That was years ago…yet, standing in a ditch while Karol took pictures of the smoldering carnage, I felt sad. Another bit of my history had gone up in smoke. On top of that, it looks like about a million dollars in damages will be visited upon people who had businesses near or inside the dilapidated old structure the Plywood Plant had become…Yet more hard times being visited upon people who’ve had more than their share since the dirty 80’s and the death of the timber industry in most of the Pacific Northwest.
I’ve never understood the thinking that has led to the death of the timber industry in places like my hometown. Trees, after all, are a renewable resource. Check out Florida, where they grow southern pine trees in rows like corn, if you don’t think so…and the sad truth is, in Libby they had been planting more trees than they’d been harvesting for many years before the rug got pulled out from under everyone. At any rate, any notion we have that our forests would be better off without our influence is stupidity of the highest order. We have been managing the forests for more than 150 years out here (much longer in the East) and if recent history tells us anything it’s that when we STOP being stewards of our forests, they just become infested with wood-eating bugs and burn to the ground as if to spite us.
The housing boom that was partly to blame for the economic bust should have been a huge boon to the American timber industry and places like Libby. We were building an awful lot of stupidly-big stick-framed houses for a long time, so it might have been flush times for mill workers and lumberjacks…except for the fact that the eco-terrorists had gutted our timber industry long ago. So a lot of that money went to places like Canada and Russia and so on…
I guess it makes more sense to float logs in from Siberia or truck hem in from British Columbia than to harvest resources in our own back yards and employ our own people.
“Green” is the social fad of the day. Just check out all the eco-friendly commerce happening on the Internet.
But am I the only person who sees the hypocrisy in selling $295 celebrity handbags on a site that touts itself as being “eco-conscious?”
To my way of thinking, it’s all an extension of the ecology movement that got traction and then ran over places like Libby starting in the 70’s. Don’t get me wrong…I believe global warming is real, that recycling is good, and that adoption of renewable power sources is key to our survival on this planet (among other things)…but I also think that there are far too many dimwitted dipshits and well-minded sheep (i.e. Californians, Sierra Club members, Eco-terrorists, and their ilk) running around and mucking in other people’s business for no good purpose other than to relieve their guilt about wrecking their own back yards.
I suppose it’s a noble and high minded goal, to “save the planet.” But people also have to be allowed to pursue happiness and all that constitutionally guaranteed mumbo-jumbo the average American barely understands and certainly takes for granted. It has always been odd to me that a politically well-connected plastic surgeon in California might have more to say about what goes on in the forests of Northwestern Montana than a logger who is actually trying to support his family here.
But it happens, and of course, the locals here just want to mow down every stick of green in the forest anyway and therefore desperately need to be steered onto the right path by someone made of apparently higher moral stuff. We dumb Montanans certainly do need to be told what to do…and judging by the state of California’s own resources and economy, they are just the ones to do it.
Okay, not just California, but they’re the most fun to pick on because they are so friggin self-righteous and self-absorbed (though apparently unable to balance the state’s checkbook).
Oh, I know how it works…it’s all about who can best afford to make the most noise in congress. It’s about who can best afford to spend millions to file lawsuit after lawsuit in order to tie lumber sales up in court long enough to drive small and mid-sized timber companies out of business. It’s about people who only see spotted owls and pretty trees and want to make sure those goofy birds (I saw one nesting at a Burger King once – apparently their habitat includes more than old growth forests) and pretty trees are still around when they come north to fish, hunt, ski, visit their summer homes, or vacation in the woods for a couple weeks every summer…I just wonder why the process so rarely works for the people who actually live here.
I’m rambling, and I do hate it when I ramble…
Anyway, I met a gentleman not long ago out by the family house I’m working on. Seems he used to be the local forest supervisor (a post my great grandfather once held, as it turns out), and he bemoaned the stupidity…and the arrogance…of all this. He noted that the local forest grows by some 400 million board feet per year, but that loggers are only allowed to harvest about 10% of that annually. The surplus is so staggering and out of control that one of these days (also factoring in things like the long-standing drought and the massive pine beetle infestation) someone is going to flick a cigarette butt into a bush around here and the whole county is going to go up like an atom bomb.
I’m hoping to live to see it so I can scream “I told you so” into the faces of a lot of greenies I know. This actually already happened once about 25 years or so ago…remember the Yellowstone fires? Well, apparently we didn’t learn anything then, either…but it’s nice Steven Spielberg could use the footage in one of his movies.
So what does all this have to do with the Plywood plant?
Hell, I don’t know…it’s just that if the eco-terrorists hadn’t killed the timber industry up here, there would still be a mill here (the old J. Neils/St. Regis/Champion mill employed up to 2,000 people at various points in Libby’s history), the Plywood Plant would have been in operation rather than being allowed to fall into disrepair, and the town would be thriving instead of slowly shrinking into what should eventually be a nice quaint retirement village run by the local group of good ole boys.
It’s unlikely that the fire would have happened at all, and if it had, there would have been appropriate resources to handle it. The people who ended up losing everything they have worked for in the fire wouldn’t be living in hellish uncertainty today…and some of my memories of youth wouldn’t now be drifting away on a tendril of smoke.
It just grates on me…maybe it’s the whole “ripple in a pond” thing.
Years ago, some well-meaning tree huggers who had already raped and pillaged their forests, lakes, and streams (and made themselves wealthy in the process) decided to save some trees from a bunch of backwards mountain people who clearly weren’t to be trusted to make decisions about what goes on in their own back yards. They were really successful, since they had more money and lawyers than God; and now there are lots of pretty trees to look at whenever they come to take a ski vacation or kill a fish or some other living creature in God’s backcountry.
Of course, it never occurred to them that saving all those trees without really thinking the whole thing through might have negative consequences for the people who lived here, and even, in the long run, the forests and wildlife themselves. So now, we have pine beetle infested forests, surplus timber about to spontaneously combust, widespread poverty and marginal literacy, old infrastructure falling apart and bursting into flames all around us, eyesores galore where once thriving towns have become ghost towns, and on and on…all to save some fowl, give a few bears a place to crap, and to save some trees that weren’t in any danger to begin with.
I just don’t understand how supposedly smart people…these self-appointed saviors of all things green…can be so unbelievably short-sighted and dumb. But here we have it in flames, rubble, twisted steel, and ruined dreams…so where are they now? Why aren’t they here cleaning up the mess they helped make?
Why indeed…I guess a burned out industrial building just isn’t as pretty to look at, or as worthy of saving, as a tree…
But with apologies to Joyce Kilmer, I just don't know if I can always agree with that.
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