www.EWEB.wtf - EWEB completed their clearcut in August, cutting the largest Doug firs (including the 15 foot circumference champion tree) and Ponderosa pines. The largest Black Oaks were cut on August 2 when EWEB clearcut most of this public forest, rushing to destroy just as the state Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) issued a temporary stay of execution based on a challenge brought by former EWEB commissioner Sandra Bishop. LUBA lifted the stay on August 17, cutting resumed on the 18th and the champion big doug fir was cut down on the 19th.
Eugene environmental groups stayed silent. They did not dare challenge EWEB's mismanagement that let existing tanks degrade to the point they are unrepairable and are silent about real estate overdevelopment, including future expansions of Eugene to Veneta and Junction City which will need lots of water. They also ignore plans for massive widening of Beltline highway (12 - 14 lanes).
In a democracy the public comment period never ends. Silence is consent.
A few oak trees and others were planted last winter on the south, treeless side of EWEB forest. This is supposed to mitigate logging of trees over a century old. If these new trees survive desertification maybe they will provide abundant shade and habitat in the 22nd century, but not in our lifetimes.
Staff and volunteers with Friends of Trees planted 18 native trees just down the hill from where EWEB plans to build two new water storage tanks
reply (unanswered, of course):
This is propaganda, now that EWEB is finally getting public attention for their impending clearcut of old forest.
No mention that EWEB is planning to destroy native habitat, including a 15 foot circumference Doug Fir (how many of those are left in Eugene?) that is more native than most of the new customers EWEB and the Chambers of Commerce hope to entice to move to Eugene where one can be sustain-a-bull. There are also mature oaks, white and black, with paint marks on them (the death sentence).
Did any of the unpaid workers visit the Big Doug that EWEB plans to destroy? It’s not immediately visible from the lawn but it’s easy to find. Are there any other trees that size remaining in unprotected habitat in the City? It’s hard to find trees that large that are legally unprotected elsewhere in the County. The timber barons long ago liquidated most of the bigger trees on their timber lands (that they stole fair and square). Probably would take at least a century or more of unmanagement to restore the original carbon and soil biodiversity.
This is like Seneca clearcut and aerial spray company saying “we plant trees” even though deforestation does more damage than replanting can mitigate. Professor Mark Harmon at OSU showed that clearcuts are carbon sources for two decades as their stumps rot and the soil is further degraded. Replanting takes a long long time for carbon and biodiversity to bounce back. But you probably already know this. Cutting old fir trees won’t be mitigated in our lifetimes, even if our behavior doesn’t further Californize our local climate. Protecting native habitat is far more important than tree planting.
But we live in a community where it is legal to sell incendiaries to pyromaniacs at the start of a very dry and early fire season, so it is hard to take this rhetoric seriously. Eugene was also built on the destruction of one of the planet’s great forests, of which only tiny remnants remain (and the best examples are mostly long gone).
Maybe Good Company can sell EWEB “oxygen credits” to offset the planned clearcut.
EWEB should allow the citizens / members / ratepayers to vote yes or no on the cutting.
And if the cut happens, please stop pretending to care about ecology. Just admit that overdevelopment is more important. No more greenhouse gaslighting. This is ‘Merica where ecocide is legal, encouraged, celebrated, greenwashed, misrepresented, the basis of our industrial way of life.
Mark Robinowitz
Because without the rain forests, we're going to have deserts. The food supply will dwindle. As a matter of fact, there's even the possibility that we're going to lose all kinds of valuable substances we know nothing about. Those rain forests have an incredible number of species of plants and animals that we know very little about. Some of them may produce chemicals of great pharmacological and medical importance. If properly cultivated, some of the plants might be new food sources. In addition to that, nothing produces the oxygen of the atmosphere with the same intensity that a forest does. Anything that substitutes for it will be producing less oxygen. We're going to be destroying our atmosphere, too.
-- Isaac Asimov
largest tree in EWEB forest, marked for destruction
(Friends of Trees did not place their sign here, but it looks good anyway.)
large Black Oak in the destruction zone
