About 20 persons spent two hours Thursday morning protesting the sale of the “old growth” Moose Matrix by the U.S. Forest Service Sweet Home Ranger District.
“We’re just trying to get the word out that it’s not okay to log old-growth forests like the Moose Timber Sale,” a Eugene man identifying himself only as Mike said. He also wanted to raise awareness about President Bush’s “fire plan,” which was before Congress Thursday. “It’s calling for logging of old growth … when in fact old-growth forests are fire resistant.
“I’m here to say we need to keep old growth standing because these are the places that clean air and clean water come from.”
The trees sold Thursday are an average of 110 years old, far younger than the Forest Service’s standard for old growth, which defines trees older than 200 to 250 years. The trees have an average diameter of 16.7 inches on 22 acres approximately two miles east of Moose Lake and Moose Creek and north of the Menagerie Wilderness.
Mike also said his group also wanted to make sure that roadless areas stay roadless, “again for clean air and water.”
Mike said he also was against the Forest Service allowing the clear cut method in logging. Even with replanting, it can only be two or three times and the new trees will not grow.
Protesters carried a variety of signs in front of the Sweet Home Ranger District Work Center on Highway 20. One sign called for no more timber harvesting on public land. Another said the Moose Matrix Sale would not be logged.
Timber company representatives, members of the press and others who wished to be present at the sale were escorted by law enforcement officers from a gated opening on the west side of the property.
Inside the building, staff from the U.S. Forest Service kept a close eye on the protestors who pushed their signs close to the building against a bright yellow warning ribbon.
Bidders and staff members helped themselves to cups of coffee and talked in quiet tones. Every now and then, one of the company represenatives would move toward the front window and move a curtain a few inches to peer out at the crowd whose chants at times rose loud enough to be clearly heard.
The bidding process was quick and involved no fanfare.
At 10 a.m. a Forest Service employee announced that the time for written bids was up and that there would be one minute to being oral bidding.
Only three companies bid on the two sales, Gingham II near Detroit and the Moose Matrix outside of Sweet Home. The minimum bid of $124.47 per thousand board feet was how all three started the written bidding process.
During the oral bidding, prices went up a nickel per thousand until Seneca Logging took the sale at $125.
Thomas Creek Logging took the Gingham II sale with a bid of $73.50. Minimum bidding started at $56.55 on that sale.
The whole process took less than 15 minutes.
One of the protestors, left the picket line long enough to view the bidding process, then returned outside as soon as the Moose Matrix bidding was completed.
Bruce Gaine, law enforcement supervisor on the Willamette and Siuslaw National Forests, said he has been seeing protest activities increasing in recent months.
“We’ve had three or four active protests since spring,” Gaine said. “We make some custody arrests during a protest near Sandy recently.”
District Ranger Mike Rassbach said the law enforcement presence was to provide a safe manner to conduct the sale.
When police officers would drive by, one protester would shout, “slave.” He would shout “genocide” when log trucks drove by. During the bid opening process, the protesters laughed as they chanted, “Killing is a sin. Your souls will rot in hell.” Among other things, they also chanted, “Killing our future for money’s really dumb.”
Police had anticipated many more protesters, Police Chief Bob Burford said. Protesters anticipated from Southern Oregon and Portland apparently did not join the protest, leaving a group of about 20 that drove from the Eugene area.
“There’s a lot of people who would have been out here, but they’re working,” Mike said.
“I’m just kind of up here to bring the essence of the people that couldn’t come,” a Eugene woman identifying herself as Kristin said. “We don’t need to be cutting these trees down.”
People need to stop thinking about money and their pocketbooks and do what’s right instead of destroying the forests along with clean air and water, Kristin said. “They know deep down it’s (logging) wrong.”
Old growth takes hundreds of years go grow, Kristin said. She suggested that instead, there should be “tree crops” to provide needed wood.
“We don’t need to be going to a new place (to cut wood) every year,” she said. Instead, there needs to be places “to grow trees specifically.”
Both industrial hemp and bamboo could also take the place of wood, Kristin said. Both have advantages over wood.
Besides, Mike added, “a lot of nasty chemicals are used in wood making it sellable.”
When people use wood products, “they need to think about where it came from, a live being,” Kristin said. People need to be conscious of what they’re using.
“I think the preservation of the environment should concern everybody,” Mike said. “We live on this planet. we need water and air, and things are quickly running out.”
“Think of the earth as a spaceship,” Kristin said. “We can’t use all of our supplies up at once. We’re going to run out of resources. We’re going to run out of air and water. I don’t want to bring any children into this world.”
Cutting wood just to provide jobs for loggers “is lacking foresight” because “there are no jobs on a dead planet,” Mike said.
Another woman, calling herself Spindle, said the argument that environmentalists have cost jobs is not valid.
Environmentalism and jobs are “not mutually exclusive,” Spindle said. “There are forest jobs without having to cut big old trees.”
Big timber companies are more to blame for job loss, she said. When it comes to losing profits or cutting jobs, they’ll cut jobs.
Spindle argued with a passing drive stopped at the nearby intersection about job losses in the timber industry.
“She was saying it was us ruining jobs, and it’s not,” Spindle said. “We’re all interested in living in a world that has clean air and clean water,” along with healthy wildlife.
Logging needs to be restructured into tree farms, Spindle said. It would be hard to simulate forest conditions on a tree farm, but that would help rebuild and redesign the timber industry’s job structure.
Ideally, she would like to see absolutely no cutting on public land.
“The whole thing with the public lands — Taxpayers paying billions of dollars for timber companies to come and rape our lands,” Spindle said. In the Midwest, people are amazed that anyone is allowed to log national forests.
She sees a compromise though, Spindle said. “I would like to see a shift toward more sustainable forestry” instead of clear cutting.
As a rock climber, she has looked down on the forests and seen small patches of old growth surrounded by clearest. This is a problem, she says, that is getting worse.
Clear cutting is no longer a practice accepted by the Forest Service.
“I see things getting worse with Bush in office,” Spindle said. She suggests that people need to go into the forests, and “the forest will speak to you.”
While standing under a tree that’s 500 to 700 years old, “maybe some people might say let’s cut it,” Spindle said, but a “700-year-old tree would excite the most hardened of spirits, I think.”
Spindle’s main concern about the Moose Matrix Sale was the cutting of old growth there. Told that the Forest Service indicates the average age of trees in the sale is 110 years old, Spindle said that a number of the protesters had been in the area of the sale and seen trees that were hundreds of years old.
According to the Forest Service, the Moose Matrix Sale is a regeneration harvest. It will include no road construction with the Moose Lake Roadless Area. There will be no harvest of old growth.
A hydrologist, soil scientist and fisheries biologist helped design the alternative to avoid potential adverse effects to water or fish habitat, according to the Forest Service. High water quality and anadromous fish habitat will be maintained and protected in the Moose Creek Subwatershed. The project also includes the enhancement of elk habitat and botanical resources.