It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest. And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.
It rained all night last night which means this morning the sun is not occluded by the forest fires which rage now every summer, blocking the sun, leaving us breathing smoke. The next three pieces are a deep dive on why this is happening. It is an easy fix, return to the 150 years of German silvaculture that managed forests all over the world. Forestry is an exact science. It knows when and how to burn, when to thin, and importantly how to manage. All over the world, courtesy of the cursed U.N., forests are not-managed deliberately. And so they burn and burn and burn.
Why are people all over the world so angry? Because the regime described below is being forced everywhere and it is destroying people, economy and land. Why is the economy in such a treacherous dangerous position? Why do we teeter at the edge of collapse? This. It started right here. Let the lady sheep-farmer describe just how surreptitiously screwed we have been. All of us. Everywhere.
It’s Not About the Spotted Owl
I am standing on the flatbed of a three-quarter-ton pickup with Kathy McKay of the K Diamond K Ranch in Republic, Washington, hanging on to a bale of straw as the truck rocks its way down a steep incline into a vast field. It is snowing and the snow is already two feet deep. As we lurch and grind, about a hundred horses spot us, turn, and as if animated by a single puppet master, start to run toward us. They are backlit by snow-covered trees ranked up the snow-covered mountain.
For the next ninety minutes, we peel six-inch layers of hay off the bales and kick them in pieces into a gaggle of horses, then jerk on to the next stomping, nickering group. A slip on the mud and slush and I’d be under the feet of six or seven dancing hungry horses. But the exhilaration is inexpressible, and not for the first time I envy the people who live out here, who live like this, working outside every day no matter the weather, using their muscles and sinew for a purpose other than “health” or longevity. There is a sense here that there is no place else. For me, Ferry County, Washington, has a kind of limerence—I’ve known about its drama for years, and seeing its beauty, I understand the dedication of those who are so beaten, so thoroughly thrashed, outmatched, and ruined. It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest. And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.
“We’re dying here,” says Republic Mayor Shirley Couse, whose life has been lived so hard, she looks twenty years older than she is. She has a cold today, so she sniffles through our meeting. She is a volunteer mayor. At first she stepped into the post when someone fell sick, and since then no one has run against her. There’s nothing fun about managing decline. She ticks off her problems, then adds, “The only thing that’s saving us is the gold mine that was recently reopened.
And even with it, we are a welfare county.”
Ferry County is the poorest rural county in the state and is the U.S. county most affected by the actions of environmental activists. Once rich, with a high median income, now desperate, still it shimmers with gold, and an occasional fantasist like me can see the glitter underneath the snow and trees, the narrow valleys, the wide flat rivers and strip malls, junkyards, and gas stations. Gold founded Ferry County, and surveyors claim the region holds all twenty-nine minerals named in the Bible. Ferry and its neighbors—Stevens, Colville, Okanagan, all the counties in the Columbia basin—together form a lost fairyland of dense forest, white-capped mountains, narrow valleys, rivers, creeks, and wetlands—like Lothlórien, the Land of the Valley of Singing Gold from The Lord of the Rings.
The action that started the ruination of Ferry County is the most stunning success of the modern environmental movement, the northern spotted-owl campaign in the 1990s, which shut down 90 percent of the productive forests of the American West. It required only a few months of marching, political pressure, direct actions (sometimes called ecoterrorism), and a typical Clintonesque deal, which drew off some of the Left’s fire for his ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but embedded in that campaign lies the corruption at the heart of the modern movement. Andy Stahl, then resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, declared: “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s the perfect species for use as a surrogate.”
Hellbound and Down 