as Native American tribes were decimated and controlled, the regular burning they used to do was halted, allowing conifers to move into oak habitats, overgrowing and killing off the oaks.  For both of these reasons, oak woodlands have been reduced by over 90% and prairies reduced by over 98%.  Much of what remains is fragmented, isolated, and heavily impacted by conifers and invasive species.  Many species of wildlife are dependent on oak woodlands and prairies; at least 10 of these species are now listed as Sensitive Species by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Some people had good intentions to solve this problem:  In 2017, the City of Eugene joined the Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Cooperative along with federal and state agencies, Lane County, tribes, and non-profit groups.  Three staff ecologists from the City of Eugene Parks and Open Space Department worked with 48 other like-minded professionals for two years to formulate a plan for saving the oak woodlands and prairies called the Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Strategic Action Plan (WVOPSAP).  This effort was funded by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the Land Trust Alliance, Pacific Birds Habitat Joint Venture, and the City of Eugene. 

The WVOPSAP, published online in March 2020, is a 70 page document which contains a 30 year plan, with maps, which shows the Core Conservation Areas to be protected and restored, adjacent to Opportunity-Based Conservation Areas and connected with Potential Future Habitat Corridors.  The members of the partnership, including the City of Eugene, signed a Memorandum of Understanding pledging to uphold and implement this strategic action plan.

If you had found this plan online and read it, you might have thought, great work, problem solved!  But good intentions are never enough.  The plan makes it clear that the Memorandum of Understanding is not legally binding.

At the same time that these City of Eugene ecologists were creating a 30 year plan to save the oak woodlands, City of Eugene planners were creating a 30 year plan of where the city would grow next.  This plan is called the Urban Reserves.  Did these city staff members from different departments talk to each other or even know about each other’s plans?  There is no evidence that they did. 

I became aware of the Urban Reserves plan in late 2019 when my farm was included in the land that was being evaluated for inclusion in the Urban Reserves.  By the time I was informed and invited to a meeting to give my input, they had already planned to put 200 homes on my 15 acres.  I did not know about the WVOPSAP at that time, but I knew that my land contained large old oak trees and at least 8 Sensitive Species.  I knew that Oregon Statewide Land Use Planning Goal 5 required the inventory of habitat for Sensitive Species and I knew that no one had inventoried the habitat on my land or any of my neighbors.  I pointed this our in my testimony at the planning commission public hearing.

How naïve I was, to think that Goal 5 was anything more than good intentions.  I came to find out that Lane County had completed and adopted inventories for Goal 5 forty years ago and that there is no legal requirement for them to complete additional inventories, ever, no matter how many more species are added to the Sensitive Species list.  No, we would have to wait until one of more of those species was so depleted that it got onto the federal Endangered Species List before there would be any legal requirement to protect its habitat.

When I happened to find the WVOPSAP online, I compared the map to the Urban Reserves map and realized that there was a direct contradiction.  The largest area of the Urban Reserves was in the exact same place that the WVOPSAP had a Core Conservation Area!  So I wrote to all 51 members of the WVOPC Steering Committee and Working Group that the City of Eugene might be about to reneg on their agreement to uphold this plan.  I also notified the other funders of this work that the City of Eugene might be wasting their funds by voting to contradict this plan.  I notified the local media of this mismanagement of public funds.  And then I wrote to the Eugene City Council about what I had discovered and who I had notified. I thought they would be embarrassed, that they might apologize to the public, to the other members of the partnership, and to the other funders of this work.   I asked them to postpone their vote on the Urban Reserves (especially since they had just been on break for almost a month) and take the time to hold a work session where members of the WVOPC could come and present their findings.  Sounds reasonable, right?

On April 10, the Eugene City Council held a work session (where no public comment is allowed) on the Urban Reserves where they did not even mention the WVOPSAP and barely mentioned oaks at all, except to be assured that there was no legal requirement for oak protection.  They then voted 7 to 1 to pass the Urban Reserves.  Matt Keating was the no vote, and apparently that was about big game habitat, not oaks.

My emails to local media were ignored (do we really even have local media anymore?)  I heard back from only 3 of the 51 people who worked on the WVOPSAP.  None of them submitted testimony to the City Council.  I heard back from only one of the other funders of this work, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board (OWEB).  Here is what they said: “It is important to note that OWEB is a grant-making state agency, and the strategic action plan is a product of the collaborative that received the grant award, not OWEB.  The plan is intended to be used for voluntary conservation oak and prairie habitat efforts, and OWEB cannot apply any pressure to land managers or landowners to implement any part of the plan.”

Just more good intentions, right?  What’s wrong with good intentions?  What’s wrong is that they make people think the problem is solved, they stop people from objecting, they obscure the reality of the situation.  To create this WVOPSAP and then refuse to apply any pressure to ensure its implementation is the same as greenwashing, but with public money.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I am not in this fight for the future of our land.  The City of Eugene says it will not do forced annexations or imminent domain.  Jim and I will never sell our land to developers and we are planning to get a conservation easement so no one can ever develop our land.  We have sold all our livestock and are planning to restore habitat on the bulk of our land.  But our 15 acres is not nearly enough to maintain viable populations of any of these Sensitive Species.  Humans just keep taking and taking and taking and taking from the natural world.  Enough.  We have already taken way more than our fair share.  For the rest of my life: “I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues….”