Editor:
It always amazes me how the timber industry learns eco-speak, renames itself, showers in greenwash and tries to make a virtue of necessity (“The McKay Tract,” May 21). As I recall, the improvements (road decommissioning, sediment control, wildlife protections) that Green Diamond chief forester Greg Templeton credits to his employer (formerly Simpson Timber Company) had to be forced on them by legislation. The Forest Practice Act, Clean Water Act and other environmental regulations were not gifts from the timber industry. They were won at great cost by activists who sat in the courts, the roads and the trees to bring about change. They faced relentless, often ruthless, opposition. Some died trying.
Claiming Green Diamond’s practices are better than its predecessor’s (Louisiana-Pacific) isn’t necessarily saying much. L-P was infamous for stripping its lands and building a massive network of roads that clogged creeks with sediment.
Templeton defends even-aged forestry, a system based on maximizing short-term profits rather than ecologically sustainable principles. Cutting is based on investment cycles, because money grows faster in the financial market than in the forest (or used to!). Clearcutting and herbicides are essential tools of this regime. Harvesting ever younger trees on steeper slopes removes more from the forest than is replaced, quickly reducing soil productivity and degrading both habitat and product quality.
The McKay tract’s “miraculous recovery” from the ravages of logging shown on the Journal’s cover is indeed due to its fertility, the result of thousands of years of deposits into the soil bank. Even-age forestry’s rapid rotations deplete the balance of this precious account.
Uneven-age forestry doesn’t depend on clearcutting and toxics. Harvest rates are keyed to forest productivity. In a mature, healthy redwood forest, that rate has been found to be about two percent annually at maximum productivity. Sustainability, diverse habitat, clean streams, high quality products and stable employment are features associated with uneven-age management.
“Biologists,” says the article, “consider development a serious threat to the habitat within the McKay Tract and Ryan Creek watershed.” Yet Templeton is confident the area’s thriving populations of owls, salmon and wood rats won’t mind losing 1,000 or so acres of their homes for our homes in the future. He complains Earth First!ers “don’t mention the set-asides” G-D makes. When companies “donate” land, it’s usually because they’ve depleted (or plan to deplete) the tract and/or lumber prices are too low.
Allowing timberlands to “fall out of” TPZ (timber production zone) and “fall into” residential development zoning is an example of unsustainable management. The word “falling” masks the intention behind these moves. The phrase “light-touch forestry.” another popular euphemism among the newly green, is also misleading. Just how light can a D-8 caterpillar be?
Given the redwood forest’s overall condition, shouldn’t habitat restoration, endangered species’ recruitment and retention of older trees be a top priority? Refugia like the McKay tract may provide a crucial stabilizing buffer to climate change.
Finally, trees grow trees. If Green Diamond really wants to shine, they should let more of their second growth keep growing — into old growth. Then, if the four principles of good forestry (no cutting old growth, no clearcuts, no herbicides and no steep slopes) are observed, there’ll be no more need for treesitters. Earth First!
Naomi Wagner, Petrolia
This article appears in With a Rural Yell.
Good points, Naomi, it’s just too bad that you have also been a traitor to the Earth First! movement. Naomi teamed up with a fellow calling himself "Water," to publish a newsletter for North Coast Earth First! I made the mistake of trying to help, in the early days, only to find that Water was paying his friends to do editing and layout, and was not allowing the group to proofread the newsletters before they were sent out to the public. Naomi admitted that Water was playing a "shell game" with Earth First! donations, using the money to fund other projects he was involved in, and providing little financial support to the active NCEF! campaigns. Meetings were held, and the end result was a consensus (minus Naomi) that Water and Naomi cease and desist publishing their misrepresentative newsletter, and to return the mailing list to the active group, yet those consensus decisions were ignored by Naomi and Water, and I continue to hear reports of more newsletters being published by this dynamic duo.
When I realized what was going on with the newsletter, and had my own negative experiences with Water’s pompous attitude, I stopped helping out with the newsletter and reported on what I had seen to the Earth First! group. I refused to carry the newsletters on the Earth First! table, yet I was still allowing Naomi to use the office to work on her defense to the Maxxam/PL S.L.A.P.P. suits that she was involved in at the time. Once she decided to settle out of the suits, she made one last attempt to get me to carry the newsletters, which I refused to do. She would often call and complain that she felt ostracized from the NCEF! group, and I told her that this would not change until she stopped working with Water on these newsletters that did not accurately represent the NCEF! movement. She became very angry at this statement, began yelling at me over the phone, and then proceeded to call up the Trees Foundation (this is where it gets good). She phoned the Trees Foundation, as a "representative of North Coast Earth First!," and requested that NCEF! be removed as affiliates, so that the funding for the office I was running could be cut! Talk about a vengeful person, eh?!?!
This may or may not have been done in anticipation of the lawsuit brought by the donor, as I had told Naomi that we had received a very large donation, or at least we were supposed to.
Once this was done, the Trees Foundation tried to flush NCEF! down the memory hole, by denying that it had ever "supported nor given funding to North Coast Earth First!" in their perjerous defense to the lawsuit brought by the donor who tried to donate $185,000 to NCEF!
Nice try, Naomi, yet the truth is that you have also been a traitor to the movement, a hypocrite when it comes to following consensus decisions, and a conspirator with the Trees Foundation to rob NCEF! of our once-in-a-lifetime donation of $185,000.
Sad but true.
This pissing match is amusing. Stupidly amusing.
Not a pissing match, just the facts.
Maybe the stupidly amusing part is all you; to many of us, these issues are anything but amusing.
They’re not people, they’re hippies.
Wow, that’s intelligent, Brian.
Been watchin’ too much Southpark there, buddy?
LOL………….errrr, thanks?