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Posted on 07/18/2025 8:51:44 PM PDT by george76
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.
OVER 110 TIMBER MILLS IN CALIF WERE CLOSED
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”
Yes, Aberdeen and Hoquiam. I grew up in the latter in the 50’s and 60’s.
There is a term “fly over country” referring to the farm and prairie land of the middle US.
That term could be applied to Aberdeen and Hoquiam. On week ends in the summer hundreds of cars pass thru on their way to the ocean beaches and the Olympic loop (hwy 101). Few stop unless it is for gasoline.
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.
Who? Who? Who cooks for you?
Hey...they said eco-tourism would replace logging revenue.
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.
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