commentary
BY ROY KEENE
Timber Town vs. Tree Town
Another forest feeding frenzy on its way?
T
imber Town growls and belches
mostly outside of Tree Town’s
collective consciousness.
Conscious of it or not, we fi nd our air is
fouled by biomass burners, wood and paper
processing gases and log treatment vapors.
The surrounding forest that feeds the mills,
hidden largely behind locked gates (but
not from Google Earth), is fragmented
with huge clearcuts and freshly sprayed
plantations. Our precious water, bleeding
out of these heavily logged watersheds,
is contaminated by eroded soil and toxic
forest chemicals.
It’s easy to forget that much of our
infrastructure — roads, bridges, railways,
dams and power plants — was built for
transporting logs and powering mills.
With over a billion board feet logged out
of Lane County’s forests in big harvest
years, our county is, literally, the timber
epicenter of the U.S. Yet many of us barely
notice a quarter million loaded log trucks
lumbering through our midst during these
periods.
We are, however, kept constantly aware
by industry’s PR machine that our schools
depend on logging revenues and our basic
public services remain tied to timber
harvest levels. This awareness works its
SUSHI
SEOUL
fearful spell for today’s Lords of Logging.
“You want your kids to read and write?”
“You want police and fi re protection?”
“Don’t interfere with us logging your
forests.”
Although the timber industry makes
only a 3 percent contribution to 21st
century Lane County’s economy, a far
greater share of land, wealth and political
process is under their control. Banks,
business and industrial complexes, gravel
and paving companies, trucking fi rms,
media enterprises, educational institutes
and even politicians are owned or
infl uenced by timber dollars.
Federal, state and local agencies are
routinely bullied by timber interests. Forest
Service managers get the cut out or suffer
demotion. State agencies are pressured to
sell public timber for a fraction of its value.
County commissioners play ball or risk
having Big Timber generously fund and
run someone against them.
Big Timber is behind the latest effort
to privatize public forests in a legislative
proposal deceptively named the O&C Trust,
Conservation, and Jobs Act. Sponsored
by “independent” Congressman Peter
DeFazio, this act would transfer a million
and a half acres of reasonably protected
public forests to a “trust” governed by
a board of directors that includes two
mill owners. These forests would then be
“managed” according to Oregon’s equally
pro-logging Forest Practice Rules.
If this act is successful, much of the
forests that surround and buffer Tree
Town’s air, water, wildlife and farmlands
will be clearcut, then ignominiously
poisoned. The gain in revenue and jobs,
greatly exaggerated by the act’s promoters,
will be relatively minimal compared to
Lane’s total budget and labor force. The
mega-mills that already purchase most of
the BLM’s timber sales will profi t hugely
from yet another feeding frenzy on our
forests.
It’s no wonder the timber industry keeps
the pressure on us. Lane County has some
of the last and greatest surviving stands
of old trees, virtually all on federal lands.
This mature, high value public timber
is, for industry, a great prize. If they can
bypass federal environmental protections
and control the right people, they can
make hundreds of millions more logging
our forests .
Once the mature BLM-managed
remnants of the “checkerboard” forest
around us are cut out, it’ll be harder for
those of us in Tree Town to ignore Timber
Town.
The surrounding hills will be completely
barren or, at best, monotonously carpeted
with fi re- and disease-prone tree plantations.
We’ll have fewer fi sh in our streams and
more toxic algae blooms in our lakes. Once
our share of trickle-down dollars from the
looted federal forests is spent, we’ll still be
trying to fund schools and services.
The best thing we would get out of this
latest public forest giveaway is that, in a
decade or two, there would be little left
for some mills to feed on and they’ll move
on to other unprotected forests, towns and
hostage workers. But not, unfortunately,
forever. When the fi ber farms that replace
our forests are ready, mills will return to
grind them into chips like they’re doing
now the South.
There’s still time for the people of Tree
Town to push back against Timber Town’s
latest scam to steal and log more of our
forests. Help save the watersheds around
Eugene from a dismal fate. Push back
together, push now! Start with telling your
representatives this proposed O&C Act is
undemocratic and unacceptable.
ew
Roy Keene is a local real estate broker and private
timberlands specialist.
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EUGENE WEEKLY AUGUST 2, 2012 9