Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservation. Show all posts

Friday, October 24, 2014

Cut-And-Paste With An Ax

Sigh. 

I don't argue with fakes. But sometimes you gotta.

May I tell the person who commented on this blog that, if you start your conversation with "I'm a conservationist," then that just puts the fakery feelers right up, because any DECENT person is a tree-hugger. It's only tree-haters who can't help what follows.

Tree-haters can't help it, because, as I've heard them admit, they love the sound of destruction as a tree comes down. There are photos of them all over the place, grinning like whaling captains at the stumps and carcasses of 3000-year-old forest-system-support trees. They might as well be standing on that stack of bison skulls and waving a couple more brain-boxes around. 

"Look at me! I killed something bigger than my penis!"

And look, people, they've been warning you for ages they don't think anybody but them gets to be on the planet. You've all seen those "Working forests = working families" signs. Those just mean, "Only us loggers have babies and everybody else needs to let us clearcut next to their community so the starving predators come into their yards!"

And then we get the goofy tree-hater industry talking points, like they're cutting and pasting the stuff off their logger class notes. Stuff like, "Well, you wouldn't have a house if it weren't for logging!" Oh, please. You had to go to balloon-framing and filling in the spaces between with toxic products, like a nasty industrial wattle-and-daub. What does The Goon Show say about England after the Luftwaffe's slum-clearing program (that's an English joke, not mine), and the reason England is now all red brick? "You can't get the wood, you know." And it's getting worse, because now we're building with chipboard, the glues of which are even worse and outgas longer. "Oh, I'm sick all the time!" wails our society. Ya THINK?

Here and there we see some decent wood, used as wood works better when there's patience in the grow and harvest, but most of it's going off for something poisonous. You people will wipe your asses with the lungs of the planet and then moan about anal cancer until the chickens come home to roost. I'm not saying that's what's causing it, but then again, it may just be the wood pulp in the food. Yup, you're eating wood like the Germans did after World War One, because that's how thin your food web has gotten. If you gotta eat trees you're in big trouble.

Oh, and I see how you loggers managed to get your hands on two parks and flatten them. It's practice for the Olympic National Park, if you can manage it. If you had your way, the whole thing would burn - including the Lake Crescent Lodge - so you could brag to each other in the taverns about how fast you took down the next generation's inheritance.

And the animals? Don't even try. Rayonier has three pages - logging and chemistry, a hunting page that's obviously like the African-based bushmeating that goes hand-in-hand with logging, and then - and does it surprise anybody? Development. I've seen it happen. My parent's generation and the older members of mine fucked up bigtime - and you're just keeping up the tradition.

Does anybody here need to be reminded that the conversation has begun that ebola came into human communities because infected animals had nowhere else to go? I hesitate to even mention it, because the American method of control would be what it's been all along - extermination of any animal populations bordering on human communities. Wiping out the people, plants and animals and replacing it with our domestic versions was the intent of our ancestors and religion, remember? Taming the wilderness. Making America safe for civilization. We've all heard the nice way of saying it, but Custer and Columbus have pretty much lost their reputations.

Stop arguing with me, loggers. Stop listening to them, people. They want to continue in an extremely destructive way of life, until there's nothing left. A real American doesn't stay and fight - we yell, "Road trip!" and get the Hell out of Dodge. But now there's noplace else to go. If you want to go any further west, you're gonna need a houseboat. Like Kon-Tiki.

But the conversation is beginning to work. Loggers and fisherfolk are bringing their kids in to talk about how to survive on this planet as modern people, and have room for everybody else. It's a lot of work. There will be a lot of tweaking, changing systems, having the courage to stay and make it work.

Your kids should be able to have homes, the internet, and a decent planet for all the peoples - including the animals and plants the native people and now science says we're all related to - to survive. Stop bragging about a bad past. Stop thinking us tree-huggers are the enemy. The corporations that are ripping down your peninsula, and sending most of the money to an out-of-country hedge-fund is what you should all be fighting.

Quit listening to the old cut-and-paste arguments and get to work. The old lazy things-as-they've-always-been aren't going to fly any more. That kite is going to come down harder than the ancient trees your granddaddy bragged about. Give your kids something to really be proud of. They're all you've got.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

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.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

On The Beach

Just some photos of wandering on the beach, limbering up after painting the house and getting exercise.  It's usually a pebble beach, but in the summer we get a collection of sand -- and the other end is sand, by the river.

It's the "Injun's fault" there are no fish -- not the out-of-town fishermen who flip lethal Styrofoam bait packets into the water.  And we never find these things until summer.  It's also the Injun's fault there are baby diapers by the side of the road all summer -- I guess the Injuns stay in Neah Bay except in the winter, huh? (Where would we white people be without the Injuns to blame?)

Gull tracks!  The California and Heermann's gulls are relaxing on the beach right now, splashing and swimming in the river.  The river used to get filthy during the summer because the mouth would close up due to stupid human engineering (more Stupid White People Tricks).  Now it's found a more natural mouth it looks like it might flow all summer and stay clean.  Those are my fancy toes -- in the summer I do too much sloppy and dirty with my hands for polish, so my flip-flopped or bare feet get all the attention.  You see this with the Makah -- the women get fancy feet at celebrations, with polish, cool flip-flops and sandals, even jewelry and tattoos.  Kind of leads to Shoe Envy at the Neah Bay graduations.

Wading pools in the Clallam River!  My favorite thing in the world on a beach or stream is those very shallow, clear wading pools.  It's a kid thing.  I just adore it.  Now there are all these immaculate, clear, clean pools to splash in.  But watch the kids -- there are some deep holes in this river.

July 30, 2011, and the river mouth is still open.  It doesn't have to fight its way past the high embankment on the other side of the wooded "island."  See?  Stop fiddling with nature, and she rights herself, like a good sailboat.  It will be like having a whole 'nother river up here for fish runs -- one in the summer as well as the winter.

You snooze, you lose.  I spotted these oyster mushrooms on a log.  I squatted down and stuffed my pockets.  On the path, I ran into a guy we'd seen on the beach, running back with a plastic bag. I asked him if he was going to collect garbage like we were (it's becoming something of a hobby thang up here).  He said, "Something," and kept on.  We realized he'd seen the oysters -- and gone back for a bag.  And he was wearing a hat!  Mushroom hunters are ruthless -- all I left was the mycelium.