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About Applegater. (Jacksonville, OR) 2008-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 2014)
Applegater Fall 2014 21 MY OPINION FROM BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR Consider community by chris bratt We residents of the Applegate live in a unique and inspiring place, but far greater community involvement and action on our part will soon be required to protect the beauty, natural diversity and environmental health of the public forests that surround us. Presently some disturbing actions and trends stand in the way of continued development of our community well-being and threaten our ability to participate as a public voice in forest management decisions. Our ability to work together with the local public land management agencies to help develop the future conditions we need for our watersheds is being curtailed. If we don’t act to sustain our public forests, we won’t be able to sustain our communities. Most of the forest management problems our community is now facing derive from the impasse over a series of complex Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issues. The BLM is under intense political pressure to supply more money for distressed counties and more logs to the timber industry. This can be accomplished only by loosening environmental regulations and imposing limits on the innovation, creativity and collaboration of the public. As I reported in the last Applegater, two extreme legislative proposals have been introduced in Congress. One bill exempts BLM forest plans from judicial review (no appeals of any timber sales), and the other bill gets rid of the BLM entirely by dividing its forest lands between the US Forest Service and a private trust (clear-cutting allowed for sure). Passage of either bill will dramatically increase logging and reduce public participation on these BLM lands. In addition, the BLM has recently resurrected that part of the 1937 Oregon and California Act that governs their interpretation of sustainable timber production. Consequently, once again the BLM is dictating that timber production (volume) is the “primary purpose” and “dominant use” of our public forest lands. Also, with new BLM Resource Management Plans (RMPs) in the making (2015) and in response to a recent federal court order, the BLM is planning to double timber sale volumes on all the forest lands they manage. It is apparent that the BLM is abandoning science-based management Harvest Fair to be held in October at the Grange by janis mohr-tiPton Greetings! We want you to mark your calendar for the next community event! The Applegate Valley Community Grange is planning to hold a Grange Harvest Fair on Saturday, October 18, from 10 am to 4 pm in the hall and on the grounds. We would love to have the community join us for this festive event. As you know, for the past two years we have had a very successful Harvest Brunch at our Grange. This year, instead of brunch, we would like to invite members of the community to participate as vendors, volunteers, sponsors/supporters, or fairgoers. Let’s create a true celebration of the harvest in the Applegate Valley! Vendors of prepared foods, locally grown produce, food and agricultural products, arts and crafts are all welcome to set up a booth to sell their wares and shake hands with their community. Booth spaces (indoors and outdoors) will be 10 feet by 10 feet at a cost of $20. Vendors are to provide covers and tables. Update from the Applegate Food Pantry by arlene and claUde aron Good news! Thanks to the plea we made in the last Applegater, we now have a new regular driver for the food pantry. Richard Mikula has generously stepped up to help in this capacity. Thank you, Richard, for your service to our community! Schedule Update: Our summer hours are Mondays from 9 - 10:30 am. On October 6, we will revert to our regular schedule, which is Mondays from 11:30 am – 1 pm. We will be closed on Monday, September 1, and Monday, September 29. If there are any further changes to our hours, we always post notices at the Ruch and Applegate stores. As we announced in the last Applegater, the Applegate Food Pantry has begun distributing all the food collected through the Neighborhood Food Project directly to local residents rather than merging it with the Medford Food Project. We were encouraged by the initial response in which almost 50 participants took green bags to fill, but on our last pickup (June 13) we received only about half of them back. We appreciate everyone who has participated and donated food, but we could really use some additional participation from the community. If you have taken a bag and for any reason cannot continue to participate, please return it to the Applegate or Ruch stores so that someone else can use it (we have to pay for the bags). And please consider joining this program if you can afford to do so. One hundred percent of the food donated goes directly to the Applegate Food Pantry, located behind Ruch School. Just pick up a bag at the Applegate or Ruch store—there are instructions in each bag. T h e r e m a i n i n g d a te s f o r dropping off bags are October 10 and December 12. If you can’t make those exact days, that’s okay—we will check the stores a couple of days before and after those dates. Questions? Call us at 541-951-6707. Arlene and Claude Aron 541-951-6707 Happy Columbus Day! on our public lands and thereby weakening the protective provisions of the Northwest Forest Plan, which calls for “multiple use” management by the federal agencies. Most of these planned BLM rewrites rely on very risky forest management actions that have never been tested. They represent just a few of the obstacles our community will be confronting from now on. The irony is that none of these outlandish proposals or actions will guarantee enough logging revenue to come anywhere near funding the budget shortfalls of “timber-dependent” counties. All of these stumbling blocks reflect attempts by Congressional representatives, timber-dependent counties, timber interests and the BLM itself to weaken the public process for citizens to influence agency decisions. Many people living in the Applegate don’t realize that the BLM’s present Resource Management Plans (1995) granted our community extraordinary opportunities to “develop and test new management approaches to integrate and achieve ecological and economic health and other social objectives” (not “dominant use” timber cutting) with our local agencies. Chris Bratt We are in danger of losing this cooperative mandate provided by our federal designation as the Applegate Adaptive Management Area (AAMA). This special area allows our community, the BLM and the US Forest Service to jointly seek innovative strategies and future actions that are most responsive to social and resource issues. From my perspective, our community efforts over the past 20 years in working cooperatively with the federal agencies in the AAMA have paid off for all parties. There is no justification for now pressuring the BLM into changing our present AAMA “multiple use” management direction, especially in this increasingly polarized political arena. We in the Applegate expect better. We need better long-term forest- management solutions. Anything else would be a travesty. Let me know if you expect better. Chris Bratt 541-846-6988 In addition to vendor booths, this event will have educational programs with agriculturally based themes such as beekeeping, beer making, noxious weed eradication, and more. Nonprofit educational booth space will be available at no cost if nothing is being sold. We will also have a children’s area with crafts and games, and we intend to have live music. We are looking for musical groups or individuals to perform. We will need volunteers from the community to help plan, prepare and set up for the event, and help with activities at the fair. Anyone who would like to sponsor or support any of the fair activities is encouraged to contact Janis Mohr-Tipton for details. This event will certainly boast something for everyone, and we hope to make it a true gathering place for all ages of our community. If you would like to be a part of this great gathering and fair, contact Janis Mohr-Tipton or Paul Tipton at 541- 846-7501 or email us at applegategrange@ gmail.com. We will be featuring vendors, musicians, sponsors and activities in our promotional materials for this event, so let us know at your earliest convenience about your participation so that we can include you. We look forward to hearing from you. Janis Mohr-Tipton • 541-846-7501 Harvest Fair Vendor and Nonprofit Booths Coordinator janismohrtipton48@frontier.com “ I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” —attributed to Albert Einstein
