It was -8 this morning. All the mud has frozen. Good thing in a way because we can get out and back in tonight from a visit to some neighbours.
A break from the nice post....
We have lived in this beautiful
place going on twelve years. Peace, freedom and we have almost shaken off our urban ignorance and anxiety.Almost but probably never completely.
In our very first post we were excited to write about our lives here, share it and maybe be a bit of light .
There is a huge elephant weighing on our minds.
The abuse and disrespect toward the natural world here is right in our faces. The abuse is absurd.
We are urban people transplanted into the forest, or what's left of it. It is mind-blowing to witness the extent of human greed. It seems we are loading our shotguns, taking aim and blowing off our own feet. Supplying the world with the pillages of rape.
They are talking "bio-fuel" now, with the "bio" making it sound friendlier somehow. The pine beetle killed off the Pine forests, we suppose because of the warm winters, now we want to cut them all down for bio fuel and plant "marketable stock". They are saying, the money suckers who survive from bending our rubber minds, that the threat of dead decaying pine forests will produce enough carbon emissions to threaten the planet ? We are crazy. What does all the wildlife do while we are clearing the forests. Have you ever walked through a clear cut? There is no place to go. There is nothing left. We are proposing clear cuts of the like never seen before. Meanwhile lumber mills are cutting, killing, the last 500 -600 year old fir trees.
Our neighbours found a 1000 year old lying in a cut block left because it had some rot in the middle. The point is why was it cut down and left in the first place! Maybe the last one. It won't even get a chance to rot and become fertilizer for the next generation - the "unmarketable timber" is pushed into piles and burned.We humans, whether you like it or not, are ripping off the dead, eating them and then complaining about the aftertaste and the heartburn.
We'll go in with feller bunchers and cut the trees, skid them out with skidders, load them on trucks and truck them to plants that aren't built yet, process them into ethanol, put the ethanol into our vehicles and burn it.... Sounds like a green plan to me.
But everyone knows this. That's what makes it so absurd and difficult to even talk about.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Forests/Canada/BC/Beetle/
Nice post cotinued....
Next morning: An enjoyable evening, a small gathering of neighbours (anyone living west of the Fraser River is a neighbour) who tend to stick to ourselves but venture out occasionally to share views, good food, homemade wine and also to offer a bit of support. Sometimes it is easy to feel completely alone in our quest to live simply with minimal damage.
We left their candlelit yurt with the nearly full moon rising in the sky, driving carefully past shadows of countless deer, bumping down the logging roads, finally into our yard to be greeted by our two dogs, tails wagging - good to be home.
http://www.caribooblades.com/
