"Eco-Terrorist" on the Right Forehead.

New Year's Resolution: to paste the term "Eco-Terrorist" back onto the forehead of logging companies, newspapers owned by logging companies, bushmeating companies, ranchers and farmers who use our money to destroy wildlife and rivers, and anybody who thinks killing things is "fun," or life is to be "harvested." Carl Hiaasen can help. I wish I had an emoticon for "barracuda."

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Everybody Lost

First of all, Happy Krampus! 

Santa ain't coming to the Olympic Peninsula. The logging companies have stripped the place, and the developers are on the way.

No use writing about the place any more. Give it a decade or two, and there will be no more hunting and fishing, and locals will have to move out because the taxes will go up on the vacation homes and the towns becoming cities.

I guess nobody cared about living in the woods that much. The animals on the planet are quickly heading for extinction. Coyotes, crows, seagulls, domestic cats and dogs, and deer are probably all that makes it through. I know - "Deer?" You'd be amazed to find out where they show up, perfectly calm and happy where no humans even see them.

The churches are still trying to fool everybody into thinking they're going to heaven. If there WERE a heaven, it's referred to as a garden, or a city. If it's a garden - does anybody think the species that failed the "take care of my garden" test is going to be put anyplace but a burning clearcut? if it's a city - those places fill up with Liberals. Hell will be that there's noplace else to go, and people like me won't pick on Stupids for being stuck there, but we won't listen to their whining, either.

The wars? Well, it's the Darwin Award. Parents don't care about throwing away their DNA, so long as they can be the Twelfth Man in a football game with guns. I guess we'll have to go on paying for the military jobs, and getting nothing back in return. So much for the myth that the military took America out of the Depression. Since I pay the military's salaries, I'm not only their Commander-in-Chief, like all other citizens - I'm their boss. 

I've pretty much taught everybody how to send in articles and photos to newspapers. The editors will be very happy - they won't have to pay anybody. It might keep those papers going a little bit longer. They're not "news" papers, anyway - just rah-rah rags for the logging industry.

Now I have to decide if I should take advantage of the Lulu.com holiday deals, to get books for Emerald City, ShortRun, and my own comicon. 

I know, I know - Twain and Hiaasen say we need to keep fighting and stay pissed off all our lives. But Nature will get her own back on all of us, sooner or later. She always does.

I do more good drawing comic books, anyway. Go over to my site and get all the links for books, shows, and hopeful stuff. 

Because this place is fucked.

Sixty-Four White People

Happy Voter Sports party! 

Now I get who's helping to destroy what's left of the pittance parks out here - greedy farmers and descendants of land-grabbing settlers hooking up to developers, and not realizing they just went to bed with the hoof-and-mouth disease.

The editor of the Forks Forum - Forks Washington's hometown newspaper is running a campaign to restore Forks' white history, including columns about the "Real Forks." I suspect that one's because, rather than siding with pissed-off loggers who can't get the girls any more, everybody wants Twilight back, and are down to Twi/Squatch tours, and it always pisses off what's left of settlers when Custer gets his reputation held up for everybody to see.

And why? Because the parks "stole" Rialto Beach Mora Olympic National Park from her grandfather and supposedly turned it over to politicians to party in. Why? They're mad because they got paid and not in 2014 dollars? As for partying in the park - what? Like we all can't reserve the park to party in?

I'll bet part of the fight will be based in how much Injun blood they got in 'em. And you know the joke: "What do they call 64 white people?" "One full-blooded Cherokee." No, that's wrong. "One full-blooded Cherokee CHIEF." It's always a chief - when it's not a princess.

And you people with the Ancestor Club - why don't you be honest and just name it the "I Been here Screwing The Natives Longer Than You Club" and not be so embarrassing? 

My people got here in 1632, which means we've been bigger asswipes, longer. Might as well admit it... and not brag about it.

Speaking of loggers not getting the girls any more - dude on the bus, yesterday, talking about why the "selection of females is so small up here" - do you even OWN a mirror? Please don't tell me you think Twilight took your girlfriend away. Like you needed help with that.

(Hopefully this post will finally make our local Canadian-logging-company-owned newspapers make me go away. I never got paid enough, never knew if a story would be paid for, and had to write the most horribly censored schlock. No wonder Hemingway refused to have his newspaper articles published in his lifetime, and kept cats. I feel for you, dude.)

Same Old Navy, Same Old Tricks

Welp, the Navy fan-boys - and everybody IS a fanboy, about something - want to play with their toys again. Can they be trusted? Probably not. Anybody with guns that big is up to no good. And they - and whatever navies they're playing "Battleship" with - blew their cred a long time ago. 

My email, followed by the one I got - and no whining about "secrecy" on the internet. We all know that ship has sailed.

Immediate action needed New Naval Weapons testing threats here in Northwest

Actions 

Donna Barr

 

 

9:05 AM

 

To: gtwahl@fs.fed.us

Hello, Mr. Wahl.

We need more time for a hearing. Democracy is about everybody's voices.

We might consider that, if the Navy is willing to - jiggle - the debate about the harm to ocean sea mammals, can they be trusted to care about terrestrial creatures - including humans? 

Donna Barr

Actions 

Nancy Morris

 

 

10/22/14

 

 

Hello everyone:

Serious new threats here in the Northwest.   People in nearby Northwest cities are asking people to call (+1-360-956-2375) Mr. Greg Wahl, a Forest Service environmental coordinator , email is gtwahl@fs.fed.us .  Please ask for an extension beyond the October 31st  deadline for comments regarding the Warfare permit, so that people can have a public hearing on this proposed testing of weapons.  Please take a moment to call or email Greg Wahl directly.  See petition link for more details, but don't just sign the petition; again please call directly requesting extension on deadline for comments and a public hearing.  There is no time to lose.  The petition link does provide background information: https://www.change.org/p/us-navy-do-not-put-any-camper-sized-trucks-with-electromagnetic-radiation-equipment-to-conduct-war-exercises-with-military-aircraft-from-15-sites-in-clallam-jefferson-and-grays-harbor-counties

Greg Wahl/ Forest Service environmental coordinator

 1835 Black Lake Blvd. S.W.

 Olympia, WA 98512

 360-956-2375

Positive Reinforcement.

Okay, time to stop picking on ALL the locals.

The readers of this blog split right down the middle - the ones that want to gut me and take my eyeballs out - and the ones that are cheering, "Go get em! About time SOMEBODY said it!"

But - more and more people up here are getting it. Fishermen are willing to fight to stop catch-and-release. Loggers are beginning to understand careful forest care and the danger of corporations and capitalism. Farmers are making lives better for their animals because their kids are begging them to stop trading off cruelty for profit. Everybody's beginning to realize we CAN have a different future - and whether you believe in an afterlife or not, we have a chance to make heaven or hell right here, where we all are.

People are discovering that being a liberal means being unafraid, all-inclusive, and sharing everything. And the more we share, the more there is. Life should be a party and a journey, not fear and anger. This is a NICE planet - the one we evolved for - and all its creatures should have a chance. 

And... we all know 'em - there's the former bad guys who just want to WIN. And if our side is winning - and folks, just face it, no matter how long it takes, the liberal folks ALWAYS win - there's conversion going on because a lot of Americans just want to be on the winning side.

We CAN be taught.

(And don't come on an start a fight with a liberal, okay? The nice people have learned that it's okay to be pissed off - and not put up with crap. And we're better educated and just plain smarter - and we actually KNOW history, and not some cartoon version of it. We'll embarrass you in public. Don't do that to yourself. Or your family.)

Good stuff and bad stuff

Good stuff first! I'd like to thank County Commissioner Mike Doherty and various other parts of Clallam County and the Bus system for fixing a problem that could have gotten very nasty. Okay, this is just a small problem, but hey, it shows how things can get done.

This problem was bearable, but as gas prices go up and the busses become truly packed day after day, it was getting not just horrid, but dangerous. 

Admittedly, I used scare tactics: "The Sappho bus stop - after an hour on the bus, everybody who has to make the next bus connection between Forks, Port Angeles and Clallam Bay is filling up the woods nearby with human waste! We have many foreign travelers now - we could have cholera or typhoid!"

Which, I know, is over the top, and I did it on purpose. But it's true.

Mike emailed that he'd started talking to the county, and they'd come up with a $15,000 estimate for a pit toilet. They'd be working on it.

BUT - when I rode the bus last time, there was a porta-potty at the park-and-ride.

So thank you for whoever was involved to help keep the woods clean and people from getting sick.

And to the bus-drivers, whom I have seen wedge a moment into their tight transfer schedule to let people use the toilet.

it's just a little thing - but we have a very responsive county government, and it listens. Thank you, folks!

**********************

Now for the bad - let's just put up the Times Magazine Cover. 

Cartoons speak for themselves. So here's my comment. I didn't color it or nothing. 

The Big Forest Lie

Harvested like corn - how long will it be here?

This is the biggest lie for the title of a law I've ever seen (Click to link):

H.R. 1526: Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act  Introduced by Rep. Doc Hastings [R-WA4] on April 12, 2013

This law promotes neither forest health nor better rural communities. It simply allows chemical and fiber companies to slash down what remains of our depleted "forests," that have been broken to the condition of little more than scrub and plantations.

Forestry has long ceased to be about wood. The actual wood harvested is poor, thin and increasingly expensive. Forestry is about "value-added product." Buying a natural product at hunger prices, tearing it to pieces, and reselling it at hugely inflated prices - and none of the communities being robbed receiving the profits. The resulting products are invariably poor-quality and toxic; for example, corn is a comparatively healthy food when consumed cooked by humans; high-fructose corn syrup turns it into a substance deleterious to human health. Chipboard and thin veneers and knotty plywood are poor construction materials.

Corn is a huge sucker of nutrients - so are forests. But corn is fertilized. And even now, it is becoming more and more difficult to grow both these products, with its huge demands on nutrients and water. Corn results in rivers full of toxic levels of nitrogen, repeated clearcuts result in smaller, weaker, ultimately failed environments. 

H.R. 1526 will lead to the future collapse of the local communities, because it will falsely lead them to continue to think they can live as they did in the 19th century or the 1950's - making them ignore what they really have to do to save their own future. These people hate the national parks and forests, because they've been fed propaganda, and believe in a terrible history as good. They want to be able to take the national heritage and turn it into personal products. They can't see what they're doing, they can't understand what they will lose.

I suspect the hatred for the national forests and parks up here has been jump-started by the Elwha getting their river back. The tribe was treated like dirt in the 19th-century. Like wolves here, and bison on the plains, they were supposed to disappear to make way for a "superior race." They've struggled for decades to get their river and their homeland back. They're telling the true story today. 

The "history" about conquest and genocide, human, animal and environmental, is still presented as noble and admirable - in this day and age, as the reputations of Custer, Buffalo Bill and Columbus are revealed for what they actually were, genocidal monsters and even a slaver.

But gradually, people like the Elwha are telling what really happened, reminding us of weeping elders, driven families and destroyed graveyards, of ruined rivers and shattered land. If we're going to grow and become a mature people, we need to relegate our past to the shelf of shame where it belongs. We have to face it, apologize for it, and reform our future behavior. And truly understand what the future has to be. 

The forests are not a field of corn. Treating them like corn will ultimately destroy these communities, within a generation or two. And, because forests produce what we breathe, along with the oceans, it will destroy all of us. Ignoring what this bill is doing to America is suicide for us - and for the planet.

Fairy Tales of the Peninsula

You've all heard about the usual sylan legends. Bigfoot. The guv'ment is poisoning the forests (with the addition that we need to cut them down to Save The Wildlife).

Here's a couple more:

1. Clearcuts are good for wildlife. 

Poke these people a bit, and you find out it's good for deer and grouse - deer and grouse - deer and grouse. They quickly prove they want flat grass, with stags and game birds on it, and nothing else. It's like English Lord wannabe.

2. Environmentalists want to live in big houses in virgin forest and travel by helicopter. 

You wonder what they're on when they make this stuff up (not that there's not plenty of choice; Forks is the meth capitol of western Washington). Want to see how an environmentalist lives? Come visit me. You'll see me using less, trying to make it last, trying to repair it. It's not easy to live in a society that, top-to-bottom, is based on resource rip-and-crash, but using less is a big first step.

Yes, we use firewood - but the other option is electricity, and the cluttered, overstretched grid, that will need to be replaced with steadily-improving in-city small-grid systems. And whomever I buy it from talks how to get Greener (not greener wood, smart-ass), in a system that makes it hard for them. Yes, we're on grids ourselves, but we try to use as little as possible and recycle what we use. We don't go to Walmart or Costco, we try to support the local businesses, what few there actually are. We try to consolidate auto trips, use public transit, and lower the yard-care impact. As far as helicopters go - we could use one or two up here, for a community taxi service. 

3. We can log forever if we just burn slag and replant trees.

I only have to use their own argument against them - that a forest is like a crop of corn: how long would you be able to keep harvesting crops of corn with no fertilizer except burning the stalks? The Mayan calendar was probably a schedule for moving a community once the corn had sucked the ground dry. Want to see someplace that kept harvesting and harvesting? The middle east. Really nice forest recovery there, isn't it?

3. Taking down the National Forest would rescue the rural economy.

I'm not even going to get into how these pulp-paper-and-cheap-building woods people have cut off their own future. I've already gone into toxic products, antique production and use methods, and ultimate soil exhaustion. But we should stop here and take a look at a truly evil bit of legislation that is being used right now to tear the heart out of the State Trust lands, and cheat landowners of their trees: H.R. 1526: Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act Look who voted for it. Any surprise? If only from an economic standpoint, the use of trees for pulp is the dumbest thing that can be done with wood. There are a million other sources of fast-growing waste products that can be used for pulp, or re-worked to replace the toxic pulp products - and everything made from tree pulp has residual toxins.

Fine wood prices in Seattle.

Here's something any landowner with trees should know: real wood, used AS wood, treated with respect, attracts a lot more money than ripped-out stands of pulp trees. Take a look at this sign on a Seattle street tree. The tree is valued at $8000 - and the fine for taking it out during construction is $16,000. Why? Because trees aren't corn, and shouldn't be sold like corn. The fact we've been treating them like corn has led to wood products that, well, in the words of Dan when we were trying to find some decent wood for a house project, "My grandfather wouldn't have used this for firewood."

Local people and landowners have been scammed out of billions of dollars since logging and pulping began up here. Wood has been bought on the cheap, chopped up like cheap corn, and sold for whatever the industries - often based in distant states - could get away with. What do companies based in Florida care about the Olympic Peninsula, or anybody who lives here?

That doesn't have to be. True planning, care, patience. And yes, people will need help in rural communities until the scarred land and forests - and yes, the fish - recover. And help getting into new, clean industries, like the tourism - ecology and entertainment, just for a start.

Subsidize the people of the rural towns until the forests heal - not the companies that will ultimately turn the whole peninsula into just another bunch of failed logging towns.

On the Record for Re-directing the Glacier

Okay. Miss Mouth has run her opinions about Only The Green Will Survive up here for ten years. Why? Because I had one of those clear dreams when I got here that ONLY when the town has a yearly high-class raft art and media world show out in the bay MAY I move, if I ever want to.

All this in a logging and sports fishing and trophy hunting area, where the main small town is convinced the cougars and wolves are out to get them (and the other small town laughs at them for it). 

After blathering with a co-op member the other day on the phone, Miss Mouth got herself invited to speak at a special co-op treasurer's meeting on how to make the future work, hooking up media, the green agenda, bla bla bla. So finally my junkbox brain and nosiness (I have a license for that, being the local stringer) finally come to some use. 

Oh, and the line I use that everybody now agrees with: "When you're down to slime eels and chipboard, your resource industries are DONE." (And thank you Twilight for teaching the larger town that MEDIA MAKES MONEY).

And the Comicon starting to roll probably didn't hurt either: 

 

The Real Working Forest

Believe me, even loggers up here KNOW forests are the lungs of the planet - and even the food-link to the algae that produce so much of the oxygen. They're asking, "But what do we do for our grandkids?" Admittedly, they still wince at the word "education" (imagine the industry propaganda that caused that) - but their kids are teaching them!

As one girl (admittedly south state) had tattooed on her belly: "We are the ones the grandmothers have been praying for." They're asking questions, they WANT education (including the highly necessary arts) and they can see ahead. One converted logger said his grandkid showed him how much money was in FUN (and your entire paycheck doesn't go fixing the @#$!!! machinery).

This is an Audobon Area - all those birdwatchers want good trail guides, and will pay, and fancy wild birds, in a proper environment, are a self-replicating, no-expense resource. If we must put it in those terms for us Geezers. "Jobs" are about serfdom, but a fully-restored forest offers hundreds of self-employment jobs. Now we need more classes about running your own business - and it's not that hard!

Note: a waitress at the Lake Crescent lodge (on a slow day) listened to how to run her own comicon at the lodge, as did people on the bus. They're all listening to the possibilities of tourism and entertainment. The term "Working Forest" works even better if it's a fully-restored forest with beautiful trails.  The real money will be in beauty and fun, for everybody, because the old model of theft, murder and greed is failing under our feet. 

We owe it to the kids to stop wiping our butts with the lungs of our planet - and pooping in our drinking water.

TYPOES AND COWBOYS

This is what a typo in a browser URL can lead to: crazies in the woods.

Makin' money and acting nuts in the woods the GREEN way.  Your comments (and laughter) welcome.

If anybody had any brains they'd harvest the knotweed, organize with Ric Polumbo in Clallam Bay to take it to Seattle with his fish, and make a mint selling Mountain Vegetables to the Japanese restaurant and overseas trade.

They gotta do SOMETHING to stave off the developers and get the cancer chemicals out of the water.