Something rotten is happening in the Oregon Coast Range. It has been festering and getting worse for over 30 years, and none of the government agencies or environmental organizations dedicated to protecting biodiversity and watershed function have said boo. There is a theme in human history of turning a blind eye. People and organizations have turned a blind eye on their fellow humans’ distress and displacement over and over in history. We look back and judge these people for their failure to take what should have been the obvious high road. History judges the people who knew, or should have known, the truth of the matter, but who failed to act.
There is also a long history, and this is perhaps a more direct analogy, of governments and organizations turning a blind eye on environmental disasters, or even aiding and abetting them, as ODF has in this case. Minamata, Love Canal, black lung, tobacco, lead – the list of slowly unfolding environmental tragedies goes on and on. In all of these cases, governments and organizations turned a blind eye, and the money-making machine just kept on grinding away at innocent people and their environments, far past any reasonable response time. Why have we not figured this out?
There really is no difference between direct assaults on human beings in the first paragraph, and assaults on their environments in the second. They occupy a continuum of sociopathic behaviors by a small number of unscrupulous people and businesses that is enabled by the inertia and indifference of everyone else. And always, when we look back, we vilify both the sociopathic people or industries and the enabling populace and their organizations – churches, charities, universities, governments – whose existence is predicated upon helping humans live better lives. We judge these organizations harshly because they knew what was happening and nevertheless failed to act.
In this case, we have an obvious high road in addressing one of many threats to our kids’ future world. This threat is the accelerating pace of biodiversity loss through the ever-increasing application of herbicides. The Oregon Department of Forestry is not only spraying our state-owned logging units, they are promoting spraying of essentially every acre of private forest in the state. The effects of spraying native plants on 6 million acres and counting is, and I can’t believe I have to state this at all, as clear an assault on biodiversity as I can imagine. I have asked the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District, the Tualatin River Watershed Council, the Oregon Bee Atlas, Metro, Columbia Land Trust, and now you all. So far all of these organizations have declined to comment, or in OWEB’s case outright defended the use of herbicides as “necessary to restore and manage healthy forests and to restore native plant communities.” I have to point out, I guess, that it’s one thing to spray a patch of blackberry and plant it with native plants, and entirely another to fly over the Coast Range killing every native plant that isn’t a Douglas-fir.
Every one of your websites extolls the value of biodiversity, and talks about future generations and sustainability in one way and another. These are your words, not mine. If biodiversity is all that important to water quality, watershed health, and human well-being, why aren’t you all saying something? Most of the rationale from agencies and NGO’s for not commenting is a fear of being viewed as advocating for any cause. I think it is just as much a fear of exposure and conflict. More importantly, looking back on human history, we are simply playing the same roles we always have. We shrug, we turn away, or we nod and comiserate but then say there’s nothing we can do. Down the line, though, future humans aren’t going to let us off the hook just because advocacy wasn’t written into our bylaws. It’s a flimsy defense now. In the future, it won’t matter at all.
My question to all of these organizations that are unwilling to even comment with simple statements of fact: in judging the behavior of past people and organizations, would you in hindsight excuse their failure to stand up for the Tribes, or European Jews, or coal miners, or the fishermen and the blighted babies of Minamata? Would you call commenting on any of these some kind of advocacy you are constrained from engaging in? Stepping down a couple of levels, would your organizations stand up for the passenger pigeon, the northern white rhino, or the Tasmanian tiger if doing so might have made a difference? It’s worth noting here that, for just a single example, the Pacific band-tailed pigeon population has been declining at an estimated 1.2-2% annually since the 1960’s. If the average of this decline range is accurate, we have only about a third of the band-tailed pigeons we had 60 years ago. I remember when band-tailed pigeons were thick in the Coast Range, and you know what I remember them going after the most? Red elderberry. How much red elderberry have ODF, Weyerehaeuser and the rest vaporized with imazapyr? Oh yeah..6 million acres worth. Think maybe there’s a connection? Maybe this needs more study…
No, we do not need to study band-tailed pigeon decline, only to come to the usual murky result of most ecological studies. We need, instead, to start using our brains and speak up when something doesn’t seem right. In the case of the pigeon, I hardly ever see them anymore. They are flocking birds, and I have seen a single paltry flock of them this year, only here at the farm where we have some red elderberry for them to eat.
Perhaps there is some hesiatation to speak up because society is granting equivalency to the view on the one hand, that herbicides are necessary and beneficial, and on the other that herbicides are wiping out biodiversity at an alarming rate. I was told by one mid-level government manager of a local conservation agency that they weren’t going to confront ODF based on one person’s opinion, that person being me. Perhaps it’s just a matter of opinion where and whether we apply these chemicals to native forests, and any action now would be premature and reactionary – even if that is just to engage in fact-finding dialog. So do some fact-finding on your own. Maybe I am just one opinion, but I’m not delusional and I have done my homework. And for the record, it’s not just my opinion that 6 million acres of native plants matters. I have talked with several experts in the field, and many of these folks have been sufficiently alarmed about this issue to engage with ODF and express their concerns.
But we need agencies and organizations to speak up. Otherwise, your silence adds to the balance, not on the side of the band-tailed pigeon, but on the side that wants us to believe that none of this matters. It doesn’t matter enough for the agencies in charge of these resources to say anything? Then how can this be anything other than a few alarmists making a stink?
I will guarantee that, in every environmental disaster before – and this is a disaster – the exact same arguments against engagement were made. To the letter. Just change “herbicides” to “lead” or “tobacco” or “you name it human or environmental tragedy where power and money were involved.” We all have to engage. And we have to hold each other and our organizations accountable to the future.
If you all need more information, or to look at the ground directly, I have a compelling field trip lined up where we can see how this is playing out in the real world. We can see natural 70-year-old forests, and we can see what happens when these are logged and then sprayed, or not sprayed. The differences are profound. Come see for yourself if you don’t believe me.
-George
More on the band-tailed pigeon. I wanted to see how my observation of the feeding habits of btp’s lined up with published resources and came across this, from USFWS: “The emergence of Pacific red elder (S. callicarpa) berries in June provided the food resources necessary for initiation of reproduction in Oregon, and probably throughout the Northwest.”
And from ODFW: “As the summer progresses, the birds will transition to ripening fruits, and feed ravenously on Cascara, bitter cherry, and elderberry. Band-tailed pigeons are usually still focused on fruits when the September hunting season rolls around.” Presumably, the later summer elderberry is Sambucus mexicana ssp cerulea – blue elderberry. All of these species – red and blue elderberry, bitter cherry, and cascara, along with all of our other flowering, fleshy-fruited native flora – are efficiently targeted by forestry herbicides. Imazapyr, one of ODF’s go-to chemicals that they apply to thousands of state-owned acres annually, is especially hard on Sambucus, and elderberry plants can be killed or severely stunted via root uptake years after application.
Now that we have wiped out the vast majority of these plants on 6 million acres, we should not be surprised that birds like the band-tailed pigeon are in decline. We already know that these birds are vulnerable to human-induced environmental perturbations. Their closest relative, the passenger pigeon, is already extinct.
So what are we going to do about it?