Doug LaMalfa and the Horrid Logging Bill: HR 1526

Joni and I took a hike down our canyon. Technically, this is the canyon for the west branch of the middle fork of the Feather River. It is free flowing in this section, until it meets the monstrously huge Oroville Dam. This earthen Dam is the largest of its type in the US and the fifth largest Dam period. From Oroville, water is shipped south in a canal that eventually is pumped over the Tehachapi Mountains to the swimming pools and general excess that is the Los Angeles basin. Jerry Brown's dad built the dam; it is his biggest legacy and enabled Los Angeles to grow by a few million more people. Which is gross.

Here's a hint: if you don't build infrastructure like increased water capacity, it makes it so that a bioregion can limit its growth. The Napa Valley is probably the best example of managed non-growth. Here's where I become the dreamer: Imagine that we changed zoning ordinances so that growth becomes nearly impossible? We inflict our own "Limits to Growth" before the inherent excesses that will curtail growth arise, usually involving some catastrophe: flood, famine, earthquake.

Joni made her own splash this week in the Chico News and Review. Here's what they wrote about Joni:

One of the protesters who spoke to the small crowd, Joni Stellar of Concow, focused on the effects of climate change and other environmental impacts in forested areas, noting that District 1, which LaMalfa represents, is largely wilderness. She said a bill currently co-sponsored by LaMalfa, HR 1526 (the benignly titled “Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act”), “pretends to be looking out for the best interest of rural communities,” but actually encourages unregulated logging.

Noting that LaMalfa’s campaign included money from the timber and fossil-fuel industries, Stellar said, “Call me cynical, but I believe Doug LaMalfa is not just a simple climate-change denier—he’s a climate-change profiteer, making money for himself and his corporate masters while the rest of us just burn and breathe smoke.”

Read the story here.

Modified Duty and an Update on my Workplace Injuries...

I have been on Disability since May 3rd of this year. On that date, I was assaulted by a patient who, unexpectedly, used his elbow to hit me as hard as he could twice to my chest. The out of control patient broke two or three ribs (depending upon which report you read). A part of my lung was deflated and bruised.  My back was screwed up as the force of the blows (these ribs attach to the vertebrae of the back), and the struggle to contain the client, combined to create a situation where my ribs and back are in constant pain. In short, I was messed up real bad.

In the past week, I was politely told that I needed to go back to work by the Workman's Comp professionals. I was given "Modified Duty", which means the hospital needs to find a position for me to "work" within the terms of my "Modified Duty". I met with the Employee Health Nurse last week, a very kind, "my hands are tied" professional, who offered me a job of sitting in a windowless, dank room and given the vastly important job of taking apart charts for the hospital. A mind numbing job, boring as hell. Eight hours worth.

When I said that my back would be unable to handle sitting for that amount of time, I was offered a "vest for upper back support" and a geriatric, lounge chair---which is a chair designed for elder adults--made of plastic, so that I could pee at will while sitting in it. I couldn't imagine spending two hours a week taking apart charts, let alone 20 hours. So, as is my nature, I complained about the job: "I think you are punishing me for getting injured by offering me a mind numbing job". I asked for a job doing something else. "Let me get up and walk around the hospital?"

The Employee Health Nurse was kind enough to arrange for me to do a job I already did at the hospital: Case Management for the Chemical Dependency Unit. I've been helping out in that department for a year. We all congratulated ourselves for our creativity in providing me with Modified Duty and we all were happy about it. Until it came time for me to work a shift.

Alas, my ribs and my back have not healed well enough over the last three months. I am in constant pain after a couple hours of being upright. I knew this going into work, but I promised the impatient Human Resources Director that I'd give it a go. (This HR Director already felt the hospital had been more than patient with my situation given that ribs generally heal within six to eight weeks, and my ribs haven't healed in 12 weeks).  I promised to give it a try out of respect to my employer. I was told that I could take pain medication at work to relieve my pain. And so I was in the rather ironic position of attempting to do Case Management on an Addictions Unit while taking an opiate for pain.

Frankly, I don't think any MD or RN or any health professional should go to work if they need to take medications that impair one's performance on the job. Why should I be forced to go to work, taking opiates, whereby if I did this in my normal duty the workplace would send me home, suspend me, possibly fire me, report me to the Nursing Board and press criminal charges against me and require me to get mandatory chemical dependency treatment. This just doesn't make sense.

It didn't work, the pain was too much and so after two days of trying to work, I went to the Workman's Compensation Clinic and was relieved from duty for two more weeks when I will, once again, see the MD that holds my employment fate in his hands.

I also was sent to see a Physiatrist, a pain management MD, who promises to relieve my pain by shooting up the muscles in my right thoracic region with a mixture of steroids and lidocaine. Sounds fun. As soon as the Workman's Comp. Bureaucrats okay this procedure, I will have this done. It is sort of like waiting for the Poliburo to choose a new Secretary of the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union. Everything stops until the announcement is made. I've already been through Physical Therapy of six sessions, with a 5%  improvement to show for it. They denied me of receiving help from a Chiropractor. I paid for a few sessions anyway, without any improvement to my pain or condition.

I don't think any of us fully understood at the time of this injury, just how serious this injury was/is. I am a bit concerned that this injury may very well signal the end of my nursing career. I've broken my ribs multiple times before; I always healed just fine. Not this time. I remain in pain--nothing has healed or improved over almost three and a half months. I am worried.

That's the update on my injury, for those who might be interested. I wish I had cheerier news.

Joni's Speech at LaMalfa's Office

Joni speaking to a group attempting to give Congressman Doug LaMalfa a Climate Change Denier Award. There are 136 Republican Congressmen who refuse to consider science and accept that CO2 is warming up the Earth. Joni was one of two speakers at the event. Here is her speech:

Forests and climate change

 

I live in a forest. Much of US Congressional District 1 is forested. Forests provide enormous benefits such as habitat and watershed health. Forests also provide effective carbon ‘sinks’, absorbing excess CO2 as they grow, and forests were doing that well for the first several decades of fossil fuel burning…

But climate change is already hugely impacting forests, and the lives of all – human and non - who live in or near them, by increasing the number and severity of wildfires.

“Climate change, and the consistently hotter and drier weather that comes with it, is largely the cause of recent SHARP INCREASE in the number and intensity of wildfires,” NASA officials said last Friday [8/9/13 Cronkite News Service]

According to the California EPA, the most serious California wildfire seasons in the PAST 50 YEARS were in 2003, 2005 and 2008 - ALL IN THIS DECADE! In the past 12 years, average acreage burned in wildfires has been DOUBLE the average of 40-50 years ago. Looking ahead, models show that for each 1.8 degree C rise in average temperature, the total area burned by wildfires would increase 380% [National Research Council report, 2011]

Wildfires, insect infestations, pulses of erosion and flooding, and drought-induced tree mortality are all expected to increase during the 21st century. [USDA 12/12] Add severe wind occurrences - micro-bursts that knock down mature trees like a Giant’s game of pick-up sticks – and the Timber Industry will profit nicely from all the timber sales that could occur with no environmental regulation if HR 1526 becomes law.

Benignly entitled “Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act” HR 1526, co-sponsored by LaMalfa, pretends to be looking out for the best interests of rural communities, but this legislation would encourage unregulated logging of national forests in order to reduce fire danger and insect invasions – which are on the increase DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE. Yeah – save those forests by logging them - again…and again…

LaMalfa accepted significant campaign monies from the timber industry, as well as the fossil fuel industry, via the Koch brothers. Call me cynical, but I don’t believe Doug LaMalfa is a simple ‘Climate Change Denier’ – he’s a Climate Change PROFITEER – making money for himself and his corporate masters while the rest of us just burn or breathe smoke.

Who else here remembers the eye-stinging smoke that blanketed the entire region much of last summer and fall? And in 2008?
 

I live in Concow – in 2008, we lost over 200 homes out of 234 in one small section of the community. Even though our home was spared, 50% of homes in our immediate neighborhood were destroyed. The entire community was rocked by the wildfires. Families that had nowhere else to go slept in cars for months.

 

I had to send my grandkids away in ‘08 and again last year, because the smoke was so bad. Our elementary school was closed a few days last fall for ‘bad air days’ due to smoke…as if staying home, without a/c, would protect anyone…Just one example of how Climate Change is already affecting the poorest communities the most, in this COUNTY, not just across the globe.

 

Wildfire smoke is also compounding the climate problem. Wildfires emit mostly larger particles, called ‘tar balls,’ which absorb sunlight and cause substantial atmospheric warming.

So instead of being great ‘carbon sinks,’ our now heat-stressed, insect-prone, drought-ridden forests are burning, making climate change worse, and faster. [Science magazine 8/18/06]

 

As Barbara Boxer said on TV a couple days ago, after touring wildfires devastating the region: “Open your eyes, breathe the air, see what’s going on. And get out of the fringe lane.”

 

 

 

 

 

Healthy Forests? Not if LaMalfa has his way...

On Tuesday of next week, all across the nation, 136 "Unicorn" awards will be given to 136 Republican Congressmen who are Climate Change Deniers. A group of local Environmentalists and Democratic Party Activists will attempt to give this award to our own Cowboy Congressman, Doug LaMalfa. Amongst that group, will be my spouse, Joni Clark Stellar. In fact, she will be one of two speakers at the event. I have obligations elsewhere, so I won't be able to attend. However, you should be able to catch it on TV.

Joni has been working on her speech, as she decided to actually write one this time. I've heard her give many talks before and she does a fine job speaking extemporaneously, but this time she wanted to have all her ducks in a row. As part of the research, she has been reading much of the legislation that Doug LaMalfa has either sponsored, or cosponsored in the United States House. She piqued my interest, so I spent the evening researching just what LaMalfa has been signing his name to in the House.

You can tell a lot about your Congressman by reading through the bills that he/she has decided to cosponsor. In Doug's case, he has signed on to provisions that make our food "pest free" (can you guess who benefits from that type of legislation?). He also signed on to a bill that states that a Carbon Tax would be bad for the country. He has signed on to bills that would leave the regulation of fracking to every individual states (which begs the question of what happens on Federal Land). He has signed on to legislation that prevents drones from killing American Citizens in the United States. Whew, I'm glad we got that one handled!

And there are the nods to the social Conservatives, with LaMalfa signing on to prenatal pain bans (expected to end abortions). He demonstrates a bit of a Libertarian streak in his cosponsoring legislation that protects e-mails from being read by Uncle Sam. Yet, I'm wondering if he would sign on to such legislation if the White House had a Republican in it?

LaMalfa doesn't mind going out on a limb, sometimes signing on to legislation that has very few cosponsors. One of these was a bill to prevent the Health Care exchanges to begin signing up customers until one year after they were created. LaMalfa pretty much signed up for anything that eliminates poor people from getting healthcare. I guess he figures the poor don't need health care.

And LaMalfa signs on to several bills that allow logging to commence unfettered on public lands. Much of our District is public land, either BLM or Forest Service land.  The very worst of these bills is HR 1526 which has the rather happy name of the "Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act of 2013". Sounds good. This law stems back from the Forest Service having been created in 1908, whereby a percentage of the logging sales would go to fund schools and roads in the host communities.

It isn't like the West hasn't been logged. It has been logged extensively. Just fly over the Sierra and you will see just how much the west has been clear cut. Some of the forest has been saved through environmental provisions such as the Endangered Species Act and clean water initiatives. For many of us, we consider the forest to have more purposes than just to become a piece of paper or a 2 x 4 in a suburb.

Rural communities next to Federal lands have been suffering for decades. They have experienced high unemployment and narrowing of opportunities. Much of this has been blamed on Environmentalists, as they are perceived as having ended much of the logging that would restore jobs and  money to rural communities. Of course, mechanization of the logging industry (just watch those awful logging shows on TV) has been responsible for much of the unemployment. Just a couple of people can log out acres in an afternoon.

Enter Doug LaMalfa and 20 House Republicans. The Healthy Forest Act encourages logging on all Federal Lands that aren't designated Wilderness Areas or National Parks. The Act negates the Endangered Species Act. It negates all other environmental protections, such as clean water initiatives. It does such by a declaration of the Secretary of Agriculture in an extremely bizarre fashion. Much of the Act attempts to slither outside of judicial review.

And here is the most cynical part of the bill: Should a group or community decide to prevent a forest from being logged, that group must put up a bond that would cover the costs of the government for defending the law. That would effectively end many attempts at saving the northern spotted owl and other critical habitat. Do you think the Center for Biological Diversity has millions to put into a bond to save a cut?

Essentially, the HR 1526 considers our National Forests to have one purpose only: to be standing board feet for the large logging operations. Other uses such as recreation, hydrology or habitat for our furry cousins are not considered relevant. All it really does is open up all Forest Service lands to increased logging operations.

This Healthy Forests Act is nothing but a wet dream for Sierra Pacific. Doug LaMalfa serves up the remainder of our forests to be nothing but a timber stand for Georgia Pacific. It is a sick attempt to get around environmental laws that have benefitted plants and animals that have had no representation. They don't have a voice. Doug effectively silences them.

Cockburn vs Hitchens; Growing Up (and old) With The Nation...

I started reading The Nation magazine back in college. I loved its newsprint feel and its trade book size. Very little advertising present; within its pages I was introduced to the essentials of (mostly) East Coast Liberal opinion. Those were bad days to be a Liberal back in the early 80's. But because of the major shift to the right (something this country still hasn't emerged from), subscriptions to the magazine did well. We had to circle the wagons and attempt to fight back the powers of barbarism present in Reagan.

I was still young enough, and lucky enough, to actually read a column or two from some of the great Left Wing thinkers who emerged from being Communists back in the 30's. I remember reading I.F. Stone-- there was something about Izzy's writing that felt authoritative. Plus he wore really cool glasses. And there were other famous names: Howard Fast, Michael Harrington, Claud Cockburn, Kirkpatrick Sale introduced me to deep green thinking, Jesse Jackson, Tom Hayden. Writing for The Nation is a rite of passage for liberals, leftists and radicals of an unspecified nature; if you wanted to be a player in the intellectual left in the US, sooner or later you would need to have a piece in The Nation.

And yet, it was also incredibly ingrown and is weighted way too much towards East Coast thinking. Proximity is the number one predictor of relationship and it also accounts for those who get published too (along with nepotism). I find New Yorkers to be stuffy, rude and, mostly, boring. The same was true for The Nation.

I read the magazine for the articles, but to tell you the truth, I never really made it through most of the over written critters. I did read the columnists though. My favorite being Alexander Cockburn.

Back in those days, Alexander Cockburn alternated weekly with Chris Hitchens. Both of them from England. Cockburn's dad was the renown Communist journalist, Claud Cockburn. Chris Hitchens didn't have a famous pedigree. Both Alex and Chris were educated in Oxford. They both cut their teeth in the Trotskyist left in England. Both proclaimed themselves to be leftists, socialists--in Cockburn maybe even a bit of Communist leanings.  It was rather off putting in a parochial sense: Couldn't we find our own American Left leaning writers? Why must we have two columnists from England in our country's Left Wing answer to Buckley's  National Review?

It didn't matter. I tended to side with Cockburn; I liked his writing better than Hitchens, although I noticed Cockburn could be spectacularly wrong. Often. Didn't matter. His writing made up for when he got things wrong. All through the 80's and 90's I read him. Every week. And when he founded Counterpunch, I couldn't wait for Friday when he would write his weekly column. I stopped reading The Nation in the early 2000's. When they cut Alex from two pages down to one page, and then from every other week to once a month, I just didn't have the interest in reading the polite writings of the Wish Washy Politically Correct East Coast Liberal Establishment.

At some point, Cockburn and Hitchens turned on each other. It was part of their evolution. Hitchens moved to the right, first with his opinions on abortion, and later with his cheerleading for war in Iraq. Hitchens moved from New York to Washington DC, where he had an apartment that overlooked the Capitol. Hitchens left The Nation for more lucrative writing assignments, ultimately landing in Vanity Fair. It is hard to get rich writing from the left side of the aisle--I think Hitchens figured that out and since he had no inheritance nor any training to be anything else but a writer (and Hitch admitted that too), well, Trotskyites don't get rich; famous Washington journalists do get rich. Christopher Hitchens' parties in Washington are legendary. He was to DC for journalistic partying as Hunter Thompson was to Colorado. I don't know if the two ever met; I doubt it.  Many of Washington's elite liked to party til dawn in the Hitchens stately apartment. Hitchens was famous for his drinking and his cigarette smoking.

Alex Cockburn, at one time excoriated Ed Abbey and the Earth Firsters as the inheritors of Malthus, ended up on the West Coast in a small town of Petrolia. Hitchens loved power; Cockburn loved solitude. And so Cockburn created a very influential left wing radical daily internet newspaper called Counterpunch. This was years before the Huffington Post came along. Cockburn ended up a great admirer of Ed Abbey. And he became difficult to define; he never really did define himself. He became kind of a crank: he denied climate change and he believed in the abiotic theory of oil. He still quoted Lenin and seemed to love Russian (Soviet) literature, philosophers and even scientists. Most of the abiotic oil scientists are Russian. Some say Cockburn drifted towards anarchism towards the end. On one video on the Internet, Cockburn states the best influence the Left had in this country was the fact that you can buy a good loaf of bread in most towns.

Cockburn and Hitchens had feuds that started in the late 80's and lasted until Hitchens died of cancer in 2011. They didn't like each other much, and in a way, they taught all of us how to have an epic feud in print. Nothing you read on a trolls page mimicked the sheer joy of reading the Cockburn/Hitchens exchanges. They were masterful. A delight to read. And I think it probably boosted magazine sales.

They both died within six months of each other. Both died of cancer. Hitchens wrote very publically about his cancer, and the process of dying. Hitchens was a drunk (the same was said about Cockburn). They both smoked cigarettes, chain smokers, although Cockburn quit at age 40. While Hitchens was dying publically from throat cancer; Cockburn was fighting his own battle with cancer, etiology unknown to me (probably lung?), very privately.

They became similar polar opposites and remained such up to the end. When I read in the summer of 2012 that Alex Cockburn died, a part of me died. A part of my youth. A part of my introduction to left wing thought. Cockburn was young, aged 71. Hitchens was even younger; he died at age 62.

May they both rest in peace.

Snake Skin..

Found a snake skin on a hike this morning. After a long walk yesterday, only the youngest-and most energy filled dog-accompanied me. The other two dogs took the day off from hiking. They wore themselves out yesterday.

I've been increasing my length of hikes in the hopes of maybe getting a backpack trip in sometime this fall.

Granolaheads versus Greedheads

I've been reading John McPhee's classic book on David Brower called "Encounters with the Arch Druid". David Brower continued a tradition of environmental activism that is sustained in a line starting with John Muir and ending with, maybe, Bill McKibben. The reality is that we don't have a major figure arguing poetically for nature, the land, wildlife, leaving it alone.

David Brower said famously (and I paraphrase) that environmental victories are always temporary. Generationally, the temptation to drill into wilderness land or to enlarge a suburb across a "green line" (as is happening in Chico)--well, these things are just too tempting. And we have a generation of kids coming online that have been online since they were in diapers and have no clue what a Monarch butterfly is, or what Milkweed is; they haven't a clue that it took just as much effort by tenacious Activists to get the Wilderness Act of 1964 passed as it did to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In my view, the two pieces of legislation are related. Joined at the hip. And both are being assaulted today.

Joni and I took a hike today. Down the blessed trail to our canyon that we had to all to ourselves. Joni went skinny dipping. I thought the water was too cold.

The water is green in our own private river. It has never been that way before. Of course, we are in a drought year(s). Water flow is minimal. But the green appearance is from algae that is suffocating our little stream. And the algae is created from run off of a few lawns in Paradise and also from the myriad of Pot Farms that dump pesticides and fertilizer into the runoff.

Environmental victories are always temporary, said the Arch Druid. And there are fewer and fewer Granola Heads willing to take on the Greed Heads. Sad.