The american wilderness system is one of the last remaining hopes for the giants of my homeland. I grew up in a logging town, in a logging family. "Spotted owl helper" in a box parodying "Hamburger helper" was a common joke item in offices and homes - You can only feel so much sympathy for a critter costing the jobs of people you know and love. Cutting down trees was just part of daily life - Trucks would go by every day with loads of logs, each a couple feet in diameter. In every cafe around my hometown, there's a few picture somewhere - Maybe one's of a giant log, at least six feet in diameter. It's been cut down and loaded on a truck, just about to be hauled off to the mill. Or maybe there's a huge two-man saw above the order counter - Far too massive to make any sense with modern trees. Sometimes there's a picture of that saw in use, with men climbing 10 feet up the tree before they get to a point thin enough for the giant blade. Out back in the forest behind my childhood home, there was a tree stump bigger than any tree I'd ever seen in my life. I never thought much about it. Over the years, I've pieced together what happened before my birth. They cut them down. Almost all of them. Innumerable giant douglas firs and cedar trees used to dominate the landscape I live in. A continuous forest of giant trees stretching from California up through British Columbia. But men came with saws, and saw good lumber in those quiet giants. They felled one... then another, and another, and another. There were so many of them, they were just money for the taking! But giants are slow to grow, and so terribly, terribly quick to fall. An old growth forest thousands of years in the making, supporting a unique ecosystem found nowhere else on earth... completely gone within the span of a few short human generations. It, in fact, took 28 years for me to figure out where the giants still existed, and go visit one. A tiny state park, virtually unknown on the map. The ranger I bought my pass from even disparaged his park, saying that several others were much better. But none of those parks had giants, and his did - Just a few. But bigger, more majestic trees than I've ever seen in my life. I'd like to see more before I die. The logging companies own the vast majority of the forest around here, and are very utilitarian - Replants are done solely with doug fir, not the traditional mix of doug fir, hemlock, and slow growing cedars. And no tree lives long past 50 years, let alone the 500+ needed for big trees. Giants won't be seen on logging company land again. The national park system is corrupt to the core - Ostensibly safeguarding land for all, the timber is instead sold off to the highest bidder. Frequently roads are even built for the use of the logging companies, at no expense to them. No giants will reclaim that land. I'll never see the old forest reclaim its ancient glory - I don't live anywhere near long enough, and most of the range is owned by timber companies or national forest anyway. But where no roads can be built, no modern logging can happen. The wilderness system protects a few, rare patches of land. And on those patches of land, a few hundred years in the future, maybe the giants can reign again, and give future generations a small glimpse of the glory of the ancient forest I missed out on. That we all missed out on.
Are you talking specifically about where you lived? Because the Alaskan preservation of wilderness and the national parks there are defended almost to an aggressively stubborn degree. Denali, for example is a cornerstone of public parks. I would doubt very much that companies could buy that for any price.The national park system is corrupt to the core - Ostensibly safeguarding land for all, the timber is instead sold off to the highest bidder. Frequently roads are even built for the use of the logging companies, at no expense to them. No giants will reclaim that land.
Oh, absolutely - Mostly I was speaking out of experience of the Gifford Pinchot, Mount Hood, and willamette national forests. I also glossed over the really complex issue of ownership of public lands - By various definitions, public land can be owned by logging companies, the BLM, the various state forest systems, the national monument system, the national forest system, and, most pertinently, the national park system. Back when the need for protecting land for public use was a new and rare idea, there were two schools of thought about how to do it. Some, like Mr. Gifford Pinchot (Which my local national forest is named after) saw the land as a resource to be managed. Others saw the need to conserve what was there, protecting it from being harvested. The differences split out into two separate systems - The national forest system, and the national park system. The national forest system allows mining claims - Find gold or other rare minerals on its land, file the appropriate paperwork, and you can dig a mine halfway to china without anyone batting an eyelash. It also does timber sales, selling the trees on sections of land to whoever will buy them. Permits are available to harvest any goods on them for commercial purposes - Lots of huckleberry pickers around here, for example. The national park system, which includes my local Olympic national park and your Denali, is completely different. No mining claims are allowed, no timber sales are done, and the parks are usually protected from their visitors by a labyrinth of bureaucracy. Seriously, I am not sure I'm smart enough to successfully visit the Olympic national park. The other methods of land ownership are also worth discussing, while I've mentioned them. Most logging company lands allows day use on them, provided you don't get in the way of any active logging operations. That makes them a public space as far as anyone in a logging town is concerned - Hunting, fishing, hikes, etc. etc. The BLM has a similar idea of land management to the national forest system, but I didn't mention it in my comment since, while it owns large chunks of the eastern Washington/Oregon deserts, it owns virtually none of the forests. Not sure why that is. The state park systems can either allow logging or disallow. The Clatsop state forest in Oregon, for example, sells timber, while the Lewis and Clark state park in Washington does not. That state park is where I saw my first giant - It's less than a square mile in size, though. You'll wander through and see all it has in a few hours. It's surrounded on several sides by logging clearcuts too- How's that for irony? The national monument system has a very similar outlook to the national park system - Extremely protective and very bureaucratic. It doesn't usually protect large swathes of land, but the area around Mt. Saint Helens has been under their jurisdiction since the volcano blew. It'll be a hundred years yet before there's any kind of forest there again, though, and when that happens it may lose the special status that made it a monument in the first place. Cheers!
Do you mean why are they allowed to log on national forest land, or why are they allowed to own most of the land around here? I have an OK answer for the first, not much of an answer for the second, but I can say that the whole situation with the logging companies precedes the "Corporations are people" attitude by a very long time.
If you are interested, there's a chilling documentary on the ELF that I'd recommend: If a Tree Falls. Also to mknod and thenewgreen. I grew up in the area where some of those arsons took place. I recall one day where there were reports of pipe bombs strapped to the bottom of SUVs in Salem, OR. Similarly, I can identify with the silent rage that one feels after seeing clear cuts. Cracked earth in that region is absolutely mind-numbing to see. Ultimately, I believe Wilderness is a myth. The origin of the word wilderness comes from something like 'self-willed'. The word came into usage around the same time in the history of English that the common road for 'ocean' was equivalent to 'whale-road'. It is an old word from a different time. Just as we don't consider the ocean a highway for giant sea creatures, we know the wilderness isn't acting on its own. It's fenced in - par-baked and ripe for the taking. The most visible and aesthetic features survive as images on stamped postcards, which are perhaps ironically made from the invisible devastation. Quarterly reports on the population of white-tailed deer - which only populate the outer rim of a healthy forest - keep the myth alive that our forest system is doing well, and our uncles keep hunting them, thinking to themselves 'I love the wilderness'. Environmental tourism is a facade, a convenient distractor for the US's ecocide.
Also, I appreciated your telling of where you grew up and your experience seeing the "giants" in person. Can I ask where you saw them, which park and in what part of the US you grew up? I'd be interested in seeing some "virgin forest" myself some day. Thanks.The national park system is corrupt to the core - Ostensibly safeguarding land for all, the timber is instead sold off to the highest bidder. Frequently roads are even built for the use of the logging companies, at no expense to them. No giants will reclaim that land.
-Is this truly the case? Are logging companies allowed to take timbre out of National Parks?
Hi there! Another fellow had a very similar question, so I made sure to answer most your questions in his reply to keep things together. Here's a link. I grew up a little north of Portland, Oregon. Cheers!