🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5Blyz0O5IAQS091yn@teleport.com>,
Larry Caldwell <larryc@teleport.com> wrote:

>The fact is, governments have not been good at managing public lands.
>They've treated forests like timber mines.  Management has been ignored,
>because a timber harvest cycle is much longer than the tenure of an
>elected politician.

It sounds like your on the verge of espousing that tired old myth
that "private timber lands are better managed than National
Forests", a myth that a quick climb to the top of Saddle Mountain
can disprove...

>One would think the sensible thing to do would be
>to blockade the offices of the forest service

You haven't noticed conservationist efforts to reform the USFS?

>Corporations don't move in with ground troops and plunder the land.  All
>that timber was offered for sale by the owner, with the harvest practices
>included as a condition of the sale.  If you don't like the way the 
>contract is written, write better contracts; it's just that simple.
>Corporate responsibility for a timber sale ends when the terms of the
>contract are fulfilled.

While this is true, it is no secret that the industry works long and hard
to dictate the terms of those sales, at least here in the US (and I'm 
sure it's no different in Canada).  After the mid-term elections in
Clinton's first term, Mark Reyes, timber lobbyist extraordinaire, was
hired by the Senate to write the new National Forest Management Act
and a new ESA with relaxed protection in forest lands.

If conservationists ONLY targetted industry workers, and not industry
leaders and government as well, you'd have a point.  There's nothing
illogical about attacking all elements involved, though.

>Hold on to your sense of humor, Kathleen, and remember that the real
>bad guys here are the elected officials who hand out timber harvests for
>political reasons, and cut corners on management because they're selling
>the worlds largest industrial resource at a loss, and forest management
>is a drain on the national budget.

And who is it that provides that political lever?  The industry.  Remove
the lever, and you'll remove the incentive for politicians to force
stupid decisions down the throats of professional resource managers
even when science tells us they're stupid.

Attacking elected officials is, in a real sense, merely attacking a
symptom.  Remove one, and another will pop up willing to line his
or her pockets with timber money.  You need to remove the money, the
lever.



-- 

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
  Nature photos, on-line guides, at http://donb.photo.net