Let your voice be heard

If you are on a fixed or limited income you should really take some time to let environmental extremists know what you think about their role in stopping logging and new energy production efforts. For most of us the cost of gas, food, housing, fuel, roads and law enforcement are getting out of hand and the environmental extremists are primarily responsible. You should take the time to recognize these people and give them your “special” blessing because they have allowed you to give up so much on behalf of their extremist beliefs.
Environmental extremists have discounted the guiding principles of conservationist Gifford Pinchot when he helped to create the US Forest Service. Gifford Pinchot understood values of nature and how to protect the forest with a balance of economics and management of our resources. Integrated forest management strategies look at the health of the forest within an adaptive management context. Plans call for the development of a variety of stand structures across the landscape. This will, in turn, benefit local and regional economies while providing ample opportunities for forest recreation such as hunting, berry picking, wildlife viewing and hiking. Healthy forest ecosystems with varied stand structures also have an added benefit as a deterrent against forest fires. Plans also have strategies for properly functioning aquatic and riparian habitats which will benefit the recreational and commercial fisheries.
Because environmental extremists have successfully blocked almost all federal timber sales through our legal system, we now have densely stocked, unhealthy forests resulting in catastrophic annual forest fires.
Don’t blame Nancy Pelosi (US Speaker of the House) for not renewing the legislation to obligate money for federal timber payments. Activists have been pressuring and suing governments and agencies for decades now. Activists are excluding science and proven safe practices to scare people into paying more for fuel that is not safer for the environment. The result is a system of government that is bowing to special interests. It’s called tyranny by the minority and the rest of us are paying the price.

Charles J. Hurlimn
Tillamook Co.
Commissioner

Protest rally
 
Assault with a deadly weapon? Chemical warfare? Eco-terrorism??? What do you call it when a backward timber industry poisons rural Oregon families with routine helicopter herbicide spraying – contaminating livestock, organic gardens, water sources, even school children waiting for the bus???
Incredibly, the Oregon Department of Forestry calls it being “a leader in professional forestry.”
What kind of primitive state do we live in where it’s business as usual for a teenage girl waiting to catch the bus to school to have to be taken to the doctor for nausea, a splitting headache and pain in her spine, due to practices of spraying herbicides on clearcuts?
And who pays the costs of the medical bills – not to mention the costs of toxic and silted rivers and streams, landslides, dead salmon and global warming gases that are the casualties of corporate logging?
The citizens of Oregon pay, of course – while the boom and bust timber industry keeps profiting from liquidating the natural world that keeps us alive.          
Three things you can do to stop these crimes against nature and humanity:
-demand your legislators enact no-spray buffers around schools, bus stops and waterways
-call to reinstate the harvest tax on Big Timber clearcuts to make up for their billions of dollars of property tax breaks
-take a stand with rural Oregon’s Pitchfork Rebellion at a rally and free concert on July 27th in Portland’s Pioneer Square to celebrate the forests that give us life.
 
Josh Schlossberg
Co-director, Cascadia’s Ecosystem Advocates
Eugene