Spotted owl didn’t start logging decline

Chuck Sheley, in his recent response to my letter, repeats the same old tired propaganda: “It’s all the Environmentalist’s fault.”

First, I didn’t suggest that we curtail logging. What I suggested was that following policies espoused for many years by environmentalists would reduce the intensity of wildfires. I now suggest Sheley do a little research on the history of logging in the west. Loss of logging jobs began well before spotted owl protection policies were instituted. Automation, improvements in efficiency, union busting, import/export policy changes and conversion of forests to agriculture and residential use were the causes. Policies instituted by a “shortsighted, rapacious logging industry,” not environmental regulation, caused a huge reduction in the number of workers needed to produce forest products.

Environmentalists just became handy scapegoats. IWA workers had a long history of Environmentalism and worked together with conservationists for decades to promote sustainable harvesting of forest products, knowing that a stable future depended on it. But, the tactics of industry are always the same: pit one group of common folks against another while you’re robbing them all blind, and yes, the Forest Service was ever complicit in this endeavor. Saying that thinning of forests helps reduce the spread of wildfires is quite simply, bunk. Indiscriminate thinning of the forest has been THE policy for over 150 years. How has that worked out for us?

Sheley is correct about one thing, however: the logging industry and the Forest Service certainly have made a mess of things.

— John McMurtry, Chico