I stole the video from Heraldo.
The thread started right in on a discussion of the GPU, where so many blog topics of limited relationship to the issue have tread.
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June 28, 2010 at 12:39 pm
A Team go!
Plan A will stop this!
June 28, 2010 at 10:29 pm
the reasonable anonymous
Well Eric, you’re cerrtainly entitled to your opinion that the issue of corporate-owned Big Timber vs. owner-occupied Small Timber is of “limited realtionship” to the GPU debate. Obviously I disagree. So in case you have readers who don’t check out the thread at Heraldo’s I thought I’d just copy and paste my first comment from there, which I must admit I rather enjoyed writing. Yeah, its provocative, but, well, who isn’t provocative at times on these here intertubes? (By the way, on Heraldo’s comment thread I also have been having a pretty interesting discussion with “Bolithio” on the more specific subject of current timber practices, including clear-cutting).
So, in response to the EPIC video of Green Diamond clearcuts:
What a fine example of the wonderful job that corporate Big Timber is doing in preserving our forest ecosystems, more proof that large centralized corporate ownership is vastly superior to small, owner-occupied timber.
As you can see from the film, Big Timber causes no “fragmentation” of the habitat, no new haul roads or cable yarding to “bleed sediment” into our creeks, and you can be sure that those lovely clear-cuts have absolutely no effect on the drying up of our creeks and rivers during the dry months.
Watching this film has inspired this great idea: Why don’t we make it very difficult, maybe even nearly impossible, for small TPZ landowners to build even a single residence on their parcel? That way they’ll be much more likely to sell off their holdings to Big Timber, yielding all the wonderful benefits of large, centralized corporate ownership that are so clearly shown in this video.
Those pesky would-be homesteaders and small timberland owners who selfishly insist on harvesting less frequently and more selectively, who have the temerity to decommission old logging roads and improve remaining ones, the ones who have this weird fetish for restoration forestry, responsible land stewardship, local self-reliance and small-scale agriculture — clearly they are the true enemy, and the sooner they can be forced out in favor of Big Timber, the better off the forest will be, right?
Now we can’t come right out and say that we want to force these dastardly homesteaders and small timberland owners to sell out to Big Timber, so instead, we can loudly complain that the small timberland owners don’t harvest enough timber fast enough, while at the same time raising the spectre of Santa-Rosa-like housing subdivisions cropping up throughout our rural landscape. We can USE the issue of dry-season water scarcity to demonize rural residents, and be sure not to focus on solutions like winter water storage, conservation, and the use of graywater and composting privies.
We can tell our hard-core enviro supporters that we’re pushing for drastic measures to curtail any new building on TPZ lands, and at the same time run radio ads that tell rural property owners that little to nothing will change with our proposals.
And since we’ll never win public approval for a policy of straight-out banning all new residences on TPZ lands, we can instead create a de-facto ban by requiring TPZ owners to go through an expensive, time-consuming, onerous, convoluted and highly uncertain discretionary permit process, in which they will have to prove (to county Planning Staff who, conveniently, have already deomstrated their bias against allowing a residence on a TPZ parcel) that their residence will be necessary for their “active management” for timber production.
That way only the very, very rich will be able to afford to build a house on a TPZ parcel, the value of TPZ parcels will drop like a rock, and many small TPZ owners will be forced to sell out to Big Timber. As a bonus, by reducing the utility of TPZ parcels, we’ll be able to reduce their market value and thereby reduce county property tax revenues by millions of dollars practically overnight (solving the county’s serious problem of having way too much tax revenue).
And if we succeed in all of this, someday much more of our forests, no longer threatened by those forest-restoring, selectively harvesting small TPZ owners, will come under the enlightened influence of Big Timber, yielding the ecological wonderland shown so clearly in this film.
Now, if only there was some organization, some movement, some politicians who were either naiive enough or cynical enough to push this agenda….
June 29, 2010 at 11:10 am
anonymous
“Plan A will stop this!”
BS. Plan A is a timber corporation dream. Large chunks of timberland locked up behind gates with no small timberland stakeholder neighbors. Clearcuts, herbicides…this is exactly what Bonnie and Clif are talking about when they talk about “protecting our timber resource” for the future. Corporate logging. Plan A bodes ill for the future. Plan A will transition timber money from local small acreage timber owners and send it to far away corporate owners instead. RA has it right.
Some Healthy Humbolts are in the know. Most are dupes. And the environmentalists have been successfully divided. Will they be conquered?
June 29, 2010 at 11:27 am
Eric Kirk
Anonymous 11:10 – then why are they and their surrogates supporting Plan “D?”