While you wern't looking they did it again.

"Allen" wrote in message
...
In article KFRLe.5175$Al5.3208@trnddc04,
"B J Conner" wrote:

BTW when you were flying around looking at those nets did you notice the
clear cuts? The country south of Olympic National Park looks like some
of
the photos of Brazil. All those bare areas on virtulaearth.com aren't
potato
fields or cow pastures.

Yep, and spent quite a lot of time hiking, hunting, camping and fishing
near and in both clear cuts and selectively logged areas in the
Olympics, Cascades, Methow Valley area and over in Okanogan. Not sure
which method is worse (or better for that matter). I don't think that
you get a real perspective on the large forest areas East and West until
you get over it via a road or airplane. It's shocking how much logging
there is but even more shocking is how much logging there isn't. My
point I guess is that development and use of natural resources does not
have to be in opposition to protection of natural resources. Hyperbole
on any side of an issue usually leads to non-useful discourse. I think
in some cases our protection of resources is going to lead to some real
ugly situations. Look at the Blue Ridge parkway in VA. Miles and miles
of in many cases a single species of tree planted by the CCC in the late
twenties and thirties. A truly great effort but what happens when the
next Chestnut blight or Pine Bark beetle comes along? The Blue Ridge
will look much like it did in the 1920's without a tree is site. We
might be better off in carefully logging parts of it and replanting to
create a more diverse biology. There was a great article in last months
Outside I read on the way back from Bozeman about a green leaning
individual who bought some property and found that the forest on it was
a real mess and that he had to carefully log it in order to make it
healthy. Because it was so bad he had a whole lot of "useless" little
trees that, although old, were all less than a foot or so in diameter.
He did some thinking and with some help from gov't grants created a
company to cut and marketing the small, very densely ringed lumber for
high end dance floors and such. Used an expensive Swedish machine to do
so IIRC. A fine use of gov't seed money that may well pay off in getting
folks to pay attention to smarter logging in non-traditional spaces
There is actually reasonable amount of non-roadbuilding helo logging in
the Cascades for large, high dollar trees. Even though they were
supposed to let the schedules folks know when and where they were going
to be in operation, on low level training routes about once a year you'd
come over a ridge inverted at 200' and 500 knots to find a helo with a
log slung under it in front of you, usually you just passed under him
and hoped he didn't drop it.

None of this issue, or any other environmental issue is simple and none
will be solved with a sound bite. The depletion of resources is due to
many smaller issues over a long period of time. It will likely be a
serious of small, appropriate midcourse corrections over time that will
fix them and not some giant change. My earlier comment about the nets on
the Skagit was based not only on flying over them but also fishing the
Skagit with the nets in and the nets out and seeing the difference. Yes,
in most cases those nets are NA nets but they have the same obligation
under treaty and law to protect the resource.

"Pacing the streets of Medford, Trouvelot must have walked around in a daze
half the time. With knowledge not only of the interstellar dramas crashing
overhead but of the minute worlds writhing through the microscope, he must
have tried to grasp the complexity visible at every scale. Strange,
thought, that with the sun shrugging off million-mile-long licks of flame
like so much comet dust, he counted on the microscopic world to follow a
regular plan. While he watched an eclipse make day into night as scientists
helpless to exert control jotted notes, he thought that an insect might
easily be harnessed to industry, that the natural world would follow his
dreamed-up rules. It's a common enough assumption, and many stake their
fortunes on it. But Trouvelot? With all that he knew, with all he'd seen,
he surely might have suspected that control of the natural world might elude
him."*

Place an immdediate and total ban on ALL salmon fishing and logging in the
northwest. Blow up all the dams on all the rivers in which salmon
traditionally spawned. Raze every human made structure within a mile of
open water......yes, including roads. Summarily shoot anyone responsible
for the kind of repugnant, morally and intellectually bankrupt debacle (on
whatever scale) that just occurred on the Black River in NY. That might do
it.

At any rate, it would be a LOT cheaper than the hundreds of billions of
dollars being spent on the killing of a few thousand Americans and a few
scores of thousands of Iraqis for no discernible purpose.

Sorry for the length, off the soapbox.

That's o.k. Where would we be if we couldn't spare the bandwidth for a
rational discussion of reasonable alternative theories and plans?

Wolfgang
*from "Tinkering With Eden", Kim Todd, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...

"Allen" wrote in message
...
//logical analysis snipped//
"Pacing the streets of Medford, Trouvelot must have walked around in a
daze
//presumably Goldsmithian analysis snipped//
Sorry for the length, off the soapbox.

That's o.k. Where would we be if we couldn't spare the bandwidth for a
rational discussion of reasonable alternative theories and plans?

Wolfgang
*from "Tinkering With Eden", Kim Todd, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Actually, if we weren't so rich we wouldn't take the time to worry about it.
How much time do you suppose the guy in China or India or Russia - or any
number of third-world countries - spends worrying about what's being dumped
into his air or water? Much less how much of his crap is affecting you or
me?

As for BJ's original point, I suspect that many of the streams affected by
the new policy probably aren't significant - in and of themselves - to wild
fish. But it looks to me like a narrowing of the margin between what's safe
and what's not, or even perhaps a reinterpretation. All of the individual
landowners in the country who put their land into conservation trusts and
sign easements to protect their streams won't amount to a hill of beans
compared to homebuilders' and real estate agents' organizations who
successfully argue that there's already ENOUGH eagle habitat, or ENOUGH
trout streams, or that the economic impact of their new subdivision is
greater than the economic impact of that ten-foot stream running along one
side.

Bob

I too have spent a lot of time hiking and fishing in Oregon, Washington
and Northern California. That started in the 1950s as teenager. Since I
have move back to the area I have found a dozen places where there use
to be small streams that now are only winter mud washes. When you look
at those draws in the clearcuts remember there is a chance that at one
time there was flow of water down it all summer.
I remember small streams in deep shady draws, water trickling from one
clear rocky pool to the next. Some of these had small fish in them (
I'm not sure what species but I'm pretty sure they were trout ). If
you go to the same places now you find a series of dried up mud holes
forming a track through the slash piles. The shade and duff that made
the sponge which oozed life all summer is gone.
Maby these places don't rate protection or consideration because they
don't have names. They may show up on topo maps as broken blue lines.
These dotted blue lines connect to unnamed solid blue lines and those
to streams with names. There are a few rivers in this part of the
world that spring forth from holes in the groung but most are the born
of thousands of rivulets, springs, seeps etc. Even in your part of
the world the rivers you fish start with source smaller than a decent
garden hose.
I have only returned to a dozen of the places I use to know, I would be
happy if these were all that were gone.