Wyden’s Open House
So I went to Senator Ron Wyden’s open house in Corvallis. And it was strange.
At first it seemed like a normal political event, held in the high school library. More than half the audience were high school students. Ron was a little late, ten minutes, and launched into a short and friendly stump speech. He joked with the students, and then took questions.
Ron tried to get mostly questions from the students, but adults kept breaking in. They were angry; angry at Bush, the Iraq war, at global warming, Republicans, and at Ron Wyden (a Democrat) for not being more outrageously liberal than he already is, which is a lot, as he kept reminding them.
There were a couple of questions regarding his new forest policy. He gave a long answer, but the gist of it was not in exact accord with the scientific testimonies he purports to support, nor with his statements reported in the press. He said “thinning in second growth stands” three times. He brought up his attempt to reach agreement between “the environmentalists and the timber industry.”
The message in the testimonies is that restoration forestry in old-growth stands (and riparian zones) is necessary to protect, maintain, and perpetuate old-growth forests. Further, such restoration forestry treatments must extend to landscape scales, in young and old-growth stands alike, to achieve fire control, wildlife habitat, and watershed goals.
Restoration is more than thinning. It is a complex of treatments that strive to restore and sustain forest and landscape vegetation structures, as informed by historic reference conditions. That includes preservation of existing old trees and other historic landscape features, and re-creation of forest development pathways that lead to long-lived trees and old-growth habitat. Restoration forestry must also be conditioned by locale; there is no one treatment that fits all acres everywhere. It’s a complex undertaking, especially on a landscape scale.
Restoration forestry is environmentalism. It is about protecting, maintaining, and perpetuating ecosystems. The timber industry, so-called, really has nothing to do with it. They own their own private lands, where they farm trees. Government land is not used for that express purpose anymore, and particularly not restored forests, which are nothing like tree farms and are not used for commercial tree growing.
The only connections between the timber industry, so-called, and restoration forestry are that both employ woods workers and wood product manufacturing companies may purchase some of the undesirable biomass removed in forest restoration activities. Private landowning tree farm companies may experience some competition in supplying low-end products like wood chips. Otherwise the timber industry, so-called, is not involved in restoration forestry.
And so-called environmentalists who advocate No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch it Rot policies are not doing our forested environments any favors.
None of that came out in Ron’s remarks. Maybe he understands, maybe he doesn’t. Mostly I think he doesn’t. His audience was hostile, at least a goodly number of the adults. He might have been biting his tongue because the restoration forestry message is anything but PC, especially to the more radical Dem adults in the back of the room. I don’t think that was the case, but it’s possible.
As the hour wore on, the more radical adults in the back of the room started flipping out. One lady congratulated Ron on his 10-month-old twins and then launched into a diatribe about Israeli’s murdering Palestinian children. The segue was ugly and offensive. Ron handled it well, I thought, but some damage was done.
Then someone demanded to know why Ron hadn’t moved to impeach Bush for all his crimes. Ron asked which laws Bush had broken, and the guy said “All of them.” A fellow demanded to know why Ron hadn’t filibustered more against this and that.
All evening Ron paraded his liberal positions. He voted against the war. He voted against the Patriot Act. His liberal voting record is spotless. Yada yada. But it didn’t satisfy.
Some people in the room began to chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” or something. I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. There were about 250 people in attendance, and the chanters were maybe five in number. It was awkward and pathetic.
Then a lady jumped up and shouted “You have blood on your hands!” over and over at Ron. She held up her hands and they were covered in red paint, except it was more of a purple. She was semi-hysterical.
All this in front of the high school students, who stared at the disrupters with polite curiosity. What kind of a civics lesson was this?
Ron was a little gruff and a little bit whiny, but the demonstrations were cheesy and juvenile, and the demonstrators stopped out of self-conscious embarrassment more than anything. Then they left, I guess. I was sitting in the back, in a corner by the book shelves, and couldn’t see everything. I didn’t want to look, anyway.
Then the whole show was over and I left, but then I gave an impromptu lecture on forestry to a forestry professor friend in the parking lot. I couldn’t help myself.
Despite that slight transgression, all in all I think I handled myself well. I was quiet and non-descript, and didn’t even whisper funny comments to my friend sitting next to me. The opportunities to make hilarious asides came one after the other, but I refrained and maintained my decorum.
Strange and unsettling evening. Hard to interpret. More weird times out here on the Western Edge of the New World.
by John M.
I’m an old Berkeley guy. I was there during the American Cultural Revolution. Hence I know what real political protests look like. The modern versions are derivative and empty, almost as if the modern radicals are a cartoon of the old 60’s version.
Back in my day, protesters had some creativity and style. Now they go through the motions in a copycat fashion, and not very good copies either. There was some humor in it all back then; today all the humor is gone and nothing is left but the nastiness.
by bear bait
Corvallis is about a segment of the left that no candidate can endorse due to its radical deviation from reality. Sort of like fleas in a Kalapulya winter dwelling. Something you live with. Not wanted, not liked, just endured. You can replace the hula girl on the dash with a Corvallis Liberal figure whose protest sign bobs up and down. Both are animated but ineffectual in changing public opinion.
Wyden is the law school grad from California who thought he could be an Oregon lawyer, but he was not up to passing the Oregon Bar, so changed course from interpreting law to making law. There has to be some irony in that.
Jerry Franklin and OSU’s Norm Johnson have made a 180 degree course correction because they realize that “let ‘er burn” policy and unintentional conflagration as the result of allowed fuel build up are, in fact, going to be the ruin of all that they wished to preserve. Some trees have to be removed in order that the forest survives. I would look at it like reintroducing loggers as needed tree removal agents, not unlike the enviro side sees reintroduced wolves as needed agents of forest health. There is a historical case for both agents of change, and both elicit similar pronouncements from academics.
However, it so far appears than none have any idea of how to get there from here without treading a known path. Wyden is no pathfinder. He is a weathervane, which is innate to long-lived politicians. His arrow now points to a gathering body of research that says there are more than biological reasons to remove trees. Local economic shortfalls are fomenting dissent that he has to placate to stay in office. However, lacking pathfinder skills, he is trying to walk down the thinning- of -planted- plantations path, which will surely result in a Green Taliban ambush at every turn in the road. If he is going to be sniped by True Believers for trying to find common ground, at the least he should be better armed, and he should have the local populace marginally on his side.
It would seem to me that such an august body as the Western Institute for the Study of the Environment should produce a white paper on restoration forestry. Certainly there is some non-profit trust or foundation that would be willing to finance such an investigation and back the publishing of said white paper. I am certain there are academics and practical forestry advocates who would be willing to contribute.
Wyden et al. need to come up with money for rural Oregonians, and they now see that selling trees to industrial wood users is the enlightened way. The great deadfall that will crush those who travel that path is a now reconfigured woods products industry that does not use a log over 22″ on the big end. Anything larger has to go to a less productive process to make products that no longer have a large market following. And logs that won’t make one 2×4 do not interest milling people. Allowing such a small range of useful trees to dictate policy will not solve the restoration forestry goal.
The trees that are being taken from the under-developed nations are large diameter specimens that produce myriad products for export from those poorer nations, which are imported by richer nations that still have an older construction ethic and a greater appreciation for larger pieces of wood. Instead of producing larger diameter logs on US public forests that no longer have a domestic market, export of those logs would now make economic sense in our hugely unbalanced trade situation. The green side of the argument is that when those trees are taken in restoration forestry, the goal is not to wood a mill, but open a canopy to restore a forest to its former state of conflagration resistance.
In the under-developed nations now supplying those logs, their logging is simply a way to get money for weapons of war, medicine to treat disease, or food to prevent starvation, just because there is little else to sell [or else for offshore profits for the mega corporations that control the poorer countries - M.] . The buyers care not one whit about how they leave the land. It is business in the Milo Minderbinder sense of inevitability, without regard for consequence. Perhaps the US could provide some of the large logs, and an enlightened foreign aid policy would not come with CC&Rs as how to spend the money we send them to not cut their forests. Al Gore could be the emmissary who sells the program.
When your automobile or kitchen appliance no longer is useable, it goes to a scrap metal processor where it is shredded and sorted by metal type into pellets that can be put into a container and shipped overseas to be gleaned by the hands of cheap labor, and smelted into raw materials for further use. Anything exportable can be containerized, and shipped overseas at a reduced rate because of the need to get returned containers to again ship consumer goods to the US as opposed to containers being shipped back empty. Containerized oversize logs would have a much wider market than ship loads controlled by Asian cartels or Japanese “zaibatsu” corporate behemoths. I would wonder if there would be an overseas market for very small diameter boles, and chips or wafers. It is a world economy, and for us to fully explore the path to restoration forestry, we have to act locally while thinking globally. Letting internal industry protections and anti-export regulations control the outcome of restoration forestry is counter-productive. We have to be open to all possible solutions to how to get there from here, and for that to happen, the old mold has to be broken.
However, nothing I can say or do makes any sense or difference if nothing happens on the ground, on a scale that might make an economic difference. To have that happen we need to change so many old ways and adopt a whole new vision of how to get there from here. Wyden might be persuaded to be part of the beginning. Or not. SSE, light and variable, changing to SW in the evening, and NW by tomorrow afternoon…
Mike, thanks for the report on Wyden’s meeting. While you were attending that gathering a similar meeting was being held in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, called by the Forest Service to discuss travel plans. The same pattern of public participation occurred, but with even more nastiness taking place. A few people went wild with comments and outbursts, one person making an alleged threat of violence against a citizen speaker. So we see again a pattern of a few people exercising their “rights” at the expense of the rights of the majority of people with more civilized views of public participation. I am sure the high school students were impressed, but probably not in a positive way.