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kia ora, Tyler.

kia orana.

Mother's Song comes through you ...

So Tyler, Are tears suppose to be welling up while we watch this video? Is there suppose to be something terribly wrong with clear cutting 10 acres? Do you live in a wood house? That ten acres of clear cut will be a beautiful meadow by the end of the summer where animals can graze and breed. Unlike the choked out forest the sierra club would like to have, where animals can't even walk though. And which is just waiting to go up into a burning inferno, while all the pyro sierra club idiots sit around and get wet in the pants watching the forest be destroyed, gleefully proclaming that fire is gods way and is good for the forest. A fire in that area would have completly wiped out the trees there as far as the eye could see, like what happened in Yellowstone. Destroying avaluable renewable resouce worth millions of dollars and jobs, Jobs not just for loggers but for carpenters like my friend Alan, and others who build things out of wood. Use your brain why don't you instead of a knee jerk reaction to a tree being cut down.

Tyler, thank you for posting this. I saw the clear cutting from a distance when I was in Oregon a few years ago. So sad and unnecessary. Houses made with straw bales and other natural, sustainable materials are so sweet and magical. I truly feel at home in them.

Brian, I'm on a friends computer and had not read your comment prior to posting mine. They must have crossed in cyberspace.

There is another side to the story on clear cutting. For another day.

Brian -

The destruction of our environment may or may not make an emotional connection. I'm not trying to get you to cry. There's no sappy music tugging at the heart strings. It is what it is.

It's not ten acres, its hundreds of thousands of acres, visible as far as the eye can see deep into hills and mountains.

I live in a part wood, part metal house. My point was that if we see where our resources come from, we might find that alternatives such as natural building are a more sustainable way to provide housing.

The ten acres will not be a beautiful meadow. They replant one or two varieties of trees, years after what you see (which is already at least two years old and has yet to be replanted). And they plant right around the stumps, which provide some nutrients as they decay. So you do not see meadows on the peninisula, where there once was old growth forest. You are making that up.

The old growth forests are not choked at all. You are making that up too. There is an extremely diverse ecosystem where the forests have been protected - much less so in the areas that border the clear cut, incidently. I'll be doing another post with photos from the protected old growth rainforest, which is extremely accessible by foot, if one were to wander off the path provided by the forest service.

Maybe Alan should check out natural building. His skills and experience would be quite valuable, and he would be contributing to a sustainable way of life. He can learn more at www.nbnetwork.org.

You can call me names and insinuate I am stupid, I don't really care. I am sharing video of what is happening to our precious natural resources, and I provided a perfectly viable solution that we can begin to look into, which involves locally-produced and entirely sustainable resources such as hay, cob, clay and mud.

Does Ventura County have an ordinance against stone houses? I've seen plenty of them in other areas, but almost none of them here. We certainly have no shortage of stone.

The clear-cutting makes me sad. The first time I noticed it was in 1971 when I drove Avenue of the Giants just north of Garberville, CA. I parked and hiked about 100 yards uphill through the redwoods and found that the seemingly endless and eternal redwood forest was largely an illusion -- in the spot where I'd parked, they'd left enough trees to hide the clear-cut areas from the road. Past a certain point it was all stumps, slash, and sunbaked earth. Where I was, there had been no replanting.

The last time I saw this kind of damage was when I flew from Portland to SB about 8 years ago. It looked like a war zone, and there were thousands and thousands of acres of it. They could have thinned -- they could have left a reasonably viable forest that would have filled back in -- but instead they chose to devastate and completely denude the landscape.

Trees are just large plants that have evolved the ability to grow long wooden stems. They didn't do that so we could cut them up into lumber and grind them into pulp; they actually had only one purpose in mind and that was to get their needles or leaves higher up above the other plants where the tree could then monopolize the Sun’s energy for photosynthesis. When foresters create openings or clearcuts when they harvest trees, one of the reasons for doing it is so the new trees growing back can be in full sunlight. Trees are basically plants that want to be in the sun. If trees wanted to be in the shade they would have been shrubs instead, they would not have spent so much time and energy growing long wooden stems.

Every species which lives in the forest must be capable of re-colonizing areas of land that are recovering from destruction. Indeed, forest renewal is the sum total of all the individual species returning to the site, each in their turn, as the forest grows back. In ecology, this is known as dispersal, the ability to move from where you are and to inhabit new territory as it becomes available. In humans, we call this migration, but it is the same thing. Dispersal is an absolute requirement for natural selection and the survival of species. No species could exist if it were not capable of dispersal. Therefore, so long as the land is left alone after the forest is destroyed, the forest will recover and all the species that were in it will return.

Fire has always been the main cause of forest destruction, or disturbance, as ecologists like to call it in order to use a more neutral term. But fire is natural, we are told, and does not destroy the forest ecosystem like logging, which is unnatural. Nature never comes with logging trucks and takes the trees away. All kinds of rhetoric is used to give the impression that logging is somehow fundamentally different from other forms of forest disturbance. There is no truth to this. It is true that logging is different from fire, but fire is also very different from a volcano, which in turn is very different from an ice age. In fact, no two fires are ever the same. These are differences of degree, not kind. Forests are just as capable of recovering from destruction by logging as they are from any other form of disturbance. All that is necessary for renewal is that the disturbance is ended, that the fire is out, that the volcano stops erupting, that the ice retreats, or that the loggers go back down the road and allow the forest to begin growing back, which it will begin to do almost immediately.

Credit to Patrick Moore

Sure, Patrick Moore's statement perhaps has validity...if you are willing to wait two centuries or more (and buy into his unstated assumption that our consumption doesn't eradicate the species that repopulate an area).

Old growth forest doesn't replicate itself in five or ten or twenty years. There are large areas that were clear cut 25 years ago that now have maturing trees, but are essentially tree farms, lacking diversity. Meanwhile, globally (but the American culture in particular), continues to pursue unsustainable consumption practices with regards to resources, energy, food and water.

Regarding your thoughts on trees in #7 - if you are that emotionally and spiritually disconnected from nature, then its no wonder that you fail to find common ground on the issues we are discussing with a large percentage of not only The Ojai Post's readers and commenters, but the residents of Ojai as a whole. It's quite shocking you chose the profession you did. Perhaps that's a story you can share with us some time.

To Tyler, phalarope, Suza, Kenley, and all others who try so valiantly to reason with Brian.......

Your patient efforts to get Brian to see the light of day are touching, in spite of (or because of) the complete futility of the task.

What you perhaps fail to grasp is that Brian's views on environmental issues are just the last little consequences of a much larger structure of thought and assumptions. That larger structure has deep roots in an underlying set of ideas about what the world is, how it got to be that way, and our place in it.

It's hard to know for sure but my guess is that Brian's fundamental outlook is shaped by Christian theology. Once you posit and accept an all-knowing God who shaped man in his own image and put man in charge of all creation, the consequences are almost inevitable. Mere man could never change the climate, for example, which was created by God.

So I'm afraid you good folks are tilting at windmills, trying to get Brian to change his mind. I must say, though, it makes for amusing reading at times. What would the Ojai Post be without Brian? Sometimes he brings out the best in everyone else.

Sometimes he brings out the best in everyone else.

But he doesn't seem to be a very happy guy. His viewpoint doesn't seem to be doing him much good.

Brian reminds me of his sworn enemies in many ways; he's pretty sure that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, or that it's at least in danger of doing so. The problem is that he believes it's the fault of people who believe as we do, and more than a couple of the other people here believe that it's the fault of people who believe as Brian does. He believes that the Bad Guys are doing everything they do out of greed and stupidity, and his opposition believes pretty much the same thing about him and his ilk.

Brian might be right about something, but he'll have a hard time imparting his knowledge to me. I went to a junior college that was absolutely chock full of John Birchers, Young Americans for Freedom, Young Republicans, The Junior NRA, and at least a half a dozen other right-wing youth groups. Brian would have easily fit into any of those clans. They almost all hung out in the Campus Center, and the Young Republicans & the YAF actually had office space there. The problem was that they weren't satisfied to stay in their offices -- they acted as if they owned the entire Campus Center, if not the school. I've been watching the Brians of America for decades, and you know what? They haven't changed a bit. I'm pretty sure I know EXACTLY what Dick Cheney was like when he was a kid.

All that said, I do agree with your assessment.