Elizabeth: Here, the main forest tree is Doug fir, which takes 80 years to be old enough to be called "mature" without laughing. The trees that were cut down above our place were all old growth spruce, hundreds of years old. That's the NW coastal problem: the trees that are native to our very hilly country are all slow-growing, but industrial forestry companies want to provide a steady income for stockholders, so they clear cut on short rotations of 40, even 35 years, when the trees are very small. We see log trucks with big piles of tiny trees, headed for pressboard factories. Because young trees require lots of water, all the coastal towns fail to have enough water every summer: most rivers have zero stream flow at some point, which is bad for fish. All rivers are far, far more warmer and lower than they used to be, a lethal combination of climate change and clear cutting. The young trees aren't large enough to soak up winter storm water, but they rob rivers of summer flows as they grow.

The cutting done above our place was yet another attempt to develop the extremely steep 200+ acres east of us. In this case, the developer got permission from the City to extend a major road, cutting a swath roughly 300' wide by a half-mile long...without any provision for runoff. The City's engineer was "surprised" that this has resulted in flooding every winter since the road was extended in 2008. "Surprised," indeed! The developer, like the seven before him, went bankrupt; the City now owns all that acreage and, yes, they can be sued for trespass of their water flooding our house and driveway. The one house closer to the ocean is flooded every winter, and they, too, can sue for trespass, which appears to be the only way to get anything done.

When I bought this place 60 years ago it was because of the pretty little creek that bubbled through a line of alder trees. Due to developers having illegally channelized the creek, illegally extended our road due west instead of following the north bank of the creek (i.e., no culvert required), etc. we've lost a half-acre of yard to the ever-growing marsh. Every winter, we look out, not on the pretty little creek, but on a huge mudflat. We do have a proposal to stop the growth of the marsh and increase drainage out to the ocean, but even that, expensive though it is, will not restore the creek to what it used to be. I refer to it as "The Death of Logan Creek."