Cornfields and Loads of Fertilizer

Well, no more chanterelle picking up the Hoko. We knew that, sooner or later, like everything I'd actually taken a liking to up here, the woods where we found them would be turned into cash for Rayonier's out-of-country investors. 

The Hoko is pretty much a clearcut nightmare. I wouldn't be writing this, but a few people drinking beer - and they were trying to be friendly - tried to tell me it was "The most beautiful scenic drive in the world." Just because I wear glasses, do they think I'm blind? Or I can't tell scrub and plantation from an actual forest? 

The regrowth is at least alders - maybe they're finally getting that through their heads that the little firewood trees are the only fertilizer they've got.

Which brings me to the myth up here that forests are "forty-year-old cornfields."

First of all, we know the trouble cornfields and other grain ranching is in. Rivers are full of destructive nitrogen leaching into our oceans. Goodbye fishing - goodbye sports fishing and fishing derbies (which are pretty obscene, considering the extinction event we're watching unfold all over the planet). Fossil-fuel-based fertilizers are more and more expensive. Soils are filling up with salts and toxins.

Forests are the lungs of the planet, and the cooling skin we naked monkeys evolved with. It's one thing to carefully harvest wood selectively from old stands - and quite another to pump every skinny stick into the toxic pulp and artificial products industry. One that can pretty much be fulfilled by any fiber industry. And no, I don't mean cut down all the trees for hemp - that plant is a jungle plant, and grows best shade-grown. Which would be a selling point up here if anybody has any marketing brains. "Shade-grown hemp" will be a preferable commodity to an artificial crop exhausting the soil.

A lot of people in Washington State were shipped up here from the South, and by the time they got here, they were thoroughly trained in the idea of being a serf, and all all of nature being harnessed to be serfs to the same feudal masters. They tell each other this cornfield myth to - what? Assuage their consciences? Deny the inevitable future? Bullshit to make themselves feel better and hold off the moment they have to face what's coming?

Lost Resort thinks its safe - but the forestry corporations want every last scrap of land and trees. They've already cut down some State and private parks, without a peep from the locals. The investors want their hands on the national parks. The Lodge at Lake Crescent better keep on the alert.

Drink beer on the porch while you can - until the day you have to give up your homes to the same eminent domain that trapped the natives, and have to go work in a city slum. Because that's coming if you don't pay attention. I saw it happen where I'm from, and I've warned and warned you.

Stop telling this corn-field myth - because it's just one more way for the corporations to cornhole you.