The war on timber towns is very real

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.

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.

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.

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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Which was a flat out lie, Spotted Owls nest where ever they want, usually NOT in dense forests.
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“Radical environmentalists targeted this fishing community and mandated “solutions” that destroyed thousands of jobs while negatively affecting the fishery.”

That was R. Reagan who caved to them, destroying the US Tuna seine fleet who fled the state, the former governor who had backed them, the President that promised them the moon, and the country they grew up in and loved. [ This action also cost me a skipper job on a brand new state-of-the-art, double hulled tuna seine boat that was not built. And lots and lots of $$. ]

While he was at it, Reagan destroyed the US bottom trawl West coast fleet by giving Canada the best grounds, and on the East Coast by giving Canada the best lobster and cod grounds.

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“... the billionaire cult aspiring to control every acre of land on earth...”

Sierra Club, the Pew Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, American Rivers, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - the list is very long.

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.

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Oh it did happen. Clinton set aside millions to train out-of-work loggers fishermen to acquire the latest job skills. That meant the people had to move to cities where that sort of work was supposed to be readily available. That also meant the people had to sell their homes in the small coastal and logging towns. Which meant selling cheaply, which meant the real estate people acquired prime real estate to be sold for many times the selling price for big commissions to well-heeled Californians who bought them for cash.

But by the time the people were trained for those shiny, new, well-paying jobs, the job market had moved on, and those jobs largely no longer existed. Followed by divorce, misery and financial ruin for the out-of-work former fishermen and loggers.

Still later, Chilton set aside $10 million [ with another $10m in case the first bit was inadequate ] and offered to make commercial fishermen financially whole because Washington state and federal government had teamed up to give away fish runs to sportsmen and Canada, as well as close healthy fisheries. To qualify, one had to document losses - what you made as opposed to what you would have made & send that in with a copy of your tax returns for the years in question. The problem being that full-time commercial fishermen reinvested [wrote off ] their earnings in their boats and fishing gear, so their tax returns showed a low number. Those fishermen who had another job, like school teacher, had great returns that were generated by their primary job.

Only a very few full time commercial fishermen, out of the thousands that applied, got an award; the school teachers cleaned up, as did the big fishing gear businesses.

All but $3 million I think was returned to the Clinton kitty, the other 10 million as well. Everybody else was offered a federal loan at 5% for around $2500-3000. Not enough to replace one net, which would go for $5000.

All part of the War on Natural Resource Harvester begun by Noxious Nixon. He’d be proud to see that his vile scam continues.

Well stated!

Much of the Aberdeen retail business district sits vacant today. At the time of the spotted owl forests closure, there was no Walmart to blame. (There is a Walmart now).

One Portland area business investor owns a HUGE number of the vacant Aberdeen business buildings and appears to be sitting on it. These are so decrept that demolishing would be more economical than “re-purposing”

We should also mention the Marbled Murrelet [ Brachyramphus marmoratus ] which was also used to shut down logging and radically change commercial salmon fishing nets because they ‘nested only in old growth’ forests and fed on the water. Wiki still claims they ‘nest only in old growth’. Which is a flat out lie.

The truth of the matter was no one in the US had bothered to study them, except a Canadian had looked into then some years prior, but, not being an American, his study was ignored.

They nest in the ground - they are a burrowing bird.

I participated in an extensive study to determine the habits of these birds on the water. You may or may not know anything about gillnets, but the mesh size is determined by a fish’s head, such that the fish gets caught by its gills and cannot escape. Birds commonly gather where small fish school and feed. These places are not where salmon are found in any numbers and are avoided by commercial salmon fishermen. No one wants to get a bird tangled in their nets because its wasteful, and they are very difficult to remove, especially when they are still alive and damaging the net [ which means taking time to fix it and not be fishing ].

But NOAA was determined to halt fishermen from catching these birds and others, so as part of the test we were required to convert the top 10 feet of our nets to 10” mesh to allow the birds to pass harmlessly through the nets. As you might know, most salmon schools in open water travel in the top part of the water column usually in the first 20 feet. These new nets drastically reduced catches, of course. Oh, as non-Indians this applied only to us. Tribal Indians could use the standard 5” gillnet. When taking these new nets aboard they tended to roll under the corkline and make the the nets prone to ‘backlash’, tangling and ripping as they were being set. Set few a fathoms, stop, untangle, repeat. Instead of setting the net at full speed.

Anyway this was the latest study of the bird and NOAA learned from their observers on our boats that the bird’s habits were totally different than they have believed. Of course, that did not stop them from mandating the new nets, nor did they care that our catches were drastically reduced as long as birds would not be tangled. Nor did they care that the birds did not nest in old growth forests.

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