O&C Lands Act, Part 1: Neither 11th Commandment Nor 28th Amendment

This is the first in a series of four Public Lands Blog posts regarding the infamous “O&C” lands, a variant of public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management in western Oregon. Part 1 sets the stage with a brief history and description of recent epochal events. Part 2 examines a recent ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Part 3 examines a recent ruling by the US District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. Part 4 recommends repeal of the O&C Lands Act of 1937 and transferring administration of all BLM lands in western Oregon to either the Forest Service or the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Top Line: By letting stand two federal appeals court decisions, the US Supreme Court dealt a body blow—fatal, we can hope—to the Clearcut Conspiracy’s fantasy of holtz über alles (“timber above everything else”) on ~2.1 million acres of federal public forestland in western Oregon.

Figure 1. A rather small locomotive of the Oregon and California Railroad. Source: Bureau of Land Management.

Ever since I began my public lands conservation career during the Ford administration, a congressional statute enacted in 1937 “relating to the revested Oregon and California Railroad and reconveyed Coos Bay Wagon Road grant lands situated in the State of Oregon” has been the bane of my existence. In the mid-1970s, I discovered that the low-elevation old-growth-forested federal public lands just a few miles from where I grew up—and another 2.1 million acres administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in western Oregon—were not just your run-of-the-mill federal public lands but rather were exalted “O&C” lands.

According to my sources at the time, the O&C lands were the result of an Act of Congress so special that it effectively served as an 11th Commandment and a 26th (now 28th) Amendment. In all matters, the timber supremacy of the Oregon and California Lands Act (OCLA) of 1937 ruled! My sources of this information were the BLM, Big Timber, the western Oregon counties that received three-quarters of the timber revenues from the clear-cutting of old-growth forests (hereafter Addicted Counties), and all of Oregon’s congressional delegation (all collectively hereafter the Clearcut Conspiracy). Notice that I don’t list the judiciary as a source at that time—more on that later.

From 1937 until 1990, the Clearcut Conspiracy was successful with its holtz über alles narrative. Since the 1990s, especially during Democratic administrations, the BLM is no longer part of the conspiracy, but the agency still loves to log mature and old-growth forests and uses the OCLA as both a sword and a shield. Today, most members of the Oregon congressional delegation are not members of the Clearcut Conspiracy. The two unreconstructed holdouts are Representatives Cliff Bentz (R-OR-2nd) and Val Hoyle (D-OR-4th). (As to the latter, see this C-SPAN video [starting at 1:17:50] where Hoyle parrots the Clearcut Conspiracy’s talking points.)

Figure 2. The bane of my existence. Source: United States of America.

A Brief Synopsis of the O&C Lands

In 1866 Congress granted 3.7 million acres of public domain lands in western Oregon to facilitate the construction of a railroad from Portland to the California border. The Oregon and California Railroad line was built south as far as Medford before running out of money, at which point Southern Pacific Railroad took it over and finished the line into California.

Southern Pacific also sold huge blocks of the granted land to timber speculators. This violated the terms of the land grant, which specified the land could be sold only to bona fide settlers in 160-acre parcels for no more than $2.50 per acre. A series of lawsuits ensued, and eventually the Supreme Court directed that the granted lands that had not already been sold by the railroad into private ownership be returned to the government.

In 1916, Congress took back (after paying the Southern Pacific for them) the unsold 2.8 million acres of granted land and placed them under the jurisdiction of the General Land Office of the Department of the Interior. It further required that the General Land Office clear-cut these “Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands” (a.k.a. O&C lands) as rapidly as possible and then sell first the timber and then the logged-off lands at auction.

Mostly the lands just remained in political and policy limbo, and in 1937 Congress enacted the Oregon and California Revested Lands Act (OCLA), a statute to retain in federal ownership the 2.7 million acres of land that were still unsold and manage them for multiple forest products (not just timber). The law also compensated sixteen western Oregon counties that could no longer collect property taxes on these again-federal lands.

The stage was set. Between 1937 and 1989, the Bureau of Land Management, successor to the General Land Office, and the rest of the Clearcut Conspiracy interpreted the 1937 statute as holtz über alles. Vast swaths of generally low-elevation old-growth forest were clear-cut and replaced with monoculture plantations of Douglas-fir.

Map 1. O&C lands administered by the BLM (dark orange), mostly in a checkerboard pattern with private timberland (white), some in a checkerboard pattern with BLM public domain land (yellow); “controverted” O&C lands administered by the US Forest Service (dark green), mostly in a checkerboard pattern with regular USFS lands (light green); Coos Bay Wagon Road (CBWR) lands administered by the BLM (burgundy). Source: Congressional Research Service.

In the early 1990s, multiple lawsuits to protect the northern spotted owl and other species resulted in dramatic drop-offs in O&C logging levels and payments to counties.

In 1995, President Clinton issued the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), which kept logging levels relatively low.

In 2016, the BLM abandoned the NWFP and continued with a management regime that resulted in the loss of mature and old-growth forests and trees but also kept logging levels relatively low compared to historical levels. The Clearcut Conspiracy (which the BLM and much of the Oregon congressional delegation were no longer a part of) sued.

In 2000, President Clinton proclaimed, pursuant to the Antiquities Act of 1906, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which included some infamous O&C lands. The Clearcut Conspiracy did not challenge the proclamation. In 2017, President Obama expanded the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument to include more O&C lands. This time, the Clearcut Conspiracy did sue.

In 2024, the US Supreme Court let stand two 2023 decisions from two federal courts of appeal that found the Clearcut Conspiracy’s lawsuits to reimpose holtz über alles were without merit because that interpretation of the OCLA was wrong all along.

For more details on the history of the infamous O&C lands, see my Public Lands Blog post “Another Northwest Forest War in the Offing? Part 1: A Sordid Tale of Environmental Destruction, Greed, and Political Malfeasance.”

Figure 3. Old-growth logs are still coming off BLM holdings in western Oregon. Source: Bureau of Land Management.

The Lands at Issue

There are three variants of the “O&C” lands (Map 1):

1. O&C lands administered by the BLM, mostly in a checkerboard pattern with private timberland, some in a checkerboard pattern with BLM public domain land.

2. “Controverted” O&C lands administered by the US Forest Service (USFS), mostly in a checkerboard pattern with regular USFS lands.

3. Coos Bay Wagon Road (CBWR) lands administered by the BLM.

Under contention in the Clearcut Conspiracy suits were 2,084,884 acres of BLM O&C lands, lands revested from the land-grant-violating railroad. Also contested were the 74,547 acres of CBWR lands (Map 2), similarly reconveyed to the federal government for similar reasons at a similar time and administered the same as the O&C lands.

Map 2. The Coos Bay Wagon Road Lands, an even more obscure variant of federal public lands administered by the BLM.Source: Bureau of Land Management.

Somewhat in the mix, as they are intermixed with BLM O&C lands, were 394,578 acres of BLM generally forested public domain lands in western Oregon, lands that have never left the federal estate. For a long while, the BLM treated these western Oregon public domain lands the same as it treated its O&C lands.

Not under legal contention were the 492,000 acres of Forest Service O&C land shown in Map 1, which are national forest lands in every way except that counties benefit from these lands according to the O&C revenue-sharing formula rather than the regular national forest revenue-sharing formula.

Timber Above All Else?

It has long been the contention of the Clearcut Conspiracy that the OCLA outranks any other congressional statute, enacted prior or subsequent to 1937. Let’s drill down on that contention and see how the judiciary has responded. A basic rule of judicial interpretation of statutory construction is that if Congress intended a new statute to negate an existing statute, it would either repeal the older statute or explicitly say that it didn’t apply where the new statute applied. In a series of court cases from 1990 through the present, the judiciary has found that the OCLA doesn’t outrank other laws—especially, but not exclusively, those congressional statutes enacted after 1937.

Take, for example, these statutes subsequent to the OCLA of 1937: the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA), the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA), the Clean Water Act of 1970 (CWA), and the Endangered Species Act of 1972 (ESA) (all as amended). If Congress had meant to exempt the O&C lands from those later statutes, it would have said so when it enacted those statutes. Congress did not. Yet it took a series of court cases, starting in 1989, to conclude that APA, NEPA, CWA, and ESA all apply to O&C lands.

As for laws enacted prior to 1937, let’s consider the Antiquities Act of 1906, in which Congress granted power to the president to proclaim national monuments on federal lands. The Clearcut Conspiracy claimed that the OCLA precluded the proclamation of national monuments on any O&C lands that had any timber on them. Most recently, the courts found that the Antiquities Act does indeed apply to O&C lands. (See my previous Public Lands Blog post, “Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument: Safe from Big Timber, Threatened by the BLM.)

In only one statute, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) (as amended), did Congress address how that statute and the OCLA were to be reconciled. Section 701(b) of FLPMA says that the OCLA prevails over FLPMA “in the event of conflict with or inconsistency between this act and [the OCLA] . . . insofar as they relate to management of timber resources.” Then senior Oregon US senator Mark O. Hatfield (see my Public Lands Blog post “Mark Odom Hatfield, Part 1: Oregon Forest Destroyer”) made sure that this clause was included in FLPMA. Hatfield won and old forests lost.

Figure 4. The northern spotted owl, which requires old-growth forests for its survival. Source: Bureau of Land Management.

What Does the OCLA Actually Require?

What does the OCLA require of the BLM insofar as the 1937 statute relates to the “management of timber” on O&C lands? Remarkably, the courts had never clearly ruled on whether the OCLA itself contains an holtz über alles mandate. Between the BLM’s revising of western Oregon resource management plans in 2016 and President Obama’s expanding the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in 2017, the Clearcut Conspiracy went all in on a judicial strategy to, once and for all, determine that (1) the OCLA is exalted above all other statutes, and (2) the OCLA is understood as stipulating that logging should reign supreme over all other uses.

Over the many decades since 1937, the BLM’s own lawyers (“solicitors”) have opined to varying degrees at various times that the OLCA is a “dominant use” statute where logging is superior to other uses, rather than a multiple use statute where timber supply is one use equal to the other named uses of protecting watersheds, regulating stream flow, contributing to local economic stability, and recreation. In its 2016 plan revisions, the BLM essentially still interpreted the OCLA as timber first—but tempered by all those other congressional statutes, in particular ESA and CWA (but not FLPMA).

The Clearcut Conspiracy’s legal blitzkrieg consisted of a total of six lawsuits, five of which were filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. As the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit explains:

The appeals arise from three sets of cases filed by an association of fifteen Oregon counties and various trade associations and timber companies. Two of the cases challenge Proclamation 9564, through which the President expanded the boundaries of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Two others challenge resource management plans that the United States Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a bureau within the United States Department of the Interior (Interior), developed to govern the use of the forest land. The final case seeks an order compelling the Interior Secretary to offer a certain amount of the forest’s timber for sale each year.

The Clearcut Conspiracy won all five cases filed in the District of Columbia at the district court level, where the conspiracy had successfully shopped for a favorable judge, but then lost all on appeal to the appeals court.

As for the sixth lawsuit, the Murphy Company and Murphy Timber Investments, LLC, filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Oregon contesting the expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Murphy lost at the district court level and also in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Clearcut Conspiracy was left with just one more option: a hail-Mary pass to the nine members of the US Supreme Court seeking review of the six cases it lost. The Supremes declined. As I speculated previously, perhaps the destructive majority on the court felt that this O&C matter was small beer compared to all the other potential damage they want to do.

In the next two Public Lands Blog posts, I examine in detail the rulings of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Part 2 of this series) and the US District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals (Part 3 of this series). I go so deep on these rulings because they make clear that the Clearcut Conspiracy’s fantasy that the OCLA of 1937 is a combo 11th Commandment and 28th Amendment is and always has been just that—a fantasy.

Figure 5. An adult coho salmon scaling Lake Creek Falls to return to its place of birth to spawn. Source: Bureau of Land Management.

Take a Bow

Special thanks are due to Kristen Boyles of Earthjustice and Susan Jane Brown, then mostly of the Western Environmental Law Center and now of Silvix Resources. These extraordinary lawyers represented Soda Mountain Wilderness Council and other intervenors. The several cases in two judicial circuits were as long and arduous as the stakes were high. The most able counsel of these two lawyers helped ensure that the courts eventually got it right.

For More Information

Blumm, Michael, and Tim Wigington. 2013. “The Oregon & California Railroad Grant Lands’ Sordid Past, Contentious Present, and Uncertain Future: A Century of Conflict.” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review.

Kerr, Andy. 2020. “Another Northwest Forest War in the Offing? Part 1: A Sordid Tale of Environmental Destruction, Greed, and Political Malfeasance.” Public Lands Blog.

———. 2020. “Another Northwest Forest War in the Offing? Part 2: Current Threats and Perhaps an Epic Opportunity.” Public Lands Blog.

Riddle, Anne A. 2023. “The Oregon and California Railroad Lands (O&C Lands): In Brief.” Congressional Research Service R42951.

Robbins, William G. “Oregon and California Lands Act.” Oregon Encyclopedia. 

Scott, Deborah, and Susan Jane Brown. 2006. “The Oregon and California Lands Act: Revisiting the Concept of ‘Dominant Use’.” Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation.

United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. July 18, 2023. American Forest Resource Council v. United States of America.

United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. April 24, 2023. Murphy Co. v. Biden.

Bring Back the Elakha

The sea otter, Enhydra lutris (or “Elakha” in the Chinook Jargon language), was extirpated from Oregon in the early twentieth century. Sea otter slaughter began offshore Oregon in the 1780s, having started earlier elsewhere. The last native sea otter in Oregon was probably shot and killed in 1910  (1910 – 1780 = 130 years), according to Cameron LaFollette, Elakha Alliance board member, executive director of the Oregon Coast Alliance, and quite the Oregon historian.  She provided a copy of an article from the Coos Bay Times from 1910 that noted that sea lion hunters (who did quite well) also shot one sea otter (hey, it didn’t sink) that would fetch $200 to 500 ($5,244 to $13,111 in today’s dollars).

The sea otter should not be confused with other marine mammals found in Oregon, like the northern fur seal, the Steller sea lion, the California sea lion, the northern elephant seal, and the Pacific harbor seal. Nor should it be confused with another marine mammal, the Steller’s sea cow, that once inhabited Oregon but now inhabits nowhere. From its first discovery by Europeans in 1741, it was extinct by 1768 (1768 – 1741 = 27 frigging years).

It’s time to return the relevance to place names along the Oregon coast such as Otter Rock (Lincoln County) and Otter Point (Curry County). There is a gap of 840 miles between resident sea otters in California and Washington. The Oregon portion of the gap is 360 miles long. The Elakha Alliance is spearheading a multi-organizational and -governmental effort to return the sea otter to its rightful place in Oregon.

Sea Otter Life History Lite

The sea otter is the smallest marine mammal in North America. A member of the weasel family (Mustelidae), the sea otter has a stay-warm strategy that relies not on blubber like other marine mammals but on having the world’s densest fur. Its two-layer fur can have more than 1,000,000 hairs per square inch. A hirsute human head has ~100,000 total hairs (~700 per square inch). The lack of blubber means a need for a lot of fuel to keep them warm, meaning eating 25 to 30 percent of their body weight daily to maintain the high metabolism.

According to Friends of the Sea Otter:

•       average length: 4 to 5 feet long for a male, 2 to 3 feet long for a female

•       average weight: 50 to 100 pounds for a male, 30 to 70 pounds for a female

•       average lifespan in the wild: 10 to 15 years for a male, 15 to 20 years for a female

Sea otters can swim at speeds of up to 5 miles per hour. The longest recorded dive lasted 7 minutes, and the deepest recorded dive was 318 feet. Otters can spend their entire lives at sea but usually not more than a kilometer from shore.

Sea Otter as Keystone and Umbrella

The sea otter is both a keystone species (“a species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically”) and an umbrella species (“species selected for making conservation-related decisions, typically because protecting these species indirectly protects the many other species that make up the ecological community of its habitat”).

Sea otters often prefer to dine on sea urchins, which decimate kelp forests. Not enough sea otters means too many sea urchins. Too many sea urchins means ruined kelp forests. Friends of the Sea Otter explains:

Acting as nurseries for many different aquatic species, kelp forests are an integral part of the underwater ecosystem. Without them, developing species would not have their protection, and thus become vulnerable targets. . . . [K]elp forests are a main prey item for sea urchins. With no predators around, sea urchin populations can multiply, forming herds that sweep across the ocean floor devouring entire stands of kelp. Enter the sea otter.

The sea urchin is a main food source for the sea otter. Playing the role as “protector of the kelp beds,” the sea otter is able to maintain the balance of the ecosystem, naturally, by consuming sea urchins. As a result, kelp forests avoid devastation, aquatic species are able to mature and live in their natural environment, and sea otters, a threatened species, are able to survive.

Figure 2. Sea otter consumption of sea urchins helps kelp forests thrive. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Matt Knoth).

According to the Elakha Alliance:

The presence of sea otters once had a profound impact on communities of early people on the Oregon coast. Today, the impact of sea otters on coastal ecosystems is an important story for modern coastal communities as well. A healthy, established population of sea otters can result in more extensive and richer kelp forests that, in turn, attract and retain eggs, larvae, and juveniles of many species of fish and shellfish, including those of commercial importance.

Kelp forests buffer ocean wave action nearshore, helping to protect the shoreline from erosion. Kelp forests increase overall marine productivity and sequester, or capture, large amounts of carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. . . .

Sea otters can provide a buffer against the effects of climate change by enabling the growth of kelp and other marine algae which sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. Their presence can also help curb the growth of sea urchins which can result from a die-off of sea stars due to a “mass wasting” syndrome that has affected the Pacific coast in recent years. Overall, the presence of sea otters in coastal ecosystems can help retain diversity and productivity that create conditions of resilience against the effects of climate change. [citations omitted]

Figure 3. Sea otters improve the health of kelp forests that serve as habitat for many species of fish and other marine life.Source: Wikimedia Commons (Stef Maruch).

Populations Then and Now

The sea otter was hunted to near extinction for its pelts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Chart 1). Before the massive slaughter began, an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 sea otters lived along 6,000 miles of the North Pacific shore from Japan’s Hokkaido Island to Mexico’s central Baja Peninsula (Map 1). Along the northeast Pacific coast, sea otters ranged continuously from 57°N, where the sea ice starts (well, for now), to 22°N, where the kelp forests end. From Japan to Mexico was a continuous “kelp highway” for sea otters.

Chart 1. Sea otter pelt sales (in thousands) on the London exchange 1870–1910 (spike is 1884). Source: Wikimedia Commons (Kalan).

Map 1. The global range of the sea otter (Enhydra lutris). The range was once generally continuous from Japan to Mexico (the red line). Today, one of the big gaps is Oregon. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Cristophe Cagé).

As shown in Map 1, there are three subspecies of sea otter:

•       northern, also called Alaskan (Enhydra lutris kenyoni)

•       common, also called Asian or Russian (E. l. lutris)

•       southern, also called Californian (E. l. nereis)

The remote coastline of California sheltered small southern sea otter colonies from the fur trade. Fifty that survived from the original estimated 16,000 individuals were rediscovered in 1938, and that population has grown to nearly 3,000.

After 59 Alaskan sea otters were relocated from the Aleutian Islands to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in 1969 and 1970, that restored population declined to somewhere between 10 and 43 individuals before climbing to 208 in 1989. In 2017, more than 2,000 individuals were estimated in an expanded range—still a fraction of the original range.

The population of northern sea otters is also growing in British Columbia after their reintroduction to the west coast of Vancouver Island. There are currently between 65,000 and 78,000 northern sea otters in Alaska, Washington, and British Columbia combined.

A relocation effort was also made in Oregon. According to the Elakha Alliance, in July 1970, 29 northern sea otters were relocated from Amchitka Island in the Aleutians to Redfish Rocks, and a year later 24 animals were relocated to near Port Orford (both in Curry County). In July 1971, 40 animals were also released at Cape Arago (Coos County). While pups were observed, the entire population had declined dramatically by 1975 and were gone by 1981 for reasons not well understood.

Wikipedia sums up the failed reintroduction effort and then reports:

In 2004, a male sea otter took up residence at Simpson Reef off of Cape Arago for six months. This male is thought to have originated from a colony in Washington, but disappeared after a coastal storm. On 18 February 2009, a male sea otter was spotted in Depoe Bay off the Oregon Coast. It could have traveled to the state from either California or Washington. [citations omitted] 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature notes that population estimates for sea otters from 2004 to 2012 add up to a worldwide population of 125,831. This means that from 42 percent to 84 percent of the original population still survives. Hell, a lot of species are far worse off—but globally (meaning in the northern Pacific Ocean), the species continues to decline and the populations are limited to small pockets.

In fact, under the Endangered Species Act, the southern sea otter is listed as threatened throughout its range (California, Oregon, and Washington), while the northern sea otter is listed as threatened throughout most, but not all, of its range (Alaska, and historically, British Columbia and Washington). Though presently absent, the sea otter is also listed as an endangered species under the Oregon Endangered Species Act.

Threats to the sea otter now include offshore oil and gas exploitation, local officials in Alaska wanting to put a bounty on sea otter pelts to protect shell fisheries, legal and illegal harvest of otters, fishing and harvesting aquatic resources (especially crab), recreational activities, oil pollution (oil coating the fur destroys its protective layer, resulting in hypothermia; as the otter attempts to clean its coat, it ingests large amounts of oil), urban runoff, and sewage outfall. Another threat is the climate catastrophe, as warming ocean waters and increased acidification can affect the health of kelp forests and the shellfish that otters eat, as well as promoting the spread of toxic algae that cause paralytic shellfish poisoning.

Which Subspecies to Reintroduce?

Given the earlier failure of reintroduction efforts, Oregon sea otter aficionados are proceeding carefully. One important question is: Just where was the demarcation line between the northern sea otter (Enhydra lutris kenyoni) and the southern subspecies (E. l. nereis)? Which subspecies was offshore Oregon? Perhaps both? Because northern sea otters far outnumber southern sea otters, moving otters south to Oregon would have less impact than moving them north to the state, but there is some evidence that southern sea otters might be better matched genetically to historical stocks in Oregon.

A 2007 research paper published in Conservation Genetics examined the genotypes of sixteen sea otters that lived before the slaughter commenced and whose bones were housed in the Archaeology Department at Oregon State University, and found that the “genotypic composition of pre-harvest otter populations appears to match best with those of contemporary populations from California and not from Alaska, where reintroduction stocks are typically derived.”

However, “More recent DNA and morphological analysis of bones in Oregon middens shows characteristics of both,” says Bob Bailey, a board member of the Elakha Alliance. “Geneticists now do not think there is any meaningful difference in terms of translocation.” Bailey further reports: “No decision has been made about source stock. We are about to embark on a feasibility study that should help us figure this out, but it is going to take a couple of years. The principal investigator for the study is a semi-retired sea otter scientist with forty years of experience.”

Controversy Expected

Bringing the elakha back to Oregon will be controversial, judging by past conservation efforts, especially related to species harvested for human consumption. The Elakha Alliance sums it up well:

If experience in other Pacific coast areas is a guide, the return of sea otters to the Oregon coast will likely have a mix of economic and social impacts depending on the location of their return and the number of otters. But in time, sea otters would likely have a profound impact on the diversity and productivity of Oregon’s nearshore ecosystem that, in turn, would result in an overall benefit to commercial and recreational fisheries that rely on a healthy marine ecosystem.

If they return to one or more estuaries, sea otters would likely increase water quality, reduce the presence of the invasive green crab, and promote the growth of eelgrass. Sea otters would also likely be a draw for outdoor enthusiasts and recreationists as they are in California and Alaska, and be a symbol of pride in some communities. In the long run, a robust population of sea otters would likely result in an increase in kelp beds, which would capture and store carbon dioxide, a leading cause of ocean acidification.

However, a growing population of sea otters in some areas could disrupt existing patterns of catch and consumption by some ocean users; such as sea urchin harvesters, commercial and recreational crabbers, and other harvesters of shellfish. Such competition and conflict between sea otters and humans is present today in several locations in southeast Alaska where the number of sea otters is in the thousands. But because sea otters do not readily migrate, have small home ranges, and have only one pup per year, their population growth and geographic spread will be slow. So it will be important to identify and anticipate such potential conflicts and choose release sites to minimize chances of conflict with other uses.

Putting Your Money Where Your Heart Is

If you want to know more, you may enjoy reading Return of the Sea Otter: The Story of the Animal That Evaded Extinction on the Pacific Coast by Todd McLeish.

Two conservation organizations focus exclusively on the sea otter. The Elaka Alliance focuses exclusively on returning sea otters to Oregon. 

• Friends of the Sea Otter — “Friends of the Sea Otter (FSO) is an advocacy group, founded in 1968, dedicated to actively working with state and federal agencies and other groups to maintain, increase and broaden the current protections for the sea otter, a species currently protected by state and federal laws, and with two geographic populations on the Endangered Species list. We wish to inspire the public at large about the otters’ unique behavior, habitat, and to take action to recover this remarkable species.”

• Elakha Alliance—“The Elakha Alliance is an Oregon-based nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring sea otters and the health of Oregon’s nearshore marine ecosystem. Named for the Chinook Indian word for sea otter, the Elakha Alliance brings together coastal Indian tribes, conservation organizations, academic institutions, community groups, individuals, and others interested in sea otter conservation and coastal ecology.”

Send one or both organizations money. I just made a tax-deductible donation to the Elakha Alliance because they are Oregon-centric and I know and have high confidence in several members of their board of directors.

Figure 4. The sea otter is missing in action offshore Oregon. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Marshal Hedin).