Money - The Ultimate Weapon

Okay. Now we know. I called the communities up here a bunch of cowards, wimps and fools for putting up with the logging companies, especially Rayonier.

Ghost trees - going away

I take it all back.

Yesterday, for the local newspapers, I was out covering the Great Strait Sale on Highway 112. Everybody puts out items for sale,  from shops to garage sales to special ed classes trying to raise funds for school supplies (that's a whole 'nother ball of worms, thank you very much, Tim Eyman, NOT). 

I was still shaking over the latest clearcut right beside our neighborhood. This one is right down the wind tunnel and on the flood plain. I didn't expect anybody to be on my side. Too often I'd heard how the logger was the hero up here. I wasn't ready for what I ran into.

The town is furious. People in churches are furious. People who make a living off mature woods and tourism are furious. They're stressed, traumatized, sickened. That's right - they're getting health problems. They face floods and wind damage because the protecting walls are gone.

All over the world, the storms and damage are happening, because our forests and wetlands are no longer there to protect us. Huge industries, unmerciful and bloated with cash, slash through the resources of the world as though they're invading aliens. In many cases they are; Rayonier, for example, is based in Florida.

To tell you how much we're hurting, a beloved neighborhood dog just died in his yard, with his family around him. When his "Mom" discovered I couldn't leave the house during the destruction, and so didn't discover the dear dog was passing, and so couldn't come support the family and say goodbye, she was in tears. 

Riven with grief by the destruction, an entire community could hardly move. The way the animals are being treated after these gigantic slashes - the triumphant hunting down of frightened, starving, displaced mountain lions and bears - makes them sick. One woman was angered because a yearling bear, "Not doing anything, just walking near here," was shot just because he was something to slaughter. She reported that the wolves that the State had tried to replace were shot, "And those hunters were all, 'Oh, we didn't know it wasn't legal!' " 

Logging industry, and the hunting industry attached to you (oh, yes, Rayonier has a hunting RENTAL page, as well as a real estate page!); You're damaging the hearts and minds of entire areas. You're attacking their livelihoods. You're ramming your machines through their lives like airliners into towers. They're waking up. And they're on Facebook, now. Not alone, not isolated, no longer unable to talk to each other, hunkering down in pain and fear.

There's a hungry lawyer out there who wants you. There's a class-action suit, based on your reckless endangerment of anybody who lives near your forest, and flat-out animal cruelty, that this lawyer knows s/he can harvest you with. You know who the most dangerous sharks in the American sea are - because they built the place. Go ahead, line up your own lawyers. Because anybody who does come in on your side will be next in line, for supporting an abusive industry. It's coming. It may not be today, or tomorrow, but you've treated the earth, its people - human and animal - and its breathing forests like garbage for too long.

This isn't a threat. It's a warning. And a promise.

And the paper I freelance for, the Forks Forum, isn't off the hook. Every time I send in an article, it is published near the stories of how animals are something to kill, and the latest piece of vomit-on-paper is a triumphant series of hunter-porn about the ONE wolf "attack" that ever was known up here. Some boob wandered into a wolf territory, and the writer is practically staining his pants about how the Big Bad Alpha Wolf was" exterminated." Yup, that's the word. The guy doesn't even know how Final Solution that sounds.

Now, why do I think the paper is in trouble, too? Because if any of these idiots hear there's a predator in the area - or even, in one case up here, a loose cow - they're out womping through the woods looking to kill something. I'm REALLY getting sick of being told I have to look out for stray bullets while mushrooming or berrypicking or just getting some forest time. I imagine the paper can at least be taken for Contributory Negligence, or something else the lawyer/s will dig up.

My last editor offered this idiot writer a large payment for going to observe salmon-fishing grizzlies - at night. 

"WTF?" I thought "Is he trying to get him killed?"

Then again, this editor also left a crazed story about a mythological Japanese airfield up here, which he told my last editor (or this one, I get 'em mixed up) was "A bomb in the system." It's bad enough having to see my decent articles published in the same rag as crazed paranoids who fear the woods and wild animals - can you imagine being the editor for this chop-shop logging blatt? No wonder these people don't last.

The paper also runs a series called "The Real Forks." Now, I read this thing and think it's hilarious - but it's just some woman doing the little nicey-nice stories. You want the REAL west-end stories - you come here. I don't give a fuck any more.