June 27th 2001

Letter to the Editor
Anderson Valley Advertiser
June 27, 2001

Editor:

"It's Not Easy Being Green," was your caption above a letter from Mary Pjerrou in you June 20 edition.

But it IS easy being Mary Pjerrou. You don't have to mess around with nasty things like facts, just haul off and say anything you want.

Bill Heil takes the position that the land needs 40,000 board feet per acre in the lower Albion, where he lives, to qualify as "reasonably well stocked." Each of us can make up our own definition, but that one would mean NO logging at all, since no one except a state forest here or there has such an inventory, and the death of the little timber economy remaining. Which is one position to take, but at least be honest and call it that and be done with it.

I prefer a timber economy to massive enclaves of well-to-do city folks - or more vineyards than we will be cursed with as it is - which is what we would have more of if there were NO logging. If the remnant timber economy in Mendocino County dies the death of a thousand cuts, you all up there might just as well move to Sonoma County. If there IS to remain a timber economy, Mendocino Redwoods is in the best position to help that happen. They are willing to tie themselves down to less than two per cent per year of their inventory - all genuflect before this sacred cow of forestry activists during the late Mendocino local rules campaign - they will be GAINING trees, since conifers normally grow more than that per year in such terrain.

And if THEY can't survive, still doing forestry, no one can. I certainly hope they make it, in general, and because they are adjoining owners on one side of the timberland I co-own. I don't want to wake up one day to learn that my new neighbor is Sierra Pacific Industries, which has announced plans to clearcut over a million acres. I believe it was the next high bidder after Mendocino Redwoods when Louisiana Pacific sold out. And when SPI says "clearcut," they MEAN clearcut - the classic kind, all vegetation removed. Or Campbell- Hawthorne.

Helen Libeu, Santa Rosa/Boonville