Guest guest Posted September 6, 2008 Report Share Posted September 6, 2008 --Today for you 30 new articles about earth's trees! (395th edition) --You can now RSS tree news in a regional format at: http://forestpolicyresearch.org --To Subscribe / to the world-wide email format send a blank email to: earthtreenews- OR earthtreenews- In this issue: PNW-USA Index: --Washgington: 1) Logging to begin in Eightmile Creek in Okanogan and Wenatchee NF, 2) Hamma Hamma Balds protected, 3) Who's the next Public lands Commissioner? --Oregon: 4) A White footed vole lawsuit will be filed, 5) Growing site-specific restoration trees, 6) More on demise of Spotted Owl, 7) Google maps of coast range clearcuts, 8) Improving water supply by removing roads, 9) No broad-scale wilderness expansion in a quarter-century, 10) Timber industry need to lose tax-free logging rights, 11) Governor relies on bad advice when it comes to forests, --California: 12) help prevent dangerous rule changes for Spotted Owl, 13) Warming temperatures killing old growth, 14) Jackson State legal victory leads to more 'research' logging, 15) 50th anniversary of an amazing women fire spotter, --Idaho: 16) Yet another unlikely truce announced for 9.3 million acres of roadless areas --Montana: 17) We don't know what the forest used to look like, 18) Fire Salvage on Teton Road, NW of Choteau, 19) How a do it yourself thinning with a conscience works, --Colorado: 20) Resort begins logging along Vasquez Ridge and Cooper Creek --Minnesota: 21) Firewood harvests continue to decline also state logging economics --Texas: 22) 100 Megawatt biomass plant to devour every last twig and leaf in the state --Indiana: 23) Yet another 100-year study about how logging may be good for forests --Connecticut: 24) Yale forestry dean says radical action / economic makeover needed --New York: 25) Why dumb foresters think clearcutting is good --USA: 26) What will we do with 'non-viable populations' 27) What happens to a forest when pollution reaches a 'critical load' 28) Tell the Bush Administration: hands off America's last wild forests! 29) Another biomass plant planned, 30) Earth First! Direct Action promo at Roosevelt memorial? Yeah right! Washington: 1) Early in September, logging is scheduled to begin in the Eightmile Creek drainage of the Methow Valley Ranger District, according to a Forest Service announcement. The fuels reduction work is being done as part of the Okanogan and Wenatchee National Forests' Eightmile project. " The purchaser is planning to start work on the Flatmoon Timber Sale in about two weeks, " said Arlo VanderWoude, vegetation program manager for the Methow Valley Ranger District. " This sale sold last year, but the purchaser has been finishing up another project. " The 2,500-acre project is designed to improve forest health by thinning overcrowded stands of trees. Left alone, overcrowded trees are weakened as they compete for sunlight and nutrients, leaving them more susceptible to insects, disease and fire, according to the announcement. The treatment project was signed in 2006 following analysis of the area. It includes harvesting about five million board feet of timber, doing pre-commercial thinning and using prescribed fire, the announcement continued. Logging traffic for the Flatmoon Timber Sale will use the main Eightmile Creek Road No. 5130 and West Chewuch Road No. 5100. " There will be between 15 and 30 loaded logging trucks coming down the Eightmile and Chewuch roads on weekdays, " said VanderWoude. " Added caution will be important as folks drive these roads. " http://www.omakchronicle.com/nws/n080904a.shtml 2) At its monthly meeting today, the Board of Natural Resources (DNR) approved a transfer of state trust land to preserve a 957-acre tract of unique and sensitive plant habitat in north Mason County. The site — Hamma Hamma Balds — was designated as a Natural Area Preserve by Commissioner of Public Lands Doug Sutherland. " This area is small, but it is so unique in the western Washington landscape that it fully deserves this high level of protection, " Sutherland said. " Creating Natural Areas is another way DNR works through the Trust Land Transfer Program to keep our state's most precious natural habitats intact and free from development. " The Hamma Hamma Balds has the highest quality known examples of Roemer's fescue grassland in the Pacific Northwest Coast Ecoregion — an area west of the Cascades, stretching from Vancouver Island to southern Oregon. The transfer drew praise from organizations devoted to protecting unique habitats for Washington's native plants. " Protection of the Hamma Hamma Balds area is an exceptional conservation opportunity for Washington, " said Catherine E. Hovanic, Executive Director, Washington Native Plant Society. " The Washington Native Plant Society enthusiastically supports DNR's Natural Area Program as an appropriate way to protect this unique and fragile plant community. " The site is the north side of the Hamma Hamma River and 13 miles north of Hoodsport. The grassland type on the Hamma Hamma Balds is considered critically imperiled and in danger of extinction. Balds are open areas, generally within a forest, where shallow soils inhibit trees from growing. In addition to transferring state trust land into Natural Area Preserve status, the Board's action will compensate the Common School Construction Account $5,258,000 for the appraised value of the timber on the transferred land. The action also deposits $221,000 (the land's appraised value) into an account to buy replacement lands for the trust that funds public school construction projects statewide. Board acts to protect Grays Harbor County forestland from development. The Board today also approved the purchase of a 42-acre tract of forestland in Grays Harbor County from a partnership of private owners. The property is on the western fringe of the Capital State Forest and about 5 miles southeast of Elma. It is a tract of working forest in danger of being converted to a different use, such as residential housing, that is incompatible with forestry. http://www.dnr.wa.gov/BusinessPermits/News/Pages/nr08_160.aspx 3) The contest for state commissioner of public lands is shaping up as Democrats against forest-product companies, environmentalists against forest-product companies, and Seattleites against forest-product companies. At least that's the way campaign contributions look in what appears to be November's most competitive statewide race — other than the bitter rematch between Gov. Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi — based on primary results and fundraising. The lands-commissioner position is often overlooked and little understood by voters. The commissioner oversees 5 million acres of public-trust land and the 1,500-employee state Department of Natural Resources, which regulates state-owned and private-land timber harvest and manages nearly 2.5 million acres of riverbanks, lakeshores and tide flats. Incumbent Republican Doug Sutherland draws heavily from forest-products, construction, development and mining interests; 126 of his 200 biggest donations come from companies and people in those industries — with the vast majority from forest-product companies. Those 126 donations account for more than one-third of his total $468,000 in campaign cash. Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark, who has raised $560,000, has no forest-product companies among his top donors. Instead he leans on Democrats, environmentalists, unions and Seattleites for key support. The state Democratic Party is his biggest donor with $46,000. Seattle residents are particularly important to Goldmark; almost half of his 200 biggest contributions are from Seattle, and a total of 964 contributions from Seattle have supplied $280,000, or almost half of his campaign cash. Sutherland calls Goldmark's supporters " Seattle-centric and strongly Democrat. " A former Tacoma mayor and Pierce County executive, Sutherland touts himself as a moderate with a balanced approach toward industry and ecology. That style has prompted many timber companies to write checks to his campaign, but not leading environmental groups, because, Sutherland says, " there are some in the environmental community who just want more. " Goldmark, an Okanogan rancher who also owns a home in Seattle, counters that his donors don't have an economic interest in how public lands are managed. " They have more of an altruistic outlook, " he said. He calls Sutherland's reliance on natural-resource industries a " reprehensible " conflict of interest. " I think the industry is very happy with the incumbent and know they get what they want, no questions asked. " Goldmark said the problem with such a conflict was seen in " lax oversight of clear-cuts on steep slopes " that contributed to last year's dramatic landslides in Lewis County. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008154620_landscommissioner03m.\ html Oregon: 4) The Center for Biological Diversity, Oregon Wild, Portland Audubon and the Cascadia Wildlands Project said they intend to sue because the department has yet to act on their June 18, 2007, petition for the vole, a native of Oregon's Tillamook region. The petition argues that the population of voles has declined and is missing from some historic habitats as a result of heavy logging and forest fires that have destroyed the old-growth forest features that they depend on. The groups contend the vole is a subspecies of the red tree vole, one of a number of species connected to the ongoing debate over forest management in the Northwest. Red tree voles are found in the canopies of old-growth forests and make up about half of the diet of the northern spotted owl. In 2006, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with environmental groups that said the Bureau of Land Management illegally downgraded the status of the red tree vole under the Northwest Forest Plan's Survey and Manage program, a move that opened the door to two timber sales (Greenwire, Nov. 7, 2006). The groups hope listing of the dusky vole would lead to a recovery plan that will include restoration of the region's old-growth forests. " For too long, the Tillamook has been a sacrifice zone for industrial forestry, " CBD biologist Noah Greenwald said. " Forest reserves and better forest practices are needed to save the tree vole, salmon and dozens of other wildlife species in the Tillamook. " Upon receiving a petition, Interior is required to issue an initial finding of whether the petition merits further investigation within 90 days. The government has 12 months after receiving the petition to respond with a finding of whether the species warrants protection under ESA. While the original petition was received in the last fiscal year, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman, Joan Jewett, said the agency was not able to start on the 90-day review until this fiscal year because there was no funding for a study. http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2008/09/05/5 5) Behind an eight-foot fence, hundreds of locally adapted native willows and cottonwoods sigh in the breeze off the river. Sprinklers keep the four-acre site moist and cool. A layer of black fabric mulch, marked off in a five-foot grid, holds weeds down and pinpoints the location of plants from each source drainage. The squares are meticulously identified and marked on a gigantic field map that looks like a version of the periodic table. " Such a huge assortment of material in one place, I don't think there's anything else like it out there, " said Chris Jensen, who works in reforestation and genetics for the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests. The Clarno Hardwood Production Beds, a joint project of the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, provides high-quality hardwood cuttings for native plant restoration projects in Northeast Oregon. Each year, the two agencies plant an average of 40,000 cuttings grown at Clarno. Duane Ecker, a tree improvement forester with the Ochoco National Forest, started the production beds in 1996. Ecker and other foresters realized native black cottonwoods in the area were aging and failing to reproduce. In some drainages, this important species appeared to be locally extinct. As he looked into restoring the cottonwood stands, Ecker came up against a shortage of locally adapted material. Commercially produced cottonwoods were available, but the Forest Service and BLM are charged with doing restoration not just with native plants, but with locally adapted native plants. " Locally adapted material is what we have in a particular drainage. Say we have one clone of black cottonwood, one tree. Over many generations, it has adapted to the weather and moisture regimes of that particular drainage, " Ecker said. Cuttings from that clone, planted in a different area, might survive for a number of years, only to die in a cold snap or a drought, for instance, that it would have survived in its native drainage. http://www.eastoregonian.info/main.asp?SectionID=13 & SubSectionID=48 & ArticleID=82\ 249 & TM=80941.16 6) " Previous recovery plans were reporting the birds were doing OK. They're not, " Haig said. She conducted the largest genetic study ever on endangered birds by taking blood samples from owls throughout the West. " We think this has occurred within the last 10 years or so. This is not a historical factor. It seems to be a very recent phenomenon, " she told the Corvallis Gazette-Times. The bottlenecks also can inhibit creatures from adapting to changes in habitat, climate or interspecies relationships. Scientists aren't sure exactly how many northern spotted owls remain. The greatest threats to their survival have been a loss of habitat and a competing species, the larger and more aggressive barred owl. Most areas where northern spotted owls have a population decline also show a population bottleneck, Haig said. The lack of genetic diversity was most noticeable in populations in the Oregon Coast Range west of Roseburg, the Klamath areas of Oregon and California, the Olympic Peninsula and the Washington Cascades. A solution could be to get birds moving to different areas by preserving habitat between populations so they aren't isolated. " They need to re-establish connectivity between populations, " Haig said. She says she expects her scientific work with spotted owls to continue to garner attention. The timber industry blames the birds' protected status for putting large tracts of timber off limits for logging, costing jobs. " Spotted owls are the flash point in the Northwest for people who want to carry out more conservation and people who are sick of that, " she said. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/377527_owl03.html 7) Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon. The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent. What's really great is that you can zoom in so close that you can clearly see the bulldozed logging roads, a line of " leave trees, " and a striated green that I'm guessing is first season re-growth of vegetation. I'll bet some tech-savvy map-genius type could collate enough Googe Map images together to do a systematic analysis of clearcutting. I could imagine starting in just one region -- perhaps a single Oregon county -- or expanding the analysis to include a large swath of the Pacific Northwest or even North America. Why am I so fascinated by this? Because back in the day we used satellite images to monitor clearcutting around Cascadia. We made pretty nifty maps -- some of them animated -- showing 30 years of cutting. Here's one that we made for a section of the southern Oregon coast. All that red shows clearcutting since the early 1970s. And, yes, it's a lot of clearcutting. These maps made a bit of a splash, and we were intending to update them every year or two. But then the imagery from the satellite became defective; and rather than fix the satellite, the U.S. government opted to redeploy the money to the Mars space program (at least that was the word at the time). We were bummed out. But with the wealth of imagery available from Google Maps (not to mention Google Earth), it seems almost possible to use Google's free public images to construct a new and ongoing analysis that would track clearcutting as often as the images are updated. By calculating acreages it should be possible to develop an ongoing forestry score -- with supplementary pictures! -- to show how logging practices are actually happening. No doubt there would be some technical issues to sort out, but I don't think it's anything that some tech-savvy map-genius type couldn't handle. http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/9/3/132211/8305 8) High on the slopes of Mount Hood in the Bull Run River drainage, where Portland gets its tap water, heavy machinery is moving earth and blacktop. The trackhoes aren't laying pavement, as crews did during the logging boom of the 1970s. They're dismantling miles of old logging roads and reshaping the slopes. The deteriorating roads, built atop thousands of dump-truck loads of unstable fill, are environmental time bombs that could slump and collapse. That would send dirt cascading into crystalline Bull Run reservoirs that provide Portland some of the purest drinking water in the country. If that happened, the Portland Water Bureau would have to switch temporarily to other water sources or undertake more expensive treatment. " The whole fill would go downhill and become part of water-quality problems, " said Parker, district hydrologist for the Mount Hood National Forest, which encompasses Bull Run. Parker and others from the Forest Service, Water Bureau and environmental groups toured the work last month. " It's so exciting to see this happening, " he said, looking at the reshaped slopes. Once at odds over logging in the watershed, the Forest Service and the Water Bureau now have a partnership. The Water Bureau will maintain some roads for access to its water system and for firefighting. The Forest Service will take out the rest. The agency has " decommissioned " and actively removed 45 miles of road within the 65,500 acres that drain into Portland's water supply. Now crews are taking out the final 18 miles of road in the critical area. The work is funded with a slice of the $40 million that Congress allocated to deal with deteriorating roads in national forests. U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., championed the " Legacy Roads " money, backed strongly by Oregon's congressional delegation. That money also is paying for removal of 245 old rusting culverts that forest officials worry could become blocked in storms and cause roads to wash out. http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1220325917171350.x\ ml & coll=7 9) Here in Oregon, where no broad-scale wilderness expansion has been achieved in a quarter of a century, we can only look northward in envy. And when Congress returns from its August recess, members of this state's congressional team must follow the lead of their Washington state colleagues and push through a bill to protect more of Oregon's pristine treasures. " Oregon, " we once remarked on this page, " should have a thoughtful debate that leads to more wilderness around Mount Hood and the Columbia Gorge. " That was 41/2 years ago. We got the thoughtful debate we asked for, but still no new wilderness areas. In the meantime, the Portland area's population has exploded, Mount Hood has become one of America's premier recreation forests and time is running out to protect some of its remaining pristine areas. The lack of progress was understandable when Congress was under Republican control and wilderness foe Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., headed the House committee that handles such issues. But voters swept the GOP out of power in both the House and Senate in 2006, and they sent Pombo packing, too.Thus it's frustrating as fall approaches that Oregon has gone nearly two years with a wilderness-friendly Congress but no expansion of Mount Hood wilderness. Most members of the state's delegation have worked on the issue, but we have yet to see results. There's hope for a Senate bill that would add 125,000 acres to existing wilderness areas around Mount Hood and the gorge. Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith must make sure it gets packed with about 100 other bills in a legislative maneuver to overcome a Senate hold placed by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on bills calling for new spending without offsetting cuts elsewhere. But Wyden and Smith should also work to see that Mount Hood wilderness expansion incorporates pieces of the excellent " Oregon Treasures " bill introduced in the House by Oregon Reps. Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer. Besides increasing Mount Hood protection, it would provide 142 miles of new wild and scenic river designations for Rogue River tributaries, protect the Elk River and Soda Mountain, and expand protection for the Oregon Caves National Monument. We've had the debate, and the resulting proposals have broad support. http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1220052\ 320241460.xml & coll=7 10) The options put forth by industry and their enablers are either: Secure a welfare check from the treasury (secure schools), or we have to log vast swaths of public forest at a net loss to the American taxpayer to prop up our local governments. The year that the " secure schools " money was approved by our nation's lawmakers, your state delegation quietly phased out all harvest taxes for private industrial timberland owners having over 5000 acres in the state of Oregon. This action by your legislators sharply decreased the overall tax contribution of the logging industry, which already enjoyed preferred tax status. It reduced their payments to the state's coffers by tens of millions of dollars each year. The industry has been stripping their lands at a frenzied rate for the last several years to take advantage of this windfall. Last year they cut 3.5 billion board feet of timber off of the private lands in our state. At the same time they were closing mills and trying to increase the liquidation of the already over-cut public forests, and they have spiked their export volume. Last year alone they increased exports by 26 percent in Oregon and Washington. The money they get for the trees is often deposited offshore where it escapes taxes once again. In 2004 Congress provided an opportunity for them to repatriate this money at a tax rate of about 5 percent instead of the 35 percent written into the tax laws. Guess who makes up the difference? Washington State taxes all timber cut from private lands with a 5 percent excise tax. While this is minimal, it provides a steady and significant flow of tax dollars to the state, which is then distributed to the counties. Why should the industry in Oregon get a free ride? They use our roads, destroy our natural environment, kill our fish and export our jobs and tax base; why should they not pay their way? Yet Governor Ted Kulongoski's Timber Payments Taskforce never addresses the export giveaway or the jobs and taxes we are losing to Asian processors. There is no mention of the end of industrial harvest taxes. There is no mention of privilege taxes. There is no mention of excise taxes. Oregon's tax structure is broken, and our elected officials are not dealing with it. Corporations used to pay close to 20 percent of Oregon's income tax. Now they pay 4.6 percent, estimated to go to 4.4 percent by around 2010. A recent study indicates that tax breaks for the wealthiest Oregonians exceed the County's lost timber payments. The commissioners from each of the timber dependent counties should be on the steps of the Capitol screaming for the legislature to fix it. http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2008/09/04/views2.html 11) Mount Hood National Forest, Rogue River National Forest, Ochoco National Forest. What do these places have in common? Big old trees? Unique wildlife? Great spots for hunting, camping, and fishing? Sure, they've got all of these things, but the simplest similarity is two words right on the screen in front of you. They're National Forests. Places that all Oregonians, and all Americans, own and love. That's why we got a little worried a couple years ago when Governor Ted Kulongoski said the state government needed more say in how our publicly-owned federal forests are managed. We were worried because we knew that the Governor relies on some bad advice when it comes to forests. The Oregon Department of Forestry and the advisory committee created to make recommendations to the Governor on federal forest policy are chock full of logging industry diehards and politicians who want to return to the " good ol' days " of clear-cuts and old-growth liquidation. No wonder then, that this group thinks every problem in the forest can be solved with a chainsaw and a bulldozer. In fact, that is exactly what the Federal Forest Advisory Committee recommended in their August report: more logging, less protection for watersheds and species, and a return to conflict in the forest. Send a letter to the Governor before September 8th telling him his advisory committee got it all wrong. California: 12) Please help prevent dangerous rule changes that could further dismantle protections for Northern Spotted Owls and their habitat in California. California's Forest Practice Rules are already far too weak; now the Board of Forestry is poised to adopt the timber industry's vision for unregulated logging. Please take a moment to register your opposition today. Under current rules, logging is allowed within 500 feet of an active nest. Not even a single acre of habitat needs to be retained outside of this core area. This does not provide adequate space for the threatened NSO to recover from decades of liquidation logging. Now our state agencies plan to adopt new rules proposed by the California Forestry Association (corporate timber's lobbying group). These changes will alter habitat definitions and allow corporate contractors to conduct surveys that only state designated biologists could carry out before. These " Qualified Spotted Owl Consultants " will not only survey for the owls, but also determine the future of spotted owl habitat. The result is likely to be more logging and less habitat. California's public agencies are obligated to act in the best interest of the public. It is not in the public's interest to promote extinction. Recent studies indicate that Northern Spotted Owls (NSO) face even more challenges for survival than predicted when they were listed under the Endangered Species Act. These proposed rule changes fly in the face of the agencies' mandates: 1) It is the state of California's legal obligation to protect wildlife. 2) The rule changes will not prevent " take " of NSOs as the law requires, but will allow the timber industry to kill owls by destroying their habitat. 3) The Department of Fish and Game is improperly delegating their responsibility to protect wildlife to the California Department of Forestry and Fire (CalFIRE), which lacks biological expertise. 4) CalFIRE, in turn, is also improperly delegating the state's authority to private industry. These rule changes are bad news for owl recovery. Please take a minute to review and edit the included sample letter and email it to board.public.comments by September 8. http://www.wildcalifornia.org/index.shtml 13) Federal researchers are warning that warming temperatures could soon cause California's giant sequoia trees to die off more quickly unless forest managers plan with an eye toward climate change and the impact of a longer, harsher wildfire season. Hot, dry weather over the last two decades already has contributed to the deaths of an unusual number of old-growth pine and fir trees growing in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, according to recent research from the U.S. Geological Survey. Sequoiadendron giganteum, an inland cousin to the tall California coast redwood, can become 2,900 years old and bulk up to more than 36 feet in diameter, making them among the world's most massive living things. Stephenson was among a team of tree demographers who monitored the health of pines and firs growing in the two southern Sierra Nevada parks from 1982 to 2004. As both temperatures and summer droughts increased over that period, he found the trees' normal death rate more than doubled, and stands became more vulnerable to attacks from insects or fungus. While those species have a faster life cycle than the ancient sequoias, scientists say the mortality rates can help predict what may happen to the massive organisms as temperatures increase as predicted an average of 3 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit statewide by the end of the century. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/09/04/state/n154402D14.DTL\ & feed=rss.business 14) The proposed harvest is designed to provide research on accelerating late-seral (old-growth) development. Approximately 160 acres of original Camp 3 harvest plan was removed from harvesting in a settlement agreement between the Campaign to Restore Jackson State Redwood Forest and the state. This " Control " or Reserve as I prefer to call it, is an important achievement for the public. The reserve is in the center of the area used for camping and trail recreation. It guarantees that the public will have a substantial undisturbed area to visit and enjoy. A hiking trail is proposed to go through both the reserve and the harvested areas; so the public will be able to experience and express its opinions about the impact of harvesting on its enjoyment of the forest. See harvest plan map. The remaining 215 acres are to receive two different levels of thinning: 30% removal (165 acres) and 45% removal (50 acres), with the intent of measuring whether the heavier removal will meaningfully increase the rate of growth of the larger trees. The underlying assumption is that having bigger trees will hasten the return toward old-growth conditions. Inventory plots will be established and measured prior to the harvest and at 5-year intervals afterward to measure the difference in tree growth rates in the two areas receiving different treatments. There are significant questions about whether or not forest recovery toward old growth can be aided by selective harvests. I will writing some thoughts on this subject soon. The settlement agreement reached earlier this year specified that active harvesting designed to further recovery toward old growth would be done in Camp 3 (and Brandon Gulch). Thus, " no harvest " was not one of the alternatives available to the JAG. Given this, the plans proposed for Camp 3 and Brandon Gulch seem reasonable. They will keep the largest trees and give them increased room to grow, retain all old growth trees and trees with cavities, broken tops, and complex crowns (features of old-growth trees), and keep the variation and complexity of tree sizes and distributions that are typical of natural forests. http://jacksonforum.org/blog/?cat=3 15) Everywhere I go, everyone's rubbing it in, " says Nancy Hood, after dispatching her weather observations by radio to Yreka, Calif. " It's embarrassing, " the 70-year-old declares before biting into a bologna, cheese and peanut butter sandwich. Having lived atop four remote mountains in the Klamath National Forest for most of her life, Hood prefers a little privacy as she makes local history. In 1959, when Hood ascended her first lookout, her supplies and role were much like Daggett's. She ate crackers and soup for a month. She drank straight from a spring. She packed a rifle and a pistol. And despite all her hankering, she was not allowed to work on a Forest Service burn crew, setting fire to logging slash, because she was a woman. At the time, Hood was a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student in Sacramento. She was spending summer break on her parent's property in Siskiyou County when neighbors told her about a vacant fire lookout. Soon after, her mother drove her up a remote fir-lined road and dropped her off at the 6,768-foot-high summit of Dry Lake Mountain. There, Hood began to study the horizon. She learned to distinguish wildfires from trains belching smoke, logging operations kicking up dust and drainages seeping fog. She competed with a community of lookouts to be the first to spot a fire and radio dispatch -- relaying her station's azimuth to a fire, the smoke's color and volume, the fire's aspect and acreage, a storm's intensity and direction -- all to prepare the firefighters for initial attack. Hood dropped out of school. A degree, she figured, would just lead to a life inside Forest Service headquarters -- and offer her no such views. " I'm an introvert. I found my perfect job, and I didn't get distracted, " says Hood from her current perch on Lake Mountain. Here, in the company of rock wrens, she's counted the surrounding 296 foxtail pines. Prevailing west winds cool her during the day, and at night she listens to classical music and studies the stars. Over the years, she's become the Klamath's keeper of lookout history. Hood, who's outlasted half her lookouts, never gripes about how little she's paid. She lives a humble lifestyle in the off-season, wintering on the old family property in a " cabin unsuitable for company. " She hauls and splits her own firewood, and works on her 1950 Chevy 3/4 ton and her 1951 military M38 Jeep. Single her whole life, she says: " Even in high school, the boys and I would just talk cars. " http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.16/fifty-summers-and-360-degrees Idaho: 16) On Friday, Idaho, one of the most forested states in the country — and one of the most conservative — announced an unlikely truce. With the support of hunters, fishermen and some environmental groups, the state and the Bush administration agreed on regulatory safeguards for 9.3 million acres that had been designated as roadless areas by the Clinton administration — and thus free of commercial activity. The compromise would leave about 3.3 million acres of the total roadless. About 5.6 million acres would enjoy similar protections, though exceptions could be made for logging in areas where fires could put communities at risk. An additional 400,000 acres would be open to all development. Mark E. Rey, an under secretary of the federal Department of Agriculture who oversees the Forest Service, said the roadless rule " was an issue that we engaged throughout. " Mr. Rey added, " Today is a kind of epiphany because we might have a solution for at least one state. " Chris Wood, the chief operating officer of the environmental group Trout Unlimited who worked for the Forest Service in the Clinton administration, said Friday: " I believe the 2001 roadless rule to be one of the most effective conservation measures of our time. However, conservation cannot endure if the people most affected by it don't support it. " Lt. Gov. James E. Risch, whose background in forestry gave him a shared experience and vocabulary with the competing interests, said Friday, " We are proud of the way we manage our own state lands, and our own private lands. " But it is clear, Mr. Risch said, that officials resent the federal government's dominance. " They own two out of every three acres in Idaho, " he said in asserting that that automatically limited the state's ability to control land within its own boundaries. http://www.warmingissues.com/global-warming/truce-is-reached-in-battle-over-idah\ o-forest-land Montana: 17) The problem for anyone advocating " restoration " is that we have few references about how the forest looked a hundred years ago. There are some historic photographs that provide a valuable perspective, but whether these represent just a point in time and at a particular spot, or are characteristic of the forest as a whole is unknown. Furthermore, there is always the potential for a selective bias in the choice of photographs by the researcher seeking to find evidence for a change in forest condition and composition. The same can be said about written accounts. Also there is always the chance for researcher bias that ignores some references to forest condition, in favor of descriptions that fit one's preconceived notions about how the forest appeared. The further back in time you go, the murkier the record. Furthermore, even if it can be proved that some forests are somewhat out of " balance " that doesn't necessarily mean that intrusive logging is necessary or can restore forest health, especially since logging has many other negative impacts that are often ignored or glossed over. These include the creation of access roads that decrease habitat security for wildlife, act as vectors to spread weeds, not to mention are a major source of sedimentation into streams (sedimentation from fires is short lived-while roads " leak " sediment for decades). Logging operations seldom leave as many snags as naturally occur as a result of fire or beetles. Logging also removes snags which are critical to the survival of many species-for instance; more than a third of all birds in the northern Rockies are cavity nesters, not to mention use of snags by a host of other species from bats to snails. Plus, logs charred by fires take longer to decompose and last longer as a structural component in the ecosystem-with long term consequences for wildlife and nutrient flows. The presumption that logging " emulates " nature is a bunch of timber industry propaganda. Circling back to the BDNF plan, all of this research calls into question the Forest Service assumptions about what is " normal " for the BDNF as well as many other forests in the region. It is possible that the Forest Service assumptions about the forest conditions are accurate. On the other hand, there is more than a reasonable likelihood that our forests are well within the " historic range of variability " and need no intrusive management other than to get out of the way and allow fires, beetles, droughts, and other normal ecological processes to operate. By GEORGE WUERTHNER wuerthner 18) Victor-based Newco 1 LLC has been awarded a contract to log 800,000 board feet of timber in a fire-ravaged area along the Teton Road, 25 miles northwest of Choteau. It is a small timber sale by harvesting standards — about 150 truckloads of logs. But removing the unstable trees in the highly used area will make it safer for the public and open up the charred ground to aid in regrowth, officials with Lewis and Clark National Forest said. " It's a good project, " said Steve Martin, the forest's timber management officer. " It will hasten the recovery of the roadside area. " The logging will occur immediately adjacent to Teton Road, a major forest access along the Rocky Mountain Front. The 60,000-acre Fool Creek fire roared through the area last summer, leaving the trees and landscape black. The contract calls for Newco 1, a log-home company, to remove larger dead spruce and lodgepole trees 150 feet into the forest on each side of the road from just west of Teton Pass Ski Area to the West Fork Teton River Campground, a distance of 3.5 miles. Under the contract, the company has until the fall of 2009 to harvest the trees, but Mike Munoz, ranger for the Rocky Mountain Ranger District, said work probably will begin soon. " They're going to get those trees removed this fall, there's no doubt about it, " Munoz said.Two-thirds of the forests in the northern region, which encompasses Montana, northern Idaho and portions of the Dakotas, harvest more logs than Lewis and Clark National Forest, Martin said. In recent years, even fewer local timber projects have gotten off the ground. Each year, 5 to 8 million board feet in the Lewis and Clark National Forest is targeted for timber sale, but the harvest has dropped to 2 to 3 million board feet over the past three years, Martin said. The market value of wood products is partly responsible for the downturn, he said. " The price they get for delivered logs at the mill is way down right now, " Martin said. The logs likely will be hand-felled, as opposed to removed by a machine, because the soil is fragile, Munoz said. The contract prohibits heavy equipment use off established roads. The goal of prohibiting the equipment is to reduce compression and erosion of the soil, which was made unstable by the fire, Munoz said. http://www.greatfallstribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080901/NEWS01/8090\ 10302/1002 19) It's a treatment long overdue on the dense woods that have taken over one acre near my house. Last autumn, foresters walked the land with me, showing me how to make it fire-safe. In late February, with the snow still three feet deep, I went out with my loppers and crosscut saw and got to work. It seemed a simple project: Each day after work I'd lop branches until dusk, pruning up to 10 feet. My wife, Barbara, piled the branches, and even as bark and lichen fall on our faces, we enjoyed ourselves. We found fox and grouse tracks in the snow and a magnificent cottonwood we had never even noticed. In March, we got busy on the fir thickets. This was easy, too, removing spindly saplings that starve bigger trees and offer flames a ladder to the canopy. As we removed the last saplings, we begin to focus on taller firs. And that's when our confidence wavered. With the forest more open, we became nervous, wondering if we were creating a sanitized park or losing privacy. Then there's another problem: We're tree-huggers. Removing fir thickets is one thing, but choosing older firs to go is harder. One offers shade for a young cedar, while another shelters some well-used deer beds. We decided to wait. We moved to the cedars, growing thick in the absence of fire. But cedars are special. Here in the Northern Rockies, their fibrous bark and drooping fronds are unique among our spruce and fir. We cut a few, but quickly moved on. The spruce should be easier. They're abundant along the edge, with their crowns mixing together and inviting a hot fire. We really should take out some taller ones, but each reaches skyward with pointy crowns, their trunks straight as a ship's mast. We stare for a while, then walk away. Removing a few snags should be simple. We quickly down four, our saw gliding through their brittle trunks. But we become bogged down about the rest. The woodpeckers are frequenting one, while another -- broken at 30 feet -- might be nice for an owl. Barbara walks to a scraggly pine and shakes it. " How about this one? " It's a runt, with a scant crown and rounded top, yet it's a white pine, and we only have a few. We leave it. I'm learning that reversing a century of fire suppression while maintaining a diverse forest for the future doesn't happen overnight. Maybe our woods just need a good fire, not a couple of hack imitators like us? http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_10362557 Colorado: 20) Last week, the resort began logging operations along Vasquez Ridge and Cooper Creek near the Pioneer Lift. A total of 68 acres will be cut in that area to remove lodgepole pines killed by the ongoing pine beetle epidemic. Brendan Irving, Winter Park Resort's Project Manager for Planning, said the timber-cutting operation is technically referred to as an " overstory reduction " to thin out and remove the hundreds of dead trees. " This is more of a forest-health project that will allow the regeneration and revegetation of the younger trees in the area, " he said. " Another important goal of the project is fuel and fire reduction to help make the area safer from a wildfire. " The 68 acres are part of the " Pioneer Timber Sale " that was worked out between the resort and the U.S. Forest Service earlier this year. The logging work is being done by Hahn Peak Enterprises of Granby. The tree cutting along Vasquez Ridge and Cooper Creek is expected to continue through the end of September. Some mountain bike trails in that area will be affected, including temporary closures. " Signs will be posted to let everyone know where the work is being done on weekdays, " Irving said. " On weekends, the workers will be moving off the bike trails and doing cleanup in other areas. " While signs will be posted in the work areas, the resort's Communications Coordinator Jennifer deBerge is urging the public to obey the posted signs and " exercise caution " while hiking or biking around the Pioneer Lift for the next few weeks. She suggested that users check out the resort's Web site for updates on what areas are temporarily closed. Both Irving and deBerge stressed that the primary goal of the timber cutting project is forest regeneration. Removing the dead trees opens the land up so that younger lodgepole pine, spruce and fir trees can get more space and sunlight to grow. " This is not clear cutting, " deBerge said. " We're helping to revegetate this area by removing the standing dead trees that are crowding out the younger ones. " http://www.skyhidailynews.com/article/20080903/NEWS/809049979/1079 & parentprofile\ =-1 Minnesota: 21) About 3.2 million cords of wood were harvested in Minnesota in 2007, and Gephart expected the same this year. That's compared with 4 million annually in the earlier part of this decade, he said. A full semi-trailer can carry 10-12 cords of wood, Dane said. The typical logger in Northeastern Minnesota earns about $19.62 an hour, according to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. Most logging is done during the winter, when the ground and swamps are frozen. But each of the state's 300 logging companies must spend about $175,000 each year replacing equipment like grapple skidders, which pull trees into piles, to be hoisted into semi-trailers. While many loggers say they still earn a decent living, they're not making enough to replace equipment. Logging industry officials argue that the government must continue trimming taxes on loggers so they can remain afloat through the tough times, and so the manpower will be there when demand intensifies. Government has responded, partially. Loggers sign contracts — about half with private land owners, the other half with government agencies — agreeing to harvest wood for a set price. When the price of wood plummeted, the timber industry successfully lobbied Congress earlier this year to get the government to rewrite the old contracts, allowing loggers to pay less for the wood. But for many loggers, the action didn't do enough. Rich Holm, who ran Holm Logging & Trucking Inc. of Cook, sold his equipment in May. " We did at least three-quarters of our work in Ainsworth, right in Cook, " Holm said. When the mills closed, he lost most of his business. " After 35 years, " Holm said, " I just said, I don't see a future here. " http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/articles/index.cfm?id=73110 & section=homepage & fr\ eebie_check & CFID=79432567 & CFTOKEN=65919683 & jsessionid=88306edd4d0f22432f5d Texas: 22) The city of Austin, Tex., approved plans on Thursday for a huge plant that will burn waste wood to make electricity, the latest sign of rising interest in a long-dormant form of renewable energy. When completed in 2012, the East Texas plant will be able to generate 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 75,000 homes. That is small by the standards of coal-fired power plants, but plants fueled by wood chips, straw and the like — organic materials collectively known as biomass — have rarely achieved such scale. Austin Energy, a city-owned utility, has struck a $2.3 billion, 20-year deal to be the sole purchaser of electricity from Nacogdoches Power, the company that will build the plant for an undisclosed sum. On Thursday, Austin's City Council unanimously approved the deal, which would bring the Austin utility closer to its goal of getting 30 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020. " We saw this plant as very important because it gives us a diversity of fuels, " said Roger Duncan, general manager of Austin Energy. " Unlike solar and wind, we can run this plant night or day, summer or winter. " More than 100 biomass power plants are connected to the electrical grid in the United States, according to Bill Carlson, former chairman of USA Biomass, an industry group. Most are in California or the Northeast, but some of the new ones are under development in the South, a region with a large wood pulp industry. The last big wave of investment in the biomass industry came during the 1980s and early 1990s. Interest is rising again as states push to include more renewable power in their mix of electricity generation. Pulp and paper companies operating in wooded East Texas have also opposed the plant, which will require a giant amount of wood residue — one million tons each year. They are concerned that there is not enough wood for their industry and the plant. But Tony Callendrello, vice president of Nacogdoches Power, said the company would use only discarded forest residues, mill waste and the like. " We have no need — and no intention — to go after anything that the forest-products companies would be using in their production, " he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/business/29biomass.html?_r=1 & oref=slogin Indiana: 23) Partnering with the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy, researchers from PurdueUniversity, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Ball State University, Indiana State University, and DrakeUniversity, will test forest management methods and their effects on wildlife and plants over a 100-year period in the " Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment. " Several management techniques will be used in nine research areas within the Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood Indiana state forests. Techniques will include clear-cutting, removing single trees, as well as prescribed burns. The researchers will also look at the effects of even-age selection, where all trees of a certain age class are cut, and removing single trees, while allowing desirable trees to grow. Trees will be cut every 20 years and the study will look specifically at how different techniques affect species with declining numbers such as cerulean warblers, Indiana bats, box turtles, and moths. The goal of this study is to gather information that will help forest managers and landowners predict the outcomes of management decisions. To read more, go to http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2008b/080903MycroftHardwood.html. Connecticut: 24) Speth, sixty-six, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is a tall, genial man who wears conservative striped ties and speaks in a quiet southern drawl. If America can be said to have a distinguished elder statesman of environmental policy, Speth is it. Before he arrived at Yale, he cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most powerful environmental groups in the U.S., then went on to serve as a top environmental policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter. In 1982, he founded the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, which he headed for a decade. He also served as a senior advisor to President-elect Bill Clinton's transition team and spent seven years as the top administrator in the Development Programme at the United Nations. It's not surprising that Speth would end up in a wood-paneled office at Yale. What is surprising, however, is that he uses his bully pulpit in academia to push for a 1960s-style take-it-to-the-streets revolution. His new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale University Press), is nothing less than a call for an uprising that would reinvent modern capitalism and replace it with, well, a postmodern capitalism that values sustainability over growth, and doing good over making a quick buck. Sound idealistic? It is¬but that's part of the book's appeal. Speth goes beyond finger-wagging to indict consumer capitalism itself for the rape and pillage of the natural world. His proximate concern is global warming and the impact it will have on civilized life as we know it. But unlike, say, Al Gore, Speth is not concerned with details of climate science or policy prescriptions for the near-term. He is after bigger game¬the Wal-Martization of America, our slavish devotion to an ever-expanding gross domestic product, the utter failure of what Speth disparagingly calls " modern capitalism " to create a sustainable world. What is needed, Speth believes, is not simply a tax on greenhouse gas emissions, but " a new operating system " for the modern world. Gus Speth: Well, I think we have to face up to the paradox that while the environmental community has become stronger and more sophisticated over the years, the environment is going downhill so fast that we're facing a potential calamity down the road. All we have to do to leave a ruined world to children is just keep doing what we're doing today¬the same emissions of pollutants, the same destruction of ecosystems, same toxification of the environment¬and we'll ruin the planet in the latter part of this century. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3222 New York: 25) Forester Bob Cross for several years had watched the stand Wood was cutting in the 10,588-acre Burnt Rossman Hills State Forest, part of 24,000 acres he manages, before deciding to cut it. The spruce stood in thin wet soil and were starting to blow down in strong winds, he said, pointing to a few tilting diagonally. " At some point you have to clear cut, " Cross said. In his opinion, managed forests are healthier than those simply left wild, saying you can take out diseased trees or the poorer ones, and like long-term farming you get some return on the trees before they die naturally. Last week, nearly all of New York's timberland labeled working forests 755,000 state-owned acres were re-certified green for the second year by independent auditors for the Sustainable Forestry Initiative Inc. That means a random sample met SFI standards for limited logging, replanting and protecting streams, wetlands, soils and habitats. In programs that have developed over the past 20 years, about half of North America's timberlands now have some environmental seal of approval, compared with 10 percent globally. But on the ground, it's not always a pretty sight. Down an old dirt road in New York's Southern Tier, past mixed hardwoods and white pines, lined with remnants of stone fences from failed farms of the previous two centuries, logger Randy Wood fired up his chain saw and quickly dropped another towering spruce, trimmed its branches and sectioned it into logs. Alone, he was clear cutting 13 acres planted in 1931 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. He bid almost $29,000 for the job and expects it to take six months, selling logs to Canadian mills for lumber returning to the United States, but now in a softer market with building slowing down. He has to replant next year, and said he might need 2,000 to 3,000 seedlings. What wasn't immediately obvious was the green ground cover of tiny spruce in much of the denuded expanse. The nonnative trees, originally northern Europeans, were already coming back. newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--greenlogging0901sep01,0,5362729.st\ ory USA: 26) A 'ghost' is a species that has been out-evolved by its environment, such that, while it continues to exist, it has little prospect of avoiding extinction. Ghosts endure only in what conservation scientists call 'non-viable populations'. They are the last of their lines. It's a spooky concept, but well-established -- the journal Science uses the word, for example, to describe the now-famous Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. These sort of ghosts can jolt authorities into drastic action. In the Southeast, for example, the Federal government says it is prepared to spend $27 million on a plan to bring back the large, charismatic woodpecker long thought to be extinct. As of 2005, one male was known to exist, although the bird has not been captured clearly on film in decades. (Back in the l940's, this bird was rarely seen outside a Louisiana forest known as the Singer Tract. Despite vigorous protests, the Singer sewing machine company leased this tract to loggers who clear cut the forest, reports Jay Rosen in his fascinating book " The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature. " Rosen, a New York City resident, became obsessed with seeing the iconic bird, and like many bird lovers spent hours and days in swampy Arkansas forests hoping to find it.) Today in the Pacific Northwest, history is threatening to repeat this old story in a new way. Millions of acres of national forest were set aside as protected habitat to save the Spotted Owl under the Clinton administration, but, in a bitter irony, as the bird becomes increasingly rare, it becomes easier to argue that much of this forest is no longer owl habitat and shouldn't be protected. " There really isn't any evidence to suggest that creating more habitat reserves will alter adult (owl) survivorship, " saidJoan Jewett, [a Bush administration spokesperson for U.S. Fish and Wildlife] She mentioned this in the context of a new Forest Service plan to sharply cut Spotted Owl forest habitat. Catch that? http://achangeinthewind.typepad.com/achangeinthewind/2008/09/21st-century-gh.htm\ l 27) Under a concept called " critical load, " pollution is measured based on where and how much falls on land or water. Critical load reflects the accumulated amount of pollution that a specific ecosytem -- a mountain range, lake or river -- can handle before long-term damage occurs. The concept has been used for pollution control in Europe for more than a decade, but is new to the United States, said Gary Lovette, a researcher at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook. " It's time to refocus and expand the existing approach to air pollution control in order to address ecosystem effects, " Lovette said. " Critical loads should be established for sensitive U.S. ecosystems to limit air pollution, assess federal and state regulations, and manage public lands. " Lovette is participating in a critical load study of acid rain in the Adirondacks being conducted by the New York State Research and Development Authority. By 2010, the study will map out acid rain deposits among 100 key lakes and watersheds, and predict which areas might recover and which are unlikely to heal without further pollution cuts. Acid rain is created primarily by the burning of coal in Midwestern power plants and is carried into the Adirondacks by prevailing westerly winds. Emissions of sulfur dioxide in rain are acidic and can render lakes unable to support fish and other life. The Adirondack study is one of only two critical load studies being done in the U.S. under the direction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The other study, of the Rocky Mountain region, will examine critical loads of nitrogen and sulfur. The $469,000 study in the Adirondacks will identify areas not recovering as quickly as was expected, despite reductions in sulfur dioxide pollution emission levels under a 1990 federal acid rain program. Knowing critical loads in the Adirondacks could point the way to even deeper pollution cuts in the future. More than 500 lakes and ponds out of 2,800 in the Adirondacks are too acidic to support most aquatic wildlife. http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=716758 28) I can think of a lot of things to say to the Bush Administration as it heads out the door in a few months. Sadly, this Administration is continuing its endless efforts to sneak through changes that will benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of our wilderness and wildlife. Now the Administration has set its sights on Colorado's Rocky Mountains, where it plans to rapidly remove the landmark Roadless Area Conservation Rule, the popular policy that protects the last one-third of the nation's most pristine forests. Tell the Bush Administration: hands off America's last wild forests » This destructive change could give the green light to roughly 100 new oil and gas drilling projects, impacting valuable fish and wildlife habitat and outdoor recreation opportunities. That is why we need your help. Please take a moment today to help protect Colorado's backcountry and wildlife from more drilling, mining, logging and road-building » http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/270114244?z00m=16381331 29) Last week, Georgia Power asked state regulators to approve the conversion of a coal plant into a 96-megawatt biomass plant. An additional 50-megawatt plant in East Texas is expected to be under construction by September. Mike Whiting, chief executive of Decker Energy International, a developer and owner of four biomass plants around the country, estimates 15 to 20 new biomass plants are proposed in the Southeast, though not all will be built. The region is, he said, " the best part of the U.S. for growing trees. " In California, which has the most biomass plants in the country, momentum is reviving after years of decline. The number of biomass plants has dropped to fewer than 30, from 48 in the early 1990s, because of the closing of many sawmills and the energy crisis early this decade, said Phil Reese of the California Biomass Energy Alliance. Six to eight of the mothballed plants are gearing up to restart, Mr. Reese said, helping California meet its renewable energy goals. At least three biomass plants have been proposed in Connecticut, and another three in Massachusetts — though last week one of these, a $200 million, 50-megawatt biomass plant proposed for the western part of the state, experienced a regulatory setback because of concerns about truck traffic. Some environmental groups have opposed the Nacogdoches plant. Cyrus Reed, conservation director of the Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter, said the plant was not " as clean as it could be " in terms of emissions. He also criticized the lack of a competitive bidding process to build the plant. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/business/29biomass.html?_r=1 & oref=slogin 30) Whenever we're in Washington, my wife and I try to visit the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial on Roosevelt Island. There are almost never any crowds. That's because it is hidden in the middle of the woods at the heart of the island. You walk along a system of trails through thick forest, and then all of a sudden everything opens up in front of you and you find yourself in a clearing. Teddy is standing in the middle of it, in bronze, and he is ringed by massive stone panels, into which are chiseled some of his statements. That's when the clamor started. Loud noises began to drift up from the south trail and echo around the pavilion. Suddenly a hundred or more young men and women were stomping their way into the memorial, all wearing green shirts, on which were printed the words " EarthFirst " . They were chatting, flirting, and texting away. No one was looking at the trees. No one was reading the quotes on the obelisks. There were TV cameras, and they were getting tape on all of this. I leaned over to Susan " That's for the funders " , I told her. " They'll want to show the video to their board. " We knew the TR Memorial would not be a memorial for the next hour or so, but a stage, on which young people (bored by the specific flora and fauna around them) would congratulate themselves, before the cameras, for their love of 'the earth'. So we left, sadly, the sound of speeches, zeal and sanctimony trailed us into the woods for a hundred yards or so, until it was swallowed by the forest. I wished that they had actually stopped for a moment to read the memorial, especially the part where TR admonishes us that, " Conservation means development as much as it does protection. " For Roosevelt earth is for us, for people. For Muir man and land were equals. It wasn't the conservationist Roosevelt who put ANWR's oil out of our reach, but the environmentalist Carter. In other words, the activist/extras who stomped their way across the memorial that day, did it under a slogan (EarthFirst) against which Teddy most heartily disapproved.http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/bowyer/11581162/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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