Eco-Obsessives Gone Hinky With Your Money
by bear bait
In the Polk County News today is a story about the Columbia Helicopter Chinook that logged the fir out from the canopy of 40 acres of oak savanna under restoration at the Basket Slough NWR… using a chopper to haul the fir logs away in order have a place to under burn and restore native prairie.
And the logs? Why, the USFWS “partnered” with the City of Portland, and the logs were hauled to the Bull Run Watershed where they were placed in creeks for fish habitat!
Hmmmm. There are right now several billion (with a “b”) board feet of logs in the Bull Run watershed, all on USFS land. Like the USFS doesn’t have enough logs to “create stream structure” in Bull Run?
So the logs were hauled a hundred or more miles, burning diesel and tax dollars all the way, NOT to produce money, or raw materials for mills, but to place in streams ABOVE a dam without a fish ladder. Like Portland wants salmon copulating and releasing clouds of sperm into their drinking water??? That is why there is no fish passage on the Bull Run. No fish ladders on the dams. Purposefully. To keep the fish out of it. Dead salmon carcasses are not amenable to potable water in the short term.
So $millions were spent to haul logs hundreds of miles to a heavily forested watershed to place in streams for salmon where salmon do not (cannot) access.
This whole deal AFTER the killing of the doug fir weed in the oak patch is so hinky. I understand the helipopper and great expense to hide evidence of access and allegedly prevent soil erosion (in a slough — the terrain is flat). I understand, sort of. But then to haul the damned things off site, to a protected “wilderness” super duper watershed with all the touchy-feely regs against logging???? To introduce EXOTIC logs into their SALMON-LESS streams??? “Partnered”??? WTF does that mean?? Is that what partnering is: two groups of stoopid people doing something together in the hopes that since both are a part of it, the act will not be seen as stooopid??? A regular dunce dance…
I read the story and could not stop giggling for an hour. Our country is broke. Busted. We BORROWED the money to hire the helipopper and the log loader and the log trucks. And did not sell the logs into commerce, but spent even more money to put them in a creek in a watershed that has tens of thousands of trees falling down each year… Just cut logs, mind you, not the root wads. Root wads impart [spawning] gravels and introduce new substrate minerals into creeks. The major value to salmon of a tree fallen into a creek is the root wad full of rocks and dirt. Besides spawning gravels, root wads make hidey holes for the tiny fish in the stream. But then, there are no salmon the Bull Run anyway.
There is no end to the stooopiddititty that goes into this kind of environmental mind fart and brain misfire. There is no shame or sense in the world of eco-obsessives.
- bear bait
