The Ground Truth Listening Tour asked Oregonians one question this spring: does Oregon need a constitutional right to a healthy environment? The preliminary findings report is out now, it runs 36 pages, and this coast is in it.
Between March 31 and June 26, 2026, with a few spot sessions in July, organizers from Stewards United and OCERA, the Oregon Coalition for an Environmental Rights Amendment, sat down with people in every corner of the state. They started in Southern Oregon, worked through Central and Eastern Oregon, and finished in the Portland metro area, the Willamette Valley, and here on the coast. Some sessions were one person at a kitchen table. Some were full rooms. There were virtual gatherings for farmers, ranchers and foresters, for youth, for elders, for people who work in tourism and outdoor recreation, and for environmental justice communities and workers. Our Children’s Trust covered the costs. Local people made each stop happen, often in a library meeting room that cost nothing.
The Newport session was coordinated by Liz Fox, the Emerald Curtain Collective, the Coast Range Association, and local media. We also carried the tour on our Act Now page in June, while the Western Oregon window was still open, and a number of you wrote something down or showed up. That is the only reason the coast appears in this report at all. A record like this gets built out of whoever bothers to speak.
What our coast said
The coastal findings are short and they are hard reading.
People talked about what is not there anymore. “Dad was a crabber, but there aren’t as many crabs.” “Fish used to be really huge.” Kelp forests dying off, warmer water, harmful algal blooms, more pathogens. One person put it simply: “We’re missing more low tide critters.” Bret, in Curry County, had a warning about stagnant water with algal blooms in it. “Don’t let your dogs drink it!”
People talked about the forests behind their houses. Participants called unsustainable timber operations the gorilla in the room, and named aerial spraying and clearcutting as the things wrecking the coastal forests that hold our water and break our wind. “All driven by profit,” one said. Another line lands harder than anything else in the section: “We have good laws, but [they have] no teeth.”
Two Lincoln County stories made the report. Susan described neighbors who lost their water after a clearcut up on Beaver Creek, and Lyme disease arriving after, with a lot of people getting sick. Sheila kept goats on a property surrounded by corporate forest land, where crews sprayed across the stream and uphill from her. Her baby goats did not survive. She reported it to Fish and Wildlife and to the Forest Service. Her account of what happened next is four words: “there was no change.”
There is a passage on the GP Mill in Toledo, where multiple people raised suspected flushing of concentrated waste through an outfall near coastal hotels, along with air pollution. A chemical engineer quit, the report says, because “it was so appalling.”
Even the mushrooms are in here. A leader in the Southern Oregon mushroom industry told the tour that the season is no longer predictable, that there is no more mist along the coast the way there used to be, and that the moisture in the air is just wrong. Mushrooms cannot adapt that fast. He described it as an economic loss headed toward market collapse.
Two coastal voices are worth carrying whole. Kathleen, on the South Coast: “People live here for the pristine environment; it’s not the culture, job or schools, but it’s the water, air, etc. We need to protect what’s left.” And Loren, in Lincoln City, on the way things used to work between neighbors and the industries around them: “There’s no more Good Neighbors Policy. There used to be.”
What the rest of Oregon said
Our problems are not unique, and reading the other regions is what makes the pattern visible.
In South Deschutes County, about 18,000 people live over an aquifer tainted by nitrates leaching from septic systems installed in the 1970s and 1980s. Nitrates in drinking water carry real risk of cancer, birth defects and death. Leadership has known for decades. Families who lost their wells paid thousands of dollars they did not have to replace them. In the Lower Umatilla Basin, nitrate contamination has been documented since the 1990s and the DEQ’s own trend analysis shows it worsening, while the data centers built there since 2011 pull tens of millions of gallons of that contaminated groundwater a year to cool their equipment, concentrate it, and spray it onto nearby farm fields, where it returns to the aquifer local families drink from. Doctors and residents there point to clusters of rare cancers, kidney failure and miscarriages.
The Dalles is looking at a plan for 200,000 truckloads of toxic waste in 2027, roughly 120 trucks a day. In 2026 the American Lung Association ranked Eugene and Springfield second in the country for short-term particle pollution and third for the annual measure. And smoke runs through every region in the report. A young woman in Bend, now 17, told the tour she cannot remember a summer without wildfires.
What was heard everywhere
Three things came up in every community, in every part of the state.
The first was distress about harms nobody is tracking, which the report ties to a lack of environmental monitoring and of coordinated reporting on the cancers and other diseases that come out of the environment. The second was despair at political stagnation and rollback, federal and state. The third was the one that ties the report together: a wide, shared sense that harmful industries carry more political weight than people do, even on questions of health and safety.
The diagnosis, and the fix on the table
The report’s argument is not that anyone involved is a villain. It is that the system produces this outcome on its own. Businesses carry a legally enforceable duty to maximize returns for shareholders, and the law lets them spend heavily on political influence. Elected officials, under the same law, end up most responsive to their largest donors. Government employees want to keep their jobs and advance. Put those three together and loyalty to the public interest gets squeezed. Some people call it government capture.
The solution the tour heard, over and over, is to make government decisions that allow or worsen environmental harm unconstitutional, and to spell out the state’s heightened duty to protect the natural resources we and our grandchildren need for life, liberty, health and safety. The point is to move these questions out of donor politics and into a courtroom, where the rules of evidence apply and someone has to prove their case.
The report’s answer to its own question is one sentence: yes, Oregon needs a constitutional right to a healthy environment.
The most useful pages are the skeptical ones
The report closes on a man who is not sold, and it is better for it.
Joseph, in Ashland, described himself as a forester, a veteran of the Timber Wars, an arborist until 2014, a wildland firefighter since the nineties, and a research ecologist. He has watched a lot of country burn, and he has seen the damage from both directions: the clearcutting and spraying on one side, and on the other, fires that followed treatments by well-meaning environmental groups. He has grown wary of large nonprofits that have money to sue and no obligation to offer a solution. He pointed to indigenous management as the real thing, and called himself an activist on activists.
The report takes the objection seriously and answers it. A successful case under the amendment would produce no monetary damages, so there is no money in it for anybody. What it would produce is a requirement that the government correct its own management. And whichever side believes it has the better practice would have to prove it with admissible evidence: expert testimony, peer-reviewed studies, cross-examination, and the best available science, which the report notes is often catching up to knowledge indigenous people have carried all along.
What happens next, and what you can still do
A Comprehensive Findings Report is due in mid-November 2026, and it is not closed yet. Additional stories, reports, analyses and findings can be added between now and the end of October. If you have something, email team@stewardsunited.org. You do not need to be an expert or a good writer. A paragraph about what the crab pots look like now, or what the creek behind your place did after the last cut, is exactly what this is for.
After that: Stewards United takes on educating Oregonians statewide, work that runs well past October 2028. OCERA aims to qualify a ballot initiative between January 2027 and June 2028, which takes roughly 200,000 signatures, and to pass it in the fall of 2028.
That is a long road, and none of it happens without ordinary people saying out loud what they have watched change. Read the report if you have an hour. Download it here. Send it to someone who loves this coast. And if you would like to hear when the next moment to speak up arrives, you can join our newsletter and Action Team, or find what is open right now on our Act Now page.
The people in these pages did the hard part. They told the truth about their own water, their own air, their own animals, to strangers with a notebook. The least the rest of us can do is read it.
