When I began to be serious about fishing the famous Canadian angler author, Roderick Haig-Brown was still alive. At that time he had already written his body of work, and the anglers whom I respected held Haig-Brown in high regard.
Haig-Brown’s books about fishing and fish, A River Never Sleeps, Return to the River, The Western Angler, are considered masterpieces. My favorite book, however, is not about fishing, but about the life of a “countryman,” as Haig-Brown considered himself. Measure of the Year, was about Haig-Brown’s life in Campbell River, British Columbia during the late 1940’s. The chapters are the months of the year beginning with March and ending with February. There is much appreciation of the coming and going of the seasons and what it takes to live and raise a family in a somewhat remote community.
The book is more than an appreciation of nature, however. In certain places it deals with some very serious issues. Haig-Brown was appalled with the injustice done to the Japanese British Columbians. Five years after the end of World War II they were still prohibited from returning to their homes on Vancouver Island.
In the December chapter, Haig-Brown deals with the issue of conservation. Sadly, the things he was critical of in 1950 are just as true today. It appears we have learned nothing. The December chapter begins by discussing Saltwater and Tideflats, but the second part of the chapter is titled “Let them Eat Sawdust.” Following are some quotes from this part of the chapter:
“It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of man can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist’s concern.”
What potentialities, I ask, have the generations since 1950 handed to the next generation? Let me supply some answers to that question: global warming, deforestation, and over population are just a few.
Haig-Brown goes on;
“It is the history of civilization that conservationists are always defeated, boomers always win, and the civilizations always die. I think there has never been, in any state, a conservationist government, because there has never yet been a people with sufficient humility to take conservation seriously.”
People are concerned only with the immediate future, not a long range future. We refuse to see beyond the future few years, certainly not beyond our life expectancy. We are willing to use the earth for our immediate purposes and leave things such as global warming and over population to future generations.
As I write this column I am listening to a radio program that is dealing with global warming. The concern that now faces us should have been taken seriously 50 years ago. The real threat of global warming is now upon us, it is a part of our lifetime, and it is something that will affect our lives. Even the Bush administration has finally acknowledged global warming, something they denied just a few years ago.
One of my pet peeves locally is the way the Oregon Department of Forestry does their timber harvest. In the Salmonberry River drainage their harvest practices have caused huge amounts of damage.
The state of Oregon bought a rail line that runs through the Salmonberry Canyon in the Tillamook/Clatsop State Forest for the Port of Tillamook Bay. State Economic Development Funds were used to buy the line from Southern Pacific Railroad. Southern Pacific was going to abandon the line because it was too expensive to maintain. Kind of makes you wonder why the Port of Tillamook Bay thought they could run a rail line that a real railroad was giving up on. State Economic Development Funds come from the citizens of Oregon; it is not just some abstract. It comes from the people of Oregon through state lottery dollars and state taxes. The people of Oregon bought that railroad for Tillamook.
In the 1996 flood the rail lines were destroyed. No one has ever pointed a finger at State Department of Forestry publicly, but I would say that many of the landslides that destroyed the rails came from timber harvest areas. In 1996 the rail line was rebuilt with money from FEMA and again the State of Oregon. Then Governor John Kitzhaber said that was the last of state money that would be used on this loser rail line.
In early December of 2007 we experienced another 100 year flood. (Isn’t it funny how we have these 100 year floods every 10 or 11 years now? There is no proof that it has anything to do with global warming.) Once again the line along the Salmonberry was destroyed. In one area almost a half-mile of track was buried and, in some places, pushed into the river. On the upslope of this huge slide is the Red Clay Sale clear cut. I’m sure Forestry will deny any blame for the slide. After all, when the sale was walked before it was cut the district forester claimed that it wasn’t a steep slope--in spite of the fact that to climb the slope you had to pull yourself hand over hand by clutching roots and ferns.
In the spring of 2007, seven years after the area had been clear cut above the railroad’s right of way, roots had rotted sufficiently to allow the first small slides across the tracks.
The same area in January 2008, directly below the Red Clay sale.
In addition to the damage done to the railroad by the Department of Forestry, which we can figure in dollars, what damage has been done to the one run of undiluted wild steelhead on the north coast? There is increased lack of shade along the river which will cause warmer water temperatures during the summer, a less desirable condition for juvenile steelhead and cutthroat. Additionally, the landslides caused by slope failures have filled in much of the river. Gravel recruitment is natural and good for rivers, but what has happened due to timber harvest is far from natural.
Spawning redds in the Salmonberry in May, 2007. Two steelhead are on the lower of the two redds.
Haig-Brown had some extremely logical ideas of how to deal with development:
“There is always ample time for mature and careful consideration of every issue involved. But early planning is always left to the single-track minds of the developers, often buried in deepest secrecy for purely commercial reasons, and the conservationist is left with a last-ditch battle. In this way the burden of proof is always forced upon him. He is standing in the way of progress—reactionary, narrow, without real vision.”
“It seems clear to me that all destruction it causes should be reckoned in the direct cost of any project, and that no preventable destruction should ever be permitted.”
We can determine the cost to rebuild a railroad, but how do you determine the value of something as unique as a run of steelhead genetically adapted to a particular stream, something so individual and unique that it can never be replaced. Who can write the check for that kind of loss?
Fifty-eight years have passed since Haig-Brown wrote these words and we are no further ahead in the way we plan our environmental future. We are only willing to look at and consider our immediate future. We are only now looking a global warming because we know it is in our immediate future.
I am cynical. I fear we will never be a people with sufficient humility to take conservation seriously.
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