{"id":62,"date":"2008-02-03T22:00:26","date_gmt":"2008-02-04T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/2008\/02\/03\/natural-resources\/"},"modified":"2013-11-11T18:24:46","modified_gmt":"2013-11-12T01:24:46","slug":"resourceful-towns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/2008\/02\/03\/resourceful-towns\/","title":{"rendered":"resourceful Northwest towns"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\"clearcutting\"
\nphoto<\/a>: Steve Ringman for The Seattle Times\n<\/div>\n

I’ll stand with farmers (of the small and sustainable school) in almost any fight, but a recent dust-up \u00e2\u20ac\u201c forgive me, but it this case it should really be a mud-up \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in southwest Washington\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lewis county has me puzzled.<\/p>\n

Folks there are still recovering from early December floods. A few days ago, our Governor said a recovery task force would study how humans contributed to the mess. She emphasized that finger-pointing wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bring people’s homes back<\/a>, but that hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stopped anyone so far. It goes something like this: farmers blame environmentalists blame loggers blame God.<\/p>\n

In this case, I think the farmers have it wrong. <\/p>\n

If a slope is wholly denuded and that slope subsequently slides into a river, does it have anything to do with the lack of trees?<\/p>\n

In a Wednesday Seattle Times editorial<\/a> a candidate for WA commissioner of public lands said, essentially, “duh”:<\/p>\n

The damage to Lewis County clearly was made worse by mudslides from the clear-cuts, building up at the base of the hills, bursting from pressure, and sending torrents of dirt, trees and water across a floodplain already stressed from years of development and pavement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never picked up a pitchfork<\/a> I guess I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be counted among the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153urban environmentalist mafia\u00e2\u20ac\u009d — as Robert Michael Pyle put it in Where Bigfoot Walks<\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c who prioritize salmon and owls above people. But that isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite right. I prize salmon and owls above land-raping corporations and the public bureaucracies that abet and abide them.<\/p>\n

\n
The Good Rain<\/a>
\n\n<\/div>\n

My guess is that Tim Egan would agree. Before he received the National Book Award for his Worst Hard Time<\/em> about Dustbowl survivors, Egan admired Theodore Winthrop, adventurer and author of The Canoe and the Saddle<\/em>, enough to wander in Winthrop’s wake around the Northwest. <\/p>\n

The troubles of Lewis county, “a declining economy based on logging and mining”<\/a>, would have fit right into his 1990 book The Good Rain<\/em><\/a> describing slowly dying “resource towns” \u00e2\u20ac\u201c those places built up to exploit and export the wealth of the Northwest.<\/p>\n

Egan has the talent to keep readers engaged and encouraged even as he laments the clear-cutting, damming, and over-fishing that strips the Northwest of its characteristic elements.<\/p>\n

If only Lewis county could become less dependent upon logging, a shift Egan traces in nearby places, such as Hood River, Oregon — once a timber town, now a windsurfing mecca. It would require identifying what is uniquely Lewis county and using that to grow its material wealth while preserving its natural wealth.<\/p>\n

That would be resourceful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

photo: Steve Ringman for The Seattle Times I’ll stand with farmers (of the small and sustainable school) in almost any fight, but a recent dust-up \u00e2\u20ac\u201c forgive me, but it this case it should really be a mud-up \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in southwest Washington\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Lewis county has me puzzled. Folks there are still recovering from early December […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,19],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology","category-farming","category-politics","tag-good-rain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pertuset.net\/openbook\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}