Andrea Tuttle's visit to Synergy House, Stanford Campus, Th Feb 3 2000:
well, it was mostly what i expected, she said she wanted to do well by the forest, and that the companies that were left were the ones that were in it for the long haul, and that CA had much better protections than OR or British Columbia, and that the political constraints and realities don't allow her or others to do all they want to do. in short, she said all that a good politician who had any concern at all for the environment and/or the public opinion, would say. i don't know her voting history much other than what Mary Bull has written, but she seemed to show some genuine anguish when she said "Mary Bull seems to have decided to single me out as the prime villain." Andrea actually has quite good credentials -- has been at UCB and Humboldt State, got her PhD at UCB in some env'l field (which again..?), worked on env'l issues on the water board on the North Coast, has been on the CA Coastal Commission, worked on deforestation in SE Asia etc., and it seems like she wants to make some changes as far as she can in the CDF: e.g. she would like to fund programs of monitoring better than they have been funded in the past, and her personal "cause" is working on getting conservation easements secured for parcels of land.
so -- she's not any kind of extreme villain, to me. she's not a superhero either, but i get the feeling that she's trying, she's really trying to make things better as she can. and i think that's good, and i told her that. finally -- again, she didn't *have* to come speak to us, to try to justify herself. most politicians don't even try, in these warped days of massive corporate influence and our amazingly deeply flawed democracy. but she did come, and i think she wants to try to do good. and when she asked at the end, "well, i'm not really that bad, am i?" i said "no, certainly not anything as bad as Charlie H." -- but as i also told her -- i'm still not going to stop raising hell on the streets. and to that, she smiled and gave a half-nod. and that was a nice ending to the eve, for myself. (and, for what it's worth, she even borrowed my own personal copy of the Luna video. :> )
en la lucha siempre- -M
Some specific things i remember:
* Especially important to me: that essentially, anything that's left out there, is because of *US* -- the environmental activists -- and we should keep the fight as strong and loud as we can.
* that the CDF has specific rules that monitor carefully how much fuel can be spilled in the process of logging, and most of the companies are falling under within the limit.
* that the herbicides do break down, and the water board that monitors this stuff has said that they *aren't* seeing residues in the rivers.
* that the compaction of the soil is much worse in tropical logging out in SE Asia.
* that most land up there is zoned TPZ (timber production zone), and that in Humboldt that's worth far more than real estate.
* that Michael Dombeck of USFS is changing their policy to disallow logging and other extractive resource uses in USFS lands (half of the forested lands in CA), which is causing the timber companies to hit their private lands harder.
* that just because a THP is passed doesn't mean it's not altered: almost all of them are handed back and modified. * that the 4 state agencies (DFG, CDF, Water Board and ...? ) and the two federal (NMFS, USFWS) *all* have to sign on to a THP before it's passed, and that's how CDF protects themselves against lawsuits.
* that there is a continuum of how land is used, from the the end of nat. parks to individual family foresters, to industrial foresters. it would certainly be nice if everything was in the first category -- but it's not. * that a lot of Redwood *is* shipped out of CA to Japan to be used as paneling, and the good stuff isn't used as just fence posts and such.
* that THP 520 is first of all, a parcel near the edge of Hwaters, is mostly second growth, was approved before Hwaters was bought, that the logging rules there are very strict, up near "HCP standards", and that really, that is not somewhere we should focus our energy.
* that "trees grow", but when i asked about topsoil being washed away permanently, she replied that yes, soil erosion *is* a concern (i don't remember any more on that.)
* that the one website which shows the 2 THP's that were approved in Gualala points out that the well-done one was in fact the one most opposed by enviros. * that sustainable logging can be 10% logging.
* that the companies are hitting their own private lands hard because they're being forced out of the USFS lands * that Jackson State Forest is a demo forest for logging.
* that humans can't really think in 1000 year cycles.
* that Gov. Davis *would* like to make some slow incremental changes, that politics in America is moving "towards the center" (whatever that means -- it seems to me when you move to the center, you move to a place where no one really feels strongly about anything and then you are most influencible by corporate interests.)
* that "i didn't hear her say yes" to my question asking if she wouldn't then really be happy if Gov. Davis did in fact move more left to the green side. :>
* that they couldn't pass the OG ban because it cut across too much -- how does one limit it to 36" trees? sometimes those are very young.. * but she *was* working to make that exemption unallowable, like the guy who took out trees because PG&E had some powerlines there.
* that she thought easements were *really* the way to go, and she was working to push this idea and these policies at her level.
* that it's to the point now where individuals should dedicate trees to themselves (the ones on private lands).
* that Simpson *is* one of the worst companies.
* that the companies that are left are in it for the long haul, and that they want to protect their resource base (including Maxxam??).