Gregoire’s Perfidy – The Politics of Poison

Elected to protect and to serve, how could a Governor reputed to be a liberal bastion of the people sell them so cheaply?

In fact, the enabling legislation kicking off the gold rush on the forests of the pacific northwest was passed unanimously by our elected representatives in Olympia. How could so many fail so dismally to protect the public?

A combination of Federal $, poor tax revenue streams, payola scientists, and lazy/ignorant/greedy politicians has lead to citizens being force fed a toxic airborne stew over their heated objections by the very officials we elected to protect us, our families, our children, our communities and our future.  The tin ear those officials have developed is a measure of how far their arrogance has grown at our expense and the need for dramatic wholesale change starting at the top.

The additional pollution of the air we all breathe on top of currently inadequate air quality regulations due to legal fictions such as the ‘carbon neutrality’ of forest based bioincineration will have a devastating impact on our health and quality of life. Forest soils already stressed by current logging practices will be bankrupted by being strip mined of their last vestiges of organic matter and biodiversity.

No critically thinking citizen can accept the vacuous notion that burning northwest forests will improve the environment.  Nor should such activity be rewarded with carbon credits (cap & trade) which is leading the charge against the people in the region, and the environment itself…all shrouded in the disingenuous self serving propaganda of ‘jobs’ and wages.  Do we sell our children so easily?  The community, after due consideration and investigation has passionately denounced this scheme.  Yet the torches are being lit as we speak, threatening our homes, our lungs, our communities and our very lives.  Shockingly, some biomassacre PR types have suggested we deserve this conflagration because we’ve used wood burning stoves.  The opposite tact was taken by Adage representatives who suggested they should be permitted to set up operations here because our air quality was better than California’s. This is tantamount, in my mind, to suggesting we should allow them (in the latter instance) to sleep with our underage daughters because the girls are virgins…or (in the former instance) because they AREN’T!  I don’t know which brazen proposal engages the more deplorable logic.  I do know that it’s offensive and has met stout resistance from the people to be affected.  Still, our elected officials (with rare exceptions) are not standing in solidarity with the people.  In all this, they’re acting as handmaidens to the very industry seeking to extract, exploit, and devour the people.  Click Story Of Stuff to see how this works.

As to Simpson Timber Co. vs. Adage?…I know Simpson and their attitude toward the environment starting many years ago in the 70’s when en route to Washington State.  Congress was debating extending protection to more of the few remaining redwood trees in northern Calif. During the hearings and debates, Simpson (same owners, corporate culture, and arrogance) elected to cut every redwood tree they could get under a chain saw, reasoning once they’d been cut, not even Congress could save them.  The same company pillaged the forests in the ‘sustainable yield’ tract in Mason County so badly it destroyed the area stream beds, silted the rivers and creating the worst flooding problems the area had ever witnessed.

Simpson is the same company whose treatment of its workers, workplace safety, and their health was so cavalier one embittered crippled logger in a wheelchair who’d been discarded by the company gunned down Sol Reed, one of the owners, in front of the timber baron’s mansion in Shelton on June, 1930. The family soon retired from the area.

I’ve seen Simpson’s training film for new hires (prior to exhausting the most merchantable local timber) encouraging them to be aggressive in cutting forests while spooking them with images of ghost towns left from boom times.  This company’s emphasis has always been to invest in capital intensive technology to eliminate/reduce labor.  It is hostile to labor unions, the watershed, the air we breathe, and the environment in deference to it’s mantra: PROFIT!  A corporation (Simpson is no exception) is a virtual machine designed with one purpose:  To make money and shield its owners from accountability/liability.  If you cut a corporation, it does not bleed, it has no conscience or heart, it has no creed or remorse, no compassion or loyalty, no ethics or morality.  It does not worry about where it’s next meal will come from or struggle for breath.  It does not suffer.  And it will crush all who stand in its way as effortlessly as a tank.  Having no conscience, ethics, or morality, it effortlessly dissembles to the people, orchestrating their undoing while in its pursuit of profit.  That our public officials have bought into this cynical pandering reveals much about the demise of our democracy and the process itself.

Make no mistake, dioxins, sub-2.5 micron particulates, mercury, lead, arsenic, creosotes, benzofurans, watershed destruction, contamination of our bays & estuaries, depletion of our scarce public tax dollars, and excessive burdens on our public infrastructure will follow closely on the heels of these bioincinerators engulfing the northwest forests in the ensuing conflagration.  The political process is too inert and indolent to save many of us due to having fattened itself at the trough of political corruption and corporate influence, but paid for by the public through corporate welfare for wealthy companies such as Adage and Simpson.

How long must the people suffer?  How long must we endure? Click I’ve Endured to hear.

I’ve never been so proud of my neighbors who have fought so hard to realize the dream of Chief Seattle, to hold dear that which is more precious than gold, to celebrate life as it was meant to be.  For of all the words of man, or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!

Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish Indians allegedly wrote to the American Government in the 1800’s – In this letter he gave the most profound understanding of God in all Things. Here is his letter, which should be instilled in the hearts and minds of every parent and child in all the Nations of the World:

CHIEF SEATTLE’S LETTER

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

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One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

One thing we know – there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We ARE all brothers after all.