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What's outside of your picture window today?

Just Want to Talk | Last Active: 6 days ago | Replies (2396)

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@joyces

What a terrific idea: an art show about the destruction of clear cutting!!! The west side of the Coast Range along the WA and OR coasts is one of the best carbon sinks anywhere, but the Doug Fir forest is being sliced down everywhere, leaving ugly bald patches and resulting in winter floods and lack of water every summer: every little coastal town suffers from insufficient water every summer now. The water that is left is too warm to be comfortable for salmon and steelhead. Oregon's Water Resources Dept. (OWRD) set up a huge pilot program about the future ways water should be used, and Lincoln County is the one example of, get this, "urban" water usage. That's pretty laughable in a county where the largest town has a little over 10,000 people! Because this pilot project had attention from the legislature, all state resource agencies, and the Governor's office, I thought it was an opportunity for great change. Hah! OWRD soon declared that industrial forestry, where the land is clear cut every 35 or 40 years while the trees are still very small was off the table for discussion, due to JOBS. Of course, this totally ignores all of us who rely on healthy fisheries for our jobs in the sport fishing industry, and tourism in general. Still, there is a groundswell of objection to having our forests mismanaged this way, with aerial spraying of the chemicals in Agent Orange following clear cutting. That means that the water coming off the clear cut area is full of contaminants and silt, so that it can't be used for domestic water without expensive treatment plants. I've monitored wild winter steelhead in a wild little stream on the north coast for 29 years, and we have the data to prove how bad the lethal combination of industrial timber management and climate change can be. When we started our data collection project, we couldn't conceive of the wild fish being threatened since the run was so strong and there was little human influence in the extremely rough country surrounding the Salmonberry River--but we're now seeing temperatures too high for steelhead for miles up the river, for long periods every summer.

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Replies to "What a terrific idea: an art show about the destruction of clear cutting!!! The west side..."

Joyce, I hesitated to give this comment a “like” because I don’t like it one little bit, except for the potential of an art show exposing the devastation of clear cutting. But it is my way of showing support for your anger, frustration, disappointment and pain over the egregious abuse of your (our) beloved forests.

@joyces. Thanks for your informative and intelligent response, Joyce. You certainly are on it with regard to the destruction that clearcutting causes to the vital watershed, the fish population, the human losses regarding the value of tourism to the economy, and for so many reasons far too numerous to mention. We in British Columbia suffer the exact same results of clearcutting as you do in your part of the world.