There’s a lot of winter wonderland to enjoy at the start of the new year. I’ve been trying to get into the mountains on a weekly basis for some snow shoeing and nature observation. One week I’ll be in 6″ of fresh powder, and the next, and ice coated shell melted back to mountain’s edge. This trip, I looked at the transition from clear cuts in the tree farm, vs. the BLM land just beyond that I can gain access to on foot. Val and I took a beautiful calm day after a weekend of rainstorms to see what was left of our first big snow of the year. It was a dramatic melt back from what I had seen the week before. This is the epic change one can experience in The Cascades. Fresh powder does not usually last long here in our rainforest mountains. But just a few hundred feet below the freezing point, a different world stands as testament to our consumer demand here in The Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Washington State is a timber resource provider, though these days, we’re cutting young wood to make laminated products, so the age of a tree is moot. Gone are the days of big timber logs in this part of the world, through just a few hours north in British Colombia, old growth is still being cut to provide building materials in The US and abroad. Millions of board feet are shipped to Asia every day, carrying off the biomass of one ecology, to support the destruction of ecology elsewhere- what progress. I see the signature of human devastation each time I enter the tree farm for recreational activity, and though I deeply appreciate the access, what I witness in resource management can be gut wrenching. After cutting and hauling off the younger trees, the GMO plantation replant is followed by herbicide application (multiple times) and then the spreading of treated sewage from our nearby cities. This last more recent part of tree farming offers the land a boost of nitrogen, along with a spreading of forever chemicals across the landscape to pollute our soil and water.
Clear cuts are sometimes hard to imagine unless you have been to them. Hundreds of acres are often cut at once. The replanted trees are funded by green wash carbon credits. Whenever you see “more than a millions trees planted” on some packaging unrelated to forests, it’s a harmful consumer company trying to make people feel better about their disconnect from the environment. Most, if not all the trees planted are in tree farms, where they will be cut for profit, never allowed to grow into mature trees. Where else do you think all these trees are magically being planted? You think there are new forests protected to old growth age? No, there are no new forests going in, unless it’s to cover up industrial pillaging in Superfund sights where people have no other option but to release toxic land from development because of pesky EPA rules, which will soon be buried for the sake of progress. Apartheid raised South African Musk and his space penis will see to that.
We are all asleep at the wheel when it comes to the real goings on in our environment, and that’s worked for generations of cancer victims, fatal neurological disorders, and an endless list of other environmentally caused human conditions that end in early death. Sorry to flush the dreams folks, but we’ve been flushing mother nature down the toilet for so long now, caring is too late. Take in the pollution- your body is, every day. Future generations will be filled with chemicals that rewrite our very DNA, and not for the better. Healthcare will not treat the preexisting conditions we find ourselves in thanks to industry under sight. Who cares? Drill baby drill! Cut baby cut! The precious few spaces left trying to recover form man’s misuse will not be enough wild space to save us from ourselves. This is the legacy I look at each time I transition from the cutting, into the “protected” land just beyond. It was still cut in the 1970s, and only remains uncut now because of elevation, slope, and scree piles that would shatter the trees if they were felled.
It’s hard to get a read on how big these alpine Douglas firs are, but I put valley on a fallen trunk along one of the trails in the BLM land to try to show you the girth of these old growth trees, which, because they are alpine scree trees, grow much slower, and are way older than their bulking size would have you believe. Still, you can see stumps from the legacy of logging that got into every forest they could reach- and may again if we have reason for it. During WWII, a whole sections of Olympic National Park was given over to logging for the air and space industry. In the quick stroke of a pen, any part of our ecological fabric can be torn apart, and sometimes, no pen is needed, just a trusty saw and some ego trying to prove dominion over all things- like the bible says. It’s a loosing battle for all of us in the end. Our heritage of consumption will have us all in the pot boiling soon. The hottest year is yet to come, and people will slow cook to death for our mishandling of the planet. This mishandling is perpetuated now by corporate bodies who say profits over people and we all cheer, seeing out meager money investments grow on a passing screen. Thanks booming economy.
When we watch Lord of The Rings, Wicked, Star Wars, or any other good vs. evil saga, how do we miss the part about us being the bad guys to our own environment? I know it’s not always easy to sort good and bad- watch any Miyazaki film and you’ll learn this. Our fire of industry has run away with nature, forcing her into “natural resources” instead of complex habitat for life- our lives. We don’t care if our streams and creeks are cemented underground so we can build a new affordable housing complex. We scoff at clean water protection because it hinders space travel. Who cares if the birds are dying? Yet we are pissed eggs got so expensive. Still, no one asks why-good bye critical thinking. We’re learning not to question any more, or follow the money, or even leave our homes to go outside when there is a new episode streaming. So we sit in Plato’s cave and stuff our faces with cheap eatings- courtesy of highly processed crap. Just reach for your Ozempic and carry on. WAKE UP PEOPLE! This is the end of life as we know it, the next great extinction caused by US. We are still buried in ignorance, or more likely, denial. What can we do with such a thing as this industrial complex of military design? How can each of us stop buying in? Getting an electric car is not the answer.
Our first step is admitting there’s a problem, then making a small list of the top 3 things we can do to change our pattern of consumption.
- Walk away from bulk buying stores and online shopping.
- Embrace carpools, public transit, and drive less.
- Get off social media.
Then reeducate yourself-
- Learn about the real cost of your consumption.
- Investigate global resources and how you use them. (smart technology is especially bad)
- Exercise your buying power locally.
The tech world is caught up in AI and bitcoin- it takes more resources than we have left for human kind to power these ideas. The companies developing tech know this, and are already taking legal action to protect their industries at the cost of local neighborhoods and towns. Meanwhile we get on these platforms and use them to do the work we should be doing for ourselves. Brain rot is the word of the year folks. Our bodies are rotting too- like the piles of slash and unwanted wood product cut by the machines in our tree farms, we too pile up and rot in far away places like Gaza and Ukraine. But a New Year’s Eve terrorist attack in New Orleans becomes the headliner for a week while we forget about the world terror inflicted on everyone daily. Fear of famine grips one part of the world, while another worries about rescheduling a football game. Yes folks, this is our path as American consumers. Once our right to protest has been knocked down for security reasons, we’re left silenced, in our online cages, like pods in The Matrix. We’ve all taken the red pill and happily gone back to sleep. Heart disease will get us before any terrorist in this country. But for children, guns are the number one killer. WAKE UP!
I stand looking over The Snoqualmie Valley from the edge of The Central Cascades, standing on recently clearcut land overlooking thousands of acres of tree farm, and beyond that, towns and cities stretching to Puget Sound. Washington State is less densely populated than a lot of other regions in our country, but it’s the home of tech industry. People here are lured into a false sense of security, surrounded by snow covered mountains and lush green stretching in all directions. North of us is British Colombia and Alaska, frontiers of ecological adventure and wilderness we are not worried about loosing. Tar Sands and The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are forgotten as we sip our hot coffee and tap away at our screens. When someone shoots up a school, we share thoughts and prayers, but cannot conceive of what pain brought an individual to such murderous rage. We cannot understand why summer smoke clogs our cities, fills our lungs, and takes years off our lives. It would not occur to most of us that we are no longer thriving, because just day to day surviving has become the norm for so many. Without time to sit and reflect, we’ve all been caught up in the hamster wheel of making enough money, earning a living, paying our dues.
The opportunity to take time outside, driving to access the wilds, this is privilege. To sit here typing out what we’re all missing adds to my place of power, to see, reflect, and share. I’m only reaching a few people with these words, and shutting down a few more who don’t want to acknowledge the truth in my rant- that we’re all caught up in something we can’t seem to get out of. Small steps. There are so many little things each of us can do in our quest for change. This first, and most simple, is to turn away from the screen and go outside. Even if you live in a congested city, go outside and look up, look around, where is the nearest green space? Where do the birds fly? How many ants crawl across the pavement at your feet? How many rats live in the wall? I lived in NYC, on Manhattan Island, and still there was nature all around. Remember, people are part of nature, we are animals too. Our development is like all animal construction, only ours remains out of sync with what the natural world constrains, until climate change redistributes the energy we’ve massed back into geologic time, and our little blip of harm will come to naught in the grand scheme of the universe, which we have no power over at all.
As I walked around the frozen lake at alpine elevation, I was struck by the two tone color of the ice. It was a momentary mystery for my monkey brain to grapple with. Why was one part of the lake darker than the other? Then I took a bit of time to study my surroundings, watched the light shifting across the peaks, and it came to me. A mountain’s shadow was keeping part of the lake colder and denser than the part in sun. A mere shadow, cast from a great peak. Then I noticed the cracked ice along shore and wondered what caused that change in the lake’s surface. Again, nature revealed herself through observation. A light breeze picked up and gently swayed the surrounding trees, the sound of a wild forest signing. I thought of how tremendous a storm might come roaring through this open landscape and realized wind would push the ice up against shore, cracking the edges as pressure built up. Another mystery solved by taking in all the surrounding inputs, even when they were not present. It’s time traveling. Nature is so complex, yet we humans keep trying to put her into compartmentalized measurements of timber feet, tones of minerals extracted, and how much energy can be sucked from her corps once we drill deep down and pump her full of chemicals to make the taking easier on our machines.
The winds of change are coming, slowly pushing back on our hubris, reminding us how little control we have in our lifetime, yet reflecting on the abuse we’ve inflicted on ourselves and each other though greed. It’s not about stability any more, it’s about how much profit we can squeeze out of every measurable thing- human life, natural resources, stocks and bonds, company productivity, energy consumption. The Colorado River is not enough water for The Southwest States. Our agricultural land is now toxic with treated sewage, polluting the best food growing soil left in our nation, and we’re exporting it abroad for profit, instead of feeding our own people. We cut the forests down to build cheap goods that will end up in land fills, so we can buy more. Influencers are busy telling us what fast fashion to buy today, or what new streaming garbage to watch. Listen to this hip podcast and worry about true crime. True crime is our tune out on mother nature. Once it’s gone, we can’t easily bring it back. We don’t think in lifetimes to come, only how big our money market account grew this year, and how we can dodge taxes, penalties, and regulations to get the best deal.
As I’ve said many times before- we can’t eat, drink, or breath money. When the smoke, microplastics, and forever chemicals fully integrate into our bodies, we will rejoin nature prematurely, with no buy out to rescue us from our own neglect. This is the living contract we all sign at birth, to live in the world with all we make of it. Our paradise is lost, and our health and happiness are the cost of doing business. I do not see an easy brake from this world of consumption, but I do see a way to slow it, turn away from some of it when I can, and at least see what we have done in this country, and know where we’re headed based on the behavior we demonstrate day to day. The birds are still outside singing, the insects still carry on, and what plants are allowed to grow do, though few will ever reach the epoch that came before human industrial money making took what was enough and culled plenty into scarcity for all.
EEC Forest Stewardship 