THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
FRIDAY EXCHANGE
5A
Thinning in watershed
he front page article about thin-
ning activities in the Astoria
watershed reads like a press release
submitted by a stenographer (“Asto-
ria keeps close eye on timber in Bear
Creek watershed,” The Daily Asto-
rian, Aug. 29). The best part was
the segment describing log truckers
braking for the corners while head-
ing out from the logging areas. One
wonders if they used their turn sig-
nals once they reached the highway.
Since the article touches on the
troubles experienced by the city of
Rockaway Beach after the hills to
the east were cut over, a brief discus-
sion of fog drip seems timely. Coni-
fers are very efficient at harvest-
ing water from the moisture-laden
marine air that we who live west of
the coast range summits are blessed
to enjoy. We are perched on the
western edge of what was once a
vast rain forest.
A forest by any name, public or
privately held, industrial tree farms
included, are all watersheds. Coni-
fers take the moisture from the air
and return the surplus to the soil to
form the rivulets and streams from
which most coastal towns get water.
The older the trees, the greater the
crown height, and the more efficient
the forest will be in harvesting mois-
ture. Plantation forestry surely must
diminish water production. I know
this, and I am not a plumber.
The article describes the Asto-
ria watershed as 3,700 acres of dense
forest where routine annual har-
vests are conducted, while stating
less than 25 percent of the growth is
harvested annually. What is meant
by “growth”? If a full 25 percent
of growth were harvested annually,
would all merchantable timber be
gone in four years?
If public lands are to be managed
as a tree farm, then make public the
forest acreage inventory by spe-
cie and more importantly, age class.
These are facts that will never, ever,
see the light of day on the industrial
forest holdings which surround us. It
is far likelier we will be charged for
their water that runs from their hills.
The article implied the city of
Astoria wasn’t in it for the money,
but some things just don’t add up,
and by coincidence the operation
made just enough to buy a new fire
truck and salt away the extra into
a capital improvement fund. This
affirms why all trees must fall: We
do it for the money.
GARY DURHEIM
Cannon Beach
T
Greed is the villain
n response to the two letters from
Sandy Nielson (“Humane options
needed”) and Patricia Wood (“Taxes
but no benefits”) in the Aug. 23 edi-
tion of the Chinook Observer, I
would like to reiterate that what hap-
pened to this family and many other
families is very sad. My opinion
remains the same as to the illegals
who enter the U.S.
Both these woman don’t seem
to care about the laws of our coun-
try. The companies that knowingly
hire illegals do so for two reasons
— first is lower wages are paid to
these workers, and second it’s supply
and demand. A recent report from
the U.S. Government Accountabil-
ity Office stated the supply of ille-
gals is creating a new crisis where
companies fire the illegals work-
ing for them who are demanding
to be represented by a labor union.
and replacing them with new ille-
gals who are paid even lower wages.
Greed is the culprit here.
I
There are over 4.4 million appli-
cants from all over the world who
have been waiting to be allowed to
legally immigrate to the U.S. As for
the less fortunate people from Mex-
ico and that region who want to
enter our country, there is a stream-
lined process in place which makes
it easy to apply for either the H-2A
or H-2B visas.
In the last eight months, the U.S.
State Department has funded a pro-
gram in those countries where they
have set up local offices in hun-
dreds of rural locations to help the
local people apply for the visas. To
date, they report over 65,000 work-
ers have used the new system to suc-
cessfully attain the work visas and
are here working legally.
Both Ms. Nelson and Ms. Wood
don’t mention the fact that these
companies only have to prove that
after 60 days of advertising to try to
hire from the local labor force they
can then hire workers from other
countries using the H-2A and H-2B
program.
We are talking about our local
problem, but nationally the problem
is much worse. Illegals now have
flooded the construction trades and
truck driving sectors and have driven
the wages down to stagnate levels.
Once again, greed by the companies
is the villain. Building trades were
once a great way to make a living,
but those days are gone. I can only
say it again — we must obey the
laws of our great country.
RICHARD CICERELLE
Ocean Park, Washington
Pot tourism insanity
’m 71, and have been smok-
ing marijuana since 1966, and
still smoke it daily. I think anybody
who really thinks cannabis tourism
will happen is insane. First, nobody
cares. Anybody unfortunate enough
to need pot habitually already has a
lifestyle.
I’ve read Stoner Magazine,
and I think, notwithstanding pages
and pages of self-serving beautiful
advertising, people aren’t just going
to start smoking weed and follow-
ing the String Cheese Incident band,
or other Grateful Dead clones. Only
people in search of extreme high-
ness (escape) want super-strong pot,
much less products like “shatter,” all
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designed to get you extremely high.
Even more escape.
I have smoked “shatter” — it’s
really strong and concentrated. I
guess I don’t need to escape that
badly.
ALEXANDER P. HANDS
Seaside
Put down the phones
e, as a people, have had more
even highly published exam-
ples of why we should not be on our
cellphones while driving, or even
walking.
On Aug. 29, while waiting on the
highway to pull into McDonald’s,
a truck came up behind me, stop-
ping quickly. I noticed he was on his
phone, so I hand gestured to hang
up, and he angrily gave me the fin-
ger, like I was wrong.
As he aggressively pulled away,
I noticed he was the owner of a
prominent local business, and my
jaw dropped. Having been a local
contractor myself, I do know how
important communication is, and
have been guilty of answering my
phone while driving.
This year my eyes have been
opened. In the last three months, I
have had two close calls in the Safe-
way parking lot, and even coming
out of the store; now two at McDon-
ald’s and three at Home Depot. In
every instance the other driver —
woman or man, old and young —
have been on their cellphones. Cars
can do a lot of damage to anything
not going very fast, let alone walk-
ing and bumping into someone with
your eyes down.
In my way of thinking, we the
citizens, have a major safety issue
caused by the disrespect being
shown to all others in public when
you’re on your cellphone while driv-
ing or walking.
TROY J. HASKELL
Astoria
W
Appreciate diversity
ecently we lost a great Ameri-
can, someone whose example
calls on each of us to be a better cit-
izen and ask more from our coun-
try and ourselves. I waited, check-
ing the newspaper every day, to see
two articles and a cartoon referring
to Jerry Lewis’s contributions, with
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no mention of the passing of Dick
Gregory.
This is the problem with my
“liberal” community, and “lib-
eral” ideals as a whole. The media
is telling us how we must denounce
white-supremacists — not white
supremacy as an ideology, but the
people who dare speak the dark
tribal nature of their hearts — while
white “liberals” are patting them-
selves on the back for being so
much better than these “others.”
Mr. Gregory himself said, “For
a black man, there’s no difference
between the North and the South.
In the South, they don’t mind how
close I get, as long as I don’t get too
big. In the North, they don’t mind
how big I get, as long as I don’t get
too close.”
Our nation is like a drunk-
ard who numbs himself, avoiding
some darkness in his past that he is
unwilling to face, thereby destroy-
ing his future. As long as we con-
tinue to commit atrocities against
those we allow ourselves to see as
fundamentally different from us,
we will never be truly strong as a
nation, able to take on whatever our
future holds.
Our diversity should be what
makes us strong. I would ask my
fellow Americans to step out of
their routine this week and make an
effort to have a conversation with
someone you see as different from
you, someone whose cultural influ-
ences may be different from yours,
who may be educated or unedu-
cated, older or younger, well-off or
poor, who is more feminine or mas-
culine, but who is very much your
equal and has something to offer by
their different perspective.
You will better know your neigh-
bor, and better know yourself when
you are done. You may find that
rather than tolerating those who are
different, you appreciate them.
SARAH JENSEN
Astoria
Two sides to every story
nce upon a time, years ago,
news sources tried to keep
their news unbiased. Those days
are gone. There was not a con-
stant stream of bashing a person
who actually won an election. Once
the election was won people got
O
on with life, without all the nega-
tive stuff. An article that starts about
the eclipse then changes to negative
bashing — enough already.
There are reasons why so many
people voted Donald Trump in.
What are they? You don’t hear any-
thing about that. That in itself is
another series in the making. There
are two sides to every story. Just to
be clear, I did not vote for him, but
do understand why a lot of people
did. I did not vote for her, either.
On another note, we have all
heard and read about the plight of
the illegal immigrant. Talking about
it over and over does nothing to
change it. If you don’t like the law
or the results of enforcing the law,
work at changing it. Start a fund to
help with legal costs, get petitions
going.
LENORE MOODY
Ocean Park, Washington
Oppose upriver mine
don’t want mining pollution in
my drinking water. Kelso’s water
comes from the Cowlitz River,
downstream from the Toutle and
Green rivers. The U.S. Forest Ser-
vice just issued a draft decision to
allow Ascot Resources to begin
exploratory drilling right along the
headwaters of the Green River. The
proposed mine for copper, gold and
molybdenum is at Goat Mountain,
on the northeastern border of the
Mount St. Helens National Volcanic
Monument.
Once prospecting is finished, it
will be difficult to stop a mine itself.
But small mines in the area from
the early 1900s leak some acid mine
drainage — a large modern mine
could produce much more. Also, the
crater is only 12 miles away. Peri-
odically swarms of small tremors
occur, and stronger activity is likely
over the life of a mine and its tailing
pond. A mining accident would be
disastrous for our water supply, as
the Kelso City Council recognized
in a March 2016 resolution.
Join me in asking the Forest Ser-
vice to protect this precious nat-
ural resource by withdrawing the
draft decision. Email Charlie Sharp,
Cowlitz Ranger District, charlesm-
sharp@fs.fed.us
GLORIA NICHOLS
Kelso, Washington
I
Hurricanes, climate and the capitalist offset
By BRET STEPHENS
New York Times News Service
exans will find few consola-
tions in the wake of a hurri-
cane as terrifying as Harvey.
But here, at least,
is one: A biblical
storm has hit them,
and the death toll
—more than 30 as
of this writing —
is mercifully low,
given its intensity.
This is not how it plays out in
much of the world. In 1998, Hur-
ricane Mitch ripped through Cen-
tral America and killed anywhere
between 11,000 and 19,000 people,
mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua.
Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nar-
gis slammed into Myanmar, and a
staggering 138,000 people perished.
Nature’s furies — hurricanes,
earthquakes, landslides, droughts,
infectious diseases, you name it
— may strike unpredictably. But
their effects are not distributed at
random.
Rich countries tend to expe-
rience, and measure, the costs of
such disasters primarily in terms of
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money. Poor countries experience
them primarily in terms of lives.
Between 1940 and 2016, a total
of 3,348 people died in the United
States on account of hurricanes,
according to government data, for
an average of 43 victims a year.
That’s a tragedy, but compare it to
the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a
cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.
Why do richer countries fare so
much better than poorer ones when
it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t
just better regulation. I grew up in
Mexico City, which adopted strin-
gent building codes following a
devastating earthquake in 1957.
That didn’t save the city in the
1985 earthquake, when we learned
that those codes had been flouted
for years by lax or corrupt build-
ing inspectors, and thousands of
people were buried under the rub-
ble of shoddy construction. Regu-
lation is only as good, or bad, as its
enforcement.
A better answer lies in the com-
bination of government respon-
siveness and civic spiritedness so
splendidly on display this week in
Texas. And then there’s the matter
of wealth.
Every child knows that houses
of brick are safer than houses of
wood or straw — and therefore cost
more to build. Harvey will dam-
age or ruin thousands of homes. But
it won’t sweep away entire neigh-
borhoods, as Typhoon Haiyan did
in the Philippine city of Tacloban
in 2013.
Harvey will also inflict billions
in economic damage, most crush-
ingly on uninsured homeowners.
The numbers are likely to be stag-
gering in absolute terms, but what’s
more remarkable is how easily the
U.S. economy can absorb the blow.
The storm will be a “speed bump”
to Houston’s $503 billion econ-
omy, according to Moody’s Analyt-
ics’ Adam Kamins, who told The
Wall Street Journal that he expects
the storm to derail growth for about
two months.
On a global level, the Univer-
sity of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr.
notes that disaster losses as a per-
centage of the world’s GDP, at just
0.3 percent, have remained constant
since 1990. That’s despite the dollar
cost of disasters having nearly dou-
bled over the same time — at just
about the same rate as the growth in
the global economy. (Pielke is yet
another victim of the climate lob-
by’s hyperactive smear machine,
but that doesn’t make his data any
less valid.)
Climate activists often claim that
unchecked economic growth and
the things that go with are principal
causes of environmental destruc-
tion. In reality, growth is the great
offset. It’s a big part of the reason
why, despite our warming planet,
mortality rates from storms have
declined from .11 per 100,000 in
the 1900s to .04 per 100,000 in
the 2010s, according to data com-
piled by Hannah Ritchie and Max
Roser. Death rates from other nat-
ural disasters such as floods and
droughts have fallen by even more
staggering percentages over the last
century.
That’s because economic growth
isn’t just a matter of parking lots
paving over paradise. It also under-
writes safety standards, funds scien-
tific research, builds spillways and
wastewater plants, creates “green
jobs,” subsidizes Elon Musk, sets
aside prime real estate for conserva-
tion, and so on. Poverty, not wealth,
is the enemy of the environment.
Only the rich have the luxury of
developing an ethical stance toward
their trash.
The paradox of our time is that
the part of the world that has never
been safer from the vagaries of
nature seems never to have been
more terrified of them. Harvey truly
is an astonishing storm, the likes
of which few people can easily
remember.
Then again, as meteorologist
Philip Klotzbach points out, it’s
also only one of four Category 4 or
5 hurricanes to make landfall in the
United States since 1970. By con-
trast, 10 such storms made land-
fall between 1922 and 1969. Make
of that what you will, but remem-
ber that fear is often a function of
unfamiliarity.
Houston will ultimately recover
from Harvey’s devastation because
its people are creative and coura-
geous. They will rebuild and, when
the next storm comes, as it inev-
itably will, be better prepared for
it. The best lesson the world can
take from Texas is to follow the
path of its extraordinary economic
growth on the way to environmen-
tal resilience.