🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5r9blv$i3j$1@news.pacifier.com> dhogaza@pacifier.com (Don Baccus) writes:

>What does a single house have to do with industrial harvest over vast
>amounts of private forest?  
>
>Most ecosystems can absorb a succession of small-scale developement
>that doesn't spread, LA-style, over the entire landscape.
>
>Industrial-scale harvest of private forest lands are not analogues
>to your situation.

I guess I wasn't clear.  My property borders on a piece of timberland
that goes all the way to Summit (three miles west) and is, I believe,
several miles north to south.  I'm butted up against this
industrial-sized operation on the west, and another equally large one
on the east.  The brook that runs past my house winds through the
western tract.  There has obviously been a buffer zone near the
brook from time out of mind -- long before such buffer zones became
a hot political topic.

In any event, my main point is so obvious to people with real contact
with the timber industry that they'll wonder why I bother; which is:
not all timber operations are run by "greedy capitalists."  Many
(probably most) are law-abiding and neighborly.  But the clueless and
the crisis-mongers characterize logging companies in general as
greedy, ignorant, criminal, subhuman, malicious, destructive, and
taking joy in destruction.  I have lived near enough logging
operations that I would by now have met at least SOME of these
larger-than-life creatures if they were anywhere near as usual as
they are claimed to be.  Alas, the drama promised by these
descriptions seems to be somewhat exaggerated:  the reality is more
mundane.  Logging, like every other pursuit, seems to be populated by
a wide range of people, most of them quite ordinary.  Thus, any
approach to environmental problems that assumes that loggers (or the
tuxedoed, diamond-stickpin- wearing executives giving the loggers
their orders) make up a callous criminal class is doomed to
cluelessness.

Most of us already know this, of course.  But not all.  Not by a long
shot.

	-- Robert
-- 
Robert Plamondon, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc. 
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert@plamondon.com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
http://www.pioneer.net/~robertp