Occupy Portland is a nonviolent movement for accountability in the United States government. At 12PM on October 6th, 2011 we will assemble at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, North Waterfront Park and Ankeny Plaza, at The Pavilion in Portland, OR where Saturday Market touches the river, just south of the Burnside Bridge. If you are coming from the MAX, get off at Skidmore fountain and walk east to the Waterfront. We will be near the fountain.
Next Tuesday, October 11th the State Land Board meets to ponder two plans for managing state lands. The Elliot State Forest Management Plan and the Central Oregon Area Management Plan or COAMP. No public input welcome on the future of public land, but the land immediately outside the capital building? That’s public. You can Occupy that.
Early in 2010 the games began when the Land Board passed the buck to the Oregon Department of State Lands and the Department of Forestry. The latter is nothing but a poorly-made tool of the timber industry. Big Timber doesn’t really care if the ODF is a capable steward of the environment: it isn’t supposed to be and it doesn’t need to be because Big Timber makes the rules anyway. Where else do you think we got this shit-wagon rural school funding clusterfuck? Back in the day (Oh, a hundred years ago or so) Cascadia had plenty of trees and not many people. Now we have less than a tenth or our original forests and far, far too many people. Much of the State of Oregon’s atavistic fires have been put out; but not this one. True, the rural school forest fire may be quashed in the near future, but that is exactly why Elliot State Forest finds itself in the crosshairs: Loggers want to keep those “dark, satanic mill” to keep on sawing logs – and if not logs then what? Biomass for one thing. The plan is to:
Increase the timber harvest level, increase revenue and increase the percentage of older forest habitat . It also reserves about 28 thousand acres of forest as “conservation areas”. But compared with what we have already lost and what we stand to lose if the plan is approved, this amounts to nothing and it in no way preserves the type of environment and climate that makes up Cascadia’s bioregion.
You can’t “manage” a forest: A “managed” forest is a tree farm.
You can’t “plant” a forest. But you can plant a tree farm.
And you can’t scrape the forest floor clean and burn the duff in a biomass plant because you kill the forest’s future and you kill the people downwind of the biomass plant. And that is the “Plan”.- KBOO