I’Ve Seen What Greed Can Do

I ‘ve been a logger since I was a very young boy. My brothers and I were raised helping my dad with his small, family owned timber management company. After graduating from high school I was proud to continue working with the family business.

For most of my years I have been convinced that environmentalists were a meddling threat to my family’s livelihood. It seemed that they had it in for us and that trees were more important to them than my ability to feed my family. However, something happened this winter that enlightened me.

My brothers, my dad and I have selectively logged the West Plains and Cheney area for over 10 years. For all those years we have eyed a 1,000-acre forest of virgin timber near West Medical Lake.

If our small, three-man crew landed a job like that it would mean steady work for over a year. We would remove a handful of trees per acre and leave a beautiful, thick forest, with plenty of trees and brush for the deer and other wildlife so abundant in that area. The landowners would make thousands and thousands of dollars, we would make a living and the land would be left with beauty and value. We hoped for years to sign a contract on this thick forest one day.

That day will never come. A slick television commercial brought our hopes to an end. The landowner signed a contract with a logging company that has, in just over a month, destroyed the lush forest.

The devastation is complete. The forest is gone. In its place are scrawny, mangled, tiny trees and slash piles bigger than most houses. I cried when I saw what they had done.

I feel angry and violated. I know it is gone forever. The once thriving wetlands and forest will never be the same. The habitat for wildlife is destroyed.

It is greed, not logging, that is the issue. Greed is the only reason that virtually every marketable tree was stripped from the virgin forest. Greed won and now what’s left? An ugly wasteland, worthless in its aesthetic value and worthless in its ability to provide a home for birds, deer, coyote, elk and other animals.

Some might think this is an issue of sour grapes, but losing jobs to other loggers is a fairly regular occurrence in a competitive market. I am angry because a legalized crime against nature has been committed and for the first time, I understand the outrage.