QOTD

[cmelak]

The same destructive spirit which has robbed us of the buffalo, which is fast extirpating the elk and threatens to make the salmon extinct, works its wanton will with our forests. When at last we are without wild game, large or small, when our valuable food fish are exterminated, we shall all then by the rivers of Oregon sit down and weep in vain

Comments

[publius_ovidius]

That's one heck of a quote. The liberals will call is prescient and the conservatives will argue that it's over a century later and that stuff is still here (except for the buffalo, of course).

How did you happen to stumble across that?

[cmelak]

well, I find it prescient, but disturbing in that it it is still quite true today....the steam donkey wasn't put into use until the 1880's, which made clearcutting "efficient" and fueled the timber boom in this part of the country (coinciding with the railroad's arrival). The pictures I see of the amazing Douglas fir forest that once covered the Puget Sound-Willamette Valley basin nauseate me, because it has been all but obliterated. Those named elements of our ecosystem are not so much still here as they are still precipitously hanging in the balance.

I got it from a book I'm reading for my "Social and Environmental History of the Pacific Northwest" class, a history class. The book is Pacific Raincoast, by Robert Bunting. I'm startled by what I'm learning about how much the Native American population shaped the land using fire, weirs, and so on, prior to the arrival of non-Native settlers....