Portland Architecture

A rant against clearcutting

 

A few weeks ago I spent a weekend at the Oregon Coast. While driving west on highway 26 through the Coast Range toward Cannon Beach and Seaside, I was appalled at the amount of forest that had been clearcut. From the road one could see thousands of acres of rolling hills in the Tillamook and Clatsop forests where there had recently been healthy ecosystems, now decimated to be as bare as Samson's scalp. I wondered if it was my imagination that more clearcutting seemed to be apparent than in the recent past.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying state forests can't be logged. After all, I'm writing this from a wood-framed building stocked with lots of wood furniture. If I could, I'd replace my vinyl linoleum floors with a nice wood parquet for that Boston Garden effect. I'd replace my ratty recliner with a wood-backed Eames chair.

But it turns out I was on to something when it comes to the Tillamook and Clatsop forests and the debate over just what their purpose is: an industrial tree farm or a natural wonder.

Earlier this year, the Oregon Board of Forestry moved toward a new policy on the Tillamook and Clatsop forests, voting to boost the cut on state forests. Apparently this came after demands from the Legislature and from Tillamook and Clatsop counties for more logging and timber revenues.

Increasing logging was just the start, though. The Board of Forestry also launched an effort to rewrite its definition of the "greatest permanent value" of the state forests as being timber production. This contradicts the existing definition:  " healthy, productive and sustainable forest ecosystems that over time and across the landscape provide a full range of social, economic and environmental benefits to the people of Oregon."

What is this, the Dark Ages? Or, as a recent Oregonian editorial said, "Oregon's state forests are not tree farms."

Granted the people of rural Oregon have been hit hard in the last 20 years by declining timber production and revenue. It's understandable to want to bring more jobs back to logging towns like Vernonia, Mill City, and Willamina. Even so, cutting down every tree in sight is a matter of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Oregon's forests are bountiful enough to provide plenty of timber that is logged sustainably. We don't need scorched-earth tactics in order to get this job done. And while this should not be an either-or choice of ecosystems and beauty versus economics and jobs, it's not merely empty romanticism to look at the forests from a speeding car and lament the devastation. It's not just loggers and logging companies that have a stake in Oregon's forest, but every Oregonian. And I'm quite confident that if you polled every resident of this state, the case for massive clearcutting would be sawed and felled in no time.

Joslin vs. Sauvie Island's Oversized Dump

Most people in the local architecture and building community know Jeff Joslin for his role as the Land Use Manager for the City of Portland, overseeing design review and historic landmarks review. But he's also a property owner on Sauvie Island, and Joslin has a bone to pick with his neighbor, the industrial dump that is looking to expand.

Joslin's property, which contains wetlands listed on the National Wetlands Registry, sits next to a 25-acre property owned by ESCO, and industrial foundry in Northwest Portland. Since 1977 ESCO has dumped foundry by-products like furnace brick and glassy slag there. (I just love the phrase "glassy slag".) As reported by The Sentinel, a North/Northeast Portland paper, last year the company applied for a conditional-use permit to raise the permissible height of its dump by 14 feet.

Joslin and his neighbors argued that the dump was a non-conforming use on land currently zoned for agriculture. The site currently also drains water into Joslin's protected wetlands. He argues it could also begin leaching contaminated groundwater. In fact, Joslin spent $25,000 of his own money on consultants (hydrologists, land-use, engineers, lawyers) to create evidence against the expansion. City employees must be better compensated than I imagined, because Joslin apparently sold his 1997 Porsche 911 to pay for the consultants.

But Multnomah County disagreed. Last month they approved ESCO's request to hugely increase their Sauvie Island industrial dump. County officials cited the fact that while Sauvie Island is zoned for agriculture, it can be used as a dump as long as it is in continuous use as one. In other words, the dump shouldn't be there, but it's been grandfathered in. And because of this idiocy, not only did poor Jeff just gave away a supercar for nothing, but the beautiful sanctuary that is Sauvie Island is gearing up to become a bigger landfill.

Maybe in some future autumn, instead of a corn maze at local farms, they can have one made of glassy slag.

Now Joslin is gearing up for an appeal. We're with you here at Portland Architecture, Jeff!