LET TERS
FRIVILOUS LAWSUIT
Our four “conservative” (Ha ha! —
“Give us more money folks, but we don’t
believe in big government!”) county
commissioners must be visiting the pot
shops a lot these days, ‘cause they’re
sinking deeper into their old pipe dream
that wiping out the local forests will
somehow improve life in Lane County.
Now, emboldened by the success of the
seditionist occupation of Burns and the
Malheur Wildlife Refuge, Commissioner
Sid Leiken threatens that a similar event
could occur here if the BLM won’t double
the cut on local forests. But before putting
out the call for right-wingnuts to bring
flags, guns and chainsaws to Oakridge,
the commissioners plan to spend $84,000
of your tax money to support a frivolous
lawsuit against the BLM’s new management
plan — whatever it turns out to be!
Yep, if you’re an advocate for the
environment in Lane County, aren’t you
tickled to know the commissioners (other
VIEWPOINT
than Pete Sorensen) plan to hand your tax
money to a timber industry lobby?
I myself worked for five logging
companies in Oregon and have nothing
against responsible and truly sustainable
timber harvest. But that is not what these
commissioners are whining for.
Phil Robbins
Dexter
SLIDING BACKWARDS
Through the symbolic fabric of local art
and life, EW Arts Editor Alex V. Cipolle’s
writings about the closing of the Jacobs
Gallery Feb. 4 describes an art community
of exile and vulnerability as one after
another local gallery closes. I’ve presented
two solo installations at the Jacobs, been in
ten Mayor’s Art Shows, as well as serving
twice on the Mayor’s Art Show jury.
The Mayor’s Art Show, as well at New
Zone’s version of the Salon des Refuses,
were serious endeavors, important to
many local artists whose selected or
rejected artworks are showcased in these
not-for-profit organizations.
How important are these shows to
artists? Most artists in Lane County are
less concerned about fame or making it
into the latest version of Janson’s History
of Art than they are about living here in
relative comfort.
So what if the city has only a few
commercial galleries, no significant
art market and a small group of critical
reviewers to help create a dialogue and
build an informed audience? If an artist is
lucky, his or her work would be accepted in
the annual Mayor’s Show, and if rejected,
shown in the Salon.
And if an artist is really lucky, he or she
will be invited to show at Maude Kerns
Art Center, LCC Art Department Gallery,
UO Adell McMillan Gallery or UO Jordan
Schnitzer Museum of Art. If an artist is
really, really lucky, his or her next exhibit
might be reviewed or previewed in EW or
The Register-Guard.
There has to be more, a dialogue
which creates an informed audience that
is buying art for more than decorative
elements to enhance a blank wall. We
need a community that views art as an
investment fostering further growth and
an understanding of contemporary visual
art.
In many ways Eugene is sliding
backwards with the closing of the Jacobs
Gallery and the Downtown Initiative for
the Visual Arts (DIVA) as well as the
Gallery at the Watershed.
We need, desperately, a stronger sense
of our own artistic history as a city.
We need a sense that art made in Lane
County can emerge from the sphere of
private lives and take on a meaningfully
public, historical dimension. This means
commitment to ongoing preservation
and re-examination of art exhibits,
particularly those in the nonprofit and
commercial sectors, to mount analytical
and historical exhibits like, say, those
BY M A RY O'BRIEN
Rewarding the Bundys
DRAFT GRAZING INITIATIVE TIES HANDS OF PUBLIC LAND MANAGERS
M
aybe it’s that my children and I twice spent spring vacations
at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the early 1980s, when
water was unusually plentiful and the birds at dawn were a
cacophony. Or that we hiked near the refuge to see pre-dawn
sage grouse males burbling like coffee percolators with inflated
chests while the females feigned disinterest.
And then, in 1983, there was the memorably titled book, Sacred Cows at the
Public Trough, written by former Malheur Wildlife Refuge naturalists Denzel and
Nancy Ferguson. It was a ground-breaking book about, well, breaking of the ground.
These many years later, we’re still tied to Malheur’s evocative, wide skies.
Several months ago we arranged to stay with friends at the refuge this May. I’m
looking forward to the staff in the refuge headquarters telling us how the bird
populations are doing.
But after living in Oregon for 24 years and working 10 years on Eastern Oregon
public lands issues, including grazing, I moved to southeastern Utah. Here in
southern Utah, 97 percent of the three national forests’ acreage is open to livestock
grazing under 31-year-old forest plans.
Last month, U.S. Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz handed Utahns and the
nation their discussion draft of a Utah Public Lands Initiative (PLI), which would
expand fossil fuel extraction, motorized recreation and compromised wilderness on
national lands in eastern Utah.
Not surprisingly, I guess, this “grand bargain” proposes to reward the Bundys
of the West with the kind of frozen livestock grazing and lack of national authority
for which the Bundys thought they had to pick up guns and occupy the Malheur
Wildlife Refuge. The PLI would create a new kind of “un-wilderness,” tying the
hands of land managers. In the grand bargain’s newly designated wilderness areas,
National Conservation Areas, Special Management Areas and Recreation Zones,
existing livestock numbers would be mandated to remain the same, or increase.
In this new “wilderness,” ranchers could use ATVs to place feed and bulldozers to
build new infrastructure. The Forest Service would be barred from considering the
continued existence, or disappearance, of species or species habitat when making
grazing decisions.
Sage grouse chicks scrawny from lack of bugs due to flowers having been
grazed? Bighorn sheep dying from contact with domestic sheep? The alpine La
Sal daisy exterminated from its only home in the world by exotic mountain goats?
Colorado River cutthroat trout eggs smothered by sediment from raw, trampled
creek banks? The public land managers would be prohibited from taking any of
these into account.
4
February 11, 2016 • eugeneweekly.com
Before the gunmen occupied Malheur Wildlife Refuge in January 2016, did they
know that there had been a successful collaboration among ranchers who graze
cattle on the refuge, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and environmentalists?
As Colby Marshall, member of a ranching family that has long retained grazing
permits on the refuge, reports on a recently finalized comprehensive conservation
plan for the refuge, “Ultimately, at the end of the day, ranchers and environmentalists
all agreed it was excellent. What it did is it provided flexibility for the public lands
managers and the ranchers.”
Flexibility for public lands managers? Down in Cedar City promoting his grand
bargain, Bishop crowed, “That’s why in [my bill] I stripped out anything that
allowed the agencies to have any discretion. If there was anything in there we took
it out. That’s the only way to give the people any kind of control.”
What people? Did Bishop know that in the last seven years in Utah, four long-
term grazing collaborations made up of people — including grazing permittees,
state and county grazing agency representatives, range professors, conservation and
wildlife groups and county commissioners — have reached consensus (that means
everybody agrees) on how to make sure livestock grazing and wildlife species and
aspen and science are able to coexist? And that two more such collaborations are
under way in Utah? That’s not a reasonable take on the meaning of “the people”?
Nothing, as we are learning with climate
change, can be frozen in time. Not permafrost,
not national borders and not last century’s
livestock grazing practices.
What we need now more than ever,
globally and locally, are disparate
people leaving their guns behind and
agreeing to figure out how we all can
live together in this world, in this nation,
on these public lands, in wilderness, in
southeastern Oregon and in eastern
Utah. All the people, as well as all our
relations living in these lands.
Mary O’Brien is a former longtime Eugene resident
and EW columnist now living in Castle Valley,
Utah. She is the Utah Forests program direc-
tor for the Grand Canyon Trust. A ver-
sion of this column first ran in The Salt
Lake Tribune Jan. 30.