This essay from High Country News my help us here in the Western US see a new perspective on our seemingly endless fighting over natural resource issues. I’m a subscriber to HCN, but I think this essay is available without a subscription: http://www.hcn.org/wotr/the-sounds-of-silence-eastern-style.

Steve

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The sounds of silence, Eastern style

 By Joe Hinson/Writers on the Range

I once read about a lock-tender who spent his life accompanied by the sound of rushing water going over the lock’s dam. Then, the dam was taken down, ending a lifetime of constant background noise, which, although perhaps a pleasant-enough sound, was still, well, constant. His greatest surprise was finally being able to hear the birds.

I now understand his perspective. A year ago, we moved from Idaho to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the oversized apostrophe of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay. Our decision generated a lot of jaw-dropping, incredulous stares from our friends and endless questions of “Why?”

As we adjusted to our new home, it became clear that something was missing, but its absence was actually pleasing. Frankly, the West is consumed with noisy fights, mostly over land and resources. Now, we don’t hear it anymore. Like that lock-tender, the sound had become a constant context to our lives, and now, away from it, we, too, can finally hear the birds.

Westerners, listen to yourselves!  You’re each a part of a Tower of Babel — a discordant group arguing about sage grouse, water, fish, power, wilderness, old growth, bighorn sheep, forest health, wolves, mining, ATVs, wild horses, grazing, energy, Indians … the list is endless, the fighting never-ending.

Moreover, Westerners seem born to battle or at least driven to claim a predictable position by their profession or politics.  You’re born or become a rancher, a logger, wildlife biologist, Democrat, Republican, environmentalist, Indian, miner, recreationist or an agency manager. Each occupation or identity comes with a clear expectation of your behavior and opinions when it comes to any given issue. Your friends and social life are defined accordingly. Public lands may be great, but it seems their current biggest public value is to provide a large, conveniently located arena for a public brawl.  At least you’re brawling in a pretty place.

During my years in Idaho, I did my share of fighting.  Some of the conflicts were productive, like the one that inspired the rewrite of Idaho’s implementation of the Clean Water Act, a law that is still on the books and reportedly serving all interests well.

Other fights, in retrospect, were rather ridiculous, fighting over whether roadless land should be available for logging, for example. Now, there is very little left of the timber industry and an equally small amount of new wilderness designated in forested lands. Seems like kind of a wasted effort at this point. Other disagreements were gut wrenching, as we tried, for example, to find a solution to potential contacts between bighorn and domestic sheep that might carry disease. In the course of that fight, my wife’s family lost about half their forested sheep range.  The truly hard part was trying to explain “why” to the newly unemployed Peruvian herders, none of whom had ever even seen a bighorn sheep.

Our new Eastern friends are certainly curious about why we chose Maryland over Idaho, but our explanation seems to strike them as more boring than thought-provoking. To folks here, national forests are often confused with parks like Yellowstone or someplace similar that they’ve perhaps visited on vacation. Federal land-management agencies are largely unheard of, and locals don’t wring their hands over how many sockeye salmon returned to Redfish Lake. They’d rather discuss the Orioles’ game or the latest fishing reports. Frankly, Scarlett, they don’t give a damn — or a dam.

Sure, there are fights. Once, an environmental group sued a farmer here over alleged runoff from a pile of chicken manure; the environmentalists lost miserably. But fights here seem to lack the increasingly mean-spirited tone of some of those currently in the West. In contrast, the liberal state of Maryland was so embarrassed over the manure lawsuit that the Legislature offered to pay the farmer’s legal bills, and the University of Maryland set up extension courses to help the agricultural community cope with legal challenges. Imagine the fight that would have caused in the West.

Call me jaded or simply burnt-out; both are probably true. But after 30 years, in which much of my job was fighting for the timber industry while my wife fought to maintain a ranching livelihood, we came to realize that we had become mere gladiators, albeit without the physique for the task. Fighting had become the job. In a perverse sense, we had to leave the open spaces of the West to finally gain some peace and quiet. Besides sharing his first name, I find myself in sympathy with Chief Joseph’s poignantly expressed desire: “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more, forever.”

So, here we sit on a small arm of the Bay, content to fish and to start contributing to society in a more constructive way.  For now, we can hear the silence and the birds — and both are golden.

Joe Hinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He directed the Idaho Forest Industry Council for 15 years and recently retired as a natural resource consultant. He and his wife, Margaret, a third-generation rancher, now live near Salisbury, Maryland.

NCFP’s readers may be interested in some of the new posts at the “Not Without a Fight!” blog, e.g.:

1.  Nelson’s November 21, 2013 Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation — Part 1

2.  Taking an Ax to Traditional Forest Management — The charter-school approach works for education, so why not apply it elsewhere?

3.  On Paradigm Change and Morris Sheppard’s Hummingbird

4.  Over-regulation as a Reason for the Timber Harvest Decline: Recalling Jack Ward Thomas’s Lament

— Ron Roizen

Here is a link I just received to a wonderful repeat photography project using Osborne photographs on our National Parks: http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/panoramic-lookout-photographs.cfm

This website was completed as part of a Masters degree from Quinnipiac University by Tina Boehle, whom some of you might know from her work as information officer on the Sour Biscuit Fire — which became part of the Biscuit — with a Type II incident management team. She is currently a Communication and Education Specialist, Division of Fire and Aviation, with the National Park Service in Boise, Idaho.

This is one of the particular methods (and datasets) that Larry, John Marker, others, and I are proposing to use in our study of the 2013 Biscuit Complex and Rim Fires, and, in this instance, particularly within Yosemite and the Stanislaus NF: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/12/07/douglas-complex-rim-fire-paired-wildfire-economics-study-proposal/

This is an excellent tool for studying wildfire events and results over time. For those of you with an interest in this method that is not restricted to National Parks — but is restricted to western Oregon — here is a related repeat photography project I have been working on from time-to-time over the past few years that also uses Osborne photographs as a beginning dataset: http://www.orww.org/Osbornes_Project/

Sorry, folks, the Forest Service has decided that you can no longer access its employees’ phone numbers or email addresses. In a taking-out-the-trash-timed move during the Holidays, the Forest Service deleted its on-line employee directory from the web. The former last-name searchable directory reported location, phone and email addresses for each Forest Service worker plus private contractors with FS email addresses. About 40,000 folks altogether.

How do I know how many? Years ago, FSEEE sent the FS a Freedom of Information Act request for this directory. “No such document exists,” was the response. Hmm . . . of course the data exist, but the FS said that FOIA does not obligate it to push the computer’s “print” command.

Dead end? Not quite. Turns out that anyone with internet access could push the button on-line and cause the agency’s computer to download the data. That was fun. Eventually, however, the Forest Service’s immune system caught on to our harvesting and blocked further access with those little American flag icons that overlaid each employee’s email address, turning simple-to-read HTML code into indecipherable garbage.

End-of-the-line? Not quite. One nice thing about the FS’s loathing of USDA oversight is that there’s almost no communication between the agency and its departmental masters. The USDA’s website had the same data, bundled up with its other agencies. So for several years we pointed our little automated harvesting machine to usda.gov.

Those gravy days of public accessibility are now dead. When you click on the”Employee Search” link, you get only the office phone directory, which, in case you missed it on the FS’s home page, has a duplicate link below called “Office Directory.”

An AP article appeared in several Oregon newspapers over the last few days, such as this one: “Private forest owners have started salvaging timber burned this summer.”

Excerpt:

Salvage logging on land burned by last summer’s Douglas Complex wildfire in southwestern Oregon is in full swing in privately owned forests, but not in federal ones.

Roseburg Forest Products has cut 8 million board feet of timber from its lands outside Glendale and plans to cut 32 million board feet more, The News-Review reported. One million board feet is roughly enough to build 50 homes.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is still deep in the planning process and has no firm timber targets for the public land.

With that planning process and the likely appeals and perhaps litigation, I reckon no Douglas Complex timber will be salvaged from federal lands. Phil Adams, timber manager for Roseburg Forest Products, is “afraid that burned timber on BLM lands will turn into brush and stands of dead trees unless they are aggressively managed.”

On a related topic, I re-watched a rebroadcast of an episode of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s excellent Oregon Field Guide, Season 23, Episode 2, a portion of which is “Elk at Mount St. Helens.” In the area where forests were blown down or buried by the eruption in 1980, private timberlands were salvaged and replanted, and Weyerhaeuser conducted its first commercial thinning in 2005. On federal lands in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, “the environment is left to respond naturally to the disturbance,” according to the Monument’s web site. The Oregon Field Guide program described the huge increase in the elk population in the Monument — elk like the open space and forage. (The program didn’t say so, but I’d bet that the elk also like the cover they find in the stands of young timber on private lands, since there’s little cover on the federal side.) However, the elk population has grown so large that there isn’t enough forage. Scenes of emaciated elk and rotting carcasses led to a public call for the government to “do something,” and that they did — they brought in hay during the winter. So much for letting the environment “respond naturally to the disturbance.” Now, if wolves had been reintroduced….