Logging Quotes

“Because we knew that grunge was the sound of a screaming saw blade—a spawning salmon flicking gravel. It looked like a clearcut. And if you cracked grunge open you would find a moldy fifth wheel trailer inside.”
― Missy Anne, Jimmy James Blood

“The river has indeed become an inefficient conduit, but the same plaque that plugs this artery used to hold back the flow when it was soil in the hills. Now the land just bleeds when it rains.”
― Robert Michael Pyle, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place

“Thus as foreign mining and logging companies open up new areas for new forms of colonial exploitation they set up prostitution industries to service the workers. These industries have a profound effect on local cultures and relations between men and women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade

“Overall, the cost to the Forest Service to prepare and administer the timer sales, to oversee the construction of the roads, to mitigate (in usually small ineffective ways) the damage to the landscape far outweighs any fiscal return.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul.

Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.”
― Denele Pitts Campbell

“The burly woodsman who attaks the diminutive pine of the east must experience remorse, as would a strong man who made war upon a boy, but [the Redwood] is something to compel his respect; he must feel that in grappling with these monsters he is doing the work of a Hercules.”
― Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History

“Repeated and prolonged proximity to moribund logging communities set off my misanthropy.”
― Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier

“As with grazing on the BLM rangelands, the destruction of our forests is heavily subsidized. The most common estimate is the Forest Service loses between $1,400 and $1,900 per acre logged.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“The annual volume of forest felled during the Obama administration was higher than all the years during the George W. Bush administration but one. In the year Obama took office, 2009, the cut was 1,954,092,000 board feet; at the end of the Obama administration in 2016 it was up to 2,536,601,000 board feet, an increase of almost 30 percent. Much of this was done under the pretext of preventing wildfire.”
― Christopher Ketcham, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West

“When trees are treated as a commodity, cutting them down is good for business. When people are a commodity, enslaving them, exploiting them and underpaying them is good for business. When everything is a commodity, the landscape grows barren, and the earth turns to dust.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Operation Jihadi Bride: The Covert Mission to Rescue Young Women from ISIS

“Forest sociologist Robert Lee says city dwellers are more likely to feel guilt toward nature, which he attributes to disconnection from nature rather than empathy toward it: "They are very likely to regard trees as a symbol of immortality or continuity," wrote Lee in one study. Rural residents, by contrast, "can live with the ambivalence of loving nature and cutting trees. It's an acceptance that that's life.”
― Lyndsie Bourgon, Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods

“China has gone on a logging orgy outside its borders, often illegally, to procure logs from Indonesia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia. And now Chinese logging firms are moving into the Amazon and Congo Basin.”
― Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization