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killing and destroying for fun - an antique and unhealthy practice, especially for the minds of children - and out-of-date resource harvesting for profit.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?

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. 

"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."

Like

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.

Into The Future

I've been doing my gloating and kidding around over on Facebook, so it's not going to end up here. Every time somebody gives up and joins me, I don't gloat - I start telling them how to do cool stuff. And the photos in this post are just for the pretty and happy.

The Clallam River, recovering and cleaner.

Thank you to everybody who's spreading the word on this blog - including the people who hate it. Remember, I'm just the messenger - I'm just outing bad behavior, not making it up. And there are a few people, who know the resource/greedhead past is going to die within a generation, who are bringing their kids to me, knowing I won't hurt them and will make their future here, in a decent rural area, possible and hopeful. 

I can't clean up your history - there are too many people with photos of exterminated wolves, and pictures of

Happy Beach Monster!

grandpa with walls full of dead bears and cougars, or so proud of themselves standing on the stumps of destroyed forests. The Natives in boarding schools - the survivors still over on Facebook, breaking hearts, talking about the horrors of The Bad Times. You're stuck, like America, with its genocidal past, the whipped slaves, and the pyramid of buffalo skulls. None of us can bury that - nor would decent people want to. But we CAN make a better future.

So, leaving the anger and fear behind, let's all look at the latest possibilities. First of all, arts and entertainment can and will have clean, low-footprint jobs for everybody. This includes forestry and construction. They need real wood and real set-builders. Don't let your forests go to toilet paper and chipboard, when you can carefully steward your future beautiful boards - which

Makah Days canoe crew.

go for huge prices, when treated properly. When you look at a tree, you shouldn't see something to take your anger out at, something to - as I've heard confessed - to enjoy being destroyed - but an ally and friend. Nature gave you a chocolate cake covered in gold. Don't stomp it or shit on it and then expect to be able to spend or eat it. 

I speak as pulp-industry spawn. I've seen the bad happen. Listen to the warnings of one who has been there, and doesn't want it here. Not without a fight.

Small point: solar use. First of all - it is NOT the 1970's. Most of what you get from local government is mentally nailed into that era. It's antique. Look at Germany, and pay attention (yes, and that translates as "Achtung!"). Speaking of Germany, it's pretty much solared up - with the same

Pebble-roasted, buttered oysters.

climate as ours - and it's gotten out of gobbling up all the solar equipment. So the prices are dropping!

Everybody up here immediately talks about hooking into PUD and "selling power back." But that's a 1970's concept. It's an attempt to keep the locomotive, when we need the SmartCar. And my dad was a long-distance trucker, who said that forget trying to out-muscle a semi for safety, and get the smallest, fastest, most agile car you could find. You will LOSE a crash with a haulage truck - better to AVOID it. And you people can't DRIVE or PARK those pretend tanks you got now. Let's all get light on our feet - and our footprint.

Speaking of unwieldy crashes:

Sequined Hummingbird, Neah Bay.

We MUST drop the idea of huge grids. Every one of you I've spoken to GETS it when I talk about rivers being kinetic energy, and fossil fuels being second-level fuels. And understands when I say that a huge grid is not only antique, but expensive, inefficient - and hooking directly into a star. A huge grid is capable of not only turning birds into puffs of smoke, but being massively dangerous. 

Now, we've handled dangerous things before, because we needed to - and not always well (ask the Russians about that) - but why do it if we can't do it as book says: "Smaller, Faster, Cheaper" - ? (Hard copy at the library). Solar is about little 12-volt appliances, some of them with their

In Clallam Bay Park.

own dinky panels. Solar is about Neah Bay turning neighborhoods into mini-grids, so that a central battery bank keeps chugging, even if one house goes down. 

Clallam County is fighting over what kind of meters to have, electronic, or analog. This is like fighting over who gets to make the buggy whips. You're wasting your time, people, over the unimportant. Get your heads in the real game.

Water? Why isn't every neighborhood taking care of all this rainfall? Perhaps bigger grids work in cities, but everything goes out here all the time, including electricity, water and sewer.* We have to think smaller, cheaper, faster. It's just how it is.

Look, folks, sooner or later, every empire eats itself alive, after the resources are cleaned out, and it's been doing war as business. Then Rome has to cut back on the far colonies and take care of the homeland. Guess who we are, out here on the Olympic Peninsula? That's right - Great Britain. And when Rome left, the Dark Ages began.

Sprinkles Yogurt, Port Angeles.

But does it have to be dark here? Why don't we get started, now? Let's take power and water out of the hands of the utilities - except as the base for making and centralizing lower-cost bulk equipment orders and storage - and use that money for the things government is REALLY good for: roads, bridges, public transportation, education, libraries, and health care. 

Perhaps if we all buckle down and make our small power work, every single kid could be funded by us to get an education at the Peninsula College - which is the ultimate investment in the future. Let's pay for the good stuff, and take care of the smart basics ourselves.

We can all do this. I KNOW you can - you're all smart enough and you love this place too much to fail. This is the New Frontier - you have a chance. Get started before Earth imposes her deadline - because she will call it in, and then it will be too late; she will drop her mask of Kind Mother and reveal herself, Kali-like, as the great Juggernaut she is, stomping forward in her power, and flipping out any little useless cog (like us) that gets in her way. Don't wait for the deadline; keep Mom happy. 

Mom likes fun. Look at the animals when they're on their own, most of their lives. The great thing about the new future is, it will depend on doing what you want, for the fun of it. You are no more on this earth to work yourself to death, than a seagull enjoying September, floating on the waves during Grownup Summer. Neither are your children. Give them the chance. It's being offered to you, with both hands. Stop complaining about how the kids won't dig ditches (have you not heard of the backhoe?) and start being proud of how they're renovating our world for the good.

Get to work. No - Come to PLAY. 

(*I didn't bring sewer up until the end, because Americans are big babies about it. We're so scared of considering it, we flush away our poop in our drinking water. Sooner or later, we'll have to organize for disposal without water. Face it, before the typhoid or cholera epidemic starts - and it will. And it's not difficult. Just ask the library for Humanure. Oh, don't whimper. Any of you who have enjoyed Beyond Thunderdome - did you think they'd brought along the pigs to power the cities? If you guys can't face it, ask the moms to work on it - they have to deal with diapers, so it shouldn't freak them out.)

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. 

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.

Rotting Heads - But Not Zombies

Respect? Or White People Values?

Okay, I'm giving my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. The house always has teenage boys running in and out. The person in charge has a laid-back attitude about kids. Yeah, I had to tell them their kids were jumping out of the ditch to run at a car; I really don't want my insurance rates raised when I make red paste out of a little boy. Which is a TAD too laid-back for me, thank you. I'm not paid to raise other people's kids (and I have a contract for that).

So - you tell me what this photo says:

1. Is it an old symbol of respect for an animal people who die - a lot - so we can eat? As in: returning the heads to the woods?

2. Is it trying to get the skulls clean (and I have no idea if respect was shown or not, beforehand).

3. Or is it kids defying the game warden, as one passing biker suggests?

At Ivar's Salmon House this year, a little girl was asking her mother what the First Nations art meant. I asked her mom if I could explain. It went sort of like this:

"Those are spirits."

Her eyes bulged. "EVIL spirits?"

I took a moment to remember what modern religion has done, and said, "No, powerful spirits. See that one? That's a salmon. That one's a bear. If you go into the woods and show respect, they'll feed you. If you disrespect rivers and forests, someday they'll go away, and they won't come feed you. You'll starve. Do you understand?"

She did. Her mom didn't look happy; in our religion, we have a god and a demon (although the western god was originally just one person in a good or bad mood), and one is loving and the other is mean. But when people really live close to nature, if you disrespect nature, the food goes away. This is true. Unfortunately, we've brought in our own selfish beliefs and spread them around.

People up here think they're living "close to nature," but they're what Dan says: "Industrial workers in the woods." Every year they're buying all the things they need to survive while short trips into the woods. They're pretending.*

The woods are full of food, fuel, shelter, medicine, time and quiet. I'm not afraid of them. I circle if I'm "lost," with the natural instinct to find my troop. If I'm hungry or thirsty or need shelter, it appears. I don't run or panic or scream or threaten. It took me ten minutes to make one of those little rock-splinter knives that have been found at a camp on the Hoko River, out of what I found lying around. I'll eat fern roots, if I have to.

Disrespect is death. We've treated the Earth like dirt for several centuries, now. Soon, we shall be reaping our harvest of pride and short-sightedness, and returning to the dirt, ourselves.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

*First Nations people are trying to get their old ways back, mostly realizing we're about to shoot ourselves in the feet. With the clearcut next to our neighborhood, cutting right into the flood and wind tunnel, there will be whining and wailing to their godlet about "WHY?" next typhoon season. Rather than sniffing, "I told you so," I should be getting business cards from a hungry lawyer, for the class-action suite? Hey, the logging companies harvest everything and everybody else - so it's their turn. What goes around, comes around. Call it recycling.

Latest note: evidently somebody must have read this and missed the point entirely, because they've stuck a hunting permit around one of the antlers of the more lifelike of the two rotting heads. Yeah, making sure we all know it's legal - that's the point of how to treat animals. In some states, cock- and dog-fighting are still legal, too. 

Looking Up To Avoid Looking Around

There's that whole "Guv'ment be sprayin' us with poison" thang going on up here right now. Of course, nobody can ever show anything except the usual water vapor from jet engines. This is the same gang goes for space ships and Bigfoot.

Of course, if you're convinced - like Pap Finn - that it's the Guv'ment doing the wrong, you don't have to take any action yourself. You're just a poor victim.

No interest in the spraying of roadside plants, or the fact that Rayonier and pulp mills are grinding down trees and treating them with toxic chemicals - before turning them into products that outgas in their homes, or into toilet paper they daily rub against their delicate genital and anal membranes. No, no chance of toxins ending up in anybody's system that way! 

The whole place is weaving with illness and cancer, and so they look up in the sky and try to blame something that doesn't even exist. Well, why not? Their pastors and priests have taught them the Earth doesn't matter, just invisible things in the sky and their own heads. I don't know if they could build new head files if they tried, now.

How did Americans become such mindless industrial serfs? Oh, never mind - I already know how. I grew up in the pulp and logging industry. No IDEA where an entire population could make heroes out of the chest-puffing young men who don't give a damn about anything but their fancy trucks and girls who don't know any better. I'M not the one, up here, who came up with the term, "Logging Camp Whores." Yeah, keep admiring these bozos, as they rip down your future, and the future of your children.

You're either Green, or you and your family are Ghosts. That's just how it's going to be, and if you can't learn, I don't know if we're even going to bother saying, "We told you so." I mean - why bother talking to the Dead? We don't have to do anything to you, or try to convince you any more. If you want to commit suicide, just keep it up. For too many of you, it's too late. Spaceship earth will keep grinding forward without you, and while me and mine will suffer horribly as she eats the disease out of her system (thank you very fucking much - not), if anybody survives, it will be us - and we'll tell stories of how humanity Did It Wrong the first time.

You'll be Grendel.

FutureFail - By Name.

Amanda Park says you don't live here.

Why should we leave any Olmpic Peninsula town out of the public shaming? 

Today is the turn of Amanda Park, Joyce, Clallam Bay and Hoquim - and Forks. Like you're fooling anybody.

Merrill and Ring says you don't get to enjoy living here.

They've certainly deserved it. Loggers all over the place are - in barely-disguised language - saying that anybody else who makes a living here off beauty and the future needs to bow down to the logger as the only person who deserves to live here. 

Rayonier - a Florida company - says "Screw you."

Greed, theft and short-sightedness are supposed to live, over beauty and hope?

Hoquim celebrates decades of destruction.

Oh, go to Forks for any festivals and watch them puffing up their chests over dead trees on trucks. The loggers hate the Twilight fandom - they absolutely hate hate hate that ANYBODY might make a living from health and air and beauty. Are they aliens from another planet? Do they breathe ammonia? Nature seems to scare the hell out of them. 

And here's Hoquim, all proud of itself for its traditional Masculine Roles - all based on Everything Is The Enemy and Everything MUST bow down to Our Superior Race. Bison, wolves, First Nations, forests, rivers, prairies - it was ALL put there for us to rape rape rape. What? I didn't make that up. I just had a woman at the food bank tell me we're supposed to have "Dominion" over the earth. She's going to get a fucking big surprise as her grandkids go under the stamping engine of Mom Nature - who is no gentle, giving parent, but a monstrous, integrated spaceship - and them what don't fit in get sent out the garbage chute. 

No, you're not going into the New Frontier of outer space - you can't keep the atmosphere going on this one. Hell, to keep shelter, food and water in place to survive, we all have to work ourselves to death now. In outer space, you and your grandkids will do nothing but fix vacuum links.

I plan to at least be one of the ones who say "We told you not to do this." No "Good German" for me, thank you.

FutureWin - FutureFail

In the future, those who have a whole forest NOW shall survive.

In the future, those who are clearcutting their forests NOW for short-term gain shall fade and die. 

First, here is the link for articles about the Olympic Peninsula, which is well into FutureFail.

Now, here are FutureFails - and, if we can find them, FutureWins.

First, a link to a FutureWin - Dryad's Rest, which has 30-year-old forests on 59 acres of woods. the healing has begun. Right now, they're struggling with predators around their goats, because the clearcutting is driving animals into their woods. They've realized these animals are refugees, and Dryad's Rest is an Ark.

FutureFail, with clueless human.

Here is a FutureFail. A photo taken in Amanda Park, Washington, of an antique person who has killed a mature predator, modeling himself on a culture hero who took government money to wipe out "vermin" species (with "vermin" defined as anything not on a leash to us). This is probably a refugee woman. These days, everything on the planet is becoming a refugee from us.

Amanda Park shows there is hope.

BUT - here is a FutureWin, and it's in Amanda Park, too. One of the Timberlands Libraries in Amanda Park. The logging industry funds libraries on the peninsula, no doubt believing their workers and readers will become logging clones (loose evidence makes one think the North Olympic Library System only hires from logging families). However, what happens when people can actually read and communicate? Go past the downtown, where the antiques are, and just go here. It's beautiful, and the librarians are lovely, intelligent people. I scared them a bit when I blew in as an Angry Betrayed Daughter of the Pulp Industry. It didn't hurt that one of them was a comics fan, and I run the Clallam Bay Comicon.

More to come! Clallam Bay and Joyce, get ready for a big smack in the head. You earned it.

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

Well, At Least We're Talking

Rayonier got back with me, for which I thank them. At least we're talking. My letter first, and then his letter follows, even though that's in reverse order. It's a blog, after all:

Dear Mr. Monahan:

Thank you for the response.

HOWEVER, I grew up in the pulp industry. Pulping trees for chemicals takes masses of toxins and water, in a world with a shrinking environment and resources. And do you really think that then taking the results and putting it into food - ie, salad dressing (as promoted on the Rayonier site) - is the best use of a resource or the best treatment of human health?

I note that, unlike the cuts of my youth and childhood, there seems to be no more poisoning of native species, and alders and other species are being allowed to grow back in. Alders, of course, are the nitrogen pumps of the forest. This is an improvement, but:

You probably did, indeed, follow all the proper, legal channels. But you and I know that "legal" doesn't always equal "best."

This clearcut happened right up against a small town, in an Audubon area, on a scenic route, in an area that, in the future, will have to build tourism and entertainment to survive, because all resources will take at least a generation to recover. Forests are, after all, most important as carbon sinks and producers of oxygen. If nothing else, because so many people here can't depend on electricity for heating and cooking and have to depend on wood, tearing out trees near a small town drops the oxygen level, which is especially dangerous for children and the elderly.

Another logging company, right on the scenic route, got county permission - all properly signed off on - to completely level an older maple grove in a state park. While this may be legal, and all the paperwork was done - was it not ultimately abusive?

Antique methods that don't take into consideration where it's done, including what happens to a resident top predator, need re-thinking. So far, no displaced, starving cougar has blasted into a neighborhood, which we've seen before, but perhaps we just got lucky. And no, the solution is NOT going in and just shooting the cougar before the clearcutting starts, in case anybody asks. Wiping out what we don't like has already led to extinctions in this area.

Perhaps it's time for a Florida company to hit the ground and begin to work with a distant state to learn what must happen for a real future. Before enough people in pain, with no future, get organized. I, for one, would rather see the former, because Daddy was a Teamster, and while we CAN organize, it's no fun for anybody, on either side. Better to use our brains and make it work. 

And thank you for your letter. It, and my reply, will be added to my blog.

Donna Barr

Dear Mrs. Barr,

Your e-mail found its way to me. I am the Resource Unit Leader for our Pacific operations. We have a lot in common. I like to fish and enjoy the environment. I got into forestry because of a love of the outdoors.

As an industry, we strive to consistently follow the rules and regulations set out through Local, State, and Federal law. This is our clear way of ensuring that we are operating in a legal and environmentally sound fashion. We conduct internal audits and 3rd party, external audits to re-confirm our performance.

The land that you refer to in your e-mail was prepared for harvest following all of the proper steps. During the FPA permit approval process, representatives from the DNR, WDFW, and the DOE made field visits. Once the felling began, our field forester made ongoing visits to monitor the harvesting and ensure that the instructions of the FPA were followed. I've checked in with him and he informed me that all aspects of the FPA have been adhered to. Felling of timber will likely be complete this week. The harvesting crew will take some time removing the timber, but this will start the reforestation process whereby you will see healthy young trees growing back in the coming years.

Sincerely,

Bill Monahan

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Bill Monahan

Resource Unit Leader

Rayonier US Forest Resources-Pacific Resource Unit

3033 Ingram Street

Hoquiam, WA 98550

(C) 334-224-9584

(O) 360-538-4568