Meg Thompson, NCCWP Member: Letter to Senator Elizabeth Steiner

Dear Senator Elizabeth Steiner;

I appreciate your desire to address fire risks to our forests. However, your Senate Bill will not protect our forests or our citizens.

Please take the time to further educate yourself about the problems created by Oregon’s private industrial forest industry:

1) Clear-cutting industrial forests increases the risk of fire! Destruction of the protective understory and damage to the watershed results in tinder-dry stick plantations.

2) Coastal communities continue to suffer harm to their watersheds due to industrial logging practices. Drinking water is polluted and compromised. Water sources are dried up due to creek damage and lack of shade. 

Please read the extensive research articles published in the Oregonian over the last decade. Rob Davis and Tony Schick have repeatedly documented the favorable financial gains the private industrial forest companies at the expense of our citizens health and welfare.

The rural citizens of our state have been harmed. Nancy Webster of North Coast Communities for Water Protection can speak to you about the tragic consequences of private forestry practices on our coastal drinking watersheds. The fire risks caused by clear-cutting are extreme.

Please contact her at:

Nancy Webster 971-386-3788 [email protected]

www.healthywatershed.org

Chuck Willer of the Coast Range Association has complied extensive research about the harm created by our industrial forest corporations.

Please contact Chuck Willer at:

www.coastrange.org

[email protected]

Please withdraw your misguided Senate Bill. Do not further empower the industrial timber industry to profit by increasing fire risks and putting our rural citizens in harms way.

Meg Eastman Thompson, Ph. D.

cc:

Nancy Webster

Chuck Willer

Rob Davis