A4
Opinion
wallowa.com
December 21, 2016
Wallowa County Chieftain
Who needs
more stuff?
By Tim Trainor
Wallowa County Chieftain
It’s almost Christmas, and many Wallowa County
procrastinators — myself included — are still searching for
the perfect gift.
Perhaps they are window shopping downtown. Perhaps
they are working late nights in their shop or quilting chair to
finish something beautiful for
someone special.
But here’s some radical
advice this gift giving season:
Don’t do it.
Much of the developed
Voice of the Chieftain
world has hit “peak stuff.”
Many Americans, and many people all over the world, have
too much of everything. And our future happiness depends on
realizing that.
This is, relatively, a good thing. We’re a materially
sufficient society. And it’s not necessarily doom and gloom
for many retail businesses, or the economy of the future.
In fact, some of the world’s biggest makers of “stuff” are
embracing the idea that the world doesn’t need more of that.
NPR reported earlier this year about hitting peak
production, peak supply, and peak demand. Beef and sugar
sales, for instance, cannot conceivably go any higher. We’re
also — as a species — coming up against peak population,
a hazy number that scientists and philosophers have been
debating for centuries.
Still, there has to be a limit somewhere —whether it’s
humans or candle holders.
“The use of stuff is plateauing out,”
IKEA executive Steve Howard told NPR
last year. IKEA, of course, is a company
that sells nothing but stuff — often cheap,
easily replaceable stuff.
It reminds me of George Orwell’s
classic dystopian novel “1984.” The
government-controlled world of the future
Trainor
is in a perpetual state of war as a means of
psychological control, but also as a means
to destroy things. Because destroying things eventually
requires rebuilding, and that requires the making and buying
of stuff. An endless cycle.
Yet perhaps it is cycle we can break.
Those weirdo Europeans, who have a lot more old stuff
than we do, are thinking about ways to deal with the glut.
The “Library of Things” in London is one answer — a
sort of cooperative where people pay to rent everything from
a carpet cleaner to a rake, from a backpack to a garden hose.
It helps city residents save money and save space, and it
saves hundreds or thousands of duplicitous things from being
purchased and thrown out and purchased again.
For a world that continues to see human populations
increase — and steadily migrate from rural spaces into cities,
— space is a real concern.
Consider that the U.S. self storage industry generated
$27.2 billion in revenues in 2014, according to the Wall
Street Journal. The newspaper noted that the industry has
been the fastest growing segment of the commercial real
estate industry for the last 40 years. About 90 percent of the
country’s storage units are in use, and about 10 percent of
American households currently rent one.
If you have space, Americans are likely to fill it with stuff.
Still, it is important to note that there are plenty of people
out there, in this country and in others, who are in real need.
They lack the stuff that make a life complete.
The Christmas season is perhaps the best time to think
of them, and donate and give of ourselves and our dollars. A
toy can brighten a child’s day, but food can give more deeper
pleasure and a scholarship can brighten a lifetime. An hour of
your time, a long-term mentorship and sustained neighborly
care, can deeply and powerfully impact a person’s life.
Teaching your child a family recipe or taking a friend to your
favorite secret, snowy trail can fire up new synapses in the
brain. Those experiences can nourish the soul and open a new
route to happiness. Giving the gift of time, even to yourself,
can cure many ails.
Christmas is a spiritual holiday. And while everyone who
will wake up Christmas morning to a BMW with a bow on it
is bound to feel some real joy, a longer and deeper peace can
be found in having and needing less. And besides, renting that
BMW means you don’t have to change the oil in the middle
of the winter.
EDITORIAL
USPS No. 665-100
P.O. Box 338 • Enterprise, OR 97828
Office: 209 NW First St., Enterprise, Ore.
Phone: 541-426-4567 • Fax: 541-426-3921
Wallowa County’s Newspaper Since 1884
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Contents copyright © 2016. All rights reserved. Reproduction
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Volume 134
Thinking about women, wishing
you all a special holiday season
It seems that this is a proper time of
year to think about women and their jour-
neys—especially the particular journey of
women in America and those individual
journeys being traveled by American girls
and women today.
Christianity has beloved Mary, the
mother of Jesus, at its center. That, at
times, has been cause for controversy
— humankind can always find reasons
to differ—with some adoring the Virgin
Mary and others claiming such adoration
takes away from the man at Christianity’s
center. I remember a book from some dis-
tant past which traced changing European
views of Mary — and thus of women and
society — through hundreds of years of
Mary portraits.
I can’t think of any contemporary por-
traits, though I am sure there are some,
even here in digitized America. Our artists
have other, more secular, concerns. Mov-
ies and magazine ads, online catalogs and
videos and television specials show a wide
range of images of women. And show that
there is controversy about how women are
celebrated and exploited. How should we
even LOOK at women? What should we
see? Mother? Mistress? Career woman?
Helpmate? President?
Although many girls and women see,
mimic, or reject and play off of these im-
ages, there is an implicit assumption that
men are hovering in the background —
once again — writing the ads, designing
the clothes, producing the movies, mak-
ing the decisions. Despite women favor-
ing Hillary by 12 points, a like 12 point
margin of men favoring Donald Trump
pushed him to the Presidency. (OK, I
know that women carried Barack Obama
in 2012 — that’s another column!
MAIN STREET
Rich Wandschneider
Of course women did not get to vote
for presidents in this country until 1920!
At its founding, only white male proper-
ty owners voted. Women’s right to inherit
and own property came later. And then the
vote. And then rights to equal treatment in
employment and education. So that today,
the number of women doctors and lawyers
is about equal; veterinarians are predomi-
nantly women, and women have recently
gained the majority of graduate school
spots. Men still predominate in financial
and technical fields.
And still own most of the farms and
ranches. This was a matter of discussion
in the class I taught again this year in La
Grande. On a day given to discussion of
gender issues in the region, wildlife biol-
ogist — and interim director of Oregon
State’s Ag program at Eastern Oregon
University — Pat Kennedy talked about
women in agriculture and natural resourc-
es. About illustrious women who traveled
as husbands’ helpmates in academia until
the 1970s, when the first women were
hired in wildlife, her field, on their own.
Our class of 32 range management, ani-
mal sciences, and natural resources majors
was, by the way, split exactly 16 and 16.
And a quick look tells you that the same
is true in university agricultural programs
across the country.
Pat asked the class to consider the
question of ownership of farms and ranch-
es, where women still comprise a very
small percentage. Why?, she asked, and
I repeated the question on the final exam:
“Given the Civil Rights Act and Title 9,
and in light of our class discussions, why
do you think are there so few women own-
er-operators of farms and ranches today?
What special obstacles do women face?”
Many students volunteered that in
their own families, parents had an equal
working relationship, although the farm
remained in the father’s name. Almost all
pointed to physical strength differences
between most women and men as an is-
sue, even in today’s agriculture. Many
pointed to expanded career opportunities
for women in other places taking them
away from the family farm, and almost all
cited ‘tradition.”
But the most interesting answer, to me,
was the business of family name. With
women marrying and taking a different
surname, a farm or ranch would not re-
main the “family” farm or ranch. This
notion is probably not even articulated by
the moms and dads, granddads and grand-
mas out there, but my survey of 32 bright
young people thinking agriculture put it
on the list.
Which got me to thinking that one of
the most important legacies of the wom-
en’s rights movement in America as far
as agriculture is concerned might just be
women retaining their maiden names at
marriage.
So there’s a hint to all of you young
wannabe farmer and rancher girls in East-
ern Oregon — hold onto the name!
And while you’re at it, to all the girls
and boys, moms, dads, grandmas and
grandpas out there, have some great hol-
iday discussions — and a grand holiday
season!
Public land users must join together
The western land use events of the last
few years seem to have been analyzed,
pondered, condemned, praised and gen-
erally discussed into a state of confusion
and stalemate. For 40 or so years I have
been active in the advocacy for econom-
ic natural resource development, mining,
timber, grazing and water. In these last
few years since the Hage case came the
Bullock/Quinn land grab, the Federal in-
trusion at Bunkerville , the James Redd
San Juan County Utah overreaction, the
Pautre Fire in South Dakota and most
recently the Hammond Family miscar-
riage of justice and Malheur Refuge and
Standing Rock pipeline standoffs. A myr-
iad of new groups have recognized the
abuses and failures of the federal man-
agement of our resource lands. Despite
all good intentions, no focused, unified
direction has been established by those
affected by federal abuse and misman-
agement. Individual states such as Utah
and Nevada have made the case inter-
nally for legislative changes demanding
transfer of most federally managed lands
to the state. Most other non-legislative
efforts have focused on raising monies
to support individuals’ efforts to litigate
abuses to their private and divided lands
use rights. An example is the well orga-
GUEST COLUMN
By Tim Smith
nized and well-intentioned but political-
ly entrenched cattlemen’s associations.
It seems three things are missing in the
efforts to eliminate bureaucratic resource
abuse: education on existing rights of
resource users; taking on the root of the
problem rather than fighting the after ef-
fects of current management abuse; and
selfless unified action.
The fundamental root of the problem
in current resource land use development
is federal management. The incredibly
large mass of land the feds are attempt-
ing to manage, under one set of rules, is
an abysmal failure for the resource, the
environment, the resource user and the
taxpayer. This will always be, due to the
sheer size and complexity of the lands
being mismanaged and the perennial
propensity for the fed agencies to grow
and be increasingly controlled by absen-
tee upper management. Classic examples
of that growth and absentee control is
the transfer of tax dollars from resource
production to fire “management” and
the onset of traveling teams of fire “in-
cident managers.” Fire ‘management’ or
mismanagement is now a huge taxpayer
funded business in the West, while the
resource production business wanes into
obscurity in many regions. Fire is now
the Forest Service and BLM’s largest seg-
ment of their budget. Distributing these
lands to state and county management
would attack the root of the mismanage-
ment we are currently experiencing. This
would increase efficiency, decrease cost
to taxpayers, increase response time to
resource and environmental threats and
establish local jurisdictions. Local juris-
dictions could knowledgeably respond
to specific resource abuses and damage
through local oversight, enforcement and
where necessary prosecution by the vio-
lators’ peers.
No one individual can afford the cost
in dollars, time and energy to take on the
policies of the federal government. Thus
our dedicated group in Harney County
was nearly thwarted in our local efforts
to help through education and unifica-
tion. At that time of realization we began
to see opportunities to join with others
across the West whose realization was
the same as ours.
Plenty of places to catch fish in a river
In response to Emmett Flynn’s letter in
the Dec. 5 edition:
Reading your letter brought back pleas-
ant memories as a kid fishing the Grande
Ronde. I know first-hand that it can be
disturbing seeing another fisherman or
fisherwoman casting their lines into your
favorite hole whether at school or other-
wise. Over a half-century ago, I was that
youngster that loved to fish for steelhead
at Troy. We knew the fishing holes that
were named for landmarks such as Mud
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Creek, Bear Creek, Wildcat Creek, while
others were named for people like the
Kiesecker Hole and Thompson Rock (for
George Thompson’s favorite hole). In the
fall, there was even a doctor who was a
relentless fisherman on the river. Every
Thursday without fail you could count
on Dr. Sharff being on the river trying his
luck to catch a steelhead.
What I am trying to say, Emmett, is
there are other people on the river that also
have their favorite hole and even though
they might be trying to fish your favorite
hole, you should share and do what all oth-
er fishermen do: Use your skills to catch
fish right under the other fisherman’s nose.
Good luck and keep a tight line!
Jon Erwin
Joseph Creek, Enterprise