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World's First Tree-sitting Weblog
Posted by
michael
on Fri Dec 13, 2002 10:08 AM
from the logging-on dept.
from the logging-on dept.
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."
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I'd watch out (Score:5, Funny)
I find it strange (Score:5, Funny)
Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
"Where?"
"www.aaagggggh.com."
"He must have died while typing it."
"He wouldn't have bothered to *type* 'aaagggggh'. He'd have just said it."
"Perhaps he was dictating."
"Oh, shut up."
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Re:I wonder (Score:2, Funny)
"blog"... ugh. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"blog"... ugh. (Score:3, Funny)
Is that what happens when you cut down a BTree?
What about the BIRDS?!?!? (Score:2, Funny)
Do you think that'll stop the tree-climbing environauts from using it?
Of course not!
Re:What about the BIRDS?!?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Simpson's Quote (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Jack Handey Style! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
How much energy (Score:2)
The blog site (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not a Karma Whore!!!!
A rhyme.. (Score:2, Funny)
While sitting in a tree,
Then the chances are,
You're a geek hippie.
Swaying in the branches,
Laptop in your hands,
No safety net to speak of,
Just a couple of rubber bands.
Be safe up in the treetops,
And please try not to fall,
Despite all that long hair,
You will not bounce at all.
Where are the police? (Score:2)
Re:Where are the police? (Score:4, Informative)
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!
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Re:Where are the police? (Score:5, Funny)
Give me a Stihl with a 3 foot blade and 5 minutes. I can get *anyone* down from a tree, guaranteed.
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Useful my arse.. (Score:5, Funny)
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..
FYI (Score:3, Funny)
Yea, I've seen it (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe, I'm one of few, but I see the environment pretty much everyday.
Bravo to San Fran Indymedia for doing this (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
If a server is slashdotted in a forest... (Score:5, Funny)
...does anyone hear it fail?
Re:One problem, though... (Score:2)
If these people dislike logging so much why don't they simply wait until the fire season and start playing with matches.
Re:One problem, though... (Score:5, Funny)
You don't know how hard I had to resist moderating that as flamebait.
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Re:One problem, though... (Score:2)
It's perfectly reasonable to question how many people will ever read these blogs (aside from those who are already fully on board the movement). It may be preaching to the choir, but it could also be used as an effective alert system to get "the choir" quickly to the site of illegal action.
I'm sure their will also be a couple members of the more mainstream alternative media (folks like Willamette Week [wweek.com], or even Harper's [harpers.org]) who will spread some of the better stuff to the general public.
Re:Wrong. (Score:2, Insightful)
The kind of changes their trying to make arent gonna be affected by them buying a laptop with manuals and using electricity from non-green sources - they are trying to change everyones opinion
One person changing does fk all - you have to get hundreds or thousands to change
If them making small sacrifices in how they follow their beliefs so that they can get the msg out in a better way, who are you to judge them as hypocrites?
Re:Right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, we need wood and paper, but do we really need to cut down ancient redwood forests containing the tallest trees in the world? If managed correctly, tree farms can produce all the pulp that we need.
Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Sure, thats fine. But what about.... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they'd be outcompeted by the guys who don't have the overhead of studying or practicing renewable techniques.
The change has to come from the marketplace or from the government... it's pretty hard to get the marketplace to do anything ethical, and the government is corrupt.
The marketplace won't change for the same reason as industry... only the wealthy can afford to spend ethically, everyone else has to go as cheap as they can.
The government is corrupt IMHO because capitalism broke democracy... through campaign contributions, employing citizens and feeding the taxbase, corporations have too much sway over government.
So how do you fix democracy so that it can take control back from capitalism and focus on what is right for the people? and not for the corporation?
You can't... for the same reason the marketplace and corporations can't change; Changing the government means changing a country and countries must compete on an international scale. Any country to toughen up on its corporations looses domestic jobs and international power.
The only way to recover that power is to build new jobs by slashing down forests, building factory farms etc.
We're all stuck in a rut. Renewable forestry will become popular only when it is either 1. absolutely necessary, or 2. every other country in the world is forced to adopt it due to (1) and the last country to hold out is wealthy enough to choose the ethics they want to practice.
Re:Wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
Really. How well do you know them ? Have you actually spoken with a decent number of them or listened to what they are saying ? The environmental activists I have met have been informed, intelligent and realistic, perhaps a bit on the pessimistic side, but often with good reason.
> they should be negotiating (note not suing) with the logging company
What on earth do they have to negotiate with. The logging company is only interested in making as much money as possible. They will invest some of that money for campaign contributions to make sure regulation is kept to a minimum. Costing the logging company money by occupying trees is a mechanism to gain some negotiation power.
> It baffles me that the choice is either rape the land, or don't touch it.
Where the hell did you get that idea ?
Do you think these people spend time, discomfort get beaten half to death by paid goons etc while remaining completely uninformed about everything.
They are not doing it for fun. They have been successfully painted as a bunch of stupid unrealistic hippies by a sophisticated PR industry that manipulates the vast majority of the media. Check out this [prwatch.org] sometime if you want to understand better where you get your views from.
Re:Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Wrong. (Score:2)
And not just any metal; copper smelting is about the nastiest of all industrial processes.
Re:Wrong. (Score:2)
I don't understand why these people aren't just lead away in handcuffs. They're tresspassing. If anybody did that on my property, they'd be looking down the barrel of a gun, and they'd come down out of that damn tree, one way or another.
Re:Wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
And, of course, the fact that the logging that Pacific Lumber Company is ok, since it doesn't hurt anyone else.
It hasn't filled Humboldt Bay with mud, seriously degrading the habitat for fish, and it hasn't seriously damaged the ability of the watershed to filter and buffer rainfall from storms, which made Freshwater Creek less likely to flood.
The fact that residents of Eureka now see a lot more flooding, and the flooding being directly traceable to the logging [wildcalifornia.org] doesn't matter, does it? The fact that their logging doesn't just affect their private property, but is damaging large amounts of both private and public property isn't important?
I'm sure if you found your PRIVATE PROPERTY was regularly getting flooded and your PRIVATE PROPERTY was being destroyed by the actions of the logging companies, that you'd be a little less likely to say "they're only doing it on their private property, they have that right!"
Massive amounts of logging affect much more than just the land that's logged. So would it be fair to say "Logging is fine until it starts infringing on other people's rights"?? Because that is EXACTLY what this company is doing.
Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
The fallacy of course, is that these particular trees are very unique. They represent some of the last old-growth coastal redwoods left in the world [wildcalifornia.org]. They are thousands of years old [nps.gov]. There used to be a lot more of them, but they've almost all been cut down [ferngrove.com] over the last century, to make crap like this [centurytel.net].
These trees should not be cut down. There's plenty of non-unique timber out there.
Re:Sounds really interesting (pot/kettle) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Sounds really interesting (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Re:Pray for High Winds... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [contrast.org] you would have known more about why they are protesting.
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Re:Or rather... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ummmm.. Contradiction (Score:2, Insightful)
I know many such people and almost all of them see technology as the solution for our environmental problems.
If adequate funding was given to clean energy sources then perhaps this dream could become reality. Of course, with GWII in power, oil buddies come first!
Re:Ummmm.. Contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not everyone (Score:3, Interesting)
I spent six months up and down a tree sit in australia. Oh, I also work as a sys admin. We ran wires & wireless stuff all around that forrest. We kept up to date websites. And we locked on when they tried to log a bilby breeding ground.
It's a case of science. It's worth pointing down that over half the people at the blockades where uni trained biologists who felt that since the politicians chose to ignore science, something drastic needs to be done. We where joined by a 80yo+ founding member of the liberal party (the conservative party in government) , a catholic nun. We where supported by the farming community and the members of the federal opposition (and a few from government on the quiet) regularly visited.
And not a hair was hurt on anyones head.
Chose your stereotypes wisely my friend
Re:Ummmm.. Contradiction (Score:2)
Put simply: why on earth would someone who is against the logging of a forest be automatically anti-technology?
Re:Ummmm.. Contradiction (Score:2)
Re:Help the Enviornment? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:did I miss a memo? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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