While I agree that we shouldn't be logging in Washington, is the answer really that we should just pay someone else to log in their watershed instead?
We need to not be logging, period. There's a huge difference in selectively felling trees locally and commercial logging. The problem is that we have collectively grown so accustomed to immediate gratification and the appearance of unlimited resources that we've completely disconnected from how the world really works.
If we really want to fix anything meaningful it's going to take people realizing that cheap energy from coal and oil, combined with paying someone else to deal with the immediate ecological damages caused, aren't sustainable approaches to living here.
I did not say we shouldn't be logging in Washington -- just not in drinking water reservoirs (which we don't). DNR managed logging / the Campbell Global Snoqualmie tree farm seem like mostly a success.
Do you know how much logging they actually do there? I haven't kept up with that project at all and can't find any recent data.
I know when they were first proposing the project the state was going to limit them to a couple hundred acre clear cuts and Campbell had their own limit at less than that. Unless that number increased dramatically, I'd say the project is a success mainly because they just aren't logging a meaningful amount of timber at all.
Someone actually just clear cut a few hundred acres down the street from me before the locals ran the investor out of town. It's terrible to see it cleared and it's basically just a massive, open, festering wound now but st the end of the data a few hundred acres of timber is a drop in the bucket relative to what we actually consume.
We need to not be logging, period. There's a huge difference in selectively felling trees locally and commercial logging. The problem is that we have collectively grown so accustomed to immediate gratification and the appearance of unlimited resources that we've completely disconnected from how the world really works.
If we really want to fix anything meaningful it's going to take people realizing that cheap energy from coal and oil, combined with paying someone else to deal with the immediate ecological damages caused, aren't sustainable approaches to living here.