Clearcutting is the cheapest, easiest way to harvest timber trees.

Clearcuts are also incredibly destructive, damaging soil and creeks, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the area, requiring repeated toxic herbicide application, wasting non-timber trees, and reducing future employment possibilities for local timber industry workers who rely on a sustainable level of timber harvest for long-term work.  Wild, diverse woods are replaced with monocrop tree plantations.

• Soils are compacted by the gigantic machinery, exposed to baking sun, and sterilized by herbicides to grow a single species of tree.
• Creeks are often filled with silt, experience increased water temperatures, and are poisoned by herbicides.  All of these are harmful to salmon and every other riparian life form.
• Wildlife loses their food sources, shelter, and movement corridors.
• Local families that rely on timber harvest for income are out of work when the biggest corporations move in with “efficient” machinery that cuts everything with minimal human labor.
• Carbon is released into the air by the clearcutting process (machinery, burned “waste” wood) – more than any other industry in Oregon.  It can take decades for a forest to become a carbon sink again after it is clearcut.  Even the conservative OR Dept. of Forestry (ODF) admits that the carbon load in the atmosphere must be reduced within the next ten years or global catastrophe will follow – but they are still letting the multinational corporations turn forests that should be carbon sinks into wastelands that will be carbon emitters for decades.

The profits from the clearcutting flow away from Oregon and into the hands of distant investors.  John Hancock Co. brags of the $26,000,000,000 they profited from “timber management” (read: destructive and unsustainable clearcutting) in voiceless rural communities around the world.  Josephine County is known for its dependence on the timber industry for the local economy.  However, big money machinery has replaced the majority of the human power needed for logging, and the mills have moved out of the county.  Worse, timber companies pay only a fraction of the property tax that the rest of us do (about 10% as much as regular people), and zero dollars of harvest tax return to the county at the time of the logging!! Why do we let this atrocious scam continue?  

None of this is worth it!  It is time for Josephine County to say a final No Thank You to the clearcuts! 

THEREFORE, we the UNDERSIGNED CITIZENS of Josephine County, Oregon, do petition the Board of County Commissioners to immediately draft and approve an ORDINANCE PROHIBITING CLEARCUTTING and FORESTLAND HERBICIDE APPLICATION in Josephine County.  For the purposes of this petition and proposed ordinance, “clearcutting” shall be defined as intentional removal of forest canopy cover to an average of less than 50%, in stands of greater than 3 acres in size. Herbicides will be defined as chemicals that kill trees or other plants, or inhibit their growth.

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