On the other hand, the cutting units in question, and the types of logging to occur in them has been greatly distorted. First of all, only dead trees will be cut. No tree with even a single green needle will be cut except in the case of safety. Second of all, there ARE roads in these Roadless Areas, and the land is not as pristene as people paint it to be. Third of all, none of the cutting units are being clearcut. My job up there was to go in and paint snags as "leave trees", not to be cut. In the Roadless Areas and Late Successional Reserves (LSRs), the biggest and best snags were to be protected and scattered throughout the units. Lastly, the projects survived numerous court battles, showing that reducing massive fuels build-ups, while retaining plenty of snags for wildlife, is a scientifically-defendable activity for reducing future fire intensities.

Just because a part of the public expresses an opinion that is scientifically wrong, does that make the Forest Service wrong in going forward to do the right thing? Is salvage logging on merely 4% of the 500,000 acres of the Biscuit Fire, including tiny 400 acre patches of Roadless Areas, a horrible thing??

For my part, one of my deeds on the Biscuit was protecting a clump of huge pines in the Roadless Area. The largest snag was close to 80 inches in diameter. Another nearby tree was around 60 inches in diameter. The last tree was a suppressed tree of 36 inches in diameter, dwarfed by the other two monster trees. All of these trees were on an acre and a half. The 80-incher was probably the largest tree in the timber sale.

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

I am confused that Kate claims to be protesting for the sovereignty of the state of Oregon, up against the bullying feds.  It may be coincidentally true in this case, that the interests of old-growth-forest-loving environmentalists are best defended by the state (Oregon) and not by a federal agency (the Forest Service).  Elsewhere, though, especially in the West, but really throughout the country, it is often the case that environmentalists are better represented by enlightened feds than by self-interested locals.

E.g., the management of wolves and grizzlies in the northern Rockies is a notorious mess.  The Fish and Wildlife Service naturalists are well-meaning but currently constrained.  Meanwhile, the states have too much power.  Montana seems to have improved, and perhaps Wyoming is slowly following -- far from clear, though -- , but Idaho remains horrible.

It strikes me as sad and confused that we environmentalists need to run for legal support to whichever authority or agency, at whatever level, seems most sympathetic to our wishes.  The current governors of Oregon, Washington, California and New Mexico are a pretty enlightened bunch; and good for Kate and her companions, for going to bat for them, however futilely.  But it is very obvious that environmentalists cannot commit themselves to state sovereignty.

To Backcut: Thanks for your interesting contribution to this.  It is not quite clear how the Biscuit Fire experience relates to Kate's experience, but I am confident there is a connexion.  "Scientific wrongness" in the statements of environmental activists needs to be pointed out.  I strongly doubt they ever want to be wrong, both for practical and for personal moral reasons.  But can any of us honestly say at this point what the best, most trustworthy, least cynically rejectible way of doing that is?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

That part of southern Oregon wants to be left alone by all forms of authority. "Green anarchists" abound there and they operate on pure rhetoric, emotion and angst. The jailings are their way of drawing attention to themselves but, somehow I think that this is a detriment to their causes. In fact, the rest of the country seems to wonder why these folks would go to jail just to "save" dead trees.

Personally, I think they should just cut their losses and move on to actions that are more important, like saving old growth. For them, it's more about the "slippery slope" of logging in a Roadless Area. Some states DO want to protect their Roadless Areas from being roaded, and I'm fine with that. What really scares me is the states that want to install roads and develop their Roadless Areas.

In truth, a majority of the Roadless Areas DON'T have much in the way of resources to extract. Otherwise, there'd already be roads in them. The recent events in Colorado should generate much more controversy, as underground resources there in Roadless Areas have been auctioned off. This is where I draw the line. If they could get those underground resources out without putting roads in, I'd be in favor of such a project.

As the Biscuit protesters have been saying, "Roadless is Priceless", I do have to agree with them on that. We certainly don't need to have roads over 100% of our National Forests.

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

The corporatista right wing takeover of forestry is complete.  

It's the same as the gas and oil lease sales, pure larceny by insider influence.  Will the slash be cleaned up by the corporate logging operation?

Absolutely not, if any of it is cleaned up it will be by illegal contract workers.  So much for "healthy forests".

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Recently, over that last eight years, climate change has caused the winter hard freezes to fail and that is killing our trees, mostly from beetle infestations.  Now we have dead trees everywhere.  My caretaker activities have matured from chasing brush pickers and firewood rustlers to a global effort to stop global warming.  It is in my backyard.  To protect the trees I must stop coal power plants.  I have been jailed several times for my good intentions, and jail was not the objective.

Where global climate disaster would be the major effect of this disease.  One keeps coming back to the senseless nature of most of recent mass human activity.

When only a small percentage of humanity seems to act in a sane fashion regarding sustainability of planet earth, does this constitute some kind of suicidal strain in mass culture?  Maybe natural evolution installs it so that species that become overwhelmingly successful in an environment have a built in limitation.

A catastrophic limit like the one posed by global climate disaster.  It's a sciency version of the "Left Behind" fundamentalist armageddon theme.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Engel: What about the "mainstream" like Al Gore and his whole environmental thing?

Jensen: I'm doing this little book right now with Stephanie McMillan about 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial while the world is being murdered and it's based on Al Gore going around the country showing this film. It's great that he's increasing awareness, but according to the filmmaker, Timothy S Bennett, who's directing a documentary, "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of the Empire," if every single American did every single thing that Al Gore's suggest that that would reduce carbon emissions in the US by about 22%. The scientific consensus at this point is to revert further disaster it needs to be reduced to 75%.

Note the similarity to the earlier statement in the Monthly Review here:

The truth is that addressing the global warming threat to any appreciable degree would require at the very least a chipping away at the base of the system. The scientific consensus on global warming suggests that what is needed is a 60-80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels in the next few decades in order to avoid catastrophic environmental effects by the end of this century--if not sooner. The threatening nature of such reductions for capitalist economies is apparent in the rather hopeless state at present of the Kyoto Protocol, which required the rich industrial countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The United States, which had steadily increased its carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 despite its repeated promises to limit its emissions, pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 on the grounds that it was too costly. Yet, the Kyoto Protocol was never meant to be anything but the first, small, in itself totally inadequate step to curtail emissions. The really big cuts were to follow.

1. Kate didn't go to jail stopping the logging of dead trees. She went to jail for stopping traffic in Medford, scores of miles away from the dead trees in question. Seems it's rather "stylish" for some folks up there to get arrested for a perceived "good cause".

2. The price of the wood in the Mike's Gulch sale reflected the uncertainty of actually getting to log the snags and the condition of the wood, 4 years after the fire was extinguished. The later sale, Blackberry, sold for more than 5 times the appraised value. The real value in still doing these projects is the removal of large material that would fuel an inevitable fire down the road. The failure is that we weren't able to remove the more flammable smaller diameter wood that will now sit out there, waiting for the next lightning strike.

3. On my own projects, in California, the slash was indeed cleaned up by "corporate interests". Even the unmerchantable logs were flown out and stacked on the landings for the public to cut as firewood. Even many of the branches were left on the logs to be removed at the landings and then burned, further reducing fuel loading on the ground.

4. If you agree that global warming is indeed a reality, you also have to agree that we have to manage what we have left in order to save those precious remnants of the previous climate. Letting the drought, bark beetles and fires take what is left can only accelerate what you fear.

5. In order to block the road at the "Green Bridge", protesters went into a botanical preserve to cut a green tree, resulting in a few hours delay for the loggers.

6. I've yet to see a valid response to this all-important question: What is wrong with cutting some of the dead trees on 4% of the Biscuit Fire?!?

7. Check out the local "Independent Media" site for more interesting chat from the polarized locals

Enjoy!

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

Asking what's wrong with cutting down a few trees in one particular roadless area distracts from the real debate about government integrity, state's rights, and sound environmental policy.  Kate wasn't trying to literally stop the logging, she was making a moral statement, as she outlines in her letter.  Other people see what she did, and even if they wouldn't be willing to go to jail for a similar cause, it makes them think, "what would I be willing to do?"

Similar distraction tactics are being used in the Kensington Mine case in Juneau, Alaska.  People ask, "what's wrong with dumping mine tailings in a tiny freshwater lake in pristine, remote Southeast Alaska?" The problem is that Bush's dumbed-down Clean Water Act allows mine tailings to be defined as "fill," and a federal court has validated this definition in a recent lawsuit.  Now it won't just be Lower Slate Lake being poisoned with acidic waste rock, but lots of freshwater bodies all over the country are at risk of facing a similar fate.

Frequently asked technical questions about Grist's newsletters and website.

"Government integrity" and "states rights" tend to fall into the arena of partisan politics. Kate's rantings about "two clearcutting projects" and warnings of industrial logging in the Roadless Areas are simply scare tactics. None of the cutting units in the Biscuit are clearcuts! There were no promises by the Bush Administration when the Biscuit Sales were put together in 2004. Court battles were won by the Forest Service and now, people like Kate refused to accept the court's decision.

This idealistic dogma-drama shows how desperate people get when their rhetoric and angst fail them. Since they couldn't get arrested at the Forest Service office in Medford, they took their protest out into the street, blocking drivers both conservative and liberal.  

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

The protest has also stirred a lot of discussion across the blogoshere. Everyone is learning.

The protestors don't have all of their facts right. Had you carefully briefed them prior to taking on this protest, would they have gone through with it anyway? Probably. Does the protest have value even though they have some of their facts wrong? Sure. Politicians are watching. The next time a lobbyist approaches to clear cut a protected old growth forest, somewhere in the back of his mind he will recall this protest and weigh the probability that supporting this lobbyist may actually cost votes.

The pressure to maximize profit will always be with us. Protests like this help to keep everyone honest. Protests like this didn't stop the clear cutting of our redwood forests, but they created the awareness that helped get the roadless rule in place.

Life isn't really about right and wrong, life is a power struggle. You don't want either side to gain total control. The universe is too complex. Neither side has all the answers. That is why our political system works... in a brutally inefficient, painfully slow kind of way.


In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

I like that kind of protest, it's a silent one. If the government "protectors" (for corporate profit)of the forests find you out there camping you are arrested.  But if you are very careful and quiet you can find "mistakes" that stop almost every sale.

Why is that?  Because the corporate contract workers (illegals? so much for local job creation) don't have time to be careful.  Their corporate masters only want maximum destruction for the bottom line.

More stealthy protestors GPSing the shoddy work of the government/corporate slashers is needed.  But public  protest has its place too.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

I've seen where protesters have used digital cameras and GPS units. Funny how they haven't even learned how to turn the picture sideways to an upright position in "portait mode". It's also very funny when their coordinates turn out to be 3 miles OUTSIDE the sale area boundary.

However, I DO agree with you that scientific involvement in the form of supplemental surveys for endangered species is always a good thing. Finding that elusive northern goshawk nest usually results in a very large protected radius from the nest tree. There's a group out of Portland, OR called NEST that goes out into cutting units and climbs large Douglas-fir trees looking for red tree voles.

Yes, ecosystem management is still an evolving process and we continue to learn more, year after year. Maybe even you, DrX, can maybe learn something by getting out into the woods instead of flinging party-line crap.

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

How about volunteering in your spare time back?   You ought to welcome the extra low cost environmental protection, since you readily accept cost cutting by hiring contractors who may or may not employ illegal immigrant workers (all you know is they do a better job).

Plausible or implausible deniability?  Let the impartial reader decide.

How about training activists to look for endangered species?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

If you have questions regarding the Biscuit project, I encourage you to read Daniel Donato's recent study on the effects of "salvage logging" (published in Science magazine) and Dominick DellaSala's article on the enormous taxpayer loss that has resulted from the Biscuit project.  If any activists out there are interested in participating in the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team (NEST), which surveys for rare and endangered species in threatened forests, please contact info@cascwild.org.  We help coordinate this team of volunteers, and would be happy to teach you the ropes of surveying forests.

Thank you, Corey, for posting my letter and opening the forum for discussion.  Thank you also for clarifying my point about protesting the precedent being set by logging in an Inventoried Roadless Area (IRA).  

Backcut, I encourage you to think carefully before accusing someone of "idealistic dogma-drama" or labeling groups as "green anarchists."  These suppositions are certainly not true in this case.  Those arrested included a high school teacher, a university professor, and a 72-year-old grandmother.  I had never before participated in civil disobedience or been arrested, but the importance of logging an IRA (and the broken promise of the Bush administration to provide interim protection until state-specific rules are developed) prompted an action that I knew would generate media attention and public awareness.  

And for anyone who has not visited Oregon's magnificent Siskiyous, I hope you will have a chance to explore this incredibly diverse and rugged region in the near future!  

Talking about promises, where does it say in ANY Roadless Rule that "Thou shalt not cut any snags in a Roadless Area"?? Bush did promise not to cut green trees and install roads. We are doing what we feel is a necessary response to a catastrophic fire, reducing fuel loads and getting slash on the ground to combat erosion. If these projects had occurred promptly, they would have been unmitigated successes. Instead, delays and re-working cost us several years and the most flammable smaller trees are now useless for boards. The Baird and Walden Salvage bill will help to cut the red tape and obstructionism that the "preservationists" have relied on for soooooo long.

Regarding Donato's study, it's exceedingly narrow focus is only valid in a tiny number of forest types, burn intensities, aspects, slopes and logging types. The funny thing is that Science Magazine only published their favorite parts of the study. It seems that even with impacts from logging, all the study plots still reached proper stocking levels, not "hindering regeneration". Also, how can the removal of fuels inside the burned areas increase fire risk and intensity??

Again, I would have done things different if I were in charge. Some units would have been dropped because of low amounts of available salvage. Some units I would have left more snags. There is no substitute for being on the ground.

I think it would be interesting to do a study to see how many bark beetles are spawned by dying trees (with green needles still on them) that weren't harvested, solely because the "brain-dead" trees have closed up with a dead cambium layer at the base. Often it will take a tree 5 years to die from cambium kill. "Preservationists" want a blanket policy for the entire nation, so they won't have to give up their tactics that utilize science, preferring emotion, rhetoric and angst. We prefer a spectrum of possibilities using science to guide us in dealing with burn salvage. Let us use the fresh, new science of Sherrie Smith, who has data from 5 years worth of burn salvage study.

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

If the Biscuit were all about greed and "rape of Mother Nature", don't you think the Feds would've wanted to harvest more than 4% of the 500,000?

Seriously, though, the Biscuit projects are NOT the way we'd want to do business. MAJOR mistakes were made that are unexcusable. It's no wonder that some people refuse to budge. We can move on and strive to do better, listening to the public and educating folks (and judges), or we can all lose when untreated burned forests burn again, sterilizing soils, adding CO2 into the atmosphere, sending erosion down to rivers and dooming a forest to be a brushfield for decades.

My own burn salvage projects are still under an injunction and roadside hazard trees still stand, waiting to fall at any time, potentially killing someone or plugging a culvert in the future, resulting in road failures and massive erosion. Why are those 9th Circuit judges barring us from making roads to major recreation areas safe? Why are they stopping us from recovering trees felled last year, using helicopters to minimize impacts brought to court by the plaintiffs? Seems quite punitive that judges would impose such penalties on the Forest Service and the American public.

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com

Fiddle on back.  Keep denying drought related to global climate disaster.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Make no mistake about my intentions, though. I'm certainly no friend of the timber industry, as I butt heads with some of them everyday in my job. I'm one who inspects their work and watches for environmental damage. They sure hate it when they have to follow the complex timber sale contract they signed....lol.

People need to understand that we are in a part of the year when we could start seeing fires in the 100,000 acre size. As dry cold fronts start to show up in the west, wild swings in wind directions can cause even small fires to flare up into beastly firestorms. One example of danger is the fires burning in NW California. These are burning in rugged terrain and very thick vegetation where containment is very slow and deliberate, in order to keep firefighters safe. They seem to only gain 5% more containment everyday and these fires have been burning for several weeks now. Significant winds could cause runs of 20,000 to 40,000 acres.

Many parts of the West are under this kind of threat every year, in forests choked with brush and overstocked with small trees. Add to that rampant bark beetle-killed trees and you have a scenario ripe for disaster. We are witnessing a huge slow motion disaster in progress and not many seem to notice what is at risk and what will happen down the road. Especially the Bush Administration, who holds the purse strings.

Scenic pics at http://Lhfotoware.blogspot.com