That is a quote of a bumber sticker you could see quite often around the Pacific NW in the early 1990’s after the eco-socialists locked up nearly 7 million acres of timberland by getting the fed to declare the Spotted Owl endangered. On top of that, they stated as fact that Spotted Owls would only nest in “Old Growth Timber” and that all cutting on all lands inside the circle the eco-socialists drew had to stop. The fed at the time agreed, as did a couple of judges and all the local media (even those who print their words on dead trees) that weren’t based in longging towns.
The eco-socialists would bus their “friends” in from cities like Portland, Eugene, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia and show up at these hearings, completely overwhelming the voices of the locals whose entire lives depended on logging and in whose self interest it was to keep the local forests a “renewable resource”.
But never the less, the fed and the courts found for the eco-socialists and tens of thousands of families were put out of work, and some on to the street, because of an owl small enough to hold in the palm of your hand was more important than they were.
A decade and a half later, the fed has now come back and said that they are going to open up some of these lands to commercial logging, for two reasons: 1. The population of spotted owls there is miniscule to the point of non-existence, and 2. Stopping the logging in these areas hasn’t helped the owls.
Of course, the eco-socialists are going apeshit.
They insist that it is all a Bush conspiracy to open up every last inch of federal lands to corporations. They call bullshit the multiple studies which the Department of Fish and Wildlife have conducted over the last decade which show that a new owl, the Barred Owl, has migrated eastward across Canada and is the main culprit for the continued shrinking of the Spotted Owl population. Seven percent a year is what the Spotted Owl population is shrinking by without even hearing a human, let alone a fucking chainsaw.
All the fed is doing is opening up 1.6 million acrres, leaving the Spotted Owl 5.3 millon acres to do whatever Spotted Owls do, but to the eco-socialists, it is all a conspiracy to kill the owl, the trees, the water, and basically rape Mother Gaia.
They have gotten themselves a new idiot judge to stop Weyerhaeuser from logging on 56,000 acres of its own land because the eco-socialists no long think the rules protecting the owls are “doing enough”.
They want to move the goal posts so far back that the timber companies cannot even hope to reach them to save a fucking owl.
The Seattle Audubon Society and some group of assholes calling themselves The Washington Forest Law Center filed their lawsuit to teach the state a lesson that it cannot go issuing permits without asking them if it is OK, or some such nonsense.
But, said Peter Goldman, director of the law center, “this opinion issues a very stern warning to the state. The state should not draw comfort from this.”
Screw Mr. Goldman and his eco-socialist friends.
I have little doubt that if the final ruling does not go their way that they will magically find either some other exotic creature of no significance to stop the logging, or even plant faked evidence, like other eco-socialists have done in the past, in order to lock off forest land from humans.