# Improving The Public Image Of Loggers and FORESTRY



## slowp (Sep 19, 2016)

This is a spin off from a post in the Falling Pictures thread. Here's my suggestion.

You guys working can start out by encouraging log truck drivers and yourselves to drive courteously in the woods. I think a lot of you already do this. In the bad old days, we delighted in hearing about tourists being run off roads or scared. That didn't help. There was a timber sale with a yarder set up that blocked one lane of a busy touristy road here. The gypo logger answered questions when he could and I even gave him some maps and trinkets to hand out. He seemed to enjoy it and mentioned that we should pay him for his good work.

Elsewhere, I have low expectations. The news reporters are not at all well versed in forestry and most likely are not interested or unable to learn about it. A headline about old growth trees to be clearcut gets more people to reading it than root rot patch to be treated in state parks. I've seen a picture of what is obviously a landing to those of us in the know labeled as a fire line that destroyed acres and acres of habitat. No recent movies about logging have been made that I know of, and loggers are usually portrayed in bit parts as evil men.

Guess you guys need to start or continue a small PR movement and work up from that.

Every once in a while, a commercial comes on about forestry but it is negated by a huge number of teachers in our education system who teach that cutting down a tree is a bad thing. Maybe some of you could visit schools in the cities and suburbs. Develop a program that overcomes the touchy feelie aspects and uses friendly sounding SCIENCE. I'd be glad to help if you did such a thing.

Pictures are everything! I got tired of hearing "specialists" misname equipment and making up rules for equipment use when they had no idea how it operated or even what it looked like. I took pictures out in the woods, printed them up, and made a little display. I also took Logger's World to meetings. It helped a leeeetle bit. Those folks have huge egos and are hard to get through to. Videos and photos are necessary.

In Wisconsin, they had Log A Load For Kids day, where loggers donated the proceeds of a load for some kind of kid's charity. I have forgotten what it was but I'm sure somebody on here knows about it. In NE Warshington, we had a field trip where we took a group of folks out to discuss a controversial timber sale. Luckily for us, Yellowstone had burned that year (our sale was a lodgepole salvage to reduce fuels in bug kill) so folks had seen how it burns. There was a little boy who was the son of one of the main appealers of timber sales. The logger on one spot that we visited put a hard hat on him and put him up on a piece of non running equipment and the kid was in heaven!

It'll be an uphill battle, for sure. Come November, everybody forgets about wildfires until the cycle starts again the next year.


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## slowp (Sep 19, 2016)

On the forestry side, I once muscled my way in with the 'ologists and had a station at a school Natural Resources type day. It was with elementary aged kids and the little ones really got into measuring trees and they could do it. At my station I'd ask them how tall a tree was. For the little ones, we'd discuss whether it would smash the school bus or picnic table if it tipped over. Kids like smashing. Then I'd hold the tape and two kids would go to the tree and others would take turns reading the clinometer. It was cute with the little ones and they could do it. The older ones showed a bored interest. 
The teachers liked it because it showed how to use math. I ended the time with the kids memorizing Pseudotsuga menzizeii and told them to bring it up at the supper table and heard from a few parents that the little ones did.


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## northmanlogging (Sep 19, 2016)

Used to be a camp out here, Silverton, for elementery/middle school kids, I can neither confirm nor deny that I was a counselor there for... anyway it was a good way to get city kids into the woods, and they did their best to show what timber management does, though the back country hikers and camp cooking where probably more entertaining.

Forestry is portrayed as a bunch of facts and figures... kinda boring.

Farming is portrayed as a salt of the earth, workin mans man, etc (even though mega farms are pretty much giant factories)

Before Farm Aid, most folks thought of farmers as ignorant hill billies, guess what... Loggers are considered ignorant hill billies now. Not sure how to fix that, unless we give ole Willie a jingle and get us a massive concert? Perhaps we can all drive our cats, skidders, trucks, loaders and clog up DC and demand a change?


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## slowp (Sep 19, 2016)

Schools send kids here to the Cispus Center. Oops, I think it has Environmental in the middle. I'm not sure what they learn, there is a ropes course and trails. Have heard that some of the teachers tell them that trees that were planted in the last century are old growth. It might even be more interesting now because it had to be pretty much clearcut around it, due to root rot in the camp area. It's at an old Job Corps center so camp is buildings.


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## northmanlogging (Sep 19, 2016)

Camp Silverton was a CCC camp, its some other **** now, for innercity kids or sumthing... not sure but there just isn't money to send kids out there anymore.

I worked it 3 years while in high school (2weeks a year or sumthing) was a bunch of fun, mostly cause it was coed councelors, and this is back when I could run 3 miles up hill like it was no big deal.


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## bitzer (Sep 19, 2016)

Log a load for kids is still going on. Schools in northern Wisconsin take trips to a working woods. Not so much around here though. I make sure that my children speak up about cutting trees down at school. My oldest came back one day with a answer wrong on a test. The teacher believed that trees were a non renewables resource. We got that changed and I know it stuck because I've had 2 other kids go through her class. Axemen is NO help for our PR especially when filming guys who are clearly junkies doing incredibly stupid things. No one ever wonders how the land got cleared and continues to get cleared for the wonderful farmers.


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## 1270d (Sep 19, 2016)

Here loggers/truckers/foresters are still kind of looked down upon by those who take their side by sides and pickups into the wood only on weekends and hunting season. We do our best to be friendly but many won't wave or acknowledge you. Then they carry on about muddy roads, or dusty roads, or equipment parked along roads. Nevermind the fact that the roads were created by loggers for loggers. Besides it's been a few years since someone pushed a car out of the way with a skidder.


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## HuskStihl (Sep 19, 2016)

You could try a bath?


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## Gologit (Sep 19, 2016)

HuskStihl said:


> You could try a bath?


 Every day?


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## Westboastfaller (Sep 19, 2016)

HuskStihl said:


> You could try a bath?


Yeah! 
And take the higher road and not have bumpers sticks like;

"Save a logger, eat an Owl"
" First we log earth, we'll log the other planets later.
" Bugger a hugger "


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## sawfun (Sep 20, 2016)

Great thread Patty, I think you hit the buzz word " environmental". If you can get forestry work as considered integral and synonymous. Do this with regard to stressing environmental future as serious science, then you may be able to approach & introduce the movers and shakers of school curriculum to give it more than a passing consideration. Unfirtunately you will likely have to start in the more rural areas where this is more understood. However if it's legit science in these areas, not just communities, then it may have the ability to spread toward urban area.


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## madhatte (Sep 20, 2016)

I make sure to always answer people's questions thoroughly when I run into them in the woods. They usually walk away nodding their heads, surprised that we're not all a bunch of gorillas who eat trees for breakfast and poop out slash piles and stumps.


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## Gologit (Sep 20, 2016)

AxMen sure didn't do us any good.


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## madhatte (Sep 24, 2016)

I don't even know where to begin with this one.


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## 2dogs (Sep 24, 2016)

Gologit said:


> AxMen sure didn't do us any good.


But that TV series learned me up real good! Zippercaught showed Cody a whole new way to climb them trees.


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## Woos31 (Sep 24, 2016)

2dogs said:


> But that TV series learned me up real good! Zippercaught showed Cody a whole new way to climb them trees.


And those examples are the image left in everyone's skull of what a 'logger' is. Falling trees at each other, hitting the hook tender with a log and the shovel. Not that they are tending the forest for the next several generations, or that they are the biggest real environmentalist in the literal sense.


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## newforest (Sep 24, 2016)

I've been on several hundred harvest sites though never as a logger. I work in young-age management. Sometimes called "Silviculture." But since I plant trees some months of the year, I get earfuls about how horrible logging is sometimes. I patiently explain it all to some people but if they are too overly obnoxious about it I always pull out the phrase from the bumper sticker - "If you object to logging / try using plastic toilet paper." Wish I had my own copy of that sticker. Some of those people really freak out when I refuse to plant their site because it is covered in 1-2" tall seedlings, or sometimes even waist-high stump sprouts. "But there are no TREES out there!"

Anyway I would say that loggers can often be their own worst enemies in one simple way - leaving empty/crushed/half-full five gallon buckets of hydraulic fluid or oil of some sort on the site after they pull off to the next job. Often right on the deck, right next to the public road. Weyerhaeuser and USFS ride herd hard enough to keep this from happening, but elsewhere... The public hates the sight of a harvest site even before they notice plastic trash. When that trash is leaking mysterious chemical compounds....


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## Gologit (Sep 24, 2016)

madhatte said:


> I don't even know where to begin with this one.



Start right in the middle and work out to both ends. There's plenty of room for comment. Unfortunately.


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## Gologit (Sep 24, 2016)

Woos31 said:


> And those examples are the image left in everyone's skull of what a 'logger' is. Falling trees at each other, hitting the hook tender with a log and the shovel. Not that they are tending the forest for the next several generations, or that they are the biggest real environmentalist in the literal sense.




Well said.


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## Gologit (Sep 24, 2016)

2dogs said:


> But that TV series learned me up real good! Zippercaught showed Cody a whole new way to climb them trees.



Let's hope not.


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## slowp (Sep 24, 2016)

I don't know what to think about this. 

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09/23/494989594/a-web-of-trees-and-their-hidden-lives


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## rwoods (Sep 24, 2016)

I don't either but as we most would agree there is a whole lot more to learn about living things than is known now. That said my initial reaction is:

To the extent it was meant to address wood quality, as you know better than me, there is a balance that must be struck practically and economically involving a multiplicity of factors.

To the extent it used to fuel the adoption of the view that it is wrong to harvest sustainable complex and/or "social" living things, it hastens the possibility that practitioners of that view may face extinction through starvation or exposure; a very sad thought. 

As it relates to this thread, it poses another aspect that the profession may need to be prepared to address.

Ron

PS To avoid unnecessary misinterpretation of my third paragraph, let me state that I classify humans as living beings not as living things.


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## northmanlogging (Sep 24, 2016)

plants, animals, microbes all living things

nothing living in this world can survive off minerals alone.

farmers cut wheat, millers make flour, bakers make bread, in this case grass dies by the billions anually, but people eat so its ok

loggers cut trees, sawyers make boards, carpenters make houses, trees die by the millions, but we are sheltered from the rain wind and cold so its ok too


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## earache (Sep 27, 2016)

slowp said:


> In Wisconsin, they had Log A Load For Kids day, where loggers donated the proceeds of a load for some kind of kid's charity. I have forgotten what it was but I'm sure somebody on here knows about it. In NE Warshington, we had a field trip where we took a group of folks out to discuss a controversial timber sale. Luckily for us, Yellowstone had burned that year (our sale was a lodgepole salvage to reduce fuels in bug kill) so folks had seen how it burns. There was a little boy who was the son of one of the main appealers of timber sales. The logger on one spot that we visited put a hard hat on him and put him up on a piece of non running equipment and the kid was in heaven!


Log A Load is still very active. It is a great program where the logging contractor, sometimes landowner, donates a "load" or more of wood cut and delivered to the mill, and gives the proceeds to Muscular Distrophy Association. Often it is coordinated on a public sale(state, county, or school forest land). The local school buses classes out to see a live logging demo, with breakouts usually including portable sawmill, forester, biologist, ecologist. Its a great program.
I host students from various schools on my jobsites up to four times a year. I also take my equipment to schools to show them a static display in hopes it will spark enough interest to get folks to come and see a live logging site.
I put out signs roadside as advertising and so passer-bys can see that the contractor is an industry professional like any other contractor that displays his work and signage. I require hi-vis on my jobsites, hazard lights and cones when trucks are loading roadside, and ALWAYS cleaning up any time on a public road, trail, etc.
I know that some contractors frown on my practices and think I'm a "goody two shoe", but I'm hoping some of it rubs off...I know I NEVER look for work.


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## bitzer (Sep 28, 2016)

Knowing you Derrick it doesn't surprise me that you pay attention to the details. That's good to have a good name for yourself among the he people selling the wood. The competition will always be the competition. Good to put in time for the kids too.

Has it been wet up there this year? Wettest year I can remember. Im cutting in Kenosha county right on the state line now. Must be the only corner of the state that had a drought. Every where else it rained at least twice a week.


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## earache (Sep 28, 2016)

Its not wet where its sandy...I'm busy.


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## madhatte (Sep 29, 2016)

Honestly I believe that the way to win folks over to "forest management" is to get them out into the field with qualified professionals who care about the land and can explain what it is that they do. biggest problems with that are A) getting the cityfolk to go outside and B) getting organizations to invite those cityfolk onto their land. We're at loggerheads here and we're sort of all on the same team, if only there was a way to talk.


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## slowp (Sep 29, 2016)

madhatte said:


> Honestly I believe that the way to win folks over to "forest management" is to get them out into the field with qualified professionals who care about the land and can explain what it is that they do. biggest problems with that are A) getting the cityfolk to go outside and B) getting organizations to invite those cityfolk onto their land. We're at loggerheads here and we're sort of all on the same team, if only there was a way to talk.



It's like herding cats. I've been on many a "field trip". I've always felt a need to get the people off the road and down into a unit, but that was not possible because they don't wear the right clothing and footwear and they don't want to get off the road. Maybe we need to post a table with beer and goodies down in a unit. 

I heard some terrible news last night. The former head of The Gifford Pinchot Task Force got herself hired as a district ranger for the USFS on the Gifford Pincho NF. She's the one who on those field trips, would say she wanted the forest restored but could not come up with a definition of restored. I do believe that after it was "restored" her plan was to keep people out. That is all ready the case because roads are not being repaired as they wash out.


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## slowp (Sep 29, 2016)

madhatte said:


> Honestly I believe that the way to win folks over to "forest management" is to get them out into the field with qualified professionals who care about the land and can explain what it is that they do. biggest problems with that are A) getting the cityfolk to go outside and B) getting organizations to invite those cityfolk onto their land. We're at loggerheads here and we're sort of all on the same team, if only there was a way to talk.



I've been on quite a few field trips with various groups. Here's something you will understand, think of herding cats. They do not show up on time and by the time we would leave the office, we'd be an hour or so behind schedule. You cannot meet before 10AM here because it takes a minimum of 2 hours for city people to get here, and they need their sleep. We would end up standing on a road. I'd try to get folks off the road and down where they could see more of a unit, but they do not show up in field going gear and do not want to walk in slash or brush. Maybe a portable bar set up down in the brush would be an incentive. I also wanted them to see active operations, but once again, by the time we would get out, things would be shut down. Logger hours are the opposite of enviro hours. 

Speaking of enviros, I heard last night that our local National Forest hired the former head of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force as a district ranger. She is one who went of field trips and would say that her vision for the forest was restoration. She could not define that or what happens after "restoration". However, I think the plan is working because as our forest roads wash out, very few get repaired so people are not able to access a major portion of the woods. 

Oh, the GP task force is an environmental group that appeals and threatens to sue the FS when timber sales get beyond a light thinning.


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## slowp (Sep 29, 2016)

Oh, in all fairness, I will say that it is hard to get quite a few Forest Service people to show up on time and get off the road too.


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## madhatte (Sep 29, 2016)

slowp said:


> Oh, in all fairness, I will say that it is hard to get quite a few Forest Service people to show up on time and get off the road too.



I'm no friend of the clock, myself. Still, stuff needs to get done, so...


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## newforest (Oct 12, 2016)

"Restoration Ecology" is perhaps another topic for another thread. I have had the unfortunate pleasure of working on many "Restoration" projects and many of them are fuzzy thinking at best, in my not humble opinion. There is a theme behind it all that land conditions before Evil Man came along are automatically best, completely ignoring what 25 Million Natives did with land before Columbus showed up with some European diseases and reduced them to only 1 Million in population. But the USFS is chock full of "-ologists" these days and Timber is not usually on the minds of "-ologists" until they need certain Timber conditions to make their particular "-ology" happy.

The one thing Restoration Ecologists seem to completely reject is the idea that Ecosystems are dynamic and they move on into Change sometimes regardless of what Man does. Restoration always seems to try and force a dynamic system back in to a static condition of the past, that is sometimes no longer even achievable.


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## northmanlogging (Oct 13, 2016)

Some restoration work is good, like fixing streams that some yahoo covered over and diverted through 2 miles of culvert, fixing that is a good thing, planting a pile of native plants etc reshaping the land to make it look more like a natural stream then a canal all good.

Restoring a forest en mass, seems like a fight yer bound to loose. Its just too big and there just isn't going to be that kind of money to recreate a forest that truly never existed outside of a text book, unless you have the odd half a millennium to wast.


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## madhatte (Oct 13, 2016)

newforest said:


> "Restoration Ecology" is perhaps another topic for another thread.



This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I agree with you 100%. Perhaps you should start this thread.


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## slowp (Oct 13, 2016)

This is not good. http://www.lewiscountysirens.com/?p=38585&print=1


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## madhatte (Oct 14, 2016)

Friend of a friend. Driver is OK but oddly the owner of the logging outfit is under some scrutiny. Seems odd to me since the owner wasn't driving.


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## Gologit (Oct 14, 2016)

madhatte said:


> Friend of a friend. Driver is OK but oddly the owner of the logging outfit is under some scrutiny. Seems odd to me since the owner wasn't driving.


 
If the truck wasn't mechanically sound, as in brakes, tires, etc. the investigators usually hold the owner responsible to some extent. I don't know if this was the case but I've seen it happen.
Also, if the driver was in violation of his HOS the owner can be held accountable. Again, not saying that this happened.... it's just information.

When the insurance companies and the lawyers get involved everybody gets their feet held to the fire.


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## madhatte (Oct 16, 2016)

From what I hear, this was simply a matter of driving too fast for the conditions. An honest mistake.


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## slowp (Oct 16, 2016)

madhatte said:


> From what I hear, this was simply a matter of driving too fast for the conditions. An honest mistake.



The road project is marked, well in advance, with required warning signs. Add to that fact that the paving and striping has been ongoing, I'd say it was a stupid "mistake". But neither of us were there. Highway 12 is a crazy one to drive on. Maybe we need dashboard shrines to deities? Call me paranoid but I'm in the habit of checking behind me and having an escape route when stopped on a highway. Too many distracted drivers out there now.


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## madhatte (Oct 17, 2016)

I got my info from a friend who is also a log truck driver and who passed the scene, with a load on, as it was being cleaned up, and who called in for details. I trust his judgment. He's quick to criticize stupidity and quick to forgive honest errors. Obviously I wan't there but I consider this a solid opinion.


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## ArtB (Oct 17, 2016)

Drove from I-5 to Mossyrock last Tuesday (eastbound) and back Wednesday (Westbound), clear weather. Thursday started to rain which was probably contributing factor.

The road construction signs start over a mile before the flagger, both directions. Signs have been up all summer in one section or the other as road is resurfaced. 3 different sets of signs IIRC before the 'flagger ahead' sign. Possibly the accident was on one of the steep downhill sections and rain after dry days made for super slick road ?


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## madhatte (Oct 17, 2016)

Apparently it was a brake adjustment issue. Likely operator error.


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