Cut-And-Paste With An Ax

Sigh. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Newspapers Can Have Very Poor Timing

We've all seen the notification that humanity just managed to drive the West African rhinoceros to extinction. Big ups there, Monkey-boys.

But get this - on November 13, 2013, within the same week this news is going around, The Forks Forum publishes ANOTHER article proving humans cannot live with animals.

Evidently a bear was "rampaging" through the area, eating farm animals, especially lambs and goats. Of course, the bear was killed, and the paper did use the term "rampaging." I'll give the reporter credit for trying to just be a good reporter, writing what she saw and heard. She actually is a reporter, unlike me, who is actually a fiction writer (admittedly social and historical fiction, but we WILL put in what we figure out - it's what we're trained to do). And us correspondents for the paper (I'm the - ahem - "West End North Correspondent." Put THAT on a nametag) do NOT write those titles. Thank you.

Considering that the Forks area has been gobbling up all the bear's habitat with clearcuts, why would anybody be surprised? One is always amazed that people try to stick farm animals into a wilderness, with absolutely no idea of what can happen when the apex predators suddenly lose their homes and food sources. Then again, I've become more and more amazed how people - even those claiming to be rural - CANNOT read animal body language, or understand wilderness forest dynamics. I swear, these people might as well have been raised in the houses behind the 7-11 in Bremerton. They're just that knowledgeable when it comes to how animals and forests actually work.

I keep my chickens in a chicken tractor. I do not try to build a completely hard, secure cage for them (although I have one, for the dead of winter, because even we sometimes get blizzards). The reason I have a light little cage is so  I can move it around - and if a starving apex predator shows up and flips the thing, the hens won't be trapped, but can scatter. Predators will kill every last animal they can catch - they're just like us, getting everything we can get our paws on - but if they can only grab one, they'll stop to eat it, and the rest will get away. 

Every time somebody whines about a mountain-lion getting their horse, you can bet a Chinese dinner somebody just clearcut next to their place. The lions prefer DEER and ELK. Not your stupid horse - those things kick! But they'll try for the more difficult meat if it's the only thing they can get.

And keeping weak domestic animals out in a field where something that eats meat - and lives by natural rules - can do a double-take and say, "OOH! Marshmallows!" is just proof the owner is stupid, not the predator is evil.

I heard a woman on A Prairie Home Companion the other day, saying she'd begun to hunt deer as revenge for their eating her tulips. WTF? What planet do these people live on? The ONLY reason for hunting or fishing is if you're hungry or cold. Period. Not for your entertainment or ego or because you need to take it out on your ex.

In Africa, the lion populations are crashing. The Masai no longer hunt them for "proof of manhood." They now guard them. How are they paid? Tourism money.

But if we keep trying to live in the 19th century because there's plenty to kill and waste, we'll all end up having to hang our heads in shame, again, because another species went under on our watch (and the West End STILL has the shame of intentionally wiping out an apex predator - for CASH!). You'd think the Christians and Jews would be on this one - the holy book they share says "steward," not "meat-headed greedy redneck." 

The Forum (you wonder if white people have ANY sense of timing) also published a shot of beautiful big-leaf maple trees with this caption - but you can't see the photo when you go there. The shot is along the Sol-Duc river. Tree-cutting is not allowed along the river, because salmon need forests and shade.

The title and lack of photo is appropriate, considering Rayonier just wiped out all the big-leaf maples along the south side of Frontier Street. This means the older folks and kids will have no place cool to walk in the summer, or see this year's crop of leaves. 

I know, you folks from California or Nevada will call us heat wimps; well, we are. We need our shade. They couldn't have left at least that little plot of land alone while clearcutting a tsunami tunnel into the back of town? Evidently, the humans mean less than the salmon - or we all mean nothing to a corporation based in Florida.

You know - where most of the profits for the death of your tourism industry are going? 

(I am so fired).

Metal Washes Out

Old metal "ribs(?)" at mouth of the Clallam River ("old" being a relative term).

The river is washing back into the old camping area by the highway, chewing the roots out out of the bank below the trees; that big electrical pylon may be next to go after the trees.

Could be spectacular.

Alders Aren't Native?

There are some people running around up here claiming the alder isn't a native tree.  One of them is even stripping out all the young alders from under a Douglas Fir in a beach area, claiming the alders are sucking all the nitrogen away from the fir, while letting the same ground be taking over by wild rose plants.  

Say what?  Alders fix nitrogen.  They're native.  I think the people doing this must be either playing a logging company propaganda game, or else they've misread Vancouver's journals, which state that alders here "resemble" English alders.

Somebody else poisoned all the alders out of a garden stand of man-planted Douglas Firs on the way out of town.  Everybody up here says they want to live "in the woods," but then why do so many of them keep trying to make it look like the Seattle arboretum?