Fraudulent Wilderness, Part 2
The proposed Copper-Salmon Wilderness [here, here] is 11 miles east of Port Orford on the Elk River. The 13,700 acre area is adjacent to the Grassy Knob Wilderness, 17,200 acres, and designated a wilderness area by the US Congress in 1984. Here is a picture of Grassy Knob:
Note that Grassy Knob is no longer grassy. It’s covered with trees. That should not be surprising, since it is in a prime tree growing area. Elevations vary from almost sea level to more than 2,000 feet on summits that include Grassy Knob, at 2,342 feet. It rains there an average of 130 inches per year.
What is remarkable is that it was once “grassy.” When named by early white settlers in the 1800’s, Grassy Knob was treeless, instead covered with Coast Range prairie. Similarly, the Grass Mountain Research Natural Area in the Coast Range west of Corvallis was once covered with Coast Range prairie, largely bracken fern and sedges. Grass Mountain is a little higher, roughly 3,000 feet, and it receives and average of 123 inches of rain per year.
Both Grassy Knob and Grass Mountain have trees roughly 100 years old. Older trees can be found in the canyons adjacent to streams, but not on the mountain tops. There the Douglas-fir on Grassy Knob and noble fir on Grass Mountain are younger and invaded after the Oregon pioneer era. Very little prairie remains on Grass Mountain, and almost none on Grassy Knob.
There were no fires 100 years ago that engendered fern brakes and Coast Range prairies. There are no snags or rotted root balls that would indicate there ever was forest on Grassy Knob or Grass Mountain. The on-the-ground evidence and historical record is clear: those prime tree growing areas were treeless.
Why? There is only one answer: the aboriginal residents kept those areas free of trees by repeated anthropogenic burning. There are very few lightning fires in the Coast Range. All of the known large fires, such as the repetitious Tillamook Fires, were human-caused. Coast Range prairie is decidedly human-induced.
Grassy Knob Wilderness Area is a prime example of a cultural landscape. The unique Coast Range prairie vegetation was an artifact, or more properly a deliberate imprint, of humanity.
The Wilderness Act is supposed to protect untrammeled areas, but Grassy Knob is a place that was trammeled by humans for thousands of years. The First Residents burned to promote edible root crops, such as bracken fern and camas, and useful fibers such as sedges. The Coast Range prairie also provided browse for deer, elk, and bears. Grassy Knob was a grocery store, a farm, a human-modified habitat with ample foodstuffs that the dense forests in the canyons did not provide.
No doubt, if the people could have burned the wet canyons too, they would have. The First Residents made use of the Port Orford cedars and western red cedars that grew in the canyons. Those trees provided building materials and canoe wood. But not food. The prairies were where the food came from. The salmon streams only ran with salmon a few weeks out of the year. The beaches had plenty of shellfish. But the vegetable foods and large mammals were found year-round in the human-induced prairies.
Those historical prairies have become overgrown and lost. Wilderness designation has destroyed the heritage. The designation as “wilderness” by law of areas habitated by humans for thousands of years was not only scientifically and historically wrong, it served to ruin the very features that made the areas useful to those humans, the features that led to the names that those areas carry today.
Denial of the heritage has led to loss of the heritage. In the rush to declare wilderness, the most valuable aspects have been wrecked. Grassy Knob and the Copper-Salmon area have not been wilderness for thousands of years. They have not been “wild.” Declaring them “wild” does not protect them; it ruins them.
It may be politically expedient and attractive to urbanites to dehumanize heritage sites, but it is not “preservation” by any stretch. The disconnection between an urban population and the real world is premised on ignorance of heritage.
Ignorance should not guide our decisions. Bad decisions are made by ignorant people. That’s pretty much a fact. It does not require examples.
Better decisions are made by informed people. You have now been informed about the ancient heritage that graces the Oregon Coast Range. Please digest that information, incorporate that knowledge, and see if together we can make some improved decisions about how we might be better stewards of our heritage landscapes.
To be continued…
by Forrest Grump
Don’t count on vetoes.
The facts don’t confuse; they illuminate. The destruction has to stop. Ignorant people are wrecking vast tracts of landscape. Let us please dispel that ignorance.
If you hit your thumb with your hammer, instead of the nail, you learn right away. Your aim improves. You don’t do that twice in a row. If you do, you put down the hammer and go do something else.
But with wilderness areas we have incinerated vegetation and habitat again and again and again and again. The hammer keeps pounding the thumb and nobody seems to get it.
Please put down the hammer and think things through. No one is talking about bulldozing Grassy Knob and erecting mini-malls. That is not the “other” option. Nobody is recommending that the Sky Lakes area be clearcut. Try not to go berserk with irrational paranoia.
What I am recommending is true stewardship that truly protects the natural values of landscapes. Holocaust does not protect anything. Setting something on fire and burning it to the ground is NOT protection.
There is a better way than condemnation via wilderness designation. It’s called stewardship. Hit the nail with the hammer, not the thumb.
I was up the Middle Fork of the Willamette last week. I see that the USFS has burned maybe 15 acres under mature ponderosa pine next to the 21 Road. Window dressing.
Wowie Zowie! Plantations galore, and thinning opportunity, commercial thinning, by the thousands of acres… and it needs it, too. All the shelterwood cuts from 30 years ago have their standing residual and some have little natural reprod under them, making them excellent candidates for underburns… so much opportunity. So much wood standing.
And so little road maintenance of really fine roads. Washboards that constipate a person for a week. They ain’t spending any money for replacement cutting edges for grader blades. Rock ravel and blowdown, water diversions, so much in need of attention. Just a crying shame. And scotch broom at 5000′. Ditches claimed by alder, all at elevation with green leaves and bent and broken by snowfall that came before Fall got started. Long faced ’shroomers everywhere on the east side. Temps in the teens, and a half of foot a cold snow on the ground. All the deer tracks headed downhill from Diamond Peak…
The shibboleths of the left concerning the climate and environment are revealed as lies by ground truthing. I saw at least two prior meadows now almost wholly claimed by tree encroachment. True firs claiming the fen… and you have to wonder why they would have built a military wagon road through that country, but then you take out the 150 year old trees from the forest, in your mind, and you then can see it was a pretty open countryside in those days of set fires and aboriginal burning. Salmon used to spawn up there before the dams, there were fire prairies all along the Middle Fork, and P Pine openings, and grey squirrels because of the pine and oaks still found in copses along the river, all being overgrown by doug fir weed.
The smart people in town, the ones with money and influence, who give us this failed economic policy, the redistribution of wealth to the poor which has now cost all of us so much, who have ruined the integrity of the forests with exploitation and preservation, always actions of extremes, can’t see that they have screwed up our resource economy, our rural livelihoods, and still have not helped save a damned thing, are the ruin of this country. The smarty pants urban liberals have led us to this place in time, and now they want to make us into some two-bit communist dictatorship of oligarchs and favored bureaucrats. Gee, don’t I feel especially lucky today. More forest to doom to certain ruin by Wilderness designation, more prairies to grow piss fir and doug fir weed. Will it ever end?
Don’t confuse the wilderniks with facts.
Here’s hoping Bush the Lesser comes out of his coma one last time. Or maybe it will be the first time, I da kno. But that Public Lands omnibus should be VETOED.