Posts Tagged → forestry
February 19th, 2025
All those people and jobs and families and dreams and homes being lost right now in the Washington DC area….
I write this as a former Washington, DC, Beltway person, a former US EPA employee, a former 1964 tract housing suburban homeowner in a sterile suburban neighborhood, and as a former refugee of that big mess.
So, as the new administration takes shape, embeds itself into the federal bureaucracy and into the DC area buildings, apartments, homes, and businesses, and as DOGE begins to really dig into the catastrophic amount of waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money in almost every single federal agency, we also hear about the cost in people there. That is, the cost in DC Beltway people whose jobs are suddenly ended, whose sinecure isn’t, whose gold-plated taxpayer funded lifestyle and pensions are now over or up in the air.
And while I do feel badly for all these people, this developing bloodied crust of human detritus being tossed about on the waves of the Potomac River, I have to ask all of them, all of you: What about all of the Flyover Country victims of these now sad bureaucrats over the years?
Remember the rural landowners whose private properties – working farms and forests – suddenly lost about fifty percent of their value after the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule was issued? Remember how those rural properties, which are the rural person’s own 401(k) retirement fund and pension, were suddenly, dramatically, radically devalued overnight by some politically radical bureaucrats in DC? Because those properties had a mud puddle on them?
And do you remember how just a few years ago the federal bureaucrats dismissively, derisively, arrogantly told everyone newly, artificially, and unnecessarily out of a job in the coal and natural gas industries to “learn to code“?
Well, folks, as it is commonly said, karma is a real big bitch. Ain’t it.
All those untouchable federal bureaucrats at EPA, USDA, ATF, FBI, DOJ, etc who enjoyed beating up on poor white working people in flyover country, impoverishing them with outrageously destructive and useless regulations, talking down to them…now suddenly some of these same bureaucrats are being held accountable. And this is not even a taste of their own medicine. This DOGE stuff is really just fixing a few broken tractor parts in the barnyard. Chief Executive President Trump has not even figured out which rotting barn he is going to try to fix and which rotting barn he is going to demolish, push into a big pile, and set on fire.
So, yes, some of my old friends in the DC area are either hurting or scared right now, afraid that they are about to be hurting. And I feel badly for them, I do. I do not want to see anyone lose their job, or lose their home as a consequence of losing their job, or not be able to pay for their kids’ college indoctrination experience as a consequence of losing their job. It brings me no pleasure. None. I actually feel badly for all of these DC federal employee people and their ending jobs, their ending careers and ending life plans.
I just also wonder if any of them see or understand the symmetry in all of this. The relationship between messing with the bull out in its rural field, and then earning the bull’s horns up your ass. Somehow, I think of DC Beltway people as not very smart, or not too wise, actually quite tribal and primitive, and having now lived within their own cozy bubble for so long that they are now living so far out in outer space that they really don’t understand what or why this is happening to them.
I am not saying that the DC Beltway bureaucrat people should be treated like cattle and just herded on out of the venue and sent out to pasture. But I am also unconvinced that they will appreciate being treated any better than that, either. They still have a deeply inbred sense of selfish entitlement that only a couple generations of working class reality can erase. C’mon out and join us in the hinterlands, and develop a work ethic we can admire, OK?
So, yeah. About all the sad DC Beltway people right now….
October 4th, 2021
Penn State forestry professor emeritus, department head, and all-things-forestry guru Jim Finley died yesterday. I was told that he was either felling a large tree on his property, or he was trying to dislodge a large tree that had been felled but was hung up on another tree. Whatever the actual facts are, Jim died from the tree falling on him. It is a reminder that even the best, most experienced forestry professionals are at grave risk.
As trite and awkward as it sounds to write here, the fact is that Jim Finley died doing what he loved in the environment he considered sacred. I am quite sure that had he been asked about whether he would like to die from a tree falling on him, or some more peaceful and less traumatic way, he would have given us the look he is giving below. It is that knowing “Why are you saying that, you know it is wrong” look. In his mid-70s, Jim was nowhere ready to leave us, and we were nowhere ready to let go of him.
His death is a huge loss.
Jim was a remarkable man, who I admired, and who left a way outsized hand print on Pennsylvania conservation and the practice of forestry in eastern America. He was a force to be reckoned with, an institution in his own right, a political-cultural movement, a gentle soul with a will of iron, kind and easy but also passionate and unrelenting.
He did not suffer fools easily, though he accepted honest debate and earnest dissent exactly the way an academic ought to: His eyes took on this hard laser focus, and you could tell he was actively listening and processing, not always ready to give an answer, either. His response might come tomorrow or next year, and if your argument was good, you could tell it had moderated Jim’s perspective.
Jim Finley was an academic, and sometimes prone to the idealism that academics naturally grow into. However, he also had the ability to be hands-on practical, and even more important, he had the ability to support aggressive, hands-on, totally practical forestry practices. You know, the kinds of visual impacts that most urbanites recoil in horror from, and which many land conservation groups really did not want to see, either, no matter how scientifically they were needed or justified. It is an admirable and rare trait to be able to be honest about unpleasant things, and Jim could look at a heavily cut tract with tree tops lying all over the place, and cheerfully explain all of the wonderful things that were now going to follow on the heels of all that disturbance. Because of Jim, conservation easements in Pennsylvania are now a lot more forestry-friendly than they used to be. And a landowner who is able to manage his or her forest as aggressively as they need to under a conservation easement, is a landowner who is much more likely to sign that easement and protect their land in the first place.
Jim invited me to speak to his classes a couple of times, and we worked together when I was at DCNR and the Conservation Fund. I knew him when I was a kid in State College, I knew him as a professional forester and academic at Penn State, and I knew him as a colleague of land conservation legend and Penn State forester Joe Ibberson, whose PSU forestry department endowment Jim presided over at the end of his formal career. It is always a huge loss when someone of Jim’s high caliber leaves us, but it is even more so when he was just starting to become mature, as he would put it in the terms of a tree.
So long, old friend. Happy travels in your peaceful forest cathedral. We who are left behind mourn your untimely departure and we will miss you greatly. You were a hell of a guy, Jim.
Wooden bowls and a vase turned by Jim Finley. Photo kindly provided by forester Dale G.
January 25th, 2014
If you haven’t done so already, pay attention to global warming/ climate change claims.
Whenever the weather is hot, or cold, or windy, or in a lull, the vacuous claims are bandied about that these occurrences are evidence of “climate change” or “global warming.”
We’ve had an unusually cold winter. Why, it reminds me of the ones I used to know in my childhood. Do you, too, recall the deep snows on roads and huge piles of plowed snow in parking lots of the 1970s?
That snow was considered normal back then. Then we had twenty years of warm winters. Now we’ve had two years of cold winters. It’s certainly not global warming! Why, could it not simply be the natural variation of a complex, large weather system in a complex planet?
No matter what, people claiming that current weather is evidence of some bigger trend cannot ever be wrong. No matter what the weather is, they ascribe it to their favorite sky-is-falling environmental crisis du jour. It is a pretty ingenious way to argue, you have to admit: They just cannot ever be wrong. No matter what the evidence is – black or white, Saturday or Wednesday, Mars or Venus, cold, hot, very cold, very hot, lukewarm, tepid, accurate or inaccurate – or when it occurs, it all proves the same thing to promoters of human-caused climate change.
And the fact is that there are real environmental quality issues that need to be addressed and resolved. One that is near to my heart is the high grading of private forests, where the best commercial trees are removed and the junk trees are left behind. This creates huge swathes of forest with little habitat value for animals, and little present or future commercial value for landowners and the surrounding society that needs their forest products.
How sad that high grading forests is accomplished with such simple emotional appeals: “Why Mabel, we will just take the big trees, and leave the little ones for later. There’ll be lots of green left in your woods,” goes the high-grader’s sales pitch.
Because western clearcutting was so damaging to western ecosystems, clearcutting got a bad name back east. Back here most of our private forests are at a point where it’s either clearcutting most of our private woods, or allowing forest fire to shape them. Most of our private forests need to be re-set to zero. That will provide maximum diversity and the broadest habitat and commercial values.
But like claims of global climate change, clearcutting is another false boogey man whose opponents are driven by emotions, and not science. And the real damage is allowed to go on under the false guise of “protecting” the forests.
July 31st, 2013
“Clearcutting” forests has become a no-no idea, a bad word with most people. Whether it was environmental advocates or ripped off landowners who said it was wrong, it’s not clear.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. “Select cut” forestry is usually the worst thing you can do, because it takes the best and leaves the rest. Worst-first is the by-line of sound forestry. Clearcutting removes a great deal of the forest canopy so that other trees and plants may grow.
It’s true that I have seen failed clearcutting, but out west, where the thin soils, steep slopes, and dry conditions leave forests at risk from too much canopy removal. Those conditions rarely apply to the northeast or the south.
Recently I contracted Lyme Disease, for the third or fourth time. It’s my guess that ticks are growing in number and area because forest fires have been artificially suppressed for so long. Short of controlled burns, clearcutting is as close as we can get to mimicking the cleansing effect of a forest fire.
If you have forest land and you want to manage the timber, don’t be afraid to clearcut it, if the trees there support that management tool.
