Environment

Little Creek on the Prairie -- restoring the balance

These are excerpts from a speech delivered at a Columbus Metropolitan Club Luncheon Debate on Wednesday, March 29, 2000. Presenting the Refuge Opposition perspective was Madison County Commissioner David Dhume.

Hello, my name is Paul Dumouchelle. I am Secretary of Darby Creek Association, a local volunteer group of 150 citizens living throughout Central Ohio. Our mission is to preserve, protect and restore the entire Darby Creek Ecosystem. Darby Creek Association was founded in 1972.

Butterfly’s landing

On Saturday, Dec. 18, Julia Hill, aka Butterfly, descended from her aerie in a redwood near Stafford, Calif., touching ground for the first time in two years. In the deal that brought Madame Butterfly back to terra firma, Hill agrees to pay Pacific Lumber $50,000, culled from donations, T-shirt sales and book royalties. In exchange, Pacific Lumber pledges not to log the Stafford Giant (which Butterfly calls "Luna"), the 1,300-year old redwood that was her arboreal hermitage for two years. The company also says it won' t clearcut within 200 feet of the redwood, although it reserves the right to conduct salvage logging inside the so-called buffer zone.

The civil disobedience actions on Pacific Lumber lands near Stafford didn't start with Julia Hill, but with Earth First!ers and local residents who feared that logging on those unstable slopes put their community at risk of killer landslides. On New Year's Day 1997, part of the logged-over hillside above Stafford gave way. Mud and rocks and stumps collapsed on part of the town, damaging or destroying more than 30 homes. The landslide originated on Pacific Lumber lands.

Save the forests, or save Al Gore?

On Oct. 13, Bill Clinton made his way, by way of helicopter and SUV, to the George Washington forest in the Shenandoah Mountains, where he disclosed his plan to protect 40 million acres of roadless land in national forests across the country. Amid the ecstatic cheers of environmentalists bussed to the site by the National Audubon Society Clinton declared that, "in the end, we’re going to protect all this," gesturing as he spoke to the surrounding trees. The networks and New York Times offered respectful coverage, some billing it as the greatest act of land preservation since Teddy Roosevelt created the national forests.

Those cheering environmentalists should have been warned by Clinton’s means of transportation to the great event. The first great flaw in his plan is that it appears to prohibit road-building, but not logging. These days, helicopter logging is becoming increasingly common as a way of extracting the trees from the cut-over terrain to the nearest available road. Logging won’t be banned it seems. Nor will livestock grazing, mining or dirt bikes. Even on its face, the plan falls short of protecting all roadless areas.

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