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I feel a sense of commonality, comraderie, brotherhood ...even though being basically a white guy yet who has respectfully learned and helped and supported and participated within traditional ways throughout my life... I thank "Junior" deeply as a fellow Earth man, and celebrate his excellent writings- along with their essential messages!

(& half-silly of me perhaps..):  My heart leapt hearing & sharing the overwhelming optimism with experiences of fellow Americans of every stripe everywhere; yet also even (whitish, whitey) as I am, I share the distrust and disappointment in the (basically white) cultural/societal/industrial thrust of this only freshly now colonized continent. 

Rather than only to declare the deficit to young Native Americans to feel motivated by the idea anti-success... I wonder if a closer examination of the well-qualified reasons for such feelings which are shared alike by many other Americans (of every stripe), also aware of current issues and events affecting living people and tribes and on existing reservations... As we know here in the Pacific NW we have dams on the Klamath, the Snake, and the Columbia Rivers all negatively affecting SALMON; & underground tanks of nuclear waste leaking into the Columbia River at Hanford!  (even this local list really gets quite huge for a TOL comment)

Helpful too, and perhaps balanced with the masterful messages in every media delivered by Alexie; could we think of the regular use as reference material and educational curricula titles such as:

"Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,"

"The Cointelpro Papers,"

& "My Life Is My Sundance" by Leonard Peltier, written from prison..

and so then one might reasonably find it essential to think of the 7 generations of connections to the tragedies and consequences of Wounded Knee then and now... having been just so recently regenerated, with modern horrors.

posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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Greatest permanent value can only be expressed by allowing forests to grow.  Forestry throughout Oregon cannont sustain any further increases in "timber production" by any measure!  Whether from an industrial, scientific, or academic perspective, forest regeneration will take more than a generation of our children and children's children (if we all make it that far) to "renew" what we have already taken.  In addition to this problem  created by our apparent collective lack of understanding of the length of time required for tree growth, we have devastated nearly all of Oregon's original forests...  Unfortunately, the vast majority of Oregon forest lands which still bear the public title of "forest" have been "converted" from healthy functioning forests  into vast managed forest plantations.

All of what we value in Oregon now; ranging from wild rivers to ship traffic, from dam power to the future of fish species, from functioning forests to timber production; all rests on our preservation and conservation of our forest resources in Oregon.

The value of timber cut and sold today shrinks away in the near future to nothing when all that money is gone, and also gone is the capacity of what we have left to continue to provide benefit to all.  We need forests for clean air and water, for timber, for fish, for feeling a sense of awe and connection to the Earth, and for the future of our children....

TO discharge the irrelevant attacks and character assassination typically dished out to anyone with an "environmental" view, I will state in brief that I am an Oregon Forester:

I have worked as a root disease surveyor for over a decade in forests throughout Oregon.  During that period, I systematically surveyed well over 25,000 acres of Oregon Department of Forestry lands all currently being managed.  The survey methods I employed required the thorough investigation of the cause of death of each and every conifer within my survey areas. 

I can state with 100% observational certainty that the greatest threat to the future of Oregon forests and to the "greatest permanent good" is most certainly the chainsaw, along with the greedy attitude to MISuse it.  Improperly managed, we lose the forest along with the creek the fish the birds and everything else if we focus on nothing but the trees.

-JDR

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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