I love your store, but....

I know everybody up here reads Facebook. It's the rural telephone, email and Uber service. So I'll be sharing this there. 

So may I mention to some very nice people what they've done? I assume it's purely ignorance. We all know how a certain group believes #blacklivesmatter means "ONLY black lives matter," when, of course, any intelligent person knows it means "Black Lives Matter TOO." It doesn't mean other lives DON't matter. 

So here's the rub: I love the store that sponsors the truck in what looks like the stock car or demolition derby. But LoggerLivesMatter painted on the side of your truck? It means you think somebody is murdering loggers left and right, like POC, with no trial, as though just breathing makes them guilty and open for any cop or frightened gun owner (redundancy) to kill. And loggers are not. They're just NOT.

Using LoggerLivesMatter on the side of your truck is cruel and ignorant, and I  hope you folks at the nice store are NEITHER. But it's not a joke. It's not cute.

And we have so many black people up here, whom you normally do business with, and are NEVER rude to! How can you do this to them? Do you think they don't understand what that means, sitting in that yard day after day? This is Clallam Bay! I can almost understand you intend its use in Forks - which really does have to work on its inability to understand racial cruelty - but there are black kids walking by it DAILY.

You have a choice - you're either completely unaware of the state of terror our people of color live in, in this country, or you don't care, or you think only your lives matter, and it's a fan club you think you deserve to be in.

Really? Do you WANT to be the target of every racist and white supremacist with a gun? Do you want to be a legitimatized target of every cop who forgets he's a civil SERVANT, and the citizen of every race comes first, not him? 

I hope you'll not try to defend what you did, and simply paint the line off your truck. I'll say no more about it - although this post will stay in place, because the internet does not allow for cruelty to every disappear. No, I'm not posting a photo of your truck. You don't deserve to have that shared.

More and more of us up here are hard-headed intolerant Liberals, who will put up with no more cruelty to any form of life, especially when it's done for "fun" or "sport" or bully jokes.

(Local cultural note: many black people up here are also Makah, and proud of both heritages. It is not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest for Indians to celebrate both their New World and Old World Tribes. It's not a good idea to mess with the Tribe.)

(All the loggers have to fear is that a logging company pulled a scam on them, and the developers are on the way, but nobody forced them to sell their land to the company instead of the parks. At least if it had gone to the parks, the loggers' kids would be able to visit it in the future. 

Clallam Bay sold the land to the parks, when the houses are being threatened by the rising waters - there before our eyes - but their kids will be able to use those parks, and not have them locked into development. If the parks offer US money, we're not going to fight them - we'll take the good price, before the waters chew out the land, and leave us with a pittance. I always said I'd just sell to a Republican, but that would mean I'd never get to come back to these beaches.

A newspaper editor up here hates the parks because her grandfather sold his farm to them. She can still go to that park and enjoy it. He got the money - by his choice - and she'll always be able to visit that place and camp and go to the beach. 

The letters to the editors about trying to survive as loggers sound like the ones in the Everett Herald in the 1960's - before the developers gobbled up Everett, Mukilteo, and every part of a formerly small town-rural area. I've seen it happen. I can only assume you're happy it's happening, and hope to profit off it. My only recommendation is, if you love your kids - sell to the parks. Because otherwise your kids will have to move to Tacoma.)

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?

Stockholm Syndrome in the Forest

Oh, NOW I get it.

Why the local population says nothing about the destruction of their parks, the clearcuts, the pumping out of all the money overseas as the forests are scarred.

Stockholm Syndrome.

I know, because I'm starting to do it myself. I "expect" my favorite groves to be flattened, and if they're not, I expect them to be ruined next year, so some guy can have more condos in France or Poland, and so the Chinese have something to ship goods to us on. I am beginning to pretend the alder/big-leaf maple, fir groves are okay, even though they're just green bandages.

Is this what the logging companies mean by "We're going to show those City Folks what a Scenic Route LOOKS like!" ?

Now I'm not mad at the locals as cowards or greedheads or fools. They're damaged. They're trapped. They HAVE to lie to themselves, and pretend this is all right.

I'm not going to try to compare them to women trying to raise kids in a war zone - but the blind eyes walking by a flattened campground, as the privatizers destroy our national legacy - are the eyes of the broken and defeated. 

THAT's that look. I've never seen it before. And it hurts. My god, and they raise whole generations in that pain and defeat and self-delusion?

What pain. More than the forests and animals - what helpless, disabled, human pain.

Don't Try Talking Like Liberals

No more chanterelles.

Facepalm.

As usual, whatever I loved or used, the clearcutters got it. Then again, I'm not the only one - everybody knows the animals are being driven into the people areas. Owls are getting hit by logging trucks. Bats with rabies flutter down from the hot, dry destruction. No use telling the pro-loggers. They repeat whatever their daddies told them. 

They have no idea that the cycle of logging will just get shorter and shorter, as the vitality in the soil disappears. They don't understand put/take. 

Then we'll have to listen to whining about, "I came up here to log and the work disappeared." 

"Cedar Recovery?" REALLY?

And watch the chipboard houses thrown up all over the place rot on riversides while the owners disappear and nobody buys. Round and round and round she goes.

In the meantime, they think using the right words will make it all better. They're using dictionaries like bandages, and forgetting we can read.

I think that's a dead sea otter, there, the second of two. I hope it's just because the populations are recovering, and with more life you get more death.

"GREEN Crow?" Are we on the same planet?

Then again, at least one drunken moron spends his days ripping around the bay with his boat. Speed? And I mean it both ways. One of our neighbors runs the motor on his bad-bargain boat all the time, gasoline fumes flying out - while smoking. On the one hand, I don't want him to blow himself up. On the other hand, when he does it at 5:00 am.... one cannot help that head file coming up. And if he does, I get paid for news story and photos. I'm only human (I make no comments on other people's genomes).

What's up with people and making as much racket as they can in the forest? I swear, so many people are scared to death of nature. It's our own planet, and so many of us act like terrified Martians. Do they think something will sneak up on them if they're not drunk and raving out there? Not the way humans smell.

Finally got the cheap but sturdy fencing for the Ugly Dog Fence (your choice on which is ugly).

I may put up a bragging sign: "Quieter than YOU." 

Dead Sea Otter #2

Oops. Better check the waffles. Or is it the tortillas? I'm cooking both in the Belgian waffle maker. To go with all the fresh blackberries. Himalayans - juiced for wine, the pulp made into dumplings or just jam.

Who cares about seeds? They're good for old people. FIBER.

Guess we better go find some other Chanterelle patch.

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. 

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.

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.

Small Narrow Heart = Small Narrow Mind

Cut by the area's wealthy man.

Today's post is all over the place. I'm going to just label the photos; you're smart enough to click them for larger reading and study.

The Egyptians said we thought with our hearts. We say we feel something in our guts because "having bowels" was an old English phrase for pity.

Speaking to a Clallam Bay librarian. Of COURSE, the Affordable Health Care Act came up.  

She said she was talking to a friend from Sweden. She thought the reason socialist health care works in Sweden is because "it's a much smaller country." I pointed out that that was "apples and oranges," and the reason it works in Sweden is, it's single payer and there are no corporate middle-men involved.

I was explaining socialism and capitalism to her (and some people up here DO get it): how S is for neccessities, C for luxuries. I offered, for example, the roads - and the bus system. 

Indica? Sativa? No - carpet fluff! :D

Immediately, she said the buses were too expensive, cost too many taxes, and "I might as well take a taxi for what they cost me." She then added that the buses went by her house all the time with only one person on them. I tried to explain that I often ride the busses and they're packed, and load and unload completely depending on the route. She kept saying she saw only one person on them. 

I couldn't understand what she was trying to prove. I didn't think she was lying - I thought she might honestly think she saw that. I got home, described this to Dan, and got a real facepalm moment.

Dan, "She sees them at the beginning or end of the run. They don't fill up until further along the route."

God, I feel stupid, for not thinking about that at the time. But he's right.

The shadow remainder of a beach-flea kelp feast.

Now, what have I said about the library hiring from logging families? Resource workers, and many people in uniform, think they're the point. They can mourn a community cat - but not even recognize the clearcut the dear animal was buried on is ghosted with the dead and refugee spirits of the animals that had to run or die. They have no mirrors, they cannot think out side themselves. They can't understand how everybody needs certain things, and they truly seem to believe that anyone who can't keep up should be allowed to fall by the wayside. When did we start ascribing to the morality of the Bataan Death March?

I told her the day would come when people in my age group our her age group would not have cars. Not everybody up here has an extended family. Not everybody can afford the $30 in gasoline it takes just to drive to and from the only large city on the peninsula, with the only vet's outpatient clinic - the very people who need to go there. I told her we all pay taxes so we can ALL use the buses or roads - nobody is denied their use. I told her that her own kids can buy a cheap summer bus pass, and a full day on Clallam County busses - to anywhere - was $3.00. How is this NOT a good investment?

Now, did I not say she worked at the library? According to her idea of how this works, if she goes into the library at night and nobody's there, then all the libraries need to be shut down. And libraries are expensive, so everybody should just buy their own books and media. Of course, she'd be out of a job - but it's always somebody else's life that doesn't count to the logger tribe.

I should have pointed out the Quilleute run a free bus on the hour to LaPush. The native peoples understand that everybody needs transportation. And you do know who's helping fund that - Ms. Stephanie Meyer, and her Twilight series.

Ghosts on slip point. Gone, or going.
So much for their real future of beauty
and health in media and tourism.
They've cut their own throats.

Now, I thought about writing about the local communities and the local tribes, except I felt that would be presumptuous (I'm talking the tribes - you white folks have SO not earned my consideration). Ms. Meyer, like so many fan writers, just slogged ahead, with no thought for anybody's feelings. The Quilleute understandably blew up over her mistreatment of their culture; just another white person sticking feathers in a character's hair and getting the names wrong.

BUT - let's hear it for her or her agent. They sucked it up, worked with the Quilleute, and made sure the tribe benefited from the series. Which is a lesson for all of us; just because you fuck up, just hand over your head on a platter and apologize and try to fix it. Bad can become good. Evidently, vampires have more humane consciousness than loggers. Oh - is that why loggers hate the vampire people? They make them look bad? They make their horrible history look bad? 

Hmmm... I know a WHOLE lot of crap about local tribes I shouldn't have access to. All kinds of screwy stuff has happened to put me in the know about things I shouldn't know.  Maybe I should be looking at zombies.... :D

Yeah, I'm talking to you, Makah tribe, with your "Rayonier Logging Company cooperated with us" down on your hatchery sign. What was THAT about? Or was it another case of, "We get our fish back, or you LEAVE"? Because those treaties are loans. Based on contingencies. 

Tomorrow, I'm going to start the campaign to really go after Hunting-For-Fun. And starting the process for pointing out which candidates are posting photos of themselves with dead animals as trophies. You know who you are. And White-out for writing on photos? Do you NOT have children who know how to use Photoshop? Or GIMP?

When This Place Works - And Could Work Better

Beautiful October day over dry grass.

Yesterday's dental appointment was at 2:30 pm, and I had to take the 9:20 bus to Forks, so even after some small errands, had so much time left. Grabbed the Quilleute Tribal bus (runs on the hour) and went down to spend an hour at LaPush on the beach. 

On the busses, my position as the West End North Correspondent came in handy. Yes, that's my title - and get THAT on a nametag; the smaller the job, the longer the title.

The Mother Log on the LaPush beach.

I as able to start linking people up with the new health care system in Washington State, and maybe help a woman - and local vets - get coverage for dental, using specialized funds.

Discovered that people read this blog - where else would they be getting this information? - and they're learning and listening. 

Women agree boys, by hyperlinking on the internet and having to learn to spell, are getting smarter and listening to their mothers. They agree that trophy hunting - hunting for sport or "fun" - is a gateway drug to joining the military, where the ultimate prey can be accessed. We were talking hunting. I said there was NO problem with getting food if it was needed, and a hunter or fisher who fed the family has every right to be proud of that. We're omnivores - we put anything in our faces we can pick or catch. But triumphing over dead animals as though they're an enemy is reprehensible. If you're hungry, hunt and fish and eat. If you're not, leave them alone.

A woman liked the idea of having a yearly thanks ceremony to recognize the animals and fish who feed us, with respect and love and sorrow. As the Makah elder said, weeping as the whale came in: the young men had their tradition back - "But one of our brothers is dead."

A young man on the bus was upset about cash money, as opposed to barter. Somehow the rumor has got running around here that the Federal Reserve is a corporation, and not part of our government. I think it might originate in the prison being privatized. 

Amanita in the RV park

Let me explain money really quickly; it's not little pieces of paper. It's numbers. You may want to barter salmon for everything, but if you want to keep using that cell-phone, Centurylink does not maintain a Halibut Morgue (that's a local reference, to the holding freezer for fist at Neah Bay). If you want to barter, you have to get off the bus, and stop driving because Clallam County needs to run the busses on roads - and you'll have neither, because they don't keep a place to put cattle or dried elk meat. And somebody has to say how much those numbers or worth. Do you want to haggle over all your service bills? Actually, you can negotiate a lot of things - but it's a full-time job.

Credit cards are just numbers without the paper, and they provide short-term, high-interest loans, without application to a bank. That's all. Get 'em paid off on time, and no interest. Do NOT use those numbers unless you HAVE them! It's just a way not to carry paper in your pocket - as money was originally a way not to carry a cow in your pocket. 

Now here's a real - as the Makah call it - Rumor to Rumor moment. I was in a business, and a couple of old guys were angry because their pensions were being messed with. Something about how "specialty pulp" was involved. They mentioned the Florida logging company - the same one ripping the limbs off the Olympic Peninsula forests - was changing pensions. Some kind of trouble with the market. 

NO, I didn't ask. They'd have shut up. Resource-rip workers are like football players; they think the entire society needs to revolve around them, regardless of those damaged or left behind. It's only when their own lives are going to pieces because of what they did that we have to listen to their whining and blaming. And THIS environmentalist isn't going to ever let them get away with it again. Suck it up boys; if you're out of a job and your town goes ghost in the future - IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT.

This sounds an awful lot like the corporate idea of "We're done with you, now starve," is in action here. I don't have details. This isn't a tabloid or junk science site, distracting from real problems; I don't claim to be an expert. But - the first damages to the communities for throwing away the real future of their forests may be happening even now.

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.

Please Don't Shoot the Company In The Head

"Olympic National Park Closed;
will log to pay off National Debt."

I'm perfectly aware the editor of The Forks Forum posted this photo to set off controversy. They haven't had a good Logger vs. Somebody/Anybody fight since the glory days of Twilight.

The man has a name, but do we care who he is? Not really. Who he is isn't important; he's just a cipher employee of an industrial logging company, most of which have their corporate headquarters someplace across the country. I have his name, but why bother with him?

However, if I were a corporate lawyer for any of these companies, I'd be sending down a memo to maybe school the serfs about talking out of turn - or getting them themselves published doing it in the local newspapers. Yes, we all have freedom of information on our side - it's why I can use this photo, under the allowances of Fair Use. 

But if you were a corporate lawyers, and you saw - or knew about - the growing connection of what seems to be intent between the shutdown and finally destroying the hated national parks - wouldn't you want to ask your own people to be a little bit more careful about what they said or how they said it? Right out in public, where anybody could Chelsea Manning you?

If this photo doesn't show anything else, it shows intent. Then again, the Forum's earlier editor did hint that the last time Forks was flush was when the Park burned down and Forks loggers got to clear the wood. 

If nothing else, the information is here. Public. Available. Traceable. Maybe I can't prove anything - but somebody paid to do so, and very well paid, would be able to track the details. I'd be happy to help add nails to that coffin.

And so would this guy, evidently.

Right In The Pocketbook

How morons manage a forest.

Welp, if nothing else gets through to a population where they still believe in Christian Dominion (oh, yes, they actually SAY and BELIEVE that), here's a point:

The logging industry has screwed everybody up here out of billions of dollars.

If the forests had been managed like wood, instead of corn and wood pulp, they would be healthy, beautiful, and growing for a better future for everything that lives here.

Instead, the forests are whipped down as fast as possible, sold to the logging companies for pennies on the board foot, and then sold at higher prices. Taken from State lands, subsidized out of all our pockets. 

The only thing that explains why the people up here have been serfs since the beginning of logging is - that's where they came from. Serfdom eats into the bone, and punishes for use of the head and heart. After awhile, serfs try to be proud of being the support of the king.

But since we're talking Americans, think about what would have happened if they had worked with the parks system in compromise and real land management; the trees would be getting bigger, instead of smaller, every generation, tourism would grow, property values would rise. 

But to do that, the brain has to be stronger than the back. Work smarter, not harder. That's where the money is. And that's where the money is going - into the pockets of middlemen, who work with nothing but their brains. The industries piddle a little back in the form of taxes or scholarships - but it's nothing to what they're making off the people here.

These people have been cheated, and their kids know it. Billions of dollars. Whole futures. Whole lives. The reckoning is coming - but it's probably come to late for resource workers.

And because the forests of the planet are the producers of 1/3 of our oxygen, it may be too late for us all.

Ready for the Big One?

Clallam Bay just opened up the back of the town to the next tsunami or typhoon, with nary a tree buffer in sight. Basically, they've recreated the conditions for the 1700 tsunami (recorded in Japanese records) that came down the Wyaatch river valley and hit Neah Bay from the back. There was nothing to stop it, or at least buffer the force.

Evidently some "American Logger" show is spreading their "forest science," which is basically 19th-century excuse-making. Helping wildlife, my ass. Look,  you can tell when a forestry "scientist" is lying - his mouth is open.

As for helping wildlife - somebody posted a picture of a pileated woodpecker in her feeder. That's right, this secretive deep-forest bird was driven out of its home and hungry enough to approach humans. A woman photographed one of these birds eating sunflower seeds out of her feeder. Another refugee, with nothing to eat and no home. 

Thanks to her for feeding it - but now how or where does it nest and find enough food for the family? These birds eat grubs and other insects in trees. It's eating sunflower seeds like your cat eats dry food pellets; because it can't get anything else. This reminds me of the scene in that movie with Peter O'Toole as the SS general, telling his men to carry food for the children of a bombed-out town. 

Anyway, I'm going to go cover the senior class tsunami drills Thursday - and I think I might hint that it may very well be a good idea to re-think putting the town refuge at the top of the hill south of town, in the expresso-stand parking log/storage. Not only would a tsunami meet no trees to take the brunt of the force - but it would be channeled right through that valley into town. It's going to be bigger and stronger and hit harder where it hits. And we won't even talk about the next typhoon winds through that valley; they'll deepen and speed up like the narrow mouth of a river. What goes around comes around.

Then again, everybody in America seems to have a death wish. I'm getting tired of eating popcorn, watching the rising weather smacking down all over the place. Oh, well. Bad DNA will just have to get cleaned out. It always does.

You heard it here, first.

Worms in the Head

Slip Point - for how long?

Oh, you gotta hear this - the latest malarkey at least one of the locals is telling herself to excuse the clearcuts:

"And the loggers are cutting due to the alleged tons of chemicals being sprayed, drying and infecting them, and are in a hurry to raze it, but the gov't agencies who would be in charge, are."

A lot of kelp makes gulls happy.

I THINK I know what that sentence structure is, but, it's a TAD confused. The-Guvment-Is-Spraying-Chemicals gang is like the Sasquatch bunch up here - a few flyerovers by test planes from Boeing or some condensation trailes are blown up into Attack like a couple of run-together big dog prints becoming bigfoot proof.

And I finally realized the biggest worm in their heads. I didn't even make the connection until now. Americans who have never been taught any different in the last hundred years are like Scottish Lairds or German Junkers - they want a landscape to look like this: stags, salmon, grouse - and nothing else, not even songbirds, because they might eat something the grouse eat, like ranchers killing prairie dogs, and complaining about pronghorn being brought back. In their minds, the seals are eating "all the salmon," and the seagulls are eating "all the herring."

I had a woman complain about the seagulls when I had just picked up four nice herring flipped onto the beach in heavy surf and took 'em home to Jim cat. A young man, here - whose family is going to survive because he's a Green, not a Greed - told me his dad had said to always kill the mergansers, because "they ate fish." He said he stopped the day he saw the mergansers eating lampreys. 

That's right - these nitwits were killing the very birds that were controlling one of the worst threats to the fish. I swear, the ignorance about wildlife and actual forest and river systems is massive. They might know how to find the fish - and clean them out to the very last one, while blaming the hell out of each other ("It's the Indians! The Sports Fishermen! Bigfoot!" Everybody but ME, in other words) - but they have NO CLUE how an actual river system works in the lives of fish. NONE.

Oh, I'd better say real quick, that the lampreys feed the mergansers and guarantee a future lamprey-cleaning patrol, or these morons will go out and try to kill all the lampreys. I wouldn't put it past them; I thought I knew how stupid humans could be about the environment, but it's a daily moment of my jaw hitting the ground. Jesus, are we REALLY that stupid as a species? The only way we - and I say that as a White Person, because I'm not going to pretend we really didn't get it going - see any way to solve anything is to destroy what's there. We can only work from a desert.

One old guy, snarling about "this guv'ment and this president" said "It used to be better." Well, if he means the time when he remembers the river so full of fish "You could walk on 'em," he and his were working overtime to make that go away - yeah, he's right about that. Although I suspect there's an awful lot of the Pap Finn whine of "Why don't somebody put this white-shirted free nigger on the block?" (Huh. And Obama DOES strip off the jacket and show the white shirt a lot, don't he?)

But because they have no more clue about how a democracy works, especially one this size, than a serf under King Richard, I suspect what the old guy actually means is that the Indians are quietly saying, "Give us back our fish - or we get your town back."

That's right - it's Bartolomé day, isn't it? Named after a Catholic Priest who spent 50 years fighting what was being done by the Spanish to the Natives. It used to be named after a white guy - but he was basically just another 15th century proof that, at one time, Hitler would have been a perfectly normal guy. Adolf the Antique didn't look that way by the 20th century, but those poor Natives who went out to trade and feed and help when those three ships sailed into the beach - yeah, they were basically facing the Nazis; genocide, slavery and all.

So... if it "Used to be better" or different than that time - good. It can just keep getting worse, then, while the people who caused it start facing what they did. And learn to act like grown-ups on this planet, instead of greedy, stupid children.

By the way, Slip Point has eagle nests. Just sayin', in case they try for it. And if that hill, logged, falls onto houses, I get to do juicy news coverage. And say, "I told you so." 

I used to hate having to say "I told you so," but now it's starting to feel good. Why should the environment - and my heart - be the only thing broken? Pride can be broken, too - and usually is. I guess in the case of a slip hill, "cometh before a fall" is horribly literal.