As a young man I stood on the side of the environmentalist.
On a personal level, a healthy, vibrant natural environment was critical to my day-to-day happiness. I roamed the woods and creeks and fished the pond.
Back then, the issue was old growth. It was being logged very quickly, most of it was gone, and it, and the web of life it supports, was in danger of extinction.
My view was not popular, my extended family hosted plenty of men who worked in the lumber mills and woods cutting, hauling and pricing timber.
I was glad when old growth logging was largely curtailed on public lands.
A true victory not only for the spotted owl, but for everyone.
Since then I’ve seen the laws and plans designed to save old growth forests applied far beyond those lands.
The idea that a healthy forest is an untouched forest is simply untrue.
Pioneers frequently describe Oregon as being abundant in grass and huckleberries, lush forests full of life and we assume that was its natural state. It wasn’t.
Native people burned the grassland to increase new growth and burned the huckleberry fields to get rid of encroaching vegetation.
Old growth and healthy wilderness aside, a hands-off approach in the forest will not give us the results we desire.
Already, many of the prairies of my youth, you can find them on maps, are no longer prairies but swaths of brush.
Timberlands are full of insect-killed trees, I’ve seen them tumbled like matchsticks dumped from a box. A fire now doesn’t purge the brush, it sterilizes the soil.
Turns out the environmentalists of my youth were right... but so were the loggers and foresters.
Where we go from here is the big question.
A forest can be a tremendous asset in so many ways, I hate to see them lost in the name of their salvation.
Once long ago, when common sense more or less prevailed, Oregon was a natural resources-based economy and there were plenty of jobs in rural areas.
Then the Northern Spotted Owl was listed as an endangered species in 1990 and harvest levels on federal lands were cut in half and then reduced even further. In 1988, Oregon’s loggers cut 4.9 billion board feet of timber on federal land.
Ten years later, that number had been slashed to 240 million board feet and environmentalists began using the Endangered Species Act as a vehicle to challenge all federal timber sales, as well as other agricultural practices.
As a result, more than 200 sawmills have closed in the Northwest during the past two decades and that has brought the loss of more than 40,000 good-paying jobs.
The irony of this massive sacrifice on the part of so many Oregon families is that the spotted owl reportedly continues to die at the rate of 2.9 percent a year.
To save the fragile creature, federal authorities have authorized killing of the Barred Owl, which has apparently invaded the U.S. from Canada. Meanwhile, Oregon’s rural communities have not been able to offset the loss of logging dollars.
Counties with national forests in their land base were once given a share of timber receipts to make up for lost tax revenue and development potential. That funding is gone, as is the compensation given as a band-aid for more than 10 years.
And our public forests are full of diseased and dying trees that make perfect fuel for costly conflagrations.
Rural communities struggle to replace lost logging with other industries because environmentalists also use federal rules to stop manufacturing firms and “big box” stores from setting up shop.
This situation will not change until the American people, say “Enough!” How bad will things have to get before that happens?
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