Where are the eagles, Grandpa?

Rusting ship knees on Slip Point, Clallam Bay
Nature bats last. And hardest.

Hello, everybody. Including Olympic Peninsula communities who are waking up to what's happening to you.

Olsen's Resort in Sekiu has been reborn as a company that understands the old days of destruction for profit might not make a very good future for this area.

They have begun to offer much more in the way of scuba-diving and canoeing, and understand that the Olympic Peninsula has the prized status of Audubon areas.

They understand that - with all wild animals now at refugee status - we need to stop sanctioning killing and destroying for fun - an antique and unhealthy practice, especially for the minds of children - and out-of-date resource harvesting for profit. Destroying the wild for profit ALWAYS results in the final death of any profit at all.

Right now, on this Peninsula, logging is going on in wetlands, wildlife areas - including areas with long-time eagle nests - and even in county parks. The destruction of the forests of Pillar Point and Tumbling Rapids, and the clearcutting of the wetlands around Clallam Bay, are cause for shame, not celebration. 

Clallam Bay's eagles and all other animals are under siege. Neah Bay does not allow cutting anyplace near an eagle's nest. What's wrong with us outside the native communities?

Who did such destruction benefit? Money went into pockets for the short term, while threatening what could be a permanent future clean industries - birding and careful forest management - and took away access to forests for the elderly and children. Kids and people on canes can't tramp around in logged regrowth, and we all know it. 

Forests are massive, complicated systems, not crops - a tree is not grass. ANYTHING made from a tree that is not wood has some level of toxicity. As a girl from a pulp town, I've seen the paint peeling off the walls of houses around the Everett pulp mills. 

Tearing down the peninsula's future for low-quality acid paper and outgassing building materials, and all those pallets for shipping goods from China is no kind of future.  The forests could be preserved for careful harvesting of large, quality trees, which would allow for wildlife to thrive as well as people.

People would stop freaking out if there was the "waste" left for wildlife, including snags. They could be taught that the reason for large forest fires was because every last forest fire - the ones that cleaned out dead undergrowth, allowing fresh, clean plant growth, good for all living things - were extinguished by humans who thought all fire was bad - rather than the native communities who had used fire carefully for centuries. Food plants could return - real ones - not intrusive non-native plants. People could learn.

I've seen what happens when an area was ultimately - as usual - destroyed for forests, and caved under to development. Mukilteo-Everett used to look like the Olympic Peninsula. Look at it now. 

This might make developers happy, but its future is Seattle - and look at Seattle's prices, now. The only thing land is good for there is real-estate churning. Who from out here can afford to live there? 

Note: people who formerly cheered to see burning clearcuts on Vancouver Island are now seriously worried as the clearcuts come close to their home. They know they'll suffer everything from flooding to hill collapse to refugee predators in their yards. 

Forks already has a recent shameful record, when a bear living near the town was driven from its home by a clearcut, and slaughtered because it had nothing to eat but farm animals. Cougars show up in yards, trying to get at the chickens - are caged chickens natural diet for anything but a starving predator? Does nothing change? Can none of us learn? Or see?

Only caring if it affects us is what being a NIMBY is all about. "Not In My Back Yard" only happens when a bad system develops far away and then crawls closer to home.

Whoever up here works to save the eagles, the trees for a better future, and all the wildlife for all life will be praised. Whoever helped kill everything from selfishness and short-sightedness or simple destructive ego, will not be forgotten. Just not in a good way.

Someday, a community will say "Enough!" and organize a class-action suit. Think it can't happen? As an army vet, I'm part of a class-action suit against the army for nerve-gas poisoning, along with the whole town of Anniston, Alabama. If it can happen for military poisons, it can happen for thoughtless resource extraction.

it's not city vs. country - American cities and country swap populations all the time. Those of us from cities grew up in what used to be country, and understand the dangers. People growing up in cities are trying to save what little they have, or reintroduce preservation. Should we be far behind them?

The Olympic Peninsula has only one history that counts - the destruction of the forests, and the extermination of the wolves. Anything else is pretending. It began to do penance by the establishment of the parks.

One side or the other will be remembered. Which shall it be? And whose children will ask: "Where are the eagles, grandpa?"

Congratulations on the Nature Conservancy's recent purchase in the Hoko area - there is a future. And shame on Clallam Bay, that fell for those Working Forests = Working Families signs, as an excuse for logging-company land-grabs for cheap, with no future. Is it too late for Clallam Bay? Or will it learn in time?

Self-Employment Galore!

Solar "meeting" at the Sunsets West Co-op: Initials KM actually posted the meeting at the post office and co-op - and even though it was only she and I there, she'd been researching on the net, brought a list of questions, and LISTENED to me. She was finishing my sentences. Over hot cups of chai, and in the course of the meeting, she learned how solar doesn't have to cost the price of a small house, and how it's best we don't hook into PUD. If the power goes out up to 8 times a year up here, we need batteries. 

I have the small-solar contact shop lined up: Anchor Marine, down in Port Angeles. It's a boat and RV shop. Of course, they already understand small solar. Ask for Eric.

Then we started discussing diagrams, and how much less it would cost her to find and build the parts. Which moved on to her finding and building the parts for other people - and - voila! - she creates her own job.

This would be at the dinky level. Unlike installing wood stoves, you're not going to kill yourself with a couple of batteries and solar panels, and some small 12-volt appliances or an inverter. You might startle yourself, but you're not going to burn down your house. Not if you have a lick of sense (and there are people up here who can blow themselves up making budder, so THINK).

How to not freak out PUD: remind them they could be the bulk near-cost supplier for parts for small solar builders and householders. It's the future - might as well make like a Boy Scout ("be prepared," not "despise gay people").

I might have launched the West End's first small-off-grid solar builder. Cross your fingers! Note: we agreed I'd not be part of any formed groups, because then, due to conflict of interest, I couldn't report to the papers. But I'll teach her and anybody else how to write press releases.

Now if I can just launch the person who will start ripping out car engines and replacing them with batteries for full electrical. If anybody can do it, it's this gang. Self-employment galore.

Note on Tesla: I think it's Arizona - or one of them thar western states - that has brought in Tesla for full electrical auto production - but lured 'em by loading the taxes they should be paying onto the citizenry.

WE, of course, know what happens when Boeing doesn't pay its taxes - everything falls apart. To our utter shame, we even lose our parks. And sell our forests to overseas hedge funds.

Butts About to Be Bitten

You know, I tried to leave you to your own devices, but I guess I don't get to do that.

I've been cornered by somebody who knows all about a local person who has been cutting timber in riparian areas, other people's property, and even cutting down an eagle tree. 

According to what's being said, somebody in Clallam County Government knew and did nothing about it. The person who came to me has your name.

Because cutting timber in flow areas could be contributing to road damage, and you never know if a car is going to go over - all of you had better hope a car doesn't go over the edge and kill somebody.

As it is, the road damage is going to probably make it necessary to move the road back. Into the clearcut property. Eminent Domain for the Greater Good. Screaming and the beating of breasts, but nothing to be done about it. Pointing and laughing.

Against my will, I think I may have fired up and begun to teach somebody a lot more involved in this community. An Aries born in the Year Of The Dog has horns and teeth.

It's a long worm has no turning. 

Going To Tahiti

October. Cold, windy, leaves coming down.

Salmon in Trouble.

No?

Warm enough to wade and swim in the bay. Who needs to go to Tahiti? The Maori come to Neah Bay to make the babies dance happy. We call their weather The Pineapple Express. It's blowing snow-eater winds along the beaches and through the still-green alders.

More and more sunfishes, great whites and sperm whales showing up in the coastal waters and even in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. 

Salmon don't like warm water.

Salmon-fishing industry, recreational and sports - fighting over the last remaining salmon, either wild or hatchery - is just making buggy whips. And whining and crying about who's going to get to catch the last salmon. I did that cartoon just for them. Greedy, future-blind morons.

I know about buggy whips. I work in the newspaper industry. Sooner or later the Fun Paper that doesn't pay its writers is going to kill both the paper-industry papers, and then up its ad rates. It won't be able to resist. Why would it? It doesn't pay its writers. If it will treat them like a harvest, it will harvest you.

Meanwhile, the actual writers will go off to blogs - like this one - and make money off their own ads. No more invoicing! No more running asses off all over town for stories and photos that get bumped because newspapers only make their own towns' buggy-whips. No more "Be nice to the logging industry, that owns our editorial board." No more writing in the fucking Associated Press style that Hemingway hated so much. Whee!

Clallam County is ruffling with an argument over electronic or manual meter-reading machines, or whatever they're called. WTF? Solar mini-grids are coming, whether the PUD and the County want it or not. The meter machines are just more buggy whips. It's going to be another case of "There go my people! I must catch up and lead them!"

No arts or dance or music anything but industrial-lineworker production classes in the schools? No entertainment-industry preparation? Go ahead, take away the money from the schools, let the corporate test-companies eat up your curriculum, and send your kids to my comicon, where they can get what they need. Forks is about to have its own arts festival. The smartest loggers and fisherfolk are bringing their kids, because they've seen the future. 

Even the guy who cuts our firewood knows the 200-year-old "jobs" paradigm is about to run out of the steam of cheap resources. And "even?" I swear, lately, talking to the guys with the little firewood trucks, they're more on top of this than most of the people squabbling down at Port Angeles City Hall. Now that Mike Doherty's retiring, are we going to get a commissioner to replace him - the kind of professional politician who comes out here once a week because he knows where the votes are? Then again, we can always train the next one. We all have email. Or at least disposable cell-phones. They're called public "servants," people.

Forests and fisheries? Going to be harvesting a lot of palm trees, there? Or scrub oaks? Or whatever can thrive here when the weather changes - and it is. Planning to move your business north? Someplace else that will put up with a lifestyle based on grab-and-shit, when there's nothing left to shove into your industry's maw? There's a reason we've been warning you TreeHaters and Animal Players for decades - because it's been coming. Thanks a lot for being greedy AND deaf.

You can't have shark derbies - the soupfin industry saw to that. Sunfish grow too slowly and are too rare to become a halibut replacement. Rockfish are actually scorpion fish - which are tropical - so maybe they'll be happier. Good old lings and greenlings - can they be hatcheried? I dunno.

Better get to work converting those fishing boats for bird-watching. Other people have had to do it. Birder life lists are imaginary - but they pay just as much as a salmon left rotting in the hot sun in a sports boat as the owner went off to lunch. 

Hm. The First Nations will have to change their traditional fish ceremonies, because they won't have salmon any more. Then again, they're resilient people; they survived us, didn't they? 

Just don't decide to go after Monster Whale instead of grey whale. Those big southern people are hot-tempered and impatient of canoes. Ask Captain Ahab.

The Amish Got It Right.

We need to adopt the Amish concept of Rumspringa - in which, when we're younger, we do some stuff that, later, we'd just as soon not be shunned for. 

If I were a judgmental person for silliness or just dumbness, practically everybody I know, including me, would be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

You're all lucky I'm just judgmental for bad stuff. If you've killed all the wolves in the mountains or cut down 3000-year-old trees, or joined the military from dumbness (oh, yes, I apply these mirrors to me, too), or left cats to rot in bags (The police are looking for you), you're not getting away with it around me. There may be no punishment, but there will be pointing and laughing. Or short, hard reports in the Anonymous Tip Line. 

But if you've done no more than wear your hair different, or THAT shirt, or made fun of your religion (who else has better right?), or crawled around drunk naked barking like a dog, or just crawled around on all fours in full fire gear so all the little school kids will learn you're not a monster but a friendly firefighter - and you're so ashamed you blame me for telling your story as fun, or silliness, or admirable - ask why you react like that.

Who's bullying you? Who's telling you, you can't have that past, just because you're trying to be somebody else, and have every right to re-invent yourself? Who's telling you in your religion you have to shut out a harmless joke when you were having fun? Who is shaming you for acting like an animal most everybody has one of up here - an admirable, noble, happy, brave, kind animal, at that?

Why this IPad Artstudio art?
Your guess is as good as mine.

Shame on them. Not you. Not me. Shame on THEM. If I told a silly story about you, it wasn't to shame you. You made me laugh back then. Or you revealed something about a group you belonged to that needed revealed. Or you did something good for children. 

Perhaps the bullies are going to tell you I'm a tattle-tale, not keeping all the secrets to myself. You know why people can't tattle on me? Because I don't have any secrets. I don't care. If I did something mean or cruel, I can't apologize and take it back or hide it. I did it. I'll own it. I'll try not to do it again - unless it's really funny and you laugh at me, and then I won't be able to help myself continuing the performance any more than the local old I'll-do-what-I-want AND play-music guy throwing his grandkid off the bridge to go not-quite bunjee-jumping (nobody was hurt. This is what rivers are for).

A bunch of bullies once called my brother a Tattle-tale. He turned and sneered, "You're not my friends."

If you do it to my friends or my community, and make them blush and hide, godlets help you if I find out. I'll draw pictures of your crap - and I'm a cartoonist. Nobody should be making you ashamed of your past, even if it was a little past the Rumspringa. 

"High school is never over."

(Oh, and if you don't want people telling stories about you and even tagging you - what are you doing on Facebook? REALLY?)

Note: I know local folks are not all as stupid as they pretend. They may BEGIN by telling you that "all these new flu's" comes from fruit flies (WTF?) but if I jump right in there and say, "No they don't, the flu evolves very quickly," they'll suddenly show they know better. Imagine living in a community where you have to test the waters for the mean and stupid. Gave an old native guy a ride, who started by ragging on "Indian nets," and I said, "Nah, nobody's nets are good." After that, we could talk. I hope to introduce the concept of "Bullshit!" to the community.

Oh, and you with the logging truck, running your engine in a sick woman's yard. If you mean to piss me off, I grew up with the things. I pretty much engine-deaf. But where I grew up, I think it was a law that they were not to be revved up in a municipal neighborhood. Now why would that be a law? Because some numbnuts Tree-hater had done it one time too many, probably next door to the county judge or something. As the Clallam County clerk whimpered to me, "Please, don't make new law." The reason you're not allowed to keep an elephant in your basement in one of the States is because somebody let an elephant die down there - and the fire department had to clean out the goop and bones.

Dark and Scary Season

Beaver Creek Falls in high summer.

Another photo essay. I think I'll mostly just caption.

Kelp anchor.

"He's a chicken - right?"

Oxford Sandy & Black pigs in Neah Bay.

And the piglet.

What book? Who knows? We(s)t End Grafitti board.

Some kind of dead animal, rotted to soup.
Yes, the police know.

Just Pretty Pictures and Stuff

More photo essay than anything.

First, paper flying-eagle silhouettes in the local school. Very well done, no?

At least a little art in this school. One of the teachers yawped at me that I'd said bad things about the school, when they're a good school, and have lots of good programs.

Really? Is that why the kids can only get art classes from the local little old ladies' art club, who are volunteers, and nobody gets paid? Pull the other one. You don't have dance or music, either. Plenty of money for the football team, and the dying industries, but nothing for the actual future.

Hallowe'en skeleton with ripening tomatoes. Next year, I'm working out how to plant the tomatoes upside down, and then, when they're loaded with fruit and the frost is coming, I'll just cut 'em and hang 'em in the house to ripen and dry.

Here's a shot from last summer, when the calla lilies were in bloom. It's the newly painted empty room. That's right - we have an EMPTY ROOM. Yeah, the upper shelves are full of DVDs and the lower shelves full of stuff - but the room itself got nothing but space and Fearless; that's her curled up in the box down there.

Karin Ashton told me about the "bed sculpture" up by the mouth of a the Sekiu river. Dan and I went up and actually found it. It made for a misty, spooky, warm beach walk. Thanks, Karin! Dunno who built it - forgot to ask her last time I saw her. She's threatening to do comic books and bring them to the Clallam Bay Comicon, so I look forward to that. I wonder if she knows about Fumetti?  The American version. I love well-done Fumetti.

Somebody went to a lot of work on the campsite and bed area. The winter tides will sweep it away, but it must have been a lot of fun for parties this summer. 

There's always something like this on the local beaches. They're temporary and don't hurt anything, but they're always fun to find.

Kind of like local art installations. Could be artists, or surfers, or just bored people. Who knows?

Salmon carcasses in the Clallam River, visible this autumn off the bridge. People throw 'em in there for the otters - an to attract the silver salmon run up the river. Yes, there might be one yet, as the river continues to recover. 

Now if we can only convince the traditional ignoramus fishermen to not catch the last ones in the run, so they can breed. I sometimes think these guys believe that fish and trees just get abracadaba's back into place, just for them. 

We call those guys BWS - Born With Servants. There's always somebody there to pick up after them, starting with their moms. And godlets help you if you have to clean up after them when they move. Finally. Late. They're the same ones telling us "alders aren't native" because it gets in the way of them logging off the land so it can be sold to developers. And don't tell the game warden about any fish they caught, especially if they gave you one.

The neighbor got many cranberries from the Folly Bog up the Hoko river road. It was started a long time ago by a guy just to see if he could do it, and not only went through three generations, but continues today under new owners. really wonderful cranberries. Good with everything, and enough to last until January.

The salmon carcasses remind me of a party I went to recently. Lovely silver salmon, baked with herbs. But finding out who caught it, I said that maybe they didn't want to be telling the game warden about it. I've seen these guys brag about catching eleven fish on a two-fish limit, and then not eating them - it's all about the fish torture. And the salmon was taken in the river that was recovering. In other words, he'd taken a fish that had actually made its head cells up to go up the river to breed.

It's hard living with children who think the planet and everything on it is their playtoy. And then have to clean up and repair after them. I wish they'd learn to wipe their own butts. But not with the toilet paper they make from the lungs of the planet.

Black Tomatoes Come To The Peninsula

Black tomatoes ripening.

I was going to write how the Ukrainian Black Tomatoes got to the Peninsula, but not even the person who found them in Seattle with me remembers how that went. 

We were walking around Seattle in Summer or Autumn, 2013. We found a pocket park with a little dead garden at one end. Two or three inky-black tomatoes still clung to dried-out plants. 

Roberta Gregory emailed:

"Hi! I will have to find it again. It was a block or two east of Broadway, around Republican or Mercer or thereabouts.

"I think we had gone out for Pho and were killing a bit of time. 

"Or, was it the time we were going to meet someone at that gay bar off of John street and had stopped in that little Halloween shop on Broadway for a while. That would have made it around this time of year. Funny, I recall the Halloween shop much more than the folks we met up with at the gay bar.

"Think the Pho and the bar were two separate occasions, but now I am not sure. Too much in the (mental) Rolodex."

I think it was the Hallowe'en Shop trip. She's right about time of year. I took the remaining tomatoes, and managed to get two viable seeds, which produced excellently.

Anyway, I'm going to share out the seed tomatoes today at a party. The tomatoes bred true, bear prolifically on a vigorous plant, and are beautiful and utterly delicious. 

Let's hope they take like Ozette potatoes.

How The Logging Industry Fucks Up

Jeeze. Don't get on me and try to tell me how the logging interests are good for everything (Oh, and don't even TRY the crap of telling me "enviromentalists cause urban sprawl." Not everybody is dumb enough to believe the lies you tell yourselves. 

I'm not BLIND. 

Every town the chop-boys can get near a town with the clearcuts - admitting, in so many words, that the sound of a tree tearing down gets their 'nads all tingly - they take down everything, and then shoot the panicky wildlife that tears into town. They love killing shit for amusement. It gets 'em off.

Old, peaceful, starving bears. Plots to kill starving mom and kid cougar (we saw what you did there). Whatever herbivore that wanders into view.

Whop down the wetland on a nice town road, because you thought you could build a truck-washing station there (that would sit and rot as soon as Rayonier had ripped everything out and moved on). It's amazing your ass wasn't fined. 

And now trying to hit every decent tree in town. WTF? Even the campground shade? If you LIKE deserts, why don't you move to Arizona? Or are you so desperate to squeeze every last dollar out of the place? Whose idea was it that you didn't have enough picnic space in the park? Had to get your hands on that, too, did you?

Well, why not? Clallam Bay had a chance to actually start getting into real tourism and entertainment, and we had just gotten rid of one junk-yard, and some moron comes along and builds an even BIGGER one.

And no doubt thinks he's being an industrial tycoon. These people have junkyard minds.

And junkyard hearts.

P.S. No, capitalism is NOT socialism - eat eat eat eat crash move on is not take out put in take out put in, etc. 

There are no more frontiers. You have to whip down the stick trees to make enough palettes to ship in the shit from China, with its cheap, non-unionized labor. We're not going to Mars, moron. There is no air there. You can't run a planetary atmosphere. You're fucking the one up on the one planet you evolved to fit. 

And it's MINUS 67 degrees on Mars. I don't think you can BRING enough hoodies.

And sitting down and "respectfully" debating with you? I don't respect you. You'll kill me and everything and everybody I love, for a buck and a tingle. I would no more debate economy and environments with you, former high-school hero, than I would debate science with a creationist - or a chemtrailer.

Of course, those "nice, middle-class Americans" you claim are "making everything better" are shoveling their kids into a corporate war for pay. And cheering the war like it was a football game. And crabs-in-a-bucketing every thinking, hopeful, trying kid they can get their hands on. I live here, too. And I'm not deaf, either. The school has lots of football uniforms and a big field - but no arts, music, graphics are dance. So much for YOUR futures.

Logging Camp Whores and Live Trolls

Wow. I got a live troll - spouting the right-wing Facebook arguments, like he was reading it from an online script - complaining that in this blog I'd called the wives of loggers "whores."

My dears, NO feminist would use the word "whore" as an insult for women; sex workers need a union.

Just as no lefty would call a Vietnam vet a "druggie." Please. We've finally gotten on the way to legalizing marijuana.

However - I DID quote a person who fifty years ago was a victim of the logging industry bullies. SHE was the one who called the old gang "Logging Camp Whores." (Well, she IS a church-goin' woman. They DO use the word "whore" as an insult, because that's the way their system works.)

I was just reporting some interesting and spicy language from one of your own abused. Sooner or later, bullies get theirs.

The troll, by the way, admitted he'd been listening to predictions of the end of the world for 50 years. Fifty years we've been trying to tell these morons, and they're bragging about being short-sighted?

Oh, well. I guess they'll just have to feel. How's the weather out where you are?

Somebody's Watching

The other day on Facebook - trying to get caffeinated, again - I snorted about a recent story: "I'll bet a Chinese dinner there's a clearcut in there somewhere."

Some journalist (a real one) must be watching my feed:

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023235343_mudslideovercutxml.html

Before the blatting about "Oh, that's not a good study!" starts, people are showing up on Facebook bitching about how the logging companies are treating them like collateral damage. Study THAT.

The local paper that's supporting this mess? Prediction: it's going to end up being one of those local-color handouts you get at the restaurant where the stuffed elk head - full of chemicals and godlets-know-WHAT parasites - hangs over your food. 

So far its editorial page has collapsed into two versions of - probably unpaid - Erma Bombecks, and photos of logging truck "convoys" that the dumbest of the locals are so excited about. One of them was going on about how the town gets no respect, and how some logger gave toys or something to kids (what? You thought I was going to read this stuff in DETAIL?).

Of COURSE he did. Industrial resource-rippers think they're the POINT, and only care for their own. As soon as the corporations get every last bit of what they came for any pump the resulting cash into overseas accounts, wait for the whining - these people care for nothing but themselves and their immediate circle. They're beginning to realize they might NOT be the good guys - and the horrible history of environmental mistreatment in the forestry industry is coming out of the dark into the light where everybody can see it. No stuffed animals - originally alive or not - are going to save that.

Hey, dancing around waving in ecstasy at bad leaders ended up with the Germans having to hang their heads over and admit their pasts, too. Bad is bad. 

And that wetland the local doofus clearcut? There's skunk cabbage up in it.

Garbage minds at work.

Might be the right timing to send that to somebody, and see if we can get his ass fined for watershed damage. Let him stick to putting fences up around a big chunk of downtown and filling it with crap, while the best the locals can do in protest is help the kids put fish art on the fence.

We no sooner get rid of one garbage-head, than we get another one. Lord, this is like that episode of Stinz, about the spite fences. I live in a comic book, I swear.

They Just Can't Help Themselves.

Over time, I've been writing articles about how "forestry" handles forests. Mostly, it's been to get my own pain out of my system. I grew up in a logging and pulp world, and - well - that's never going to heal (You'll find a bunch of those articles at the end of this post. They've got email and youtube and all sorts of other links in them).

But the logging companies just couldn't help themselves. It's not enough they destroyed the Pillar Point Rec Area, taking down a big-leaf maple tunnel (and here's the document on who signed off on that); it's a slap in the face of the people who live here.

Now they've finally had to come right in between neighborhoods in a small town, in a full-blown clearcut in Clallam Bay.

Look, I know I can't stop all the horrible abuses in the world. And I could have survived, if just a little nature was left, here and there. I could have driven through clearcuts if Pillar Point had been there as a little relief. But what do I do now? If I just stand back this time, another company will be around the point next year, cutting down trees with eagle's nests in them, on a cliff, with no concern that a slip cliff would come down on the homes below. They just had to keep poking, didn't they?

Mother tree.

And I can make this pronouncement. Anybody who doesn't go in and rip out resources, the people who do say we have no families; it's an obvious insult. Or simply poorly thought out. Don't think so? Well, look at these signs. That's what they posted for everybody to see. And I want to know who paid for that expensive print run. And since they're about activities on State lands, I get to ask, under freedom of information. Well, I do.

Look, sooner or later these logging companies are going to go after me and try to make me take down these posts. Because they really, really, REALLY can't help themselves. I'll post any paperwork or emails I get from them. Because, as Mr. Manning and Snowden taught us - we all have to stand up. If nothing else, logging companies are starting to feel sorry for themselves. They don't have to; they can cooperate and grow up.

And while we're at it, here's the kid's tree house. It's in a big double Douglas Fir, grown from an older nurse stump.

Kid's tree house.

It's a "mother tree" - the basis for the fungal network that stores and feeds

water and nutrients from the big central tree back into surrounding trees. Logging companies are busily chipping down trees into toxic products that make us sick, and putting them into from materials in foods to materials that outgas in homes for years. It's all planted firmly in the 1950's, when All Chemistry Was Good. It's doubtful "forestry science" even knows what these big trees do, or what it means. And if the people involved do - more shame on them.

Mother tree root base

It's not the 1950's any more. It's 2013. Mature, learn, study. And don't be like the guy I just had a conversation with, whose only protest against "wilderness" was that the logging companies wouldn't let people come in and cut firewood from the slash. The guy was a former dairy farmer, and when I tried to tell him that burning what was left back into the soil was the only - token - form of fertilizer these companies could manage, and even made the connection to his fertilizing his corn crop, he just didn't get it. He wanted some little thing, all for himself, and he can't see past that.

If nothing else, being allowed onto forestry land - even a "wilderness" compromise - to thin dog-hair stands for firewood

Destruction of old growth in Audubon area

Are they drinking? Serious question.

would contribute to the health of a forest. Forests have lived with humans for thousands of years, and on this continent, the management was far better than it was on my home continent. A forest can take some thinning and underbrush burns and food-harvesting. It can't take every single tree, large or small - and especially large - being chewed down to the earth every 30 years - with no replacement of thousands of years' worth of nutrients. It just can't. We already know this from Easter Island, Scotland, Ireland, and most of the middle east and the Mediterranean countries. They blew it.

Speaking of blowing; we evolved with trees. They make the level of oxygen we need, and sink the level of Co2 we need to be removed. They are our lungs and our cooling system. What is wrong with us? Is it really so important to pay for machinery to destroy our life support to pay for machinerty to... well, we all know what a vicious cycle is.

I'm going to hand this on to the next people who might do something about it. The Sunsets West co-op in Clallam Bay is where to go to start the networking for people who just tired of an old, broken, poorly-planned system, that has every possibility of simply bringing on the great human die-off faster. 

Good luck folks. You'd better run in the long run, because the future of human life - and any other life - on this planet depends on it. We're all in this together, whether we like it or not. It's work and do, or die. This time, it's your life.

And read ANYTHING by Jane Goodall. I think she's the only sane person left. 

Now here are the articles and links:

Alders aren't Native?

Pillar Point Rape 

More Clearcut Dancing

Come Help Us Save This Place

Logger Covers His Face 

There Are Trees In Your Salad Dressing

Well, At Least We're Talking

Drugs, Heroes and Blindness

A promising young man recently committed suicide up here. According to town rumor, it's because the army decided he was "overweight" and he'd "disappointed his uncle." These are only rumors. 

I saw this kid at graduation. If the rumor is true, it's a lie. Supposedly, the army yanked away his future, and he shot himself. Again, the family is torn to pieces, and not sharing exact information - but it's all over town, through one rumor or another. 

A grandmother up here was furious about recruiters at the high-school job days. The army acts like one of those bad religious groups, looking for the suffering and dead-end to lie to and suck into the machine. I'm explaining "pension rank" to everybody - the fact that, in order to guarantee s/he'll retire as a general and not a colonel, a general really needs a war. And recruiters have quotas, and will commit suicide themselves, if they can't meet them.

While delivering food-bank food to a dying man, I saw a group of kids clustered near his door, in the parking lot. They were discussing something that had upset them. They were also waiting for their drug dealer (from the looks of them, probably the locally-produced meth). 

These kids, waiting for a pain-killer, were hurt by the death of a school hero. 

Hoquim recently put together a block watch. What are they most concerned with, about kids? Cleaning off graffiti. Not why the kids are suffering and hunting paint, alcohol and meth. Not why they're in pain and need help. They have pretty new uniforms, but where is the outreach to the suffering, and the kids already on the streets? These kids all know each other, regardless of how they try to cut them up into us vs. them. The "us" and "them" is actually by generation - and the "us" isn't doing a very good job helping "them."

The old guard up here is disgusting. Loggers are clear-cutting in a wildlife/wetland area right next to the dead boy's town. They hit their jake-brakes when going by campgrounds in the Olympic National Park. The people from the 1950's are gleeful that trees are going down. All they can see is a football game - not just cash, but the domination of the Enemy, Nature. And guess who they call "eco-terrorists?"

Wildlife and trees and tourism, that can offer so many working positions - not just jobs - for all the kids for the future. These people raise money for scholarships for kids, but how will those kids get to stay here if there's nothing?

The Clallam Bay Comicon may have to be witness to what the old guard does to the community. The place may be wrecked for our generation - but the only thing that really stopped wholesale whaling and overfishing of cod were the collapses of populations. So maybe the west end needs to die before it can live. 

But why do we always have to go through a resurrection?

We need to reach out to all the kids, because all the kids know each other. And they're asking what we're doing with their planet, and why we're only leaving them scraps and mud. That look in a sad kid's eyes? That's blame - and helplessness.

Or is it? A kid up here is going to be building an anti-bullying website. Whenever we go hiking or to the beach, there's very little litter, and since kids are the ones who run farthest, they're the ones keeping it clean. Kids who love nature and know it's the future are stewarding now. They're cleaning up water and woods. They want modern logging techniques, not just ones that pay for the machinery, in a cut pay cut pay vicious circle. Fewer and fewer people are fishing except for food. The old paradigm of animals as toys and something to play with, for trophies (training for war) or catch and release (tormenting animals for the fun of it) is beginning to fade. The horrible 20th-century myth that only humans can feel and hurt is being hunted down and dispatched for what it was and is - an industrial excuse for treating our fellow peoples on this planet as so many tools and cash bags.

The old guard calls people like us "wimps." This is another word for "meek." Only the green will survive - and who do you think will inherit the earth?

(And why am I bothering to write this? Because it's the only weapon I have against the spoilers. And so nobody can accuse me of not trying, and for turning a blind eye. I don't want to be the one to stumble in surprise on the tattered remnants, and claim I never knew. And the more I can spread this, the less able others will ever be able to say, "But we didn't know!" I don't want to have to say, "I told you so!" again - but I'll probably have to. I really hate looking this prescient, every single time, when past lessons should have taught us better. And we're still testing animals to see if THEY can learn? What was the definition of insanity, again?)