Cascade-Siskiyou: The Threatened National Monument Everyone Ignores
Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou is the only national monument specifically mentioned by name in Project 2025. We need to pay attention
Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is the kind of place you can drive past on Interstate 5 in southern Oregon and never realize you are skimming the edge of one of the most biologically consequential “seams” in the American West.
It sits at a geologic and ecological crossroads—where the Cascade Range, the Siskiyou Mountains, and the broader Klamath-Siskiyou region collide and overlap—creating a tight mosaic of habitats that don’t usually share the same neighborhood.
That overlap is the monument’s entire point: not a single landmark, not a single ruin, not a solitary group of rock spires, not an individual species, but the living complexity created when multiple ecoregions meet and mix.
President Bill Clinton’s June 2000 proclamation establishing the monument explicitly framed it around “ecological wonders and biological diversity” at this interface.
And today, Cascade-Siskiyou occupies an unusual—and politically vulnerable—position in the public landscape: Project 2025 identifies it by name as a national monument “worthy of downward adjustment,” and it does so in the specific context of increasing timber harvest on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands.
For the record: Project 2025 actually matters.
It’s the blueprint basically all public lands- and environment-related decisions made by the Trump administration are based on.
I pointed this out in this Substack post on January 8—an observation that was echoed and confirmed by an excellent in-depth analysis by the Center for Western Priorities on January 15.
For all the anti-conservation language in Project 2025, the administration’s guidebook for public lands destruction, Cascade-Siskiyou is the only national monument specifically mentioned in its text.
Despite that worrisome fact, I haven’t seen anyone talk about this so far.
Other public lands and waters called out by name in Project 2025—Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Brooks Range, and Tongass National Forest; Minnesota’s Boundary Waters; and New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon—have gotten plenty of attention recently, mainly because they’ve actually already been under sustained attack by the Trump administration.
Cascade-Siskiyou has not (yet).
I was surprised to see that even seasoned outdoor writer Chris Keyes didn’t include it in a list of national monuments targeted for shrinking on his fantastic RE:PUBLIC website.
The BLM’s own materials describe Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument as a patchwork of forests, grasslands, shrublands, and wet meadows—and emphasize that it was designated to protect “objects of scientific and historic interest” identified in the presidential proclamations that created and expanded it.
This is not a monument where the “object” is obvious from a postcard, though.
The “object” is biodiversity itself: the way natural features, elevation, soil, and moisture transition quickly across the landscape, allowing species from different ecological provinces to overlap within a relatively compact geography.
In practical terms, that means you can move from oak woodlands into conifer stands, from open meadows into wet pockets and rocky outcrops, and see wildlife assemblages that reflect multiple Wests at once.
It’s also why Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument has long been described—by scientists and conservation advocates, and often by local interpretive materials—as a biodiversity hotspot: the monument’s value is less about one famous view and more about protecting an ecological “transition zone” that is increasingly rare in an era of fragmentation and climate-driven range shifts.
In January 2017, President Barack Obama expanded Cascade-Siskiyou. The White House archival proclamation describes the monument’s purpose in essentially the same terms as the original designation: protecting biodiversity at the meeting point of multiple ecoregions, providing a “home to an incredible variety of species and habitats, a rich mosaic of forests, grasslands, shrublands, and wet meadows.”
The BLM’s expansion fact sheet provides the most straightforward “fast facts”: an original monument of roughly 65,000 acres in southwestern Oregon, with an expansion of roughly 42,000 acres in Oregon and roughly 5,000 acres in California.
That expansion triggered years of litigation—primarily from timber and county interests arguing, in essence, that the Antiquities Act should not be used in a way that conflicts with statutory expectations for timber management on certain Oregon and California Railroad Lands (O&C Lands).
In March 2024, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear challenges seeking to undo the 2017 expansion, leaving lower-court rulings in place and keeping the monument’s current boundaries intact.
“Once again, courts have rejected the logging industry’s abhorrent theory that BLM lands cannot be conserved,” said Doug Heiken, Conservation and Restoration Coordinator with Oregon Wild, about a 2023 lower appeals court ruling that affirmed the legality of the monument expansion.
“These are public lands, managed for more than just logging. Special places like the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and our mature and old-growth forests deserve to be safeguarded for fish and wildlife, clean drinking water, recreation, carbon, and other important values,” Heiken said.
Even if you don’t follow the procedural details, the stakes are easy to summarize: the monument has become a test case for whether presidents can protect ecologically significant BLM landscapes—particularly in southwestern Oregon—without Congress, and whether opponents can use the O&C Lands argument, which dates from 1937, as a lever to limit monument protections.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to take the case didn’t end the underlying political debate, though, as the current threats continue to show.
Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” does not just criticize monument designations in the abstract.
In the Department of the Interior section, it argues that a prior monument review under the first Trump administration “was insufficient,” calls for “downward adjustments,” and pushes the current Trump administration to vigorously defend those reductions to tee up a Supreme Court ruling on presidential authority to shrink monuments.
Then it turns to western Oregon’s O&C Lands and becomes unusually direct:
It states that “one national monument worthy of downward adjustment is in Oregon,” and immediately ties that claim to the idea that the monument’s designation and expansion interfere with a federal obligation to harvest timber on BLM lands.
It identifies Cascade–Siskiyou National Monument by name as part of what it describes as a “trifecta of illegal barriers” to timber harvests, placing the monument’s designation (and later expansion) in the same narrative chain as spotted owl protections.
It calls for the new administration to “immediately” manage the monument for “permanent forest production” to ensure timber is “sold, cut, and removed.”
What is substantively important here is that Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is singled out by name in a downsizing argument built around timber harvest obligations, in a level of detail that is uncommon in a document that otherwise often speaks in broad categories.
If you wanted to design a political target that maximizes conflict, Cascade-Siskiyou almost does the work for you.
It is BLM-managed, not a marquee National Park Service unit, which means it doesn’t always have the same national constituency or cultural branding power as places with “National Park” in the name—even though, in reality, its ecological stakes are much higher than many national parks.
It’s also nested in a landscape where debates about rural economies, timber supply, wildfire, and federal land mandates have a long and often painful history.
Project 2025’s argument explicitly links its preferred management direction to “jobs” and “well-paying employment opportunities in rural Oregon,” alongside wildfire claims.
That rhetorical pairing is not accidental. It’s a strategy: reframe monument protection as an elite constraint on local prosperity, then present “downward adjustment” as opportunities for employment.
I’ll use some facts and statistics to explain why that’s completely backwards below.
In the meantime, allow me to repeat this once again: the monument was created precisely because this is an ecological junction—because it is unusually rich, unusually mixed, and unusually worth defending as an intact system.
In fact, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was expanded because fifteen scientists, most of whom locals, raised concerns “that the existing boundary was too small to preserve the monument’s biodiversity,” according to its fact sheet. Seventy more scientists later supported the expansion in an open letter.
Additionally, Cascade-Siskiyou expansion also received support from local mayors, city councils, and chambers of commerce, as well as from dozens of local businesses, private property owners, and many local and national conservation organizations.
During a public comment period, over 5,000 comments were submitted. About 75% of those were in favor of expansion.
That is why the monument exists in its current size, and that is why “downward adjustment” is not a neutral, technical tweak. When you protect transition zones, boundaries matter, because edges are where the science lives.
While the national debate tends to fixate on proclamations and court cases, successful day-to-day monument protection is often shaped by unglamorous land-use planning: travel management, grazing and vegetation decisions, recreation infrastructure, the slow grind of NEPA compliance, and, crucially, public input.
In June 2023, the BLM opened up a public comment period to inform an updated management plan for the monument, explicitly grounding that update in the “objects of scientific and historic interest” identified in the Clinton and Obama proclamations.
“The Presidential Proclamations provide a framework for managing the monument, and the public can help us determine the best way to implement them,” BLM Oregon/Washington State Director Barry Bushue said at the time, emphasizing the importance of public input and support in determining how monuments are managed. “Input at this stage will help inform the issues considered during the planning process and the decisions made in the final resource management plan.”
And in January 2025, based on those public comments, a Record of Decision and approved Resource Management Plan (RMP) was published.
These planning milestones matter because they reveal a core reality: Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is not “locked away.” It is very much a landscape that is used—by all kinds of people. It is managed. And that management is done based on public input, as well as science. People hike, hunt, fish, camp, and travel through it.
The monument includes well-known destinations like Pilot Rock, Grizzly Peak, the Jenny Creek Wild and Scenic River, the Soda Mountain Wilderness, and segments of the Pacific Crest Trail corridor.
When Project 2025 calls for “downward adjustment” of a monument boundary in order to ensure that its trees are “sold, cut, and removed,” it’s not only talking about lines on a map. It’s talking about which legal regime governs the land:
Under Antiquities Act-authorized monument status, management is guided by the proclamations’ conservation purposes and the protection of identified objects.
Under the framework Project 2025 invokes, the emphasis shifts toward fulfilling what it frames as a mandate for “permanent forest production” on Oregon and California lands.
In a biodiversity monument, the most consequential losses are often not the photogenic core but the connective tissue: lower-elevation interfaces, meadows, oak transitions, migration linkages, and climate-resilience gradients.
Shrink a monument and remove its trees, and you tend to reduce exactly the kinds of ecological “options” that let species adapt as conditions change.
There’s also the issue of setting a precedent here.
Project 2025 explicitly argues for defending monument reductions to get a Supreme Court ruling on whether presidents can shrink monuments.
In other words, Cascade-Siskiyou is not only a place—it’s a vehicle for a broader legal objective that could reverberate across the monument system. So, it may not be the widely talked about Bears Ears or Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments that’ll prove to be the determining Antiquities Act courtcase. It may be Cascade-Siskiyou—and, again, no one’s been talking about it.
Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument has already lived through the modern national monument cycle: designation, expansion, industry challenge, lower-court rulings, and a Supreme Court non-intervention that leaves protections standing (for now).
Project 2025’s inclusion of the monument signals an attempt to reopen that cycle through executive policy, not just litigation. And it does so by framing the monument as an obstacle to a specific economic program—industrial timber harvest on certain federal lands—rather than engaging the monument on its own scientific terms.
To understand how real the danger is here, it suffices to know that the Trump administration already “has implemented, or begun to implement, over 80 percent of actions pertaining to public lands recommended by Project 2025,” according to the analysis by the Center of Western Priorities.
You can see an overview of the 50 major environmental rollbacks by the Trump administration and Project 2025 here.
It’s not hyperbole to say that all of the things that happened to our public lands and waters in 2025 were the result of the Project 2025 guidelines.
The fact that something hasn’t occurred yet doesn’t mean that it won’t.
The administration still has about 20% of Project 2025’s public lands actions to initiate, including monument reductions. We could see the start of that in 2026—and I’m paying special attention to Cascade-Siskiyou.
It’s also worth pointing out that most of the language on public lands and the environment was written by William Perry Pendley, who served as the acting director of the BLM under the Trump 1.0—a position that was never confirmed by Congress—and is “a man who does not believe public lands should exist” in the first place.
Now, the nominee for BLM director under Trump 2.0 is Steve Pearce, yet another vehemently anti-public lands and anti-conservation politician with proven ties to the oil and gas industry.
If Pearce gets confirmed by Congress, he’ll oversee and be able to decide what happens to Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
On top of that, in the past few months, Congress has been using the Congressional Review Act in an unprecedented way to undo BLM Resource Management Plans (remember the one for Cascade-Siskiyou I mentioned above?).
So far, it has successfully gotten rid of RMPs for public lands in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Alaska—and is currently, as I write this, working on using that same act to establish a mine near the Boundary Waters.
This is not the stuff of speculation. It has happened and it is happening.
This having been said, based on the BLM’s own public documents from 2016—which was one year before President Obama expanded the monument—it’s hard to justify downsizing it now and implementing more logging from a economic standpoint.
In fact, those documents, which were discussed in a June 2018 article by Oregon Public Broadcasting, made a very strong case in favor of expansion and conservation.
In that year, Cascade-Siskiyou—in its smallest size—generated $16.6 million in recreational economic output. Grazing generated $1.1 million, and timber merely $0.6 million. In other words, the value of recreation in Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was almost ten times more than grazing and logging combined.
Additionally, recreation supported 200 jobs, while grazing supported 26 and timber supported a measly 3 jobs.
All of this is supported by a fantastic study on the “economic performances of communities near national monuments,” conducted by Headwaters Economics and published just over a week ago, on January 20, 2026. The study concluded that national monument designation does not disrupt local economics. In fact, it always does the opposite.
In the case of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which was analyzed in the study, the rural region added more than 25,000 jobs between 2000, the year the monument was created, and 2022.
During the same time period, per capita income rose by 25%, earnings per job increased by 15%, and non-labor income, which includes investments and real estate rentals or leasing, rose by more than 45% after the monument was created.
Based on those numbers, where, do you think, should the focus be? Exploitation? Or conservation?
“Economics is not the reason for the monument. If there is a recreation benefit, and according to the BLM there is a remarkable economic recreation benefit, that’s a byproduct. That’s a bonus. That’s frosting on the cake,” said Dave Willis of the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council at the time. “Green is gold. When you protect public lands it’s economically better off in the long term than degrading them.”
Still, despite all of this, in the current political climate of environmental destruction and rewarding political donors above all else, we should expect to see more attempts to downsize monuments, so that well-connected industry tycoons could plunder those previously protected lands.
“If America’s national monuments shrink again this year, it will not be a surprise,” warns Chris Keyes in RE:PUBLIC.
With all of this in mind, I will be spending a significant amount of time in Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument this year—to document, photograph, and highlight what we stand to lose if its boundaries are, in fact, shrunk, and the massive commercial timber harvests outlined in Project 2025 actually do get initiated.
I’ve added this to my list of ten other threatened public-lands-and-water destinations for 2026, which also include a few other public lands in Oregon: Willamette National Forest, the Owyhee Canyonlands, and the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge.
If you’d like to support independent public lands journalism and/or support me on this particular journey, which I’m paying for out of my own pocket, you can do that by becoming a paid subscriber.
For a monthly price equivalent to just one cappuccino, one box of pasta and a jar of cheap pasta sauce, one bundle of firewood, or one craft beer, you’ll help to keep me energized, warmed, and fed as I travel across the sprawling wilds of the West. Thanks!
Thanks for reading and for caring our public lands and waters!
See you out there,
Bram
Photo 1: Bob Wick / BLM
Photo 2: Bob Wick / BLM
Photo 3: Bob Wick / BLM
Photo 4: Bob Wick / BLM
My MAGA husband cherished riding his motorcycle thru here last summer. When I told him it was on the chopping block, he told me to stop overreacting, which is what he tells me about everything trump does…..
These PEOPLE!!!🤬🤬🤬🤬