Ray, one time about fifteen years ago, not sure when exactly but during the reign of the reagan-type FOs, i'm standing with a young friend on a street that leads directly from the space needle to the harbour, just at the point where it breaks over the hill and starts dropping, it's getting dusk and we're waiting for the fireworks, it's the fourth of July ..... good viewpoint, there are a few other people around there, and one of them looks at me, points at my pickup, and growls 'what are you, some kind of X____ foreign logger or something' and i naturally reply 'right X___ on you X___ X___ing X__________', and there we are, instant buddies, we launch straightaway into meaningful conversation, finding these pleasantries adequate as an introduction, we end up at one point in a pub that purports to be the oldest in town .... turns out he is maybe ten years older than i, he's begun his logging in the early to mid-fifties, and largely in that Edmonds to Olympia et environs region, he's never worked in camp, always travelled from home, and lives within some short drive of downtown, quite similar to my situation at the time .... we get to comparing the present to the past, as loggers are wont to do, especially in respect to individual pieces of land, it's the old 'what's growing there now' question .... well, precious bloody little was growing where he had worked, for the most part the land had been paved and concreted and plasticked and condoed behind him so that nothing could grow there but e. coli and crimes/day statistics .... this is remarkably similar, just about ten or twenty years advanced, to my own situation at the time, doing nuclear war on private developers' land in advance of their pavement 'n plastik Endlösung ... lots of money in it, and somebody's got to do it or the wood goes to waste, but it turns the gut nevertheless
Forestry is another matter entirely - much of this province is too steep for these plastik pushers, and in the hands of the crown in any case, they cannot here extend their pestilence beyond the limits of the old grants - there is one thing for which the land is suited, growing timber, and so that is what we do, what we have done for over a hundred years, and what we shall do in the future, and do well, your FOs be damned
Now you may choose to criticise our forestry in as ill-informed or myopically selective a manner as you wish, fill yer boots, but i maintain that is among the lightest and most sensitive uses that mankind has for land - we are not paving it over to deaden it forever, we are not ploughing it up each year to make it wash away - we take a tree, we plant another, and we come back in eighty to one hundred twenty years ... that's pretty light, amigo
The criticism we hear pretty much all comes from the inhabitants of obscenely huge and permanent clearcuts covered with said pavement and plastik etc, go figure eh .... like the europeans, who wiped out all, and i mean all, their original forests centuries ago, and for some reason feel entitled to get on our case for the less than half of our province that we designate working forest and harvest in sustainable manner ... well we just go <shrug>it's a strange species this one ain't it</shrug>, and carry on - many a community here depends completely on timber, and timber it shall be, your FOs be damned
I can show you a place - on forestry land, not developers' prey - where in the late sixties i fell timber, and where i could economically log the place again some thirty-two or so years later, the second-growth is that advanced .... i have fotos of myself and two others standing on a stump with a panoramic view behind us, i still know where that stump is and have taken people there within the last three years, there is no longer any but a short-range view for the camera, it's deep woods again now, and will be for sixty years or so, and then again in ninety to one hundred fifty years, ad infinitum, your FOs be damned
While this is off the FOs vs Normal People topic, it is an off-topic on which the FOs would like to attack us, however it is quite simple to turn their argument around and say hey may it please the court let's examine the neighbouring states of this offending union, what does their situation look like, might they perhaps a time or two have had areas aesthetically displeasing to pavement-dwellers? ..... glass houses, stones, the action of throwing - cuidado amigo ... cheers |
