• Protecting and restoring the diverse ecosystems that provide habitat for rare and endemic and special status wildlife and plant species.
• Protecting and restoring landscape-scale resilience for the area’s critically important natural resources.
• Protecting intact habitats and undisturbed corridors that allow for animal migration and movement.
• Reducing fire risk both within the wildland urban interface and to CSNM objects and values.
• Managing discretionary uses to protect CSNM objects and values.

Dave Willis, chair of the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, said in a statement to the Rogue Valley Times that the approved Resource Management Plan and final environmental impact statement appear little changed from earlier proposals, despite protests that were filed.

“BLM’s final revised Record of Decision/Resource Management Plan for the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is mostly — not entirely, but mostly — a profound disappointment,” he wrote. “There are some good things in BLM’s revised Monument plan, but for the most part, BLM’s Monument plan revision is chainsaw-heavy, does not take seriously the negative impacts of commercial cattle grazing and proliferating (even imported) feral horses, refuses to carry forward existing and create new Areas of Critical Environmental Concern and Research Natural Areas, and too often semantically contorts to evade the singular protection mandates of this remarkable Monument’s designating proclamations.

“BLM’s now-approved ‘up-to-two-acre openings’ — aka clearcuts — have no place in an already diverse monument landscape uniquely established to protect biodiversity,” Willis continued. “Scientists and other citizens who have painstakingly worked for decades to protect this special place are quite sad to say — when not angry — that BLM’s revised plan is not worthy of this monument.”

Willis cited former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s decision after 1996 to take monument management on BLM lands away from the National Park Service and allow BLM to manage protections. He did call Babbitt’s decision “a well-meant effort to reform BLM’s commodity-oriented custom and culture.”

“But going on a quarter-century since this particular monument was established, BLM’s revised plan here shows that Babbitt’s gamble has progressively — and now decisively — failed at Cascade-Siskiyou. BLM as an institution — especially BLM in Oregon — is simply not capable of doing the protection job required by the Monument proclamations.”

The final proposed plan was released in October. A period to file protests ended Nov. 12, and Willis said the wilderness council, joined by groups including Oregon Wild, KS Wild, the Center for Biological Diversity, Wild Heritage and the Western Watersheds Project, filed two protests among the 11 protests that were formally lodged. BLM’s public record shows four were dismissed as “comments only” and seven were denied, including the pair of wilderness council-backed protests.