Longtime environmental activist Andy Kerr says it's time to transfer U.S. Bureau of Land Management forestlands in Western Oregon over to the U.S. Forest Service.

"I hope 10 years from now you'll find the BLM only in the history books," said Kerr, one of a dozen presenters at Saturday's "Beyond Big Timber" conference in Medford.

"Our national forests are better managed than the BLM lands," he said. "Not as well as we would like but better than the BLM's.

"The dark days we're in now have never been darker," he said later. "I miss James Watt."

He was referring to the former Department of Interior secretary in the Reagan administration whose decisions were uniformly disliked by the environmental community. The BLM is part of the Interior Department while the Forest Service is under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The session drew some 75 environmental activists from throughout the region to discuss the BLM's ongoing Western Oregon Plan Revisions. The agency manages about 2.6 million acres west of the Cascade Range.

Participants expressed concern the revisions would serve as a vehicle to increase old-growth timber harvests in Western Oregon, a concern BLM officials say is unfounded.

Environmentalists have proposed a "community-conservation" alternative that protects mature and old-growth timber while focusing on restoring forest and watershed health.

Each participant, including keynote speaker Russell Sadler, stressed that the standing trees are worth more to the local economy in the long term than harvested timber. They cited the growing value of tourism, recreation and special forest products, such as mushrooms, overlooked by the timber industry in the past.

Dominick DellaSala, a forest ecologist who heads the World Wildlife Fund's Southwest Oregon office, said too often a forest's health has been measured by its sustained timber yield.

"Sustainability involves more than timber," he stressed, noting other factors include everything from habitat to the watershed.

Building roads into a roadless forest and then logging in the area add up to an "aquatic double whammy" which causes erosion and degrades fish habitat, said Cindy Deacon Williams, conservation director for Headwaters. The fishery biologist was also involved in creating the aquatic conservation strategy for the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan.

Chip Dennerlein, director of the Siskiyou Regional Education Project, who has spent more than 25 years in Alaska where he was an avid hunter and fisherman, said Southwest Oregon's wild rivers compared favorably to those in the Last Frontier.

"They do not know what they have," he said of those who would log or build roads in the virgin watersheds. He called for a "Siskiyou Wild Rivers Conservation Reserve" to protect the region.

In an interview after his presentation, Kerr, a senior counselor to the Oregon Natural Resource Council which he once directed, said he was very serious about having BLM lands taken over by the Forest Service. Both agencies were already beginning to share employee resources, he said.

The idea of consolidating the agencies is nothing new, he said, noting it was proposed in both the Reagan and Carter administrations.

"If you want more people on the ground, hopefully doing good restoration work rather than clearcutting old-growth forests, we need to look for efficiencies in the bureaucracies wherever we can," he said.

Polls have repeatedly shown that a large majority of Oregonians want to preserve old-growth forests and the roadless areas, he said.

"The Forest Service increasingly understands that but the BLM doesn't understand yet at all," he said. "The BLM is still operating under an obsolete paradigm. The world doesn't work the way it used to. There is more money in these forests when they are left standing."

The session continues today with field trips to local sites.