Western Larch, © George Wuerthner
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Andy Kerr's Oregon Forests Index Page
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Pacific Monthly, 1908) |
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See also Forests, General and Wilderness. Reinvesting in Oregon's Natural Infrastructure To ensure functioning forest ecosystems (both across the landscape and over time), protected water supplies and adequate re(-)creational opportunities, much Oregon timberland needs to be reconverted to public forestland. Changes on the Siuslaw appeared in Forest Magazine. Jewels in the Old Cascades was published in Seriatim: The Journal of Ecotopia Oregon Natural Resources Council is the premier organization working to conserve and restore Oregon's forests. American Lands is a leader the campaign to end old growth logging on US public lands. The Tillamook Rainforest Coalition is instrumental in the effort to save the Tillamook (and Clatsop) State Forest(s) in the north Oregon Coast Range. Like our great counterparts the Romans, we are, as I have said, a commercial and a utilitarian, not a poetic or artistic people. Our genius, too, is for construction; construction in institutions as well as in stone and mortar. Our art finds its place in skyscrapers and bridges. The dream has no place with us, though all which truly lives forever has begun as a dream. Three hundred billion board feet of timber in Oregon are impossible figures to count on the fingers, but they are easily grasped by arithmetic. It is no trouble to divide them by Portland's own cut of lumber (which is only part of the total cut), five hundred and fifty million feet a year, and guess at the day when Oregon forests shall not be. The City of Roses craved from that forest will have to take its visitors even now far to show them so much as a few acres of an unbroken forest, and it is so everywhere. The dollar rules, and except for the Government reservations there has been no thought of preserving a specimen of what mysterious Nature was a thousand years in building into infinite beauty with infinite patience. When I see a dead giant rising from the river and placed dripping and naked before the saw, stripped of its armor of rugged bark to which the lichens and mosses clung lovingly till the last, I am foolish enough to think of the past ages and the future, and to believe that it is not necessary all should be wiped off clean, and when I hear the shriek of the log at the first bite of the saw I am Greek enough to think of Daphne and the dryads and the hamadryads, and I like to think of the shadowy aisles of an untouched Oregon forest, where the sky is blotted out by the dark and over-arching roof of green and into the sky, smooth and clear and round, for one hundred, two hundred feet rise the great solemn columns of this cathedral, I smell the balsam and feel the soft carpet of needles and of moss and look into those bluish depths where the giant trunks become almost ghostly and, behind that veil, it sees to me still lingers the Great Spirit of Creation. The brooding Silence shuts out the world and in these temples there is perfect rest. It seems to me that this great beauty and solemnity is perhaps as valuable as the shriek and clamor of the mill. It is a pity to have all this majesty of antiquity wholly destroyed. Man cannot restore it. It cannot be rebuilt by Nature herself in less than a thousand years, nor indeed ever, for it is never is renewed the same. Nor do Government reservations preserve this to us; they, too, are wholly utilitarian and their plan contemplates the gradual sale and destruction of these Titans. There is no spot where the primeval forest is assured from the attack of the worst of all microbes, the dollar.
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