NO
LB, WE’RE NOT DONE YET
Keynote Address
American Loggers Council
Ninth Annual Meeting, September 26, 2003
World Forestry Center, Portland, Oregon
By James D. Petersen
Publisher, Evergreen Magazine
Executive Director, The Evergreen Foundation
Good evening.
It’s wonderful to be among old friends – and new ones - in one of forestry’s great landmarks.
Not so many years ago this beautiful building was known as the Western Forestry Center.
The original structure – erected in 1905 to help commemorate the centennial Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition - was located just over the hill from here. It burned to the ground in 1964. This beautiful building opened in 1971: an altogether fitting tribute to empire builders in the history of forest conservation and forest products manufacturing in the West.
Among those honored here:
Bill Greeley, third chief of the Forest Service and a man whose contributions to conservation outdistance those of Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service and his more famous rival.
Brothers Julian and Owen Cheatam, founders of Georgia-Pacific
Ben Cheney, who built the West’s first truly large stud mill after which all other big stud mills have been modeled
Forest firefighting legend Charlie Cowan
Tom Autzen, who many credit with the development of plywood, and for whom the University of Oregon football stadium is named
Wilson and Orange Clark, founders of Willamette Valley Lumber Company, which became Willamette Industries and was recently acquired by the Weyerhaeuser Company
John Phillip and Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser, two giants in the history of a company that is itself a giant.
Lumberman Julius Hult and his son Nils, who contributed the money used to build the Hult Center, focal point of culture and entertainment in Eugene
Plywood magnate Sam Agnew, tireless defender of conservative causes
Tree Farm legend T.J. Starker, whose family still leads the way in tree farming here in the Douglas-fir region
And the late Alan Disdero, who handpicked all of the lumber used in the construction of this beautiful building.
The center was renamed the World Forestry Center a few years ago, over the quite vocal objections of my great friend Bill Hagenstein, one of only a handful of men the Center has chosen to honor on these premises while they are still living. Bill, who was this industry’s persona for more than 30 years, and is in my opinion forestry’s greatest living historian, would want you to know the original building – and this one – were constructed for only one reason: to remind our fellow Americans that forestry is good for people.
Let me add my voice to that bygone and now seemingly politically incorrect notion. I know of no industry that has made greater contributions to this nation’s economic and environmental prosperity than ours. That we no longer remind our fellow countrymen of this truth every day is a shortcoming we ignore at our own peril.
Is there something wrong with reminding the public that there is not a job or a product on the face of the earth that is not the result of the harvest or extraction of a raw material and its conversion to a finished product?
Or this simple reminder, which appears on our Evergreen Foundation stationery: "We must always consider the environment and people together - as though they are one - because the human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."
Your conference theme is "Focusing on the Future." This evening we will spend some time in the past, the present and the future. But before we set sail I’d like to introduce my wife Kathleen, without whose support I would not be here, and Evergreen Magazine would not exist. She is my business partner and the love of my life. As loggers, you understand better than many what this priceless asset means when you are trying to figure out how to keep going when going on seems impossible. Kathleen does not often accompany me on these trips because someone has to stay home to mind the store. I asked her to come tonight because she needs a boost and because I wanted to thank her and tell her how much I love her in the presence of people who understand that in the logging game even those who simply write about it don’t get very far without the support of a loving wife.
When my long-time friend Jim Geisinger asked me to come here tonight he said he wanted me to give a speech like the one I gave last winter at the Oregon Logging Conference in Eugene. But when I reminded Jim that I had talked there for nearly an hour, that it was morning and not evening, and that perhaps such a long speech would be too much for an after dinner crowd, he said, "That doesn’t matter. They deserve the full Monty." Having seen the movie I can assure you that no such spectacular flights of fancy await you here this evening.
How many of you are from the West? Southwest? Northeast? Southeast? Great Lakes?
How many of you have read Evergreen Magazine?
How many are dues paying members of the Evergreen Foundation?
Hopefully more of you will want to join us after you hear my message.
Let me begin by telling you a bit about me. I am the son, grandson and great grandson of miners, loggers, sawmill workers, cattle ranchers, farmers and the sturdy women who followed them across oceans and across this great land. We are from Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, England and France. We spoke as many languages as the countries from which we immigrated. But we had two things in common: a desire to make a fresh start in a new country and the ability to work land, to transform its great wealth into even greater wealth: food, clothing and shelter - the building blocks of our great nation and of civilization itself.
We are doing less and less of this in America today: a fact that reminds me of something a friend of mine said to me 20-some years ago. He said whoever controls access to natural resources controls the destiny of the world. He was right. And the fact that we are increasingly dependent on natural resources from foreign and not always friendly lands ought to scare the daylights out of you. It does me.
I have two objectives this evening.
First, I am going to pound the table for the President and his Healthy Forests Initiative. Sometime in the next two weeks the Senate is likely to vote on its version of the House-passed Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and the outcome is far from certain.
Second, I am going to urge you to create your own image-building campaign. For too long now loggers have been tied to the apron strings of big landowning and sawmilling outfits. Times have changed – and it is time for you to stand on your own feet.
My speech is titled "No LB, we’re not done yet."
LB was Larry Brown. We were best friends for 31 years. He died last year at the end of a long battle with cancer. Kathleen and I stood at the foot of his bed until the end. If you have ever watched a friend’s soul take flight you know it is a humbling and unforgettable experience.
Larry was a forester by profession: Paul Smith’s College Class of 62, Oregon State University Class of 64. We met in 1971 when I went to work as county government reporter for the Grants Pass Daily Courier. Back then Grants Pass was a sawmill town on the Rogue River about four hours south of here. Larry was the County Forester. We shared a love of fly-fishing and forests. Around the two we built a friendship that survived years and miles apart.
Fate brought us back together in 1986 when Kathleen and I moved to Grants Pass to start Evergreen Magazine. The world looked a lot different than it does today. Mill towns were still mill towns and anyone who wanted to work could. But those glorious days were short-lived. Within four years the decade-long collapse of the federal timber sale program had begun, and with it the collapse of much of the West’s timber industry. Today hundreds of mill towns are no more and thousands who lost their jobs are still unemployed. Entire communities now stand on the brink of social and cultural collapse. Some have collapsed.
For this American tragedy there is more than enough blame to go around. Some say the spotted owl is the reason. Others - perhaps more circumspect - blame the Endangered Species Act. But I think our industry bears some of the responsibility for what happened here in the West in the 1990s. We spent too little time shouting our truth on street corners and too much time whispering it in Capitol Hill cloakrooms.
In 1987, we had a terrible forest fire in southern Oregon. The Silver Fire Complex incinerated more than 100,000 acres of old growth timber on the Siskiyou National Forest just west of Grants Pass. We endured heavy smoke and nightly ash fall for more than a month. And before the smoke had cleared Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council announced that not one black stick of timber would be salvaged because salvaging timber after a forest fire was – in his words - like "mugging a burn victim."
Those of us who were living with this tragedy were stunned. We simply could not believe what we were hearing. Not harvesting dead trees, not repairing the damage and not replanting what fire destroyed seemed to us an unconscionable act. We soon learned that many in Congress shared Mr. Kerr’s point of view. Our needs, our conservation ethic, simply did not matter on the wine and cheese circuit where – now even more than then - vast sums of money are fueling socialist strategies for transforming America into a country our ancestors would not recognize.
I resolved that Mr. Kerr’s declaration would not go unchallenged. But "help" seems too inadequate a word to describe what Larry did - so let me simply say that LB and I and a third friend, R.B. Slagle, who I will talk about next, did something that, even now, seems impossible: we orchestrated the largest public gathering of its kind in our industry’s history. We called it The Silver Fire Roundup. We said, "If you share our belief that valuable fire-killed timber should be harvested and the land replanted come to Grants Pass and stand with us publicly so the country can see us, hear us and consider our common sense message."
What happened next still raises the hair on my neck whenever I think about it.
Were any of you there? Do you still get goose bumps when you think about it?
Friends, 1,556 logging trucks from five states showed up in Grants Pass.
10,000 spectators lined the streets to welcome them.
The first truck rolled past our make-shift reviewing stand at the Josephine County Fairgrounds at 11:15 in the morning, the last truck rolled past at 7:45 that evening.
No one left the grandstands until the last truck passed by and its occupants had been introduced on the public address system.
Nearly every cab held a husband, a wife and children. Among them: a family from Judith Gap, Montana – 21 hours distant
A young man from Libby, Montana showed up with his family and a band of trucks from Libby, Eureka and Darby. You know him well. Bruce Vincent. He is here tonight. He does not know this but he has done a pretty good job of filling the space in my heart left by LB’s passing.
From notes hastily scrawled while waiting his turn to speak, Bruce delivered the most electrifying speech I’ve ever heard. It was titled "It’s okay to be a logger." When he finished 10,000 people rose up in a way I have never again witnessed. Many of them are still standing today. Many others have since joined them.
Within a matter of months the yellow ribbons we asked our supporters to fly from their antennas were flying from antennas in every state where there is a timber industry. That’s 45 for anyone who is counting. The ribbons became a symbol of our unity. They spoke – as R.B. Slagle explained to a Portland television reporter - for people who could not easily express themselves.
Those 1,556 trucks formed what the National Trucking Association would later call the largest peacetime convoy in U.S. history. At one point, the line of southbound trucks waiting to exit the freeway at Grants Pass was 42 miles long. The northbound exit, which channeled trucks from California, was only slightly shorter. People standing on Sixth Street in 105- degree heat passed water and soft drinks to families in trucks that moved by a foot at a time.
The cornerstone in a grass roots movement that today joins loggers, ranchers, miners, farmers and fishermen was laid that afternoon in Grants Pass: August 27, 1988.
R.B. Slagle is gone now too, leaving me to wonder if he ever understood how he had single-handedly altered the course of our industry’s history. He was a family man, a Marine who never talked about what he saw fighting his way through the Solomon Islands, a log trucker for 52 years.
He was also a giant in my life and he still is. I am not sure Evergreen would have ever gotten off the ground without him. It was he who in trademark abruptness coerced southern Oregon’s mill principals into funding the project. At the end of a second long meeting in which I had offered my thoughts on the need for a direct mail publication that could build public support for the Forest Service’s forest planning process, he declared in full voice, "We’ll sonny, that’s a hell of an idea, but there ain’t a son-of-a-bitch in the room that can do it, would you?"
Over the years RB and I traveled more than 150,000 miles in "Old 21," a 1966 Peterbilt he called his "Protest truck." Woe unto the truck dispatcher who actually dared send "Old 21" to the woods for a load of logs. When one actually had the audacity to ask why it was to remain parked next to the office R.B. declared, "Because, damn it, we might need it."
RB and I did not miss many rallies on the West coast in those years. In fact "Old 21" became so well known on Interstate 5 that folks in passing cars often honked and waved, some with only one finger, a wave we happily returned in kind.
Bob knew how much I wanted to learn how to drive log trucks, so he taught me. Then "Old 21" got a new motor, two new air-ride seats, and two cab-welded flag poles: one for the American flag and another for a Yellow Ribbon Coalition flag hand-stitched by one of his daughters. I think we were quite a sight.
In 1989 Bruce asked us to come to Montana for a rally at the Missoula County Fairgrounds. By then, things weren’t going very well in Big Sky Country and he hoped RB and I could help him buoy sinking spirits. We put the word that we were going and – to our complete amazement – 100 trucks from Oregon, Washington and California fell in behind us as we headed up Interstate 5. Among our number: a tanker driven by a Bakersfield, California fuel distributor whose customers included loggers and farmers. His 10-year-old son was with him. When another trucker asked why he brought the boy he said, "Because I want him to learn how to defend his culture and his future."
Just east of Portland we got our second surprise of the day. My wife passed us. She had waved good-bye to all of us from a Grants Pass overpass earlier that morning, then decided she wanted to be a part of what we were doing. As she rolled past RB and I a friend in the second truck announced her presence on the CB declaring, "Well, there goes Jim’s weekend."
We overnighted in Pasco, Washington. With more than 300 miles still to go, we were on the road an hour before daylight the next morning. As first light illuminated the golden wheat fields that are eastern Washington’s trademark, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw something I can see as clearly tonight as I saw it then: 100 sets of headlights, stretched out over rolling hills, glistening in the rising sun.
Up and down the line every driver could see what I saw, yet not a word was spoken. Silence joined us. We knew where we were going and why. We were going to Montana to help a friend who had helped us. And we were doing it together. Nothing else mattered.
RB and I also answered a long distance call from Indiana in 1989. Joanne and Phil Etienne, downstate sawmill owners fed up with the fact that there had not been a timber sale on the Hoosier National Forest for two years organized the event in an open field near their mill at St. Croix. It is a long way from Grants Pass to St. Croix, Indiana but we still found nine truckers willing to take 10 days out of their lives to defend our culture and its future. Several area sawmills pitched in to help us with travel expenses. When Don Deardorf, one of the plywood industry’s legendary tough guys, heard we were going he called R.B. and asked how much a truck sponsorship would cost. R.B. said $2,500. Don said, "I’ll take two."
We made national news along our travel route. But more importantly, we added a vitally important link in our growing grass roots network. As amazing as it now seems there was no Internet then, so we shared our hopes and ideas via telephones and fax machines. But what really bound us to one another was a rock hard belief that together we were much stronger than the sum of our parts. This is still true – which is why I get so irritated when I hear loggers say, "Oh that’s not our issue. Things are different here. That won’t ever happen to us."
Having spent most of 1995, 1996 and 1997 on the road, traveling from state to state, writing about you and your families and what you do and think and believe I can tell you with absolute certainty that every last one of you is cut from the same cloth and has the same gravel in your guts.
The Midwest Pride Haul was on Saturday. Friday night we rolled into a state weigh station at the Indiana border and were greeted with the news that Governor Frank O’Bannon, who passed away just last week, had granted our trucks free passes. The welcome mat was out. The ladies who worked day shift at the scales waited two hours for us, so they could serve us hot coffee and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. The next morning we rolled from Indianapolis to St. Croix amid a caravan of news cars and greeters who joined in all along the route. It seemed as though the whole state knew why we had come so far - and loved us for what we were doing to help call attention to the plight of downstate logging and sawmilling families.
My wife showed up again. Another lost weekend. She couldn’t stand what she was seeing on the nightly news. So she flew to Los Angeles and caught the red-eye to Indianapolis. She landed at 6 in the morning. I got her a ride to St. Croix with a long haul trucker from Wisconsin. He had a load of refrigerated beef and was headed for Atlanta when he heard about us on the CB. He had worked in sawmills when he was a kid and wanted to show his support, so he happily let my wife ride with him. His name was Floyd. Every time I pass a Martin Trucking Company rig I look in the cab to see if he’s there.
Sunday after the rally we gathered in a nearby church basement to plot a strategy for unseating an Indiana congressman named Jim Jontz who was spending more of his time in Oregon campaigning against logging than he was taking care of business in his own district. With the help of organized labor we got him tossed out on his ear a year later. I suspect it was a chilling moment for members of Congress accustomed to casting free environmental votes against us.
Lest you have become lost in the details of my story, I will remind you that the movement that took us to St. Croix began just a year earlier in Grants Pass at the Silver Fire Roundup. The Roundup was videotaped. I have the tape here if any of you would like to watch it. In the last scene, the camera looks down from the roof of the grandstand onto the football field. LB had emptied everyone out of the stands onto the field and arranged them in the letters "U.S.A" for a final picture. A young lady from Roseburg stood among them and sang "God Bless America." Then silence.
LB’s booming voice is the last sound on the tape. He is yelling a question up to the rooftop cameraman who has been video taping the days events.
"Are we done yet? Are we done?"
No LB, we’re not done yet.
As a matter of fact, we’re just getting started.
I am here tonight to hand out assignments – and to remind you as forcefully as I can that we are family - and that everything we stand for is under attack: hard work, home, family, community and a kind of forest conservation that has people in it.
If we do not fight back we will perish. Many of us already have. They did not die willingly or easily. But they are gone nonetheless. And it is partly our fault because we have not taken the battle to our enemies as forcefully as we should have. In fact, only recently have some of us discovered what others of us have known for nearly 20 years: we are at war. In the words of an old lawyer friend, "You have enemies who want to destroy you."
Our unpardonable sin is that we cut down trees and plant new ones. From our labors a nation is sheltered. But in our enemy’s eyes we are the very embodiment of evil. We are greedy. We are a cancer on the breast of Mother Earth. I could go on, but won’t. We have never given these fakers and frauds a soapbox to stand on in Evergreen and I am not going to share this wonderful stage with them tonight either.
LB’s hero was George W. Bush. Or as he used to say whenever he was in the presence of people he knew had voted for Al Gore, President George W. Bush. Someday I hope to shake the President’s hand and tell him how much I appreciate what he is doing for our culture He is only the second president in history to ever speak publicly on our behalf. The first was conservationist Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1903 reminded Washington, D.C. members of the Society of American Foresters that a forest that contributed nothing to the wealth, progress or safety of the country was of no interest to him and should be of little interest to them.
How far we have fallen.
But the long climb back to the moral high ground we once occupied on the cultural landscape that is America has begun. It started 13 months ago in Medford, Oregon. The President went there to thank firefighters then battling the half-million-acre Biscuit Fire and – against the counsel of advisers who viewed our crisis as a political liability – to unveil his Healthy Forests Initiative. And when asked why he was willing to spend some of his political capital on an issue they considered to be a loser he said simply, "Because, it is the right thing to do."
Less than two months after his Medford visit, I was called to Washington, D.C. with others to offer my thoughts on what we might do on Evergreen pages to help build understanding of the West’s wildfire crisis and support for the President’s restoration strategy. In the hope of overcoming my own cynicism I asked a man who is close to the President if he was serious about what he said in Medford. I will not soon forget his answer. He said, and I quote, "The President is personally and morally committed to this issue. No matter what happens this White House will not jerk the rug out from under those who are trying to help the President advance his Healthy Forests Initiative."
Looking back over the last year, measuring the President’s commitment by his actions and words, can anyone doubt that he is serious about dealing with the underlying political and environmental causes of the West’s wildfire crisis? I certainly don’t. And you shouldn’t either.
I know that those of you who log outside the West – in the Southeast, Northeast and Great Lakes regions - have wondered what is in the President’s Healthy Forests Initiative for you. Look around this room this evening. More than 10,000 loggers from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming who might have been members of your fine organization are not loggers anymore. They and the entire federal timber sale program were pushed off a cliff by judges and political activists for whom laws are a convenience to be followed only if it suits their purpose.
If you think these people intend to retreat now, having met their first objective - which was to quickly destroy as much of the West’s logging culture as they possibly could - you’re crazy. They are an industry now, with CEO’s and CFO’s and boards of directors and Lear jets and lawyers: all of the trappings of the very evil empire they say we embody.
You’re next. And the fact that you harvest timber on private land – and not from the public’s forests – isn’t of the slightest importance to them. They don’t believe in private property rights anyway. They are determined to take you down just like they took down much of the West’s timber industry. And – as Bruce has observed many times - whether they shoot you with a high-powered rifle or suffocate you with a pillow doesn’t matter to them. Without a moment’s hesitation or the slightest twinge of conscience they will use every tool in their considerable arsenal - political, legal and otherwise. The big TMDL fistfight so many of you were involved in two years ago was just a warm-up. Remember, we have sitting federal judges in the country who think rocks should have legal standing in their courts.
But now, for the first time in many years, there is hope. Because now we have a President for whom we are more than stage props, a President for whom the phrase "I feel your pain" is much more than a sound bite. He does mean to see us through our great darkness – out the other side and into the light again. And you had best understand very clearly that if he loses his bid for re-election next November you will lose much more than our next logging job. You will lose our way of life, your future.
Sometime in the next two weeks the U.S. Senate will probably vote on its version of the House-passed Healthy Forests Restoration Act. We have been to this dance before. The House passed a similar bill last year, only to see time run out before the Senate vote. But this year it does not look like deja vous all over again. It looks like there will be a vote. And it looks like it will be very close. So it is incumbent on every person this room to make sure your Senators understand that from coast to coast millions of acres of public forest land are on the brink of ecological collapse - and will collapse if Congress does not get serious about forest restoration.
The science here is pretty straightforward: there are too many trees crowded into our federal forests and they are dying by the millions. The listed causes of death are drought, insects, diseases and nutrient starvation. But in truth they are victims of a head-on collision between conflicting government policies – a policy to preserve forests in no management or minimum management reserves and, concurrently, a policy to exclude wildfire from forests the public loves.
What we have failed as a country to understand is that preserving forests requires that we care for them. As an old Tennessee forester friend once observed, "The problem with leaving forests to nature, as so many seem to want to do, is that we can’t control the outcome. We get whatever nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times. But with forestry we have options, and a degree of predictability not found in nature."
So the debate currently underway in the United States Senate – over whether to approve or reject the Senate version of the House-passed Health Forests Restoration Act – really comes down to a choice between two alternatives: we can – as a society – assume responsibility for applying science in the management of our federal forests – thinning and harvesting to control growth and the limits of natural disturbance – or we can abdicate our responsibility and accept nature’s consequences.
For the record, there is clear evidence – in the form of focus group results from six major U.S. cities – Washington, D.C., Denver, Phoenix, Sacramento, Memphis and Portland – that most Americans have zero interest in standing around with their hands in their pockets while forests they treasure burn to the ground. The Senate has this evidence.
It is very, very important for everyone in this room to understand that, regardless of the outcome of the Senate vote, the real battle still lies ahead of us on the presidential campaign trail. The President’s enemies are going to come after him – and his environmental record - with a vengeance. I don’t know how many of you have had an opportunity to read the Sierra Club’s recent internal memo concerning the upcoming campaign, but it is chilling. We are dealing with people who will do or say anything to regain power this White House is taking away from them. And I for one fear our industry is poorly prepared for this fight. Our focus is too short. Past experience suggests that many of the companies that are supporting the President’s Healthy Forests Initiatives will take their marbles and go home as soon as the Senate votes. And that will be a fatal mistake. Because with the stroke of a pen any of the Democrats currently on the campaign trail can wipe out everything we’ve gained with Mr. Bush at the helm. So prepare yourself to walk through fire to get our friend George W. Bush re-elected. I am.
Earlier I said I wanted to talk with you about an image-building campaign for loggers. I said your interests – and those of the big landowning and sawmilling outfits – no longer mesh as well as they once did. It is time for you to start telling your own story, time to acquaint the public with the remarkable array of technologically advanced tools that have transformed your industry into what it is today. Too few people know about these tools, or best management practices, logger certification or any of the other self-help programs you’ve launched in recent years.
We can help you on Evergreen pages – and we have - but you have to help us too. Most of the family-owned outfits that supported us for years are gone now – gone the way of those 10,000 loggers.
We are struggling, just like you. I can now count on one hand the people whose contributions are keeping us in business. Yet this year alone we have somehow managed to publish four very solid issues of Evergreen, including three in support of the President’s rescue plan. A fourth issue in this series will be out in three weeks, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll produce several more next year on topics related to the President’s initiatives.
It is our firm belief that these issues focusing on various aspects of our nation’s forests health crisis will play a vitally important role in the coming election season – just as they played a central role in congressional debate. This was no accident. Several key lawmakers in both the House and Senate have taken it upon themselves to hand deliver copies of Evergreen to their colleagues. You can’t get any closer to the decision makers than this.
We have been on the front lines in the fight to protect science-based forestry – and harvesting’s role in it - for 18 years. And there is clear evidence that the arguments favoring management that we have advanced on Evergreen pages are finally being heard in important opinion shaping forums: the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, the Society of American Foresters, Washington think tanks that would not have touched you with a 10-foot pole 10 years ago and several forestry schools that are again re-engaging in the debate.
Equally clear is the fact that we have built up something money cannot buy: credibility – a hard-earned reputation for telling the truth and backing it up with facts and figures that cannot be disputed. No six-second sound bites, no fancy advertisements, no high priced public relations firms and no lawyers. Just plain old hard-nosed down-in-the-trenches reporting the way it was taught by those from whom I learned my craft many years ago.
The first time I spoke publicly about Evergreen and our publishing plans I said we intended to put a face on this industry – on those who care for forests in one manner or another: private landowners, public land management agencies, scientists, foresters and loggers. I think it goes without saying that we’ve done it in a way that it has never been done before.
We can do much more to help you, but first we all need learn how to sing from the same sheet music. We need a funding and marketing strategy that allows every logging association in the country, including this one, to leverage our assets. Not just Evergreen, but Provider Pals and numerous other state and regional programs. Why aren’t these programs the well-oiled parts of a larger effort befitting your culture and your contribution to the nation’s well being?
The answer – sad to say - is that for too many folks in our industry the world ends at the county line. How many times have I heard these words spoken with great but fatal pride: "If it didn’t happen here, it didn’t happen!" Ladies and gentlemen, this incredibly shortsighted view of the political landscape is killing us. If you do not take anything else away from our time together this evening take this: If we do not soon begin to see themselves as parts of something larger and much grander than our own individual efforts we will miss the brass ring again, miss the big doors the President has swung open wide for us, miss what may be our last best hope for regaining the moral high ground.
I did not come this far to go home empty handed - and I don’t think you did either. I’ve spent more than enough time crawling around in my own guts to know that our cause is just and that we can win this war. But we have to help each other more than we have. We have to stop leaving our wounded on battlefields. Friendly fire is unacceptable. For Heaven’s sake follow the instruction written on all U.S. Army rocket launchers. It reads, "Aim at the enemy."
I am going to leave you this evening with the same request that I made of my logger friends in Eugene last February. Write the President a letter and thank him personally for his moral courage, for lending us some of his political capital so that we might save our forests, our communities, our way of life, ourselves. We are – in Winston Churchill’s inspiring words – "still masters of our fate, still captains of our souls." This will be – again in Churchill’s words – "a war of unknown warriors." But as he told his countrymen when all seemed lost, "let us strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age."
It is time for us to remove our dark curse, to lift it from our age, to seize this moment in time and squeeze from it ever glimmer of hope and opportunity we possibly can. If we fail, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. And future generations will surely do that for us.
And so the spirit of my great friend Larry Brown rises again to ask you the same question he asked at the Silver Fire Roundup.
"Are we done yet? Are we done?"
No LB, we’re not done yet. As a matter of fact, we’re just getting started.
-end-