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World's First Tree-sitting Weblog
An anonymous reader writes "Amit Asaravala over at Wired News has an interesting article up about the tree-sitters in Humboldt County. Apparently a bunch of tech activists from the Indymedia Center are setting the tree-sitters up with an 802.11b network so that they can blog about all the logging going on up there. Seems like a pretty interesting way to use technology to help the environment, which isn't something you see everyday."
Only terrorists use 802.11!
that the loggers use Dells and all the tree sitters use Macs. What could that mean? I'll check back in 24.
...so he's protesting logging, and logging the experience.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
how will he spell his scream as he falls out of the tree to his death
"Blog" is a stupid word. You know that, right? Okay then.
"And if you go up in the tree, you can't come down for anything, not a phish concert, not even for Burning Man"
At least now they can communicate a bit more with the world while sitting in the trees. Though one has to wonder how they recharge their laptops? Those would need to be some pretty long extension cords.
As opposed to what? All of the really exciting stuff going on in your parent's basement? Since when have weblogs been interesting? Quite hypocritical for someone who probably plays games all day to rip on someone who is trying to help save the environment.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
They are not as clueless as you are, that's for sure. Chopping down a large part of a forest will destroy the habitat for animals and other species living there, some of which may be very rare.
If you would have read their weblog you would have known more about why they are protesting.
http://www.contrast.org/treesit/
I'm not a Karma Whore!!!!
Dear Diary:
Had a grand ol time at Pooh Bear and Tiggers pajama party last evening. Things really rocked when the Country Bears stopped by and busted out some tunes. Ol Smokey really put a damper on things at the end though with the whole "only you can prevent forest fires" blog.
Heard about Bambi's mom. Real bummer, Grizzly Adams was really bent out of shape about it, going on and on about the damn recreational hunters.
And a tree fell yesterday. It didn't know I was watching, it made no noise.
I don't think you can characterize anyone who is pro-environment as anti-technology. Not everyone on /. thinks corporations are the spawn of evil. I do wonder if many people who are pro-environment know all of the pollution that chip manufacturers produce... etc.
However, for all of you who will slam others for their inconsistencies, keep in mind that it is almost impossible to be 100% consistent. Just because someone has decided to choose one area to focus their energies on for some good, and isn't trying to be super(wo)man and fix everything, that should not nullify any truth that is in their message. That should not be pointed out to discredit them, or make you seem smarter. Every bit of good helps.
I can just see the IM traffic..
Tr33Hugg3r: Hey man, can you toss me over another bag of granola? The last one fell on that park ranger's truck.
fukDaMan: sure, if you toss me another bag of soy nuts.
veggieChix0r: I'm cold, I want to go home.
1l0v3Tr335 : damn, my batteries in my MP3 player died, no more Bruce Cockburn for me..
Trolling is a art,
Maybe, I'm one of few, but I see the environment pretty much everyday.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
If these people dislike logging so much why don't they simply wait until the fire season and start playing with matches.
You don't know how hard I had to resist moderating that as flamebait.
I grew up in a very small town in northern Maine where 90% of the jobs were in the lumber industry. Logging paper and milling. 100 years ago the state was something like 80% forest now due to replanting and such the state is over 90%, I believe it is like 94-95% right now but I have been wrong at least twice today already :).
The loggers really dont mind people sitting in the trees or just hanging out. It just means that they cant cut that tree right now. There are plenty more. There is no real benifit in taking these people away if they are not hurting anyone.
I say that in a very serious way. The people who we call "tree huggers" can get really scarry and do things that cause peoples lives. There have been a number pf people in Maine arrested for causing harm. Picture a logger cutting a tree with a chainsaw and all the sudden his saw bucks out of the tree and takes him in the head because a protester drove a 10 inch spike into the tree, not to mention that spiking trees isnt good for them either. Logging is a very dangerous buisness and sometimes the activists get mean.
As long as you do not harm other people or other peoples property I believe you have the right to be heard and if in the process you change some peoples thinking than good. And I know that the loggers will thank you for not messing with them and they might just like the company.
Sorry for the bad spelling.
Earth First!! We'll Timber the rest of the planets later!
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Yes I do expect them to renounce all technology, and furniture for that matter ;-)
Most of these people have a hypocritical, short sighted, rose colored view of the world. Instead of sitting in the damn tree maybe they should be negotiating (note not suing) with the logging company to develop their replanting and harvesting strategy. If the protesters were more open minded then maybe they could help loggers take trees out of the forest selectively and leave a variety of ages of trees in an area, plus plant new ones. A consession would probably have to be more low maintenance roads to get into the areas and selectively cut. It baffles me that the choice is either rape the land, or don't touch it. Stewardship of resources is not really discussed or handled, basically because the activists have iron clad belief in not doing anything. It's pretty well proven that when you do that the forest will burn. Of course when you clear cut and then replant trees that are all the same age fire danger can go up as well.
Maybe the solution is actually somewhere in the middle.
"I think the great thing about tree-sitters using 802.11 is how they can post on the Internet without wires. That way, they can type 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!' while falling out of a tree, and click 'Submit' right before they hit the ground."
...
Have you ever tried to remove someone from a tree? As the older brother of five avid tree-climbers, let me assure you that it is QUITE difficult. Especially when they don't want to co-operate with the removal.
Give me a Stihl with a 3 foot blade and 5 minutes. I can get *anyone* down from a tree, guaranteed.
I'm one of those nutty Indymedia activists. I have serious problems with the conservative domination of our so called "liberal" media, and am doing proactive, constructive things to work to change that. Among them is writing for my local IMC, another is working for media reform, as much of this has been made possible by federal legislation and other actions by the Fed.
anyway, serious bravo to folks at San Fran IMC for doing this. Technology is not necessarily paradoxical to environmental activism -- and if anything, the high tech world needs a serious dose of environmental awareness, power consumption and chip production being the two main things that I'm sure we could come up with very creative solutions to.
Briefly more on IMC: I can only speak for my local Indymedia, but we've been doing a lot of reporting on things that the Big Media(tm) have ignored. There've been a number of controversial things happening in Madison over the past few years. While we are fortunate to have more than one daily newspaper, we're as affected by radio, TV, and cable conglomeration as the rest of the United States. That means that in the major press outlets, many of these controversial issues have gone on without more than the Official Word(tm) being spoken about it. While we're still small, we're growing, and with it a sense that fair and accurate reporting needs to happen by everyone -- corporate media and volunteer/activist media alike. I'm proud to be working with what must now be the thousands of other media activists in the 100+ IMCs that exist around the world. let's keep it up!
-- haaz.
So you can't be an environmentalist unless you live in a shack, grow your own food, forgo Western medicine, and don't use any technology that you didn't build yourself? That's absurd. I consider myself an environmentalist. I try to minimize my consumption. I think about purchases. I don't own a car. I try to educate others. But I live in a city, I use technology, and I use fossil fuels. Am I hypocrite?
Listen, it's easy to be a critic, but if you've ever seen with your own eyes what these tree sitters are fighting for, you might change your mind. I've been to some of the clearcuts on Vancouver Island, BC. You wouldn't believe the logging practices that went on before the environmental movement helped put a stop to them. There are entire mountains there that have been clearcut bald, from the summit straight into the valleys. Whole landscapes, brown and full of nothing but broken stumps. Soil washed away so nothing will grow back for a long time. It's gastly. But now, clearcuts like these are banned, and sustainable logging is being practiced more and more widely in BC.
These environmentals aren't against the wholesale use of wood, or oil, or technology - don't be silly. That's a false choice. It's in how we do things. Do we drive around town in Hummers, getting 8 miles per gallon, or do we acknowledge that yeah, there's more to living on this planet than unfettered self-gratification, and learn to make due with a smaller car? Or public transit? It's about rationale choices, man.
...does anyone hear it fail?
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers
It's not all one sided, of course. But the upper management of LP, the ones with the power to change things, are pretty much all hard set against negotiation - they take a very hard line, and use considerable influence with local government (which is largely corrupt) to get thier way.
She also says:
In short, it sounds like negotiation and criminal and civil litigation have already been attempted and have failed. Their demands do not indicate that they want the lumber industry to stop cutting altogether - she lists four things she'd like to see:
I'm not sure I agree with the first "demand" - I'd have to be given better reasoning than just "it's bad" - so I'll leave that one as being perhaps a little overboard. But I dunno.
I'd hope we can all agree that simple clear-cutting is bad and irresponsible. The lumber industry would actually be better off replanting or leaving enough trees so that the forest can grow back. However, MAXXAM/PL is apparently taking an incredibly short-sited view of things and is going for as much profit short-term as possible, instead of attempting to ensure that they will be able to continue with a source of lumber into the future.
As for herbicides, I'd love to know why a logging company would be spraying herbicides. It would seem to increase the damage from any wildfires (as it would cause there to be more deadwood). I would guess they do it to help clear the underbrush to be able to pull trees out easily? Seems unnecessary and quite possible to be worked around. Not being a logger, I don't know.
The last one again should be just common sense. You know what prevents a large sloped mass of dirt from being a large flowing mass of mud? Roots, be they tree roots or other undergrowth. Remove the trees, the roots die, and then you get mudslides in rainy conditions. But anyone engaging in clear-cutting probably doesn't really care about the land after they've finished exploiting it, so they probably feel fine about letting the area turn into a deathtrap once they've got their wood out. At the very least, one would hope that on slopes with the danger of landslides, lumber companies would either be forced to leave most of the trees and immediately replant around the trees they have removed a new tree and probably grass as a stop-gap measure until the tree matures enough to hold the ground in place.
The solution probably is in the middle, but if you actually read the 'blog, it seems that the logging company is intent on maximizing immediate profits with no concern for what will happen as a consequence.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
1. Massive logging on the peaks of the mountains (which is easiest to log) destroys the root systems that sustain the topography. After the loggers are done stripping the peaks, they move on. A few years of rains and the entire hillside washes away, destroying everything below it. THis happens repeatedly. Landowners get fucked by giant mudslides and erosion due to overlogging. I won't even start with the impact of the dirt/mud runnoff into the drinking supplies of people that live near ridge logging operations. Some people do get their water from streams and not the a municiple water company, like city folk. Don't they have rights to clean water? Think joe blow in colorado has a chance to sue BoiseCascade for the damage done to their drinking water a few years after a logging campaign completes? Fat chance.
2. Yes, there are natural forest fires. Nature moves on. But when nature has to absorb the stress of natural deforestation AND man-made deforestation, it can't handle it.
3. The logging companies themselves have no problem clearcutting forests, and then moving on. Suppose you live in a small town of 1,000 people, and Boise Cascade decides to set up shop. They spend 5 years clearcutting all the trees around you, then move on, leaving their abandoned mills, and nothing but dry arid stumpy land. This happens quite a bit. I supposed you don't mind the sight thousands of acres of stumps and dried up land, but many millions of americans enjoy nature.
4. Before you rant about 'everything is made of wood', that's not the point. Some logging companies use sustainable tree farms. This is costly, but eco-groovy. However, we all know it is easier to clear cut old growth than manage your own. Bush lifting national protections is just a field day for loggers to tear through wildlife and destroy at will. Tree sitters are trying to protect the most endangered flora on earth, eg. 1000+ year old forests. If that means nothing to you, then I guess I'm wasting my breath.
5. Next time you're in Arcadia, california, drop by the Sequoia National Park. It looks beautiful on rte 1 while driving, until you hike in a half a mile and witness the stumps as far as the eye can see.
6. When does the greed end? They may not log an entire forest, but ridge-logging effectively destroys everything. Should we just let logging companies blow off sustainability to make an extra buck? Or should we actually do something to protect the shrinking environment?
The issue here is sustainability, and not giving loggers a free pass to clear cut ancient forests.
Again, if you see no value in nature, I'm wasting my breath.
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