Dave Willis, a grizzled woodsman and backcountry outfitter, has spent decades laboring to protect the mountains of south-western Oregon, one of the most beautiful, biodiverse regions in the country.

Through grassroots activism, Willis and his conservationist allies have won the support of two US presidents. In 2000, Bill Clinton created the roughly 52,000-acre Cascade-Siskiyou national monument, proclaiming it an “ecological wonder”. Located just outside of Ashland, it was the first such monument established solely for its extraordinary species diversity. It’s a place that harbors rare lilies and endemic trout, Pacific fishers and goshawks, black bears and a stunning array of butterflies.

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During his final week in office, meanwhile, Barack Obama added about 48,000 acres to the Cascade-Siskiyou monument, nearly doubling it in size.

Now, the Trump administration is threatening to undo it all. In April, the White House announced its intent to review 27 different national monument designations, as the Interior Department looks for commercial opportunities for the oil, mining and timber industries on American public lands. And the Cascade-Siskiyou preserve is on the list.

“All the signs indicate that we’re in the crosshairs,” says Willis, as his horses drift through 10-storey trees during a recent ride through the monument. “We could lose it all.”

With the monument review due to the president on Thursday, conservationists like Willis are on edge. Ryan Zinke, the swaggering Montana native who is the secretary of the interior and is leading the effort, has already unveiled some of his recommendations. They include shrinking the Bears Ears national monument in Utah, a 1.3 million-acre monument created by Obama to protect Native American antiquities. Zinke said six monuments should be left alone, which leaves 20 including the Cascade-Siskiyou at risk of being reduced in size, eliminated or opened to industrial uses.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ryan Zinke, who’s overseeing Trump’s review of 27 national monuments, has said only six should be left alone. Photograph: Steve Marcus/AP

In late July, Zinke, visited Cascade-Siskiyou; he met with monument opponents and supporters. He hasn’t yet publicly signaled the direction he is leaning in. But since his arrival in Washington, Zinke has been remaking the interior department by filling senior positions with representatives from extractive industries and rightwing advocacy groups.

At its core, the monument review is an attempt to weaken the Antiquities Act, one of America’s oldest public-interest conservation laws. Backing the review are some of the most powerful conservative factions in Washington, including organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Americans for Prosperity, all heavily financed by dark-money funds tied to wealthy Republican donors.

The debate over Cascade-Siskiyou presents a snapshot of the cultural and economic conflict that so often characterizes public land management in the American west. It’s a conflict that regularly pits scientists, conservationists and the burgeoning outdoor-recreation economy against the industrial interests that have dominated the region for well over a century. The struggle is about power and wealth and culture – who gets to decide how the publicly owned mountains and mineral deposits and timberlands are managed.

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“The underlying issue, across the west”, says Steve Pedery, the conservation director at Oregon Wild, “is that oil, gas, mining, grazing and logging interests are angry because 20 years ago they ruled public lands, and today they don’t.”

Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the president is authorized to unilaterally declare any federally owned object “of historic or scientific interest” a national monument and preserve it in perpetuity for all Americans. Every president since Theodore Roosevelt, save Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush, has used it, and this country now has a grand total of 129 such monuments. The 27 monuments now under review were set aside over the past three decades by Clinton, George W Bush and Obama. Donald Trump is the first president to consider undoing the designation of monuments by his predecessors.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Clinton, flanked by Al Gore, designates the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Photograph: Doug Mills/AP

In 2000, when Clinton initially established the Cascade-Siskiyou monument, he described it as a “biological crossroads – the interface of the Cascade, Klamath and Siskiyou eco-regions, in an area of unique geology, biology, climate and topography”. The monument’s extraordinary species diversity includes a vast selection of birds and furbearers, of wildflowers and ferns and fungi, much of it undisturbed by industrial activity or real estate development.

In 2011, however, local scientists came together and concluded that the monument did not sufficiently protect the full range of species diversity in the landscape. They published a report that urged the Obama administration to expand it and began a campaign to make the Cascade-Siskiyou monument bigger.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cascade within Sucker Creek inside the Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon. Photograph: Kevin Schafer/Getty Images

The Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, chaired by Dave Willis, along with a slew of other environmental groups, led the charge. They did the slow grassroots work that conservation work often requires, from lobbying federal representatives to taking people into the backcountry to see the landscape for themselves. Oregon’s governor, both its senators and numerous state legislators backed the expansion. The nearby Klamath Tribes were behind it, too.

In mid-January, they largely prevailed when Obama agreed to expand the monument.



But the opposition was significant. The expansion would permanently withdraw as much as 45,000 acres of land from most commercial timber production though many of these had already been set aside for conservation purposes. Greg Walden, the state’s powerful Republican congressman opposed the expansion. The governments of all three counties containing the monument, as well as seven Oregon state legislators and two California members of Congress, also were against it. The most vigorous foes, though, were members of the timber industry.

“The economic impacts [of the monument expansion] would be devastating,” says Travis Joseph, president of the Portland-based American Forest Resource Council, or AFRC, a timber industry trade group. Joseph says neighboring counties would forever lose revenue for public safety, health and roads, asserting that those acres could support or create a few hundred jobs.

In March, the AFRC filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Obama’s national monument expansion wasn’t just economically harmful but also fundamentally illegal. The suit relies on a little known law called the the Oregon and California Revested Lands Sustained Yield Management Act (known as the O&C Act) of 1937. The law declares that these lands are to be managed for “permanent forest production” to provide timber, protect watersheds and contribute to local economic stability.

In its lawsuit, AFRC claims that Obama’s monument expansion violated the 1937 law by banning most commercial logging. A few other parties, including a regional wood products manufacturer called Murphy Company and an alliance of county governments, filed similar lawsuits last winter.

While this fight is about timber production on public lands, it also reflects the sense among some people that the federal government is an overweening bully trying to snuff out the economic and cultural heritage of rural westerners. Colleen Roberts, for instance, a Jackson County commissioner, sees the monument expansion as a top-down designation that will stifle local authority.

“Another concern I personally have is just a continuation of federal land-grabbing,” she says, sitting in front of an American flag in her Jackson County office. “Constitutionally I don’t know if that is what the federal government was supposed to do, to own all of our land and control it.”

A similar mentality was on display last February, in what might be the Cascade-Siskiyou’s most Bundy-esque moment. For one day, a caravan of big pickups descended on the area for an anti-monument rally meant to protect “culture, heritage and livelihoods”. Scores of protesters drove to the Green Springs Inn, a small restaurant and hotel located on private property inside the Cascade-Siskiyou area and whose owners are ardent monument advocates. The rally featured a hodgepodge of members of interest groups from militia supporters to motorized vehicle proponents, who stood outside the inn and held signs reading “New Endangered Species: Rural American” and “Quit Closing Roads”.

“We really need to stick up for our culture,” said Ryan Mallory, a local marketing consultant who helped organize the rally, during a radio interview in February. “And in a way I feel like this is an attack on a culture, a culture of people that has been here for more than 150 years.”

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Diarmuid McGuire, one of the Green Springs Inn’s proprietors, says the monument has helped business and “put us on the map”. But it has also inflamed raw divisions.

“You have two cultures with two totally different value systems and two different political agendas and in our community everyone is sort of amalgamated,” McGuire says. “It is a culture war, really, and when you organize a political rally around it, you get the anti-monument people, you get the gun people ... and then you get the anti-government militia mixed in, and we had them all here across the street.” He points to his neighbor’s property across the street, displaying a sign in block letters: “NO MONUMENT OUR LAND OUR VOICE”.

Steve Pedery of Oregon Wild says the forest products industry and its allies are trying to return Oregon to some long vanished golden era of timber riches. The industry, after all, has declined immensely in the state, from a peak of having nearly 90,000 direct payroll jobs in the 1950s to roughly 31,000 today.

All the while, the outdoor recreation industry has blossomed, currently employing more than 140,000 people in Oregon, according to a report from the Outdoor Industry Association.

In February and March, conservation groups like Oregon Wild, Willis’s Soda Mountain Wilderness Council and some of their collaborators, fearing that the Trump administration might settle with the timber industry, lawyered up and intervened in the court cases in an attempt to defend the monument.

Willis is troubled bythe lawsuits and Trump’s monument review, but he and his allies have battled what he calls the “timber-county industrial complex” for years. It’s been a hard slog to prevent timber sales, buy out grazing permits, limit off-road vehicle access and otherwise preserve and restore this place. Willis, who lost both feet and his fingers to frostbite during a Denali ascent decades ago, is a determined man. And no matter what transpires now, no matter what the secretary of the interior says or a distant judge declares, he’ll keep fighting to protect the landscape he loves.

“Love where you live,” he says, riffing on a conservationist slogan. “Defend what you love.”

Disclosure added August 31st: On June 20, 2017 the author spoke about his journalism at a national monuments forum in Portland organised by Oregon Wild. He received no fee and paid his own expenses.