Last weekend I went to the annual Oregon Logging Conference, where our volunteer trail crew had set up an exhibit about our trail work and brought several small logs and two large crosscut saws, about 80 teeth each, for people to use, with supervision, to get an idea of how we clear wilderness trails, where chain saws are not allowed.
The night before, Oregon Wild, an organization to which I belong and donate, demonstrated out front. I felt a bit traitorous going inside the exhibit hall, but my trail clearing crew has many ex-loggers on it. They are experienced sawyers and have a lot of woods experience, and I have learned from them. Showing the public that volunteers are doing significant work to help the public access their national forest is important.
There is now hashtag Timber Unity, Stand up for Working Oregonians, web page Dear Oregon, which is more of the same, and a year after the attempt failed, Stand up for Oregon, Legislators want to take your guns. The legislature Republicans have left the state so there won’t be a vote on the cap and trade bill or anything else. Last year, they did the same thing. They feel put upon as a minority. Well, I lived in southern Arizona for 37 years and was a minority when it came to stuff that was passed up in Phoenix. We talked about Baja Arizona and seceding, but it was a joke. I feel like a minority in my country right now, run by the rural and put upon folks, who rub it in whenever they can. Apparently, when the Republicans get put upon, they walk out. It reminds me of the kind of stuff I did when I was a boy and what some physicians I know did when medicine changed and hospitals had to change, too.
On my way from the car to the exhibit hall, I went by a house with a sign up on a tree: “Log it, Graze it, or watch it burn.” And one of the first people I saw in the hall had a Trump 2020 hat on. This is not a friendly group. Many think we are forcing them all into Priuses and want to outlaw diesel, red meat, gluten free, LED bulbs, transgender, the thought of climate change, think the eastern two thirds of the state should become part of Greater Idaho, and only one side owns the flag. At least with Greater Idaho, they wouldn’t have any more senators and not another representative, either, unlike the State of Jefferson folks, who think the 40,000 there deserve two and one.
I hear much about how we have more trees than we did a hundred years ago. Sure, because then, there was mass cutting without concerns about ecosystems, resources, animals, or anything else. But there isn’t more old growth now, where carbon storage is huge and the ecosystems fully developed. I don’t count seedlings as “trees” in that sense. If we had more trees now, the pictures of the state over the last 20 years would not be an example of how much clear cutting has been done, and Oregon Wild would not have put pictures of clearcuts on the MAX trains up in Portland.
A friend told me her father was a logger many years ago and said everybody thought the forests were infinite. I also see signs saying that young trees take up carbon at a higher rate than older ones. That’s a tipoff to the fact that the trees are small. Here’s how I know “higher rate” comparisons are a sign of something small:
2018 2019
Paul’s Pizza sales $1 million $2 million
Big Cheese Pizza. $175 million $180 million
Paul’s has grown 100%, impressive; Big Cheese has only grown 2.9%. Wow, Paul’s is growing more than 33 times faster than Big Cheese.
But Big Cheese has gained $5 million in sales, compared to Paul’s $1 million. That is 83% of the market increase. As to market share, Paul’s has increased from about 0.6% to 1.1%. Now, extrapolation can be misleading, but I could hardly be faulted here for noting at the current rate of increase of market share, it will take Paul’s at least a century to catch up with Big Cheese, which is well named.
A century is about the minimal time period we should let planted trees grow, not 40 years.. Do clearcuts affect the soil long term? One reference, which was put out by a logging group, pointed to the need to keep slash, the branches and other material, at the site and that the nutrients quickly came back to normal. It’s perhaps not fair, but the reference looked at only minerals, did not define ions properly (calling them “nutrients”) and said new approaches used non-toxic chemicals, including “agua regia” (sic). I heaven’t studied chemistry in a half century, but the term is “aqua regia,” a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, a bit toxic. Another article looked at fungi and bacteria in the soil and found that even 10-15 years after a clearcut, the soil had not recovered. Compaction from heavy equipment, with anaerobic conditions developing, was a significant problem. It was clear to me that the second article gave a better idea of what was going on than measuring only minerals and ions, and using Spanish where Latin belonged. Don’t laugh; mistakes like agua regia (even spell check picks up the error) hurt one’s cause. It is the coffee stain on an airplane meal tray. If you can’t check spelling or grammar, what else are you missing?
A significant number of fires start in slash left behind after clearcuts, including the Milli fire in 2018, where Black Crater’s wonderful trail was destroyed. We used to have “teepees” to burn waste. I remember them when I traveled through the state 50 years ago. Many think we should bring them back; in this administration, who knows, maybe we will. Never mind that smoke from them and once allowable grass burning once led to a multi-car, multi-death pileup on I-5, in 1988, where 7 were burned to death and 37 injured, many severely, from smoke. Twenty years later, the rye grass group still had 10% of the fields burning every year.
These organizations want to go back to the days when we could do all this stuff, but we didn’t know better then, the land was less crowded, and life was supposedly better—assuming, of course, one didn’t get seriously injured in an accident, didn’t die of diseases we can cure today, and one wasn’t a person of color, immigrant, female, different, gay, lesbian, or disabled.
What I noted in the exhibit hall were young parents with several children. I wondered, while looking at them, how they would adapt to climate change, which is real, to changes in timber management, which must happen, if not now, after this administration, and to health care. Their representative in Congress, Greg Walden, wrote the bill that would have taken a couple of hundred thousand of them off Medicaid. He still got easily re-elected.
Our priorities need to include education, family planning, better access to affordable quality medical care, better environmental stewardship, adaptability to climate and world demographic changes. COVID-19 is another warning shot by nature. We would do well to listen. There will be more of these, and neither nature nor viruses cares a whit about jobs, ways of life, families, or those who feel they have a monopoly on “hard work.”
Boreal B[l]og 
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