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Posted on 07/18/2025 8:51:44 PM PDT by george76
People coming of political age in the last decade or so were no doubt shocked to learn of the Biden administration’s insane plan for saving the northern spotted owl from purported extinction. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act, preserving the owl requires slaughtering nearly half a million barred owls at a cost, opponents say, of $1.3 billion over the next 30 years. That is so, the FWS maintains, because the larger, aggressive barred owl is killing its cousin at a prodigious rate.
Perhaps more stunning to these political newcomers is that the FWS made a similar prediction over 30 years ago regarding the northern spotted owl. In the early 1990s, the agency declared that logging in the Pacific Northwest, throughout Washington, Oregon, and northern California, was destroying the owl’s essential habitat and must end.
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1993, the Clinton-Gore administration, over the objections of tiny timber towns throughout the region and those who had worked, lived, and recreated there for generations, did just that. The government’s edict, an 80% reduction in timber harvesting, soon became 90%, devastating some 130 rural communities in Oregon and Washington alone.
Thirty years later, nothing has changed. None of these communities has “recovered.” Apparently, working for the FWS means never having to say, “We got it wrong,” let alone, “We’re sorry.”
President Donald Trump has promised relief, both by “Restoring Gold Standard Science” and by resuming the original mission of the Forest Service — that is, the “continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” In the meantime, the daily news tells of ravenous, deadly, and destructive wildfires sweeping across neglected federal lands — that is, lands off-limits to thinning, wood production, and even the basic necessity of fire breaks for town safety, as revealed horrifically in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.
Fortunately, for those who care about nature and the people who live and work in its midst, there is an exciting, fast-paced, fact-based novel in which only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain by T.H. Platt follows environmental reporter Grace Newman as she clashes with a truth-telling third-generation logger at an environmental conference in Los Angeles. She sets out for the Pacific Northwest to uncover his lies and retain the acclaim of her host of friends in the environmental and academic community.
Platt, a veteran of the environmental wars of the 1990s, knows whereof she speaks. Her family and friends had fished for tuna for generations on the high seas in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean, an 8 million-square-mile area stretching from California to Chile and out to Hawaii. Radical environmentalists targeted this fishing community and mandated “solutions” that destroyed thousands of jobs while negatively affecting the fishery. I profiled her battle in It Takes a Hero, my 1994 book about former recluses such as her who fought back against the enormously affluent and powerful environmental juggernaut. Later, she spent time in the Pacific Northwest, Washington, D.C., and Europe.
What Grace discovers from college-educated logger Jackson Armstrong, who quotes Thoreau as easily, but differently, as do her environmental group friends at their galas and fundraisers in Los Angeles, shatters her illusions. You call us “timber dependent communities,” he scolds; “We in Silvercreek are not timber dependent. You are.”
Jackson tells how radicals “dumped sand in the gas tank” of the equipment at his mill, costing “thousands to repair,” while their lawyers “pour sand in everything, muddying up the works,” endangering his mill’s very existence. There is nothing Jackson, his family, friends, employees, and neighbors are unwilling to discuss in painstaking detail, from the magnificent and endlessly sustainable Douglas Fir forest that surrounds them, to their family mill that opened shortly after the Civil War, to the technological innovations necessary to keep pace economically and with the needs of the world’s urban, timber-dependent, but uninformed and unappreciative, communities.
Slowly, Grace begins to question everything she thought she knew. Then things turn dark — as one reviewer put it, what follows is “murder, treachery, betrayal and an inside look at the billionaire cult aspiring to control every acre of land on earth.”
There is not a false or insincere voice in The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain, least of all from the men and women of the timber towns who have nothing left to lose by speaking forthrightly. Years ago, at the Northern Spotted Owl Wars conferences in Portland, Oregon, I represented them. Before that, I spent time in their woods, their mills, and their tiny towns and villages. Reading Platt’s book, I am back with them. It is painful, sobering, and sad, but it is also educational and encouraging. The war on the rural west and its productive, creative, and inventive people is not over.
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It has, however, gone global, and now our government has declared that the owls themselves are to be destroyed. As the book’s characters uncover the games being played by the rich, famous, and powerful and the shoddy science underlying their plan to make hundreds of thousands of America’s magnificent birds of prey their next victims, your blood will run cold.
By giving access to worlds many do not know exist, this beautifully written novel engages and changes the reader. The Dark Side of Hunger Mountain is available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and via Substack’s digital platform, where readers in 39 countries posted laudatory reviews.
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Trinity County, in far northwestern California, is the state’s poorest county. It was totally dependent on the timber industry until the environmentalists, backed by the government, destroyed it.
Done.
By the same token, wolves, coyotes, and dogs are all of the canids species. The political splitters can stick it. If we don't respect definitions, we don't have a language.
My grandfather, having lived through the Great Depression, dirt poor… worked as a lumberjack in the “Tillamook Burn”. He saved his money and eventually created his own logging and lumber milling and veneer peeling business.
The EnviroNazi sacks of shit blocked small companies from being able to harvest tracts that were legally acquired. Killed my family business and put well over 100 people out of work.
I hate those sonsofbitches.
I would gladly employ a kinetic solution to send those sacks of shit to hell, if I were permitted to do so.
From what I have read in the past the barred owls are mating with the spotted owls creating sparred owls. Which is why the pure spotted owls are disappearing.
In the early 1990s I hitched a ride up the mountain in northern CA with an old man who turned out to be the owner of a timber company. I was hunting deer in the forest.
He told me, “The greens are secretly breeding spotted owls. When sections of national forest come up for bid they put owls on it to prevent logging.
As you can observe, the forest is now full of dead and dying trees because we are not allowed to remove them.
Eventually there will be catastrophic fires and they will be hot enough to sterilize the soil. After the fire there will be little vegetation. Rain will wash away the soil that has accumulated since the last ice age.
The mountains will not recover for hundreds of years.
Out of work loggers support their families as fire fighters. Some set fires to generate work.
Overall, the policies will destroy the forest the greens claim to love”.
I think I received some inside info from a man who spent a life in those mountains.
It's really the left's war, fueled by Satan, against everything good and decent and right.
This war is to destroy what made America great, thinking they’ll be able to control it and remain in power, untouched by the disaster they are causing.
I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s in a WA state coastal logging town. THe streets were full of businesses and shoppers. The saw and shingle mills were many. There were 2 wood pulp mills in town. The 40,000 people who lived there were fully employed, had “good union” jobs with benefits (even the company loggers). It was a boom time. The cities called itself, with out too much exaggeration “The Lumber Capital of the World”
Then in the 80’s the tree huggers started to put the screws to any logging at all. Old growth, they said, was sacred. It also is home to the endangered spotted owl. So the national forests and some private lands started to be off limits. Only “small logs” from private lands could be cut. This meant large amounts of capital for saw mills to re-tool to small logs . Most could not afford that and went toes up.
In Bill Clinton’s first term, a “logging summit” was held to deal with owl and national forest shut downs. What a damn farce! Displaced loggers and mill workers were promised better jobs by free education learning how to code etc. Bull shit. It never happened.
Today, the population is about the same number. The 2 pulp mils and all the saw mills have closed. A new “small log” mill opened but runs about half the time.
The population has largely been replaced by Mexicans. The biggest employers are the state and federal social services and drug sales. The biggest tourist attraction is a muddy patch of river bank where Curt Cobain used to shoot up as a high school kid.
There is no industry. Only lazy bastards sucking off the teat of Uncle.
From Grok:
A 1995 Los Angeles Times article mentions that in the mid-1980s, Happy Camp had a population of about 2,500, supported by a timber industry that included four sawmills.(with)the 2020 Census reporting 905
me:
Those 4 mills are gone. Got a fundraiser letter from the volunteer fire dept in Seiad Valley. The board’s biggest challenge was described as needing ‘anyone that can drive a truck and lay hose’ After high school all the kids leave for lack of regular work.
But the dozen, or so, Snowy Plovers that crossed the CA/OR border were a separate and distinct breeding population, and their presence was justification for shutting people out of areas of the coast during nesting season.
Aberdeen? Sounds like the story of Coos Bay, OR, once “The World’s Largest Lumber Shipping Port.”
Exactly. Excellent post. Biological definitions, like all words, mean things.
Gundog—you beat me to it.
My generation in Coos Bay was absolutely devastated by the war on timber by the environmentalists, which was well in swing by the 80’s——and which a lack of appropriate trade policies exacerbated.
Coos Bay had gone from being the world’s biggest port in terms of board feet of lumber exported, to the world’s biggest port in terms of board feet of logs exported, to, along with the entire county, on its way to being a nature preserve, although only about 80% of the mills had shut when I graduated (’88). Job prospects were, and remained, so bad that at my ten-year reunion, from a class that had graduated over 300, NOT ONE GUY (at least among those who attended the reunion) had managed to make it back to in-county (some of the gals had married older guys with jobs——eventually some guys did make it back, many not too long after).
No one with a college education was any closer than Portland (five hours away).
(gundog’s Dad was an outstanding composition teacher at the high school, to whom I am greatly indebted).
That would be the meeting that Eric Hollenbeck spoke at. Years later(2022) he and his Blue Ox Mill in Eureka would get a TV show called The Craftsman. Very good show about Eureka and it's beautiful old buildings.
Killed my family business and put well over 100 people out of work.
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I was on a blm spotted owl survey, and our wild life biologist told me he cooked the numbers to make it endangered for the greater good . I blew the whistle and got nowhere except to lose my gs5 not the next season.
I lost my job, home, car, truck, motorcycle, boat trying to stay afloat . It ended my marriage too .
All my friends lost their jobs too.
/
I hate those sonsofbitches.
) as do I
except to lose my silviculture contract administration gs5 NTE 180 gig the next season.
.
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I haven’t been by to look at it, but there’s a large facility going in that makes wood-pellet fuel. Coos Bay’s niche remains the export of timber by-produbts.
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