VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, November 26, 2016
East Oregonian
Ursula K. Le Guin’s prophetic vision
Quick takes
L
Japanese restaurants come
to Umatilla County
So cool. I’ve been saying for years that
Pendleton needs a sushi restaurant. I do
wish they would get some real chopsticks
though. The cheep disposal kind doesn’t fit
the nice atmosphere.
— Lisa Bork
Don’t really know if I like sushi but
excited to try something new!
— Kelli Stewart
I wondered when people would get tired
of hamburgers.
— Scott Hernandez
State looks at new ways
to plug budget holes
The people voted no (on Measure 97), so
now they want to force the tax on the people
anyways?
— Richard Rockwell
Really, why do we vote if they don’t
understand people don’t want it?
Maria Richards
Alkio celebrates her 100th
She was my home economics teacher.
She was the one that got me interested in
sewing and cooking.
— Debbie Steinnerd
I still remember my eighth grade class,
you were always smiling Mrs. Alkio.
— Dianne Kaser McEwen
Tweets from the
president -elect
The cast and producers of Hamilton, which
I hear is highly overrated, should immediately
apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible
behavior.
—@realDonaldTrump
I watched parts of Saturday Night Live last
night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show —
nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?
— @realDonaldTrump
The only bad thing about winning the
presidency is that I did not have the time to go
through a long but winning trial on Trump U.
Too bad!
—@realDonaldTrump
I have always had a good relationship with
Chuck Schumer. He is far smarter than Harry
Reid and has the ability to get things done.
Good news!
—@realDonaldTrump
I canceled today’s meeting with the failing
@nytimes when the terms and conditions of
the meeting were changed at the last moment.
Not nice.
—@realDonaldTrump
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We will,
together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
—@realDonaldTrump
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.
ast year The New Yorker
zeroed in on the natural
hazards of our Oregon
coast in Kathryn Schulz’s “The
earthquake that will devastate the
Pacific Northwest.”
Maybe it is appropriate that
the magazine, in their Oct. 17
issue, now focuses not on a
force of nature but a voice for
humanity.
“The Fantastic Ursula K. Le
Guin” by Lisa Phillips offers an
intimate portrayal of the only
living author — with Philip Roth
— in the Library of America
series.
Le Guin first enchanted
readers in the 1960s and never
stopped. Among the most
honored of America’s authors,
she lives in Portland and
Cannon Beach. “We believe
she is one of America’s finest
authors and a bold and honest
voice in the entire field of
literature,” Cannon Beach Book
Company’s co-owner Maureen
Dooley-Sroufe said this week.
At the Cannon Beach Book
Company a request for Ursula
K. LeGuin’s writing results in a
“walking tour” of the store.
“We start in science-fiction/
fantasy, head over to children’s
books, on to poetry, then to
essays and finally Pacific
Northwest Regional books,”
Dooley-Sroufe said. “Ursula K.
Le Guin is the only author whose
books we feature in this way —
it reflects the great diversity and
breadth of her work.
“She is a part-time resident of
Cannon Beach, and we delight in
knowing that she may be writing,
relaxing or strolling to the beach
right now,” Dooley-Sroufe
added.
Watt Childress, co-owner of
Jupiter’s Rare & Used Books,
praised Le Guin in an interview
with the Gazette’s Erick Bengel.
Le Guin’s work, Childress
said, “rises to the level of epic
myth that burrows deeply into
our consciousness ... She speaks
from a place and a position that
commands respect.”
Le Guin’s books are magical,
not necessarily cheerful hocus-
pocus, but with cloudy edges
teased into being by a prankish
wizard.
In “Unlocking the Air,” the
author warns: “There is no ‘after’
in ‘happily ever after.’”
But “after” is what Le Guin
pursues, our ability to re-invent,
re-create ourselves: “We can tell
the story over, we can tell the
story till we get it right.”
Imagining the future
In The New Yorker’s profile,
Phillips draws a biographical arc
describing a young Le Guin as
an outsider uncomfortable with
the cultural cliques of the 1950s
and ’60s, “never at home with
establishments of any kind.”
As a young writer Le Guin
acutely felt the closed society of
both literary and male-dominated
Submitted photo
Filmmaker Arwen Curry, producer and director of “The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin,” with the
author in Cannon Beach.
elites, each to stymie her and
then shape her own genre-de-
fining path.
A frustrating period of
rejections gave way to a venture
into a new genre.
“I just didn’t know what to
do with my stuff until I stumbled
into science fiction and fantasy,”
Le Guin tells Phillips. “And then,
of course, they knew what to do
with it.”
The author’s success was
immediate. Science fiction
opened Le Guin up to writing
not only about aliens, but
from “alien” points of view:
“composing the political
manifesto of an ant, wondering
what it would be like if humans
had the seasonal sexuality of
birds, imagining love in a society
in which a marriage involves
four people.”
The author, through her
characters, was questioning and
redefining the modern gender
experience.
At home in Oregon
Le Guin slings wicked
puns, to wit, her short story title
“Ether, OR: For the Narrative
Americans.”
The story, like a significant
part of her work, pays homage to
the state where her great-grand-
father arrived from California in
1873.
And who could be more of an
archetypal Oregonian superhero
than George Orr, the man who
can stop an earthquake, in “The
Lathe of Heaven”?
When on the coast, Le Guin
tells The New Yorker, she “does
the stupid, ordinary stuff that
has to be done that you can’t let
go.” That also includes partici-
pation in local literary activities,
including the 2013 program “Get
Lit at the Beach.”
For a glimpse behind the front
door, visit Le Guin’s blog, where
she provides rants, cat photos,
poetry, even rules of the game
“Fibble,” where “the only words
allowed are words that (so far
as anybody there knows) do not
exist.”
“Doing fine but not doing
very much,” Le Guin posted in
September.
A late October health update
(Le Guin suffers from a congen-
ital heart murmur that landed her
in the hospital): “Can’t hang from
branches yet, but am real good at
moving slo o o w w l y…”
A passionate voice
We don’t often think of
courage as a literary trait — Le
Guin reminds us otherwise.
“The measure of a civilization
may be the individual’s ability
to speak the truth,” Le Guin
proclaimed in the 1976 essay
“Language of the Night.”
Le Guin encourages us to be
masters of our own destiny, like
George Orr, whose dreams can
alter reality.
Le Guin celebrates the power
of imagination and the individu-
al’s freedom to express it.
“Don’t worry about control!
Freedom is what you’re working
toward!” she writes.
The unconscious mind is “the
wellspring of health, imagina-
tion, creativity,” to be expressed
The many problems with grazing
T
he Department of Interior recently
released its Integrated Rangeland
Fire Management Strategy
whose goal is to reduce range fires in
sagebrush ecosystems critical to sage
grouse.
The plan correctly identifies that
cheatgrass, a highly flammable exotic
annual, is a major threat to the bird,
as well as the sagebrush ecosystems.
However, the plan
failed to acknowledge
that livestock grazing
is the major factor
facilitating the spread
of cheatgrass and
targeted grazing as a
fire prevention solution
is a delusion for reasons
I’ll discuss below.
Even if livestock
grazing were effective,
there is collateral
damage to sagebrush
ecosystems that is
typically ignored.
Worse, livestock
grazing has multiple other impacts
on sage grouse at all stages of life
cycle that are virtually impossible to
eliminate.
Cheatgrass, as an annual, whose
seeds can remain viable in the soil for
years, can burn repeatedly, even every
summer, and maintain itself on the site.
Native perennial grasses and sagebrush,
by contrast, historically burned at long
fire rotations, often up to hundreds of
years. They cannot survive frequent
repeated burns.
One of the factors that protects
native grasses from cheatgrass invasion
are soil crusts. These crusts cover the
soil surface in the spaces between
the native bunchgrasses. They make
it difficult for cheatgrass seeds to
become established. However, when
the soil crust is broken and disturbed by
livestock (or other activities like ATVs)
across the landscape, it provides an
Page 5A
empty niche for cheatgrass to become
established.
In addition to facilitating the seeding
and establishment of cheatgrass,
livestock preferentially graze native
grasses before they consume cheatgrass.
Thus, the native grasses are suffering
losses. This increases the gaps between
plants, opening more of the soil surface
to colonization by cheatgrass.
To quote from one
paper by Reisner et al.
2013: “If the goal is to
conserve and restore
resistance of these
(sagebrush ecosystem)
systems … Passive
restoration by reducing
cumulative cattle
grazing may be one of
the most effective means
of achieving these three
goals.” There are several
scientific studies that
purport to show that
targeted grazing can
reduce fire intensity
and preclude rangeland fires. There are
many inconsistency in these reports.
The biggest problem with these
studies is that they don’t work on a
landscape scale, nor under extreme fire
weather conditions, which are the only
times when you have large range fires.
To be effective targeted grazing
requires highly concentrated animals
in small areas, which ensures that
native grasses and sagebrush will be
trampled and the soil crusts destroyed,
thus aiding even more cheatgrass
establishment. Nearly all the studies
that purport to show that livestock
can reduce fuels are done under
very controlled conditions in small
acreage with electric fencing and/or
tightly herded concentrated animals.
However, not only is this expensive to
implement, translating such a model
of concentrated grazing across the vast
grazing allotments that are typical of
When the soil
crust is broken
or disturbed,
it provides an
empty niche
for cheatgrass
to become
established.
public and private lands in the arid West
is impossible.
Grazing sufficiently severe enough
to reduce fuels will compact soils,
increase drying of soils, reduce carbon
storage, reduce forage for other native
herbivores like elk, and reduce hiding/
security cover for many ground nesting
animals. This includes the sage grouse.
The second problem with target
grazing proponents is a failure to
understand or acknowledge the
conditions that create large rangelands
fires. All large fires are driven by
extreme fire weather/climate conditions.
You need extended drought, high
temperatures, low humidity and most
importantly high winds. If you do not
have these ingredients with an ignition
source, you simply don’t get a large
uncontrollable fire. However, anecdotal
evidence from large range fires, as well
as many studies, have documented
that under extreme weather conditions,
you cannot stop range fire. High winds
blow embers miles ahead of any flame
front. Even presuming targeted grazing
had sufficiently reduced fuels to affect
fire behavior, it simply cannot preclude
large wind-driven fires, which are the
only blazes that pose a threat to the
sagebrush ecosystem.
Indeed, one scientific paper by
Bruegger et.al (2015) and widely
cited by livestock advocates in
support of targeted grazing admitted
its final conclusions: “Although it is a
promising tool for altering fire behavior,
targeted grazing will be most effective
in grass communities under moderate
weather conditions.”
Targeted grazing, as its name
implies, can only affect a small area,
and typically enhances the spread of
cheatgrass.
■
George Wuerthner is an ecologist
who has published 38 books, including
one dealing with livestock grazing
impacts.
freely and without restraint.
The author’s voice resonated
in a passionate speech at the
2014 National Book Awards:
“Right now, I think we need
writers who know the difference
between production of a market
commodity and the practice of
an art,” Le Guin said. “We’ll
need writers who can remember
freedom — poets, visionaries —
realists of a larger reality.”
In an age of self-censorship
and media-bashing from right
and left, Le Guin provides
inspiration for the creative voice
in all of us.
“We believe she is one of
America’s finest authors and
a bold and honest voice in
the entire field of literature,”
Dooley-Sroufe said. “Her
support of authors, readers and
the art of creative writing is
legendary.”
Sometimes politics jump from
abstraction to “larger reality” in a
jolting manner. Le Guin, like her
characters, seems to possess the
power to conjure a reality eerily
similar to our own.
I wonder if I’m the only
one reflecting on this chilling
opening to Le Guin’s “Dispos-
sessed”:
“There was a wall,” Le Guin
writes. “It did not look important.
… But the idea was real. It was
important. For seven generations
there had been nothing in the
world more important than
that wall. Like all walls it was
ambiguous, two-faced. What was
inside it and what was outside it
depended upon which side of it
you were on.”
In the most highly charged
political atmosphere in history,
Le Guin offers a steady vision
into our world — internal and
external — as timely as when
she first put pen to page.
■
R.J. Marx is editor of the
Seaside Signal and Cannon
Beach Gazette, sister papers of
the East Oregonian.
How to get most value
out of Oregon forest
The Bend Bulletin
T
he Elliott State Forest, located in the Oregon
Coast Range northeast of Coos Bay, is for sale.
State officials have received a single bid for
the 82,000-acre forest, which they decided to sell in
2014. It’s a decision that has environmental groups
up in arms.
Yet the state Land Board’s decision may be the
only way to put the land to the use for which it was
intended. In turn, that’s a reflection on the state of
forestry in Oregon these days, and it’s not a pretty
picture.
The forest has its roots in the 3.5 million acres the
federal government granted Oregon when it became
a state. That land, much of which was scattered in
parcels, was expected to produce income for the
state’s schools, and the state constitution requires that
it be managed to do so. In 1930 the state and federal
governments completed the land swap that gave the
Elliott the form and location it has today.
The Land Board is charged with managing the land
for the benefit of K-12 education. It was a relatively
easy task for years, when the forest generated millions
of dollars of income from the sale of timber. Sales
peaked in the mid-1980s, however, and with the
federal listing of the northern spotted owl as threatened
in 1990, the picture changed.
Combine that listing with lawsuits over many of the
state’s plans for the forest, and the decision to sell the
Elliott almost seems like a foregone conclusion. Suits
have challenged the state’s conservation plan and its
decisions to sell timber — also a threat to the marbled
murrelet, another bird listed as threatened — over the
years.
Today the Elliott is a money loser. It does actually
turn a profit some years, but generally not more than
$1 million. Other years it costs the state more than is
collected.
No doubt that’s why the Land Board got one bid,
for exactly the appraisal price of the property. No one
but Lone Rock Timber Management, working with the
Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians, thought it was
worth even that much.
If environmental groups are unhappy with the
decision to sell, they have only themselves to blame.
Having brought logging and the revenue it generates to
its knees, they’ve left the state with no other option.