VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Quick takes
Boardman mega-dairy would
bring in 30,000 cows
Smelly economy. I wonder how that will
attract people and tourism.
— Jovanna Centre
If they burn off the methane it won’t
be so bad. Gladstone did that with the old
landill as the city moved in around it, and
they actually sold the hot water and steam
power to a nearby wood mill. Both are gone
now and Home Depot built a store right on
top of it. No smell anymore.
—Dan Wolf
Fact is animal farming (meat, egg, or
dairy) creates way more greenhouse gases
and pollution than vehicles do.
—Destiny Lynn Chase
And most of it isn’t really all that
nutritious, and not very economical when
compared to growing plant food.
— Kate Chastain
Minam grade to get straighter
It’s about lippin’ time! How many lives
have been lost over the years on the Minam
downgrade?
—Julie Smith Peterson
So much for Wallowa County history.
That curve has been there longer than all of
us have been alive. My husband says that
they should install a solar powered lashing
sign then maybe people would pay atten-
tion. It would be less expensive but we as
taxpayers don’t have any say.
— Flo Powers
I’m thankful. I lost my sister/best friend
not long ago to this curve. Thank you so
much. It’s about time.
— Rebekeh Weaver
One of the great lessons of the Twitter age is
that much can be summed up in just a few words.
Here are some of this week’s takes. Tweet yours
@Tim_Trainor or email editor@eastoregonian.
com, and keep them to 140 characters.
East Oregonian
Page 5A
The resilience of rural America
’ve spent most of my life living
or pointed ingers, rather than offer
in big cities. But the truth is, a
concrete solutions and new avenues
lot of what’s shaped me came
of opportunity. But we’ve pursued
from my grandparents who grew
a different approach — one that
up on the prairie in Kansas. They
helps workers retrain and learn the
taught me the kind of values that
skills they need for a job in the new
don’t always make headlines, let
economy. One that supports small
alone the daily back-and-forth
businesses and entrepreneurs to help
in Washington. Honesty and
Barack attract more of the new economy’s
responsibility. Hard work and
Obama jobs to rural communities. One
toughness against adversity.
that upgrades our
Comment
Keeping your word, and giving
schools — from
back to your community. And
working toward
treating folks with respect, even if you
universal preschool
disagree with them.
to two years of free
They’re the same values I saw as a
community college — so
senator in Illinois, driving long country
that all our kids have the
roads to visit with folks in small towns.
same chance to reach
They’re the same values I saw in Iowa,
their potential without
campaigning for this ofice in community
having to leave their
centers and coffee shops and high school
hometown.
cafeterias. They’re the same values that
Over the last eight
have inspired me every day as President, in years, my administration
visits to all 50 states and letters I read every has worked hand-in-hand
night from every corner of this nation.
with rural communities
And it’s only reinforced my belief that the
to build more opportunity
values that drive our small towns and rural — investing in rural schools, supporting
communities are the same ones that drive
rural small business owners, deploying
America as a whole.
high speed internet and wireless, and
At the same time, what’s also true
building partnerships between businesses
is that when our country is tested, our
and colleges to help train folks not
rural communities are tested as well.
just for a job, but for a career. And for
An economy that’s been changing for
those struggling with opioid use, we’ve
decades — more automation, more global
expanded access to treatment to help them
competition — has, in many ways, hit
get the care they need.
rural communities particularly hard.
So we’re making progress — progress
Too many people are still ighting back
that’s possible only because of the strength
from the recklessness on Wall Street that
and resilience of the people in our rural
shuttered storefronts on Main Street.
communities.
Too many workers are still reeling from
In Pikeville, Kentucky, former coal
plants that moved overseas and took good
miners are trading coal for code. They’re
jobs with them. Too many communities
retraining to learn HTML, JavaScript, and
are struggling to compete, hamstrung
PHP, transforming an old bottling factory
by lagging infrastructure like slow or
into a digital hub. It’s a transition that not
nonexistent broadband connections. And
only supports good jobs, but also offers a
too many families have been ravaged by
glimpse of what the future could look like
the heartbreaking epidemic of opioid use.
in other communities like Pikeville.
For too long, leaders who could do
In Clinton County, Ohio, young people
something to help have passed the buck
have organized to tackle the brain drain,
I
creating a fellowship program that matches
local businesses with college students
home for the summer. And those young
people aren’t just learning, they’re leading
— just last year, Wilmington, Ohio, elected
a majority-Millennial city council.
In Piedmont, Alabama, school leaders
have invested in high-speed connectivity
and laptops for every student, so that
teachers can tailor lessons to individual
students and assess each
student’s progress in
real time. Already, test
scores and graduation
rates are up, and tiny
Piedmont City School
District has emerged as a
national model for digital
learning.
That’s what rural
America can look like
in the 21st century.
Smart investments that
lead to real, tangible
progress. Today, rural
unemployment has
dropped from a high of about ten percent
during the Great Recession to six percent.
The rural child poverty rate is dropping,
and rural median household incomes are
rising again.
We certainly still have more work to do,
but we’re moving in the right direction.
And that couldn’t be more important.
Because as a prominent rural Kansan
— President Eisenhower — once said,
“Whatever America hopes to bring to pass
in the world must irst come to pass in the
heart of America.”
In so many ways, from its resilience
and ingenuity in the face of a challenge
to the deining values that power it every
day, rural America represents that beating
heart. That’s why these communities are so
important — because when America’s rural
communities are strong, America is strong.
■
Barack Obama is the president of the
United States. This op-ed was released Oct. 4.
The rural child
poverty rate is
dropping, and
rural median
household
incomes are
rising again.
Logging myths fuel legislation Avoiding a punitive
By GEORGE WUERTHNER
T
he timber industry and its
advocates continue to promote
a number of myths designed to
garner public support for increased
logging. These myths are being
repeated by many in Congress,
including Oregon’s Greg Walden,
who are advocating new legislation
that would weaken environmental
protections, reduce public review of
Forest Service timber sales (called
variously vegetation management,
forest health restoration, fuels
reduction, hazard tree reduction,
salvage timber sale) and signiicantly
increase money-losing logging on
public lands.
Myth: Restoration of our forests is
needed to recreate historic conditions
Truth: There is growing debate
about whether most forest ecosystems
need any restoration. Nearly all
higher elevation mixed conifer and
subalpine forests grew in dense
stands that tended to burn at medium
to long intervals (often at intervals of
hundreds of years) with large patches
of mixed to high mortality so they are
well within historic conditions.
Low elevation ponderosa pine
forests were considered different
from the moister, higher elevation
forests and characterized as open and
park-like, and burned by frequent
low severity surface ires. However,
new research concludes that many
pine stands historically experienced
occasional high severity stand
replacement blazes and may not be
signiicantly outside of their historic
condition.
For instance, one recent
review paper concluded: “Current
attempts to ‘restore’ forests to open,
low-severity ire conditions may
not align with historical reference
conditions in most ponderosa pine
and mixed-conifer forests of western
North America.”
Myth: Logging reduces large
wildires.
Truth: Large wildires burn under
extreme weather conditions. Under
extreme weather, wildires burn
through, over and around clearcuts,
thinned forests, and areas that have
been prescribed burned. Such ires
are “controlled” when the weather
changes to more moderate conditions.
Logging may even increase ire
spread and ire severity.
The conclusion of the Sierra
Nevada report to Congress had this
to say: “Timber harvest, through
its effects on forest structure,
local microclimate, and fuels
accumulation, has increased ire
severity more than any other recent
human activity. Logged areas
generally showed a strong association
with increased rate of spread and
lame length, thereby suggesting
that tree harvesting could affect
the potential ire behavior within
landscapes. In general, rate of spread
and lame length were positively
correlated with the proportion of area
logged in the sample watersheds.”
Another study done by ire
ecologists at the Missoula Fire
Lab concluded: “Even extensive
fuel treatments may not reduce the
amount of area burned over the
long-term and furthermore, reduction
of area burned may actually be an
undesirable outcome.”
They go on to conclude: “Treating
fuels to reduce ire occurrence, ire
size, or amount of burned area is
ultimately both futile and counter-
productive.”
A new study soon to be published
found that reviewed 1,500 wildires
between 1984 and 2014 found that
actively managed forests had the
highest level of ire severity.
While those forests in protected
areas burned, on average, had the
lowest level of ire severity. In
other words, the best way to reduce
severe ires is to protect the land as
wilderness, not “manage” it.
Myth: Thinning national forest
lands will protect homes.
Truth: One only needs to reduce
the lammability within 100 feet of
homes to protect them. Reducing
fuels more than 100 feet beyond
the home confers no additional
protection.
As one study concluded: “It may
not be necessary or effective to
treat fuels in adjacent areas in order
to suppress ires before they reach
homes; rather, it is the treatment of
the fuels immediately proximate
to the residences, and the degree
to which the residential structures
themselves can ignite that determine
if the residences are vulnerable.”
Myth: Beetle outbreaks increases
the chances of wildire.
Truth: Any number of research
studies have documented that beetle
outbreaks have little effect or even
reduce the chance of large wildire
for a period of years. Dead trees do
not burn as well as live trees with
lammable resins. For example, one
study concluded, “We found no
detectable increase in the occurrence
of high-severity ires following ...
outbreaks. Dry conditions, rather
than changes in fuels associated with
outbreak, appear to be most limiting
to the occurrence of severe ires in
these forests.”
Myth: Large wildires have
increased.
Truth: If you start with the
middle of last century when the
climate was cooler and moister — a
climatic condition that reduces ire
spread — one might conclude there
are more large ires, but if your
starting point is earlier in the century
or even over the last thousand years,
there is no evidence for an increase
in large ires. We have a deicit of
large ires, and as a consequence of
the snag forest and dead wood habitat
that such ires creates. For instance,
a 2016 study concluded that “area
burned at high severity has overall
declined compared to pre-European
settlement.”
Myth: Dead trees are a sign of a
forest health problem.
Truth: Dead trees are critical to
healthy forest ecosystems. Some
250 scientists recently sent a letter
to Congress afirming “snag forest
habitat” are “ecological treasures
comparable to old growth forests.”
Unfortunately, as result of logging
and other forest management, we
have a deicit of dead trees in our
forest ecosystems. Episodic input of
dead woods results from wildire,
beetles, and disease. These natural
processes help maintain forest
ecosystem health.
■
George Wuerthner is an ecologist
who has published 38 books.
tax on wind
By RYAN CALL
Writers on the Range
n 1986, President Ronald Reagan observed that under his
predecessor, Jimmy Carter, “Government’s view of the
economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: ‘If
it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops
moving, subsidize it.’”
Reagan’s quip about the government’s interfering tendency
under a Democratic president drew laughter from those
attending a White House Conference on Small Business just
over 30 years ago. But in Wyoming, a handful of Republican
lawmakers have pushed a three-fold increase in the tax rate on
wind-energy production, and that is no laughing matter.
Wyoming is the only state in the nation that imposes a
$1 per megawatt tax speciically on power generation from
wind. For a state where the Republican-dominated Legislature
routinely invokes Reagan’s legacy, this latest proposal —
recently considered and fortunately rejected by the Wyoming
Legislature’s Joint Revenue Interim Committee — contradicts
his low-tax approach.
When entrepreneurs decide to invest billions of dollars and
almost a decade’s worth of planning to develop and deploy
new technologies, build signiicant infrastructure, and create
thousands of new and well-paying jobs, they do so hoping that
a state’s tax and regulatory policy will be predictable enough to
allow them to earn suficient returns on their signiicant capital
investment. But as Bill Miller, CEO of the Power Company
of Wyoming, told the Los Angeles Times: “Just about every
legislator we’ve met with asks us, ‘You tell us how much we
can tax you before we put you out of business.’” In a state
hurting from a decline in revenue from fossil fuels, is that how
elected oficials should help to spur economic growth?
The Bible records the observation that “the wind blows
wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell
where it comes from or where it is going.” In Wyoming, it
appears that a few state lawmakers have decided that the sound
of the wind signals only an opportunity for generating new tax
revenue.
It makes sense for the state and federal government to
impose severance taxes when oil, gas, precious metals and
other minerals are permanently taken from the land. But taxing
energy production from renewables such as wind and solar as if
they, too, were not renewable, makes no sense. Nor does it make
sense to single out a speciic form of energy production that has
the capacity to meet consumer demand and help reduce carbon
emissions. It’s almost as if wind power were a vice meriting the
kind of “sin taxes” imposed on alcohol and cigarettes.
It’s bad enough that Wyoming is the irst and only state in the
nation to impose a punitive tax on wind-energy production. This
tax needs to be repealed, and at the very least, state lawmakers
should resist any move to add more tax burdens to an industry
that we all need to prosper.
■
Ryan Call is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the
opinion service of High Country News (hcn.org).
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