TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
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EDITORIAL
Optimistic
news from
Baker 5J
schools
When the 2020-21 school year for the Baker School
District started Sept. 8, students weren’t were they
normally are.
Or where they need to be.
Which is sitting in a classroom, learning from their
teachers along with their classmates.
But as disappointing as it was to see local students
taking classes instead by computer, a system that
despite the district’s investment in better technology
has inherent and inevitable limitations, this unfor-
tunate effect of the coronavirus pandemic might not
last much longer.
At least not for Baker’s younger students.
The Baker School Board last week discussed the
possibility of having students from preschool through
the sixth grade return to their classrooms starting
Oct. 12.
This welcome development is a possibility — no
fi nal decision has been made — due to declining
numbers of new COVID-19 cases in Baker County.
The situation is more challenging for students in
Baker Middle School and Baker High School because
they, unlike younger students who spend most of
their day in a single room, move between classrooms
during the day and thus have contact with a larger
number of their classmates. State guidelines for in-
person classes limit the number of such contacts per
week to 50.
Although every household, and every student, is
unique, it seems all but certain that younger stu-
dents are more likely to be negatively affected by on-
line education. Among other things, teachers simply
can’t give students the level of attention possible in a
classroom. The challenge is considerable for parents,
as well, since elementary students can’t look after
themselves, and their classes, as well as middle and
high schoolers.
It’s gratifying to see the school board, and district
offi cials, seek to resume in-person classes, for as
many students as possible, as soon as the district
meets state standards.
Students already missed an entire term of “nor-
mal” school during the spring. These lost opportuni-
ties for lifelong learning can’t be made up.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Columnists Debate Topic: What Causes Western Wildfi res?
Climate change is the culprit
In southern Oregon, we have been
living with the effects of climate change
for years.
Our summers are hotter, drier and
increasingly smoky due to wildfi res.
Smoke has shut down performances
at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
and endangered the health of outdoor
workers, while our rivers bloom with
toxic algae.
But nothing makes you feel the effect
of climate change bone deep like watch-
ing your community turn to ash.
I’m the executive director of Rogue
Climate and a lifelong resident of the
Rogue Valley in southern Oregon. After
fl eeing our homes with our friends and
families while entire communities went
up in fl ames Sept. 8, my colleagues
and I can say with authority that the
climate crisis is here today, and it’s a
direct threat to public health and safety.
Our offi ce in Phoenix, Oregon, burned
to the ground.
Our region is not a stranger to
wildfi re, which is a natural part of the
forest ecosystem, and fi re has been used
by indigenous communities to care for
the forests for millennia. But climate
change is changing how fi re operates in
the West.
These wildfi res were a perfect storm:
dry forests and strong easterly winds
that pushed fi res from forested areas
into populated towns. Thousands of
people had to evacuate their homes,
setting aside concerns about the CO-
VID-19 pandemic to stay with friends
or at shelters.
When it was all said and done, the
fi re destroyed much of the small towns
of Talent and Phoenix, and burned into
Medford. More than 1,700 homes and
businesses burned.
So what can we learn from this
unprecedented climate-driven catastro-
HANNAH SOHL
phe? A lot, it turns out.
CLIMATE SOLUTIONS IMPROVE
LIVES NOW
As winds picked up, electric utilities
were forced to turn off the power in Tal-
ent to avoid sparking more fi res.
Our organization, along with others,
set up mobile charging stations where
displaced families could charge elec-
tronics, enabling them to let frightened
friends and family know that they were
safe.
Now our team is collecting and dis-
tributing emergency supplies — water,
tents, N95 masks and more — to people
who lost everything to the fi res.
In a world of more extreme weather,
locally owned, resilient power systems
driven by clean energy will be key to
picking up the pieces after a disaster.
Homes and community centers with
rooftop solar and batteries don’t have to
wait for power lines to be repaired. Tal-
ent has a commitment to reach 100%
clean energy by 2030 and has one of
the most aggressive clean energy action
plans in the state.
These kinds of clean energy efforts
help accelerate the transition away
from the fossil fuel projects that heat
the atmosphere, like the massive
proposed Jordan Cove liquefi ed natural
gas export terminal that would cut an
explosive pipeline through Oregon.
EVERYONE DESERVES CLEAN AIR
Those who didn’t lose homes have still
been forced to live with choking wildfi re
smoke that poses an immense risk to
peoples’ respiratory health.
Much of the West Coast has registered
unhealthy or hazardous air quality for
more than a week, forcing people to
stay indoors. Scientists say prolonged
exposure to wildfi re smoke can lead to
decreased lung function, higher rates
of respiratory problems and potentially
more deaths in patients battling CO-
VID-19.
Eventually, Pacifi c Ocean winds will
clear the smoke, and a combination of
autumn rains and the round-the-clock
work of brave local fi refi ghters will put
out the fi res.
But many communities across the
country don’t get to take a break from
living with unhealthy air. Industrial
factories, power plants and freeways
disproportionately pollute neighborhoods
with large populations of Black, indig-
enous and other people of color.
Here in southern Oregon, large propor-
tions of Latinx workers have outdoor jobs
in agriculture, construction or forestry,
where they are exposed to toxins daily
and can’t afford to take a day off when air
quality gets hazardous. Our temporary
air quality nightmare is the day-to-day
reality for many of our neighbors.
While climate change is clearly here
now, there are still better and worse
possible futures — and which future we
will get depends on what we do today. For
decades, corporate special interests have
been able to block urgent climate action
despite scientists’ warnings.
These fi res underscore that we simply
can’t let that happen any longer. So as we
show up to support our community and
rebuild, we have to start implementing
large-scale solutions now.
It is a matter of justice. It is a matter of
survival.
Hannah Sohl is the executive director
of Rogue Climate. She wrote this for
InsideSources.com.
Poor forest management puts forests in peril
The catastrophic wildfi res rag-
ing up and down the West Coast
should force a radical reversal of
30 years of disastrous government
policies.
Instead, the politicians and en-
vironmental pressure groups who
gave us these policies are using
climate change as a smokescreen
to avoid blame and to prevent the
change of direction in management
needed to restore health to our for-
ests and thereby reduce fi re risks.
We might be able to forgive
those who, like Democratic
presidential nominee Joe Biden,
know nothing about what they are
talking about when they blame the
fi res on climate change.
It is enough to point out that the
big fi res are occurring almost ex-
clusively on public land — national
forests, Bureau of Land Manage-
ment forests and rangelands, and
state forests — and not on private-
ly owned forests.
But the Sierra Club, founded
by John Muir in 1892 to protect
Yosemite National Park and other
MYRON EBELL
wonders in California’s Sierra
Nevada Mountains, should know
better. The Sierra Club has led the
campaign to end active manage-
ment of our public lands and
since 1996 has offi cially opposed
commercial logging in all national
forests.
Yet here is a statement pub-
lished on Aug. 27 by the Sierra
Club’s executive director, Michael
Brune: “If any good can come from
this fi re season, let it be that it
serves as a wake-up call for our
politicians. We must end the cycle
of putting fossil fuel interests
before public health and safety
— right here, and right now ...
California can set the standard for
environmental policies across the
country. If we sharply reduce emis-
sions, we show the rest of the US
what’s possible.”
While Congress has not legally
banned commercial logging, Sierra
Club allies like Reps. Peter De-
Fazio, D-Ore., and Jared Huffman,
D-Calif., who represent two of the
districts hardest hit by this year’s
fi res, have successfully pushed for
management changes that come
pretty close to a ban.
Timber production from national
forests averaged 12 billion board
feet per year in the 1980s. As a
result of the “timber wars,” which
most notably included listing of the
spotted owl as a threatened species
under the Endangered Species
Act in 1990, timber production
declined precipitously through the
1990s and has averaged between 2
and 3 billion board feet since 2000.
The Trump administration, to
its credit, has tried to increase the
cut to at least 4 billion board feet
in the face of fi erce opposition from
Congress and the environmental
movement.
Cutting 2 billion board feet of
timber a year while growing trees
add between 14 and 17 billion
board feet a year in total forest
volume has inevitably led to mas-
sive fuel buildup. And massive fuel
buildup inevitably leads to disease
and insect infestation and eventu-
ally to catastrophic fi res.
Bill Dennison, former president
of California Forestry Association,
is one of the many professional
foresters who warned in the early
1990s of the consequences of clos-
ing the national forests to logging.
But you don’t need to be a
professional forester to see that
those warnings have come true.
Anyone driving through forests in
the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade
Mountains, or the Coast Range can
see the destruction.
Tens of millions of dead trees as
a result of bark beetle infestations.
Endless thickets of unhealthy
small trees where there should be
mighty stands of Douglas-fi r or
ponderosa pine. And huge areas —
more and bigger every year — that
have been incinerated by fi re, leav-
ing nothing but blackened trunks
and wildlife carcasses.
In the face of this environmental
and economic catastrophe, there
have been calls for modest reforms.
Some advocate more prescribed
burns. Others promote more pro-
grams to thin overgrown thickets.
There is even a bill in Congress to
allow salvage logging without the
environmental reviews (followed
by lawsuits) that now last so long
that the dead or burned timber has
decayed so much that it is worth-
less before salvage begins.
But these reforms are mere
Band-Aids when a heart trans-
plant is the only thing that will
save the patient. If we are going to
save our public forests and reduce
the risk of catastrophic fi res, a
healthy timber industry must be
restored.
It won’t be easy. Overcoming in-
tense opposition to logging is only
the fi rst step.
Myron Ebell is director of the Center
for Energy and Environment at the
Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Ebell, who is a 1971 graduate of
Baker High School, wrote this for
InsideSources.com.