SOS Forests

Portland environmentalists want to run the show. So they go to their Board members to gain that course for the future. The free lunch crowd is at the table demanding more from the private table. The salami has been sliced so many times on their behalf that there is little salami left to slice.

Oregon has less than 1 million acres in state and other local government ownership. The State manages Common School Lands for benefit of the Common School Fund, which is a pocket of money that is allowed to produce income, and can be added to but not subtracted from, except that earnings are directed to K-12 education.

BOF also manages tax foreclosed timberlands acquired by counties during the last Great Depression. Not all counties chose to participate. The issue was counties could not run schools, let alone government, and manage timberlands. So the State was elected to do that for counties that participated, and the State would sell timber and the counties would get 65% of the realized sales dollars in lieu of property taxes. Now the urbanistas fully believe they have better standing than the county in which the timber is located, and those counties continue to suffer financial losses to State investments of their collected taxes, PERS monies, and they need timber sold to pay for some of their unexpected expenses. The urbanistas want that NOT to happen, and for those lands to become landscape reserves for water and wildlife of their choosing and use. After all, the clean water issue is always about cheap, abundant, clean water for town, at the rural resident’s expense. Portland is still trying to quit pooping in the Willamette, and I now see has a problem with Missoula Flood boulders mucking up their Great Sewer Tunnel project, and everyday that it rains .15″ or more in a day, sewage ends up in the Willamette River. Of course the answer is to hold the State Forester responsible.

This resignation would appear to be just another Portland Power Play for the most liberal of sensibilities. And another nail in the rural economic coffin. I spent two days in southern Douglas county, and the timber goes and goes and goes, and the only clearcuts are Plum Creek on old GP land out of Powers, and some Seneca and Roseburg Lbr, and Sun Studs lands… all on private land, and all under regulatory prescription by the BOF. The public lands are doing little except some thinning, and the thinning is well thought out and leaves an exceptional stand of residual trees. However, those will all soon be larger than the 22″ dbh that officially denotes “old growth” by size and not age, as the age of this timber is mostly under 50 years. And most under 40 years.

As a state, Oregon is bound and determined to kill all jobs outside of the TriCounty area or other urban enclaves. And never use a natural resource… when Gov Toolongstupidski determined that hydro power was NOT sustainable, and not to be encouraged, you had to know that politics determine the natural order of things, not science and reason.

Forester Brown was about Science and Reason, and the mandate for State Forests to produce income and raw material for industry. That does not sit well with the urbanista trust puppies who use their tax avoidance money to influence government and undermine private efforts to employ people. Academic forestry is tax supported, grant supported, trust fund supported, NGO supported. Nothing about it is concerned with employment and commerce. And this is more damage from the war between academic forestry and for profit forestry. One creates the money to sustain itself, and the other is a drain on tax coffers and is about taxpayer support of security and maintenance.

Look at USFS lands, and now BLM lands, all the roads being torn out because they then do not have to maintain them, nor do they access campgrounds that have to be taken care of, and that list goes on and on. The issue is there is no longer a commercial aspect to that agency, and it is all about unsustainable costs of security and maintenance. So they let it burn now, as the cheapest management course. There is something so Pashtun about that. Like cutting off the wife’s nose and ears so she won’t be attractive to anyone and thus not someone’s lover. If that fails, just stone her to death. And soon, if you need money to pay PERS, sell your ten year old daughter into marriage to some 50 year old horn dog. Pashtun Forestry. The Oregon Way!!! Like the State Land Board is now doing with isolated chunks of Common School Lands. Sell the cow to pay the milkman…

A possibly related article, Ministers plan huge sell-off of Britain’s forests, is [here].