East of Oregon's Cascade Mountains lies a unique landscape known as the high desert. Here, one can experience wide open landscapes, deafening silence and stunning beauty. This land is home to fascinating lava flows, rugged river canyons, sensitive and endangered species, pristine mountain streams and amazing wildflowers. Seventy-five percent of the land in this area is public land, primarily managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
The Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) is a non-profit group based in Bend, Oregon. ONDA’s mission is to protect, defend and restore forever the health of Oregon’s wild deserts. Although two-thirds of Oregon is desert, ONDA remains the only organization working full-time to protect Oregon’s arid lands and desert waterways. Founded in 1987, ONDA is a 1,200 member grassroots organization that successfully uses education, science, litigation, and grassroots advocacy to achieve its mission.
Over the past 20 years, ONDA has earned many successes, including the protection of Steens Mountain in southeast Oregon as the nation’s first “cow-free” wilderness in 2000. ONDA also helped remove livestock grazing from the Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in 1992, the Donner and Blitzen River in 1997, and the Wild and Scenic Owyhee River in 1998.
Most recently ONDA saw decades of hard work come to fruition when President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act into law last March. This act protected 30,000 acres of wilderness in the Badlands area just 15 miles east of Bend. Also protected was Spring Basin, a 10,000 acre area just above the Wild and Scenic John Day River.
Badlands Wilderness
Because wilderness provides the greatest and most permanent protection for wild lands, ONDA seeks to protect Oregon’s most pristine and ecologically important public lands through this designation. ONDA staff and volunteers have conducted wilderness inventories across eastern Oregon and have identified eight million acres suitable for wilderness designation. These lands make up the foundation for the work that ONDA is doing to add more wilderness in Oregon to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
With the momentum generated by their recent victories, ONDA is poised to help protect millions of acres of new wilderness in the coming years. Just across the John Day River from the Spring Basin Wilderness, ONDA and private landowners have put together a land consolidation and wilderness proposal that would result in 15,000 acres of new wilderness and provide public access to three miles of river frontage in a key recreational area. In addition to this exciting development, ONDA also has wilderness proposals in the works for 145,000 acres in the John Day Basin, 208,000 acres in Central Oregon and a whopping 2.1 million acres in the Owyhee Canyonlands. If they are successful in protecting the lands encompassed in these proposals, Oregon could nearly double its percentage of land protected as wilderness.
In addition to wilderness protection, ONDA works to protect wildlife and clean water through wild and scenic river designation, habitat restoration trips, legally enforcing conservation laws and facilitating third party buyouts of grazing permits on public land. ONDA’s program areas complement each other, weaving grassroots advocacy, public education, fieldwork, litigation and science into a comprehensive effort to protect Oregon’s vast desert landscapes. By engaging in this suite of tactics, ONDA is an effective and well-rounded advocate for these sparsely populated and often overlooked wild places.
For more information, visit the Oregon Natural Desert Association website.
