This writing is a message from over 10 Indigenous leaders and organizations who aim to explain that regenerative agriculture and permaculture offer narrow solutions to the climate crisis. This collaborative work has been shared freely. To access the original version, along with credits: see below.
Regenerative agriculture and permaculture claim to be the solutions to our ecological crises.
While they both borrow practices from Indigenous cultures, critically, they leave out our worldviews and continue the pattern of erasing our history and contributions to the modern world.
While the practices ‘sustainable farming’ promote are important, they do not encompass the deep cultural and relational changes needed to realize our collective healing.
Where is ‘Nature’?
Regen Ag & Permaculture often talk about what’s happening ‘in nature’: “In nature, soil is always covered.” “In nature, there are no monocultures.” Nature is viewed as separate, outside, ideal, perfect. Human beings must practice “biomimicry” (the mimicking of life) because we exist outside of the life of Nature.
Indigenous peoples speak of our role AS Nature. (Actually, Indigenous languages often don’t have a word for Nature, only a name for Earth and our Universe.) As cells and organs of Earth, we strive to fulfill our roles as her caregivers and caretakers. We often describe ourselves as “weavers”, strengthening the bonds between all beings.
Death Doesn’t Mean Dead
Regen Ag & Permaculture often maintain the “dead” worldview of Western culture and science: Rocks, mountains, soil, water, wind, and light all start as “dead”. (E.g., “Let’s bring life back to the soil!” — implying soil, without microbes, is dead.) This worldview believes that life only happens when these elements are brought together in some specific and special way.
Indigenous cultures view the Earth as a communion of beings and not objects: All matter and energy is alive and conscious. Mountains, stones, water, and air are relatives and ancestors. Earth is a living being whose body we are all a part of. Life does not only occur when these elements are brought together; Life always is. No “thing” is ever dead; Life forms and transforms.
From Judgemental to Relational
Regen Ag & Permaculture maintain overly simplistic binaries through subscribing to good and bad. Tilling is bad; not tilling is good. Mulch is good; not mulching is bad. We must do only the ‘good’ things to reach the idealized, 99.9% biomimicked farm/garden, though we will never be as pure or good “as Nature”, because we are separate from her.
Indigenous cultures often share the view that there is no good, bad, or ideal—it is not our role to judge. Our role is to tend, care, and weave to maintain relationships of balance. We give ourselves to the land: Our breath and hands uplift her gardens, binding our life force together. No one is tainted by our touch, and we have the ability to heal as much as any other lifeform.
Our Words Shape Us
Regen Ag & Permaculture use English as their preferred language no matter the geography or culture: You must first learn English to learn from the godFATHERS of this movement. The English language judges and objectifies, including words most Indigenous languages do not: ‘natural, criminal, waste, dead, wild, pure…’ English also utilizes language like “things” and “its” when referring to “non-living, subhuman entities”.
Among Indigenous cultures, every language emerges from and is therefore intricately tied to place. Inuit people have dozens of words for snow and her movement; Polynesian languages have dozens of words for water’s ripples. To know a place, you must speak her language. There is no one-size-fits-all, and no words for non-living or sub-human beings, because all life has equal value.
People are land. Holistic includes History.
Regen Ag and Permaculture claim to be holistic in approach. When regenerating a landscape, ‘everything’ is considered: soil health, water cycles, local ‘wildlife’, income & profit. ‘Everything’, however, tends to EXCLUDE history: Why were Indigenous homelands steal-able and why were our peoples & lands rape-able? Why were our cultures erased? Why does our knowledge need to be validated by ‘Science’? Why are we still excluded from your ‘healing’ of our land?
Among Indigenous cultures, people belong to land rather than land belonging to people. Healing of land MUST include healing of people and vice versa. Recognizing and processing the emotional traumas held in our bodies as descendants of assaulted, enslaved, and displaced peoples is necessary to the healing of land. Returning our rights to care for, harvest from, and relate to the land that birthed us is part of this recognition.
Composting
Regen Ag & Permaculture often share the environmentalist message that the world is dying and we must “save” it. Humans are toxic, but if we try, we can create a “new Nature” of harmony, though one that is not as harmonious as the “old Nature” that existed before humanity. Towards this mission, we must put Nature first and sacrifice ourselves for “the cause”.
Indigenous cultures often see Earth as going through cycles of continuous transition. We currently find ourselves in a cycle of great decomposition. Like in any process of composting there is discomfort and a knowing that death always brings us into rebirth. Within this great cycle, we all have a role to play. Recognizing and healing all of our own traumas IS healing Earth’s traumas, because we are ONE.
Where to go from here?
Making up only 6.2% of our global population, Indigenous peoples steward 80% of Earth’s biodiversity while managing over 25% of her land. Indigenous worldviews are the bedrocks that our agricultural practices & lifeways arise from. We invite you to ground your daily practices in these ancestral ways, as we jointly work towards collective healing.
Learn whose lands you live on (native-land.ca), their history, and how you can support their causes and cultural revitalization.
Watch @gatherfilm and Aluna documentary.
Amplify the voices and stories of Indigenous peoples and organizations.
Follow, support, donate to, and learn from the contributors to this post.
If you’ve gotten this far in this book—or if you’re simply anything other than entirely insensate—we probably agree that civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about. If you don’t agree with this, we probably have nothing to say to each other (How ‘bout them Cubbies!). We probably also agree that this crash will be messy. We agree further that since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet, the sooner civilization comes down (whether or not we help it crash) the more life will remain afterwards to support both humans and nonhumans.
If you agree with all this, and if you don’t want to dirty your spirituality and conscience with the physical work of helping to bring down civilization, and if your primary concern really is for the well-being of those (humans) who will be alive during and immediately after the crash (as opposed to simply raising this issue because you’re too scared to talk about the crash or to allow anyone else to do so either), then, given, and I repeat this point to emphasize it, that civilization is going to come down anyway, you need to start preparing people for the crash.
Instead of attacking me for stating the obvious, go rip up asphalt in vacant parking lots to convert them to neighborhood gardens, go teach people how to identify local edible plants, even in the city (especially in the city) so these people won’t starve when the proverbial shit hits the fan and they can no longer head off to Albertson’s for groceries. Set up committees to eliminate or if appropriate channel the (additional) violence that might break out.
We need it all.
We need people to take out dams, and we need people to knock out electrical infrastructures. We need people to protest and to chain themselves to trees. We also need people working to ensure that as many people as possible are equipped to deal with the fall-out when the collapse comes. We need people working to teach others what wild plants to eat, what plants are natural antibiotics. We need people teaching others how to purify water, how to build shelters. All of this can look like supporting traditional, local knowledge, it can look like starting roof-top gardens, it can look like planting local varieties of medicinal herbs, and it can look like teaching people how to sing.
The truth is that although I do not believe that designing groovy eco-villages will help bring down civilization, when the crash comes, I’m sure to be first in line knocking on their doors asking for food.
People taking out dams do not have a responsibility to ensure that people in homes previously powered by hydro know how to cook over a fire. They do however have a responsibility to support the people doing that work.
Similarly, those people growing medicinal plants (in preparation for the end of civilization) do not have a responsibility to take out dams. They do however have a responsibility at the very least to not condemn those people who have chosen that work. In fact they have a responsibility to support them. They especially have a responsibility to not report them to the cops.
It’s the same old story:
the good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done. Do what you love. Do what you can. Do what best serves your landbase. We need it all. This doesn’t mean that everyone taking out dams and everyone working to cultivate medicinal plants are working toward the same goals. It does mean that if they are, each should see the importance of the other’s work.
Further, resistance needs to be global. Acts of resistance are more effective when they’re large-scale and coordinated. The infrastructure is monolithic and centralized, so common tools and techniques can be used to dismantle it in many different places, simultaneously if possible.
By contrast, the work of renewal must be local.
To be truly effective (and to avoid reproducing the industrial infrastructure) acts of survival and livelihood need to grow from particular landbases where they will thrive. People need to enter into conversation with each piece of earth and all its (human and nonhuman) inhabitants. This doesn’t mean of course that we can’t share ideas, or that one water purification technique won’t be useful in many different locations. It does mean that people in those places need to decide for themselves what will work.
Most important of all, the water in each place needs to be asked and allowed to decide for itself. I’ve been thinking a lot again about the cell phone tower behind Safeway, and I see now how these different approaches manifest in this one small place. The cell phone tower needs to come down. It is contiguous on two sides with abandoned parking lots. Those lots need to come up.
This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters.
Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows.
For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore.
While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect.
Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,”
said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”
Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.
While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.
The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.
The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.
“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,”
Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.
Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. . .
This article was written by Cypress Hansen and published on 24 November 2020 in Mongabay. You can read the full, original article here:
Stop Thinning Forests is a community compilation, sponsored by Deep Green Resistance, of research and voices that speak in defense of our forests against the atrocities that are being committed on those communities in the name of “fire mitigation” and “forest health.”
The Forest Service, in partnership with the timber industry, uses propaganda to promote the idea that thinning helps lessen fire severity while improving forest health. The research on the benefits of forest thinning is financially backed by the timber industry, and congressional passing of bills that promote thinning are backed by the lobbying efforts of the industry. The main goal for thinning forests is to increase revenue by allowing the timber industry to get into forests that were previously protected by environmental laws. Recent legislation has allowed the industry to bypass those laws and profit from forest products in the name of “forest health and restoration.” The Forest Service has consistently worked with the timber industry as a result of financial incentives and has been responsible for creating the infrastructure through use of federal tax dollars in the form of subsidies that enable the industry to “get the cut out.”
Individual land owners have recently been encouraged by the Forest Service to thin their lands with available grant monies under the guise of protecting their homes from fire and to improve the health of the forests. The available grant money filters down to the Forest Service from federal legislation that allows industry to get into our treasured, and last remaining, intact forests. Thinning private lands is offered as another incentive that generates money for the Forest Service while creating the appearance that the Forest Service is promoting a policy of “fire mitigation” and “forest restoration,” extending to the wildland/urban interface. Private land owners have the power to become informed and make rational decisions to protect their homes from fire that will not devastate the forest community. It is essential that individuals making these decisions become informed about federal forest policies and the history of the Forest Service before making decisions that will disrupt and harm the forest communities where we live.
Here is a recent on-the-ground report back from Deanna Meyer, a Deep Green Resistance organizer in Colorado:
I went up to check on my neighboring forest who is being destroyed as I write with heavy equipment. These photos show some of the results. Pictures could never show the true devastation, and this place, which is very important to me, is now unrecognizable.
This is at a church in Sedalia, Colorado and this tax exempt church accepted hundreds of thousands of tax payers’ dollars to destroy this forest. All of this is in the name of “fire prevention.” Research analyzing millions of acres throughout the West where fires have occurred shows otherwise.
Here in Colorado, all we need to do is look at the 3 largest fires in our history, all occurring this year, and pay attention to all of the acres that were “thinned” just like this. They did NOT fare any better than the untouched forests and in many areas they burnt even faster and hotter because of wind breaks and dried out soil.
All of this is horrific and heartbreaking, but the soil stands out the most to me. It takes thousands of years to create healthy soil and mycelial networks. This land now is a barren dustbowl with some wood chips thrown on top. The mycelium, grasses, sedges, forbs, and trees who were there and holding the soil together are now completely obliterated from the heavy equipment, mulching and utter destruction of at least a foot of soil who used to be sinking carbon and healing the land.
Every time our forests start to heal themselves from the decades of colonizing destruction, the Forest DISservice and private land owners come in and log it again. When you look at the forests that have not been touched for decades, they are healing and thinning themselves out. Just because they look “messy” to colonizers who can’t stand the idea of not having control over every living biome that exists does not alter the fact that the forests know best what to do with themselves and our meddling with them is biocide.
A few years ago, when you saw a security camera, you may have thought that the video feed went to a VCR somewhere in a back office that could only be accessed when a crime occurs. Or maybe you imagined a sleepy guard who only paid half-attention, and only when they discovered a crime in progress. In the age of internet-connectivity, now it’s easy to imagine footage sitting on a server somewhere, with any image inaccessible except to someone willing to fast forward through hundreds of hours of footage.
That may be how it worked in 1990s heist movies, and it may be how a homeowner still sorts through their own home security camera footage. But that’s not how cameras operate in today’s security environment. Instead, advanced algorithms are watching every frame on every camera and documenting every person, animal, vehicle, and backpack as they move through physical space, and thus camera to camera, over an extended period of time.
The term “video analytics” seems boring, but don’t confuse it with how many views you got on your YouTube “how to poach an egg” tutorial. In a law enforcement or private security context, video analytics refers to using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to automate ubiquitous surveillance.
Through the Atlas of Surveillance project, EFF has found more than 35 law enforcement agencies that use advanced video analytics technology. That number is steadily growing as we discover new vendors, contracts, and capabilities. To better understand how this software works, who uses it, and what it’s capable of, EFF has acquired a number of user manuals. And yes, they are even scarier than we thought.
Briefcam, which is often packaged with Genetec video technology, is frequently used at real-time crime centers. These are police surveillance facilities that aggregate camera footage and other surveillance information from across a jurisdiction. Dozens of police departments use Briefcam to search through hours of footage from multiple cameras in order to, for instance, narrow in on a particular face or a specific colored backpack. This power of video analytic software would be particularly scary if used to identify people out practicing their First Amendment right to protest.
Avigilon systems are a bit more opaque, since they are often sold to business, which aren’t subject to the same transparency laws. In San Francisco, for instance, Avigilon provides the cameras and software for at least six business improvement districts (BIDs) and Community Benefit Districts (CBDs). These districts blanket neighborhoods in surveillance cameras and relay the footage back to a central control room. Avigilon’s video analytics can undertake object identification (such as whether things are cars and people), license plate reading, and potentially face recognition.
You can read the Avigilon user manual here, and the Briefcam manual here. The latter was obtained through the California Public Records Act by Dylan Kubeny, a student journalist at the University of Nevada, Reno Reynolds School of Journalism.
But what exactly are these software systems’ capabilities? Here’s what we learned:
Pick a Face, Track a Face, Rate a Face
If you’re watching video footage on Briefcam, you can select any face, then add it to a “watchlist.” Then, with a few more clicks, you can retrieve every piece of video you have with that person’s face in it.
Briefcam assigns all face images 1-3 stars. One star: the AI can’t even recognize it as a person. Two stars: medium confidence. Three stars: high confidence.
Detection of Unusual Events
Avigilon has a pair of algorithms that it uses to predict what it calls “unusual events.”
The first can detect “unusual motions,” essentially patterns of pixels that don’t match what you’d normally expect in the scene. It takes two weeks to train this self-learning algorithm. The second can detect “unusual activity” involving cars and people. It only takes a week to train.
Also, there’s “Tampering Detection” which, depending on how you set it, can be triggered by a moving shadow:
Enter a value between 1-10 to select how sensitive a camera is to tampering Events. Tampering is a sudden change in the camera field of view, usually caused by someone unexpectedly moving the camera. Lower the setting if small changes in the scene, like moving shadows, cause tampering events. If the camera is installed indoors and the scene is unlikely to change, you can increase the setting to capture more unusual events.
Pink Hair and Short Sleeves
With Briefcam’s shade filter, a person searching a crowd could filter by the color and length of items of clothing, accessories, or even hair. Briefcam’s manual even states the program can search a crowd or a large collection of footage for someone with pink hair.
In addition, users of BriefCam can search specifically by what a person is wearing and other “personal attributes.” Law enforcement attempting to sift through crowd footage or hours of video could search for someone by specifying blue jeans or a yellow short-sleeved shirt.
Man, Woman, Child, Animal
BriefCam sorts people and objects into specific categories to make them easier for the system to search for. BriefCam breaks people into the three categories of “man,” “woman,” and “child.” Scientific studies show that this type of categorization can misidentify gender nonconforming, nonbinary, trans, and disabled people whose bodies may not conform to the rigid criteria the software looks for when sorting people. Such misidentification can have real-world harms, like triggering misguided investigations or denying access.
The software also breaks down other categories, including distinguishing between different types of vehicles and recognizing animals.
Proximity Alert
In addition to monitoring the total number of objects in a frame or the relative size of objects, BriefCam can detect proximity between people and the duration of their contact. This might make BriefCam a prime candidate for “COVID-19 washing,” or rebranding invasive surveillance technology as a potential solution to the current public health crisis.
Avigilon also claims it can detect skin temperature, raising another possible assertion of public health benefit. But, as we’ve argued before, remote thermal imaging can often be very inaccurate, and fail to detect virus carriers that are asymptomatic.
Public health is a collective effort. Deploying invasive surveillance technologies that could easily be used to monitor protestors and track political figures is likely to breed more distrust of the government. This will make public health collaboration less likely, not more.
Watchlists
One feature available both with Briefcam and Avigilon are watchlists, and we don’t mean a notebook full of names. Instead, the systems allow you to upload folders of faces and spreadsheets of license plates, and then the algorithm will find matches and track the targets’ movement. The underlying watchlists can be extremely problematic. For example, EFF has looked at hundreds of policy documents for automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and it is very rare for an agency to describe the rules for adding someone to a watchlist.
Vehicles Worldwide
Often, ALPRs are associated with England, the birthplace of the technology, and the United States, where it has metastasized. But Avigilon already has its sights set on new markets and has programmed its technology to identify license plates across six continents.
It’s worth noting that Avigilon is owned by Motorola Solutions, the same company that operates the infamous ALPR provider Vigilant Solutions.
Conclusion
We’re heading into a dangerous time. The lack of oversight of police acquisition and use of surveillance technology has dangerous consequences for those misidentified or caught up in the self-fulfilling prophecies of AI policing.
In fact, Dr. Rashall Brackney, the Charlottesville Police Chief, described these video analytics as perpetuating racial bias at a recent panel. Video analytics “are often incorrect,” she said. “Over and over they create false positives in identifying suspects.”
This new era of video analytics capabilities causes at least two problems. First, police could rely more and more on this secretive technology to dictate who to investigate and arrest by, for instance, identifying the wrong hooded and backpacked suspect. Second, people who attend political or religious gatherings will justifiably fear being identified, tracked, and punished.
Over a dozen cities across the United States have banned government use of face recognition, and that’s a great start. But this only goes so far. Surveillance companies are already planning ways to get around these bans by using other types of video analytic tools to identify people. Now is the time to push for more comprehensive legislation to defend our civil liberties and hold police accountable.
To learn more about Real-Time Crime Centers, read our latest report here.
“We do not want those whose first impulse is to compromise. We want no straddlers, for, in the past, they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval areas which should never have been lost.“
Mr. Wuerthner provides a long list of key conservation victories, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Olympic National Park – all of which were protected because heroic people refused to compromise. He cites notable failures, as well, writing:
“Pragmatists, in the end, leave messes for future generations to clean up. Capitulating to local interests with half-baked compromises in the interest of expediency typically produces uneven results. Either they do not adequately protect the land or create enormous headaches for future conservationists to undue often at a significant political and economic expense.“
The National Forests system was originally set up by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect forests from commercial activity – not log them. Compromises made by Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service, resulted in mining companies (and later timber companies) gaining access to our National Forests. In the early 1900’s, almost no one could imagine that the seemingly limitless supply of virgin timber on private lands would one day be exhausted. They could not conceive that in a few generations’ time, timber companies and their partners in government agencies would be fighting tooth and nail to log the dwindling amount of old growth in our national forests – our collective natural heritage.
Lessons for the Elliott Mr. Wuerthner’s impassioned writing has left me wondering what lessons future generations will glean from the current process surrounding the Elliott State Forest (likely to be handed over to OSU with their timber-centric “research design” in the coming weeks). How will they see the unusually short public outreach/comment period and the rush to complete the OSU plan in time for the Land Board’s approval? How will they judge our mainstream environmental groups who seem afraid to openly criticize the egregious shortcomings of the plan and process? Will future Oregonians accept that compromise was the best we could hope for with the Elliott State Forest?
Insight from the Advisory Committee: In a recent email, Bob Sallinger (Portland Audubon member serving on the Advisory Committee) clarified the current situation with OSU’s draft plan for the Elliott:
“The draft plan calls for cutting up to 3287 acres of mature forest (between 65 and 152 years of age) over a period of a couple or two decades using selective harvest (20%-80% retention). Several hundred acres within this 3287 acres are on the younger side (65-100 years old) but the majority is in 100-152 year range…
I don’t think there is anybody in the conservation community that thinks it is a good idea to cut these older stands or that the research benefits outweigh the benefits of preserving 100% of the older stands…Ultimately the question the conservation community will need to decide is whether they can live with the tradeoffs in this plan…
Pretty much 100% of the changes and concessions over the past year have been made to address conservation concerns. Despite that fact, if conservation interests sign-off, it looks like we will have consensus among all stakeholders including tribes, timber, counties, hunters and rec, and schools…
So bottom line is that there are definitely tradeoffs in this plan. There would be under any management scenario. In a perfect world we would lock up the entire Elliott as a carbon/ biodiversity reserve. However the same issues that have necessitated a decades long battle over the Elliott are still in play today.
Folks will have to decide whether the inclusion of things like clearcuts in about 14,000 acres of existing plantations (under 65 years of age) or selective harvest in a limited number of stands >65 are deal breakers or not. In doing so, I would encourage folks to think carefully about the other pathways that are available to us.“
I have great respect for Bob. He has been a true conservation hero on the Advisory Committee. But the 12-member committee was compromised at the outset by the inclusion of hardliners with vested economic interests (Douglas County Commissioner Chris Boice is a great example). When Bob writes about the need to live with tradeoffs and reach consensus among all stakeholders, I wonder what happened to the broader group of stakeholders – the citizens of Oregon. I also wonder why experts in forest ecology and carbon were not included on the committee – while timber interests were.
When it comes to the fate of the Elliott, surveys show Oregonians overwhelmingly support conservation. When I see DSL and the Land Board showing such great deference to OSU, I wonder, “Where’s the deference to Oregonians?” When it comes to this state forest, one ought to defer to the citizens of this state. And when it comes to compromise and tradeoffs, one has only to look at the millions of acres of clearcuts in our state and federal forests to understand that we’ve already compromised our natural heritage.
Pictures Tell the Story: OSU’s latest draft plan for the Elliott State Research Forest (ESRF) is an unwieldy mix of contradictions, obfuscation, and technical jargon put together by folks who clearly are not adept at communicating with a broader audience. When it comes to understanding this fundamental issue of compromise in the Elliott, pictures are the key.
The map below shows the locations of older trees (indicated by darker shades of green) in the Elliott State Forest. It is important to note that significant quantities of older trees are scattered across vast stretches of the Forest.
Tree age classes in the Elliott State Forest (darker = older)
This next map shows the habitat of threatened birds (marbled murrelet in red and northern spotted owls in blue) in the Elliott. Predictably, the habitat is closely aligned with the older stands.
Habitat for threatened birds in the Elliott State Forest
This final map shows how the OSU would divide the forest. The purple areas (denoted as “CRW”) would be “conservation research watersheds”, with limited logging allowed. The dark green areas (labeled as “MRW Reserve”) will be subject to experimental treatments (= logging) in the coming decades. The orange areas (labeled “Extensive”) will undergo thinning in which 20-80% of the trees are to be cut (including thousands of acres of older trees). The light green areas (labeled “Intensive”) are composed of trees less than 65 years of age, and will be subject to clearcutting.
OSU’s research design for the Elliott would perpetuate clearcutting or fragmentation in well over half the forest (conservation reserves shown in purple)
Viewed from the perspective of older trees and habit for our threatened birds, OSU’s plan for the Elliott is a complete disconnect. As the maps clearly show, it would sacrifice a majority of the Forest to continued clearcutting and fragmentation.
George Wuerthner’s eloquent words could not be more applicable to the Elliott:
“In far too many cases, there is a tendency to believe that it is necessary to appease local interests typically by agreeing to weakened protections or resource giveaways to garner the required political support for a successful conservation effort. However, this fails to consider that in nearly all cases where effective protective measures are enacted, it has been done over almost uniform local opposition.
In those instances where local opposition to a conservation measure is mild or does not exist, it probably means the proposal will be ineffective or worse—even set real conservation backward…Nevertheless, many environmentalists now believe that due to regional parochialism and lack of historical context, significant compromises are necessary to win approval for new conservation initiatives.“
The Elliott State Forest has already been heavily compromised – OSU’s plan would perpetuate the mistakes of the past.
The essence of OSU’s plan for the Elliott – the area on the west side would be protected, the area to the east would face continued fragmentation via a complicated matrix of “forest management” (including ~14,000 acres of clearcutting).
Often, ALPRs are associated with England, the birthplace of the technology, and the United States, where it has metastasized. But Avigilon already has its sights set on new markets and has programmed its technology to identify license plates 
