By Nat Bingham – North Coast News, July 19, 1990
As we come down to the “D-Day” this week with all the Earth First!ers planning to demonstrate at one end of Fort Bragg and the loggers and their families organizing a counterdemonstration and barbecue on the other end of town under a flag labeled “solidarity,” I ask myself, “Hey, what’s going on here?”
This is the community that rallied unanimously two and a half years ago to oppose offshore oil development. On that issue, we did have true solidarity. This was phenomenal. So unusual in fact, that a couple of sociologists were able to get a grant to do a study of our community compared with one in Louisiana; Apparently any time that there is an issue of environmental impact or toxics, a public hearing on the issue will bring out support for development or impact on a ratio of about 20 percent. The study is trying to find out why our North Coast community opposed oil 100 percent. The answer is simple: There was nothing in it for anyone here. Environmental concern joined hands with concern for our local economy. The result was that we got something started which may have a nationwide impact.
Now we have an issue that, rather than uniting us, is driving us into separate camps. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves that two and a half years after achieving unity, we have fallen into such an obvious trap. I mean check out the posturing. On the one hand, you have Earth First!ers blaming the whole overharvest of timber on large corporate ownership and management of the land. The apparent remedy they offer is some kind of collective ownership of the land by the workers, plus a return to vegetarian-gatherer occupation of the forest.
On the other hand, from the timber industry we get a lot of flag-waving about private property rights and dark mumblings about “outside agitators.” Caught in between are the actual forestry workers, the millworkers and the fishermen.
In case you are wondering where the fishermen will be next Saturday, the answer is that we will be fishing. Right now the local salmon fishery is locked into a six-days-of-fishing, eight-days-of-no-fishing program imposed by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. July 21 falls in the middle of one of the six-day openers.
I will tell you that. from most of the dockside conversations I’ve listened in on. The fishermen (while they well understand what the impacts of forestry on fisheries are) strongly relate to the concern for jobs and local lifestyle expressed by the solidarity folks…
If forced to choose next Saturday, I suspect that most of us fishermen would end up at the loggers’ barbecue. Now that is a Goddamned shame that we would be put in the position of having to make that choice.
What it seems to mean is that we have socio-economic concerns and family ties in direct conflict with long-term sustained yield issues from both the forest and the fisheries. Worse yet, everyone seems to be looking outside our community for someone to blame for the problem.
As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Nearly everyone in California lives in a wood-framed house and eats fish. The local foresters and fishermen serve the consumers by providing these products. There is no question but that we are faced with inequitable distribution of wealth in our society today. The savings and loan scandal, the homeless, and the disgustingly rich are right there in our faces. But hey, we the people of the United States voted Ronald Reagan and his sleazy bunch of crooks in, and they proceeded to deregulate big industry and banking and tax the poor.
So now we have millions of people trapped in dead-end lifestyles in polluted cities who will vote for Forests Forever that they might never get to see. The big and small timber owners are scared that they will get shut down by the initiatives, so they are logging as if there were no future. While we squabble, trees fall.
There are other possible solutions to this problem rather than shutting down our industries for lack of trees or regulatory shutdowns. How about a government program that pays landowners big and small to grow trees? If it were more profitable to grow them than cut them, you would see a lot more forests and a lot less stumps.
Somehow in the near future, the two groups that are going to rally at opposite ends of town this week, have to go figure out a forum where they can sit down and figure out the answer to the forestry problem. Each group has got something vital to contribute to the solution. United as we were on the oil issue, we can solve this problem for ourselves. When the TV cameras go on this weekend, let’s give them a big surprise.