In Bed With Big Wood

In Bed With Big Wood
Salwasser should resign. He should be encouraged to do so by all who care about Oregon's forests.

Charlie Ringo has done a great public service by floating the Dean's emails to the top -- revealing to all who care to look just how "neutral" this former Forest Service hatchetman is on forest politics, and how completely enmeshed Salwasser and his fellow OSU timber dinosaurs are in the political machinery of the logging corporations. It's probably too much to hope that OSU's strong pro-timber slant will be corrected, but this is progress.

Meanwhile, what needs a lot more attention is this quote from Columbia Helicopters: "Post catastrophic harvest is the most important part of our business, making this a very difficult issue between our organizations ... How OSU handles this from this point on could play an important part on our issues."

That's extortion, pretty much -- and it shows why the industry has spent millions to push the disastrous Walden bill through Congress. There are still fortunes to be made liquidating the public trust, if we let them. Hooray for those who keep the hurdles standing... save the Biscuit roadless!
—ghost dawg

In Bed With Big Wood
I guess I'm considered a "goon" by Salwasser because I care about forest ecology and conservation. If I'm a "goon," what is Salwasser, an industry whore?

He needs to be fired. His actions are unethical and completely out of touch with public values.
—"Goon"

In Bed With Big Wood
Daniel Donato will be made out as a gadfly and dissenter by the wood industry and OSU will stand to one side and be very still. I'm not a Ringo fan, but on his outspokenness I applaud him.

There is too much coziness with industry and colleges.
—KISS

In Bed With Big Wood
I don't think Salwasser should resign. I think he should be fired. The OSU Administration has to stand up for its students and faculty who have been hurt in this episode. The only way any of us can feel safe in the College of Forestry now is if Salwasser, Sessions, and Newton are all FIRED! There is certainly enough of a paper-trail for that to happen at this point. Each additional day they haunt the halls at Peavy and Richardson, the dark spot grows larger on OSU.
—OSU grad student

In Bed With Big Wood
Salwasser, Sessions and the rest of the professors attempting to block the findings of the Donato paper should be fired, or at minimum reprimanded severely for their actions. Professors at OSU’s COF have for years considered their personal agendas over the importance of teaching and education and it is sad that the recent events have made that fact known to the public at large. Those in charge of this college have blatantly disrespected the ideals of academic freedom here at OSU and have done so without any recourse. All the meetings, surveys, hand-holding, consoling and Kum bi ya singing in the world will not clean up this mess. Those of us in the COF that have had nothing to do with the Donato study or its fallout have had our reputations irreversibly damaged. We (the COF) must move forward with new ideas and new people in charge of restoring integrity and prestige to this fine institution.

—OSU insider...

In Bed With Big Wood
Demsky says more than is apparent when he mentions the "mission of a publicly funded research institution". The problem is that our Universities are no longer publicly funded, they are funded by corporations, because the public has abandoned them by refusing to pay sufficient revenues to keep first-rate universities running. Of course the corporations are going to step into the breach when the people's representatives fail to provide proper funding mechanisms. In fact, the present Administration in DC seems to encourage them to step up and buy shares of State University, Inc.
—Tom Manning

In Bed With Big Wood
Everything done in science comes out of a subjective, controversial, personal, social, culture, economic, political, etc context, and this article shows in an obvious way how every bit of knowledge eventually goes back into that context to be used by it for political, etc debate.

Science isn't and shouldn't be about objectivity. It's about letting the pursuit of reality shape policy, rather than its opposite: seeking to conform our understanding of reality to whatever our current policy happens to be. Consequently, the second one (conforming reality to pre-formed policy) is exactly what the Bush Administration did with Iraq: they had planned the invasion long before 9-11 and before they had any legitimate excuse to carry it out.

If we don't want our science and other knowledges to be a whore of industry, politicos, etc, we'd need a lot of institutional and culture reform. This article shows what happens when someone tries to break free of that whorishness without such reform...hopefully in the future more scientists will follow suit in order to keep this issue up front, because that will facilitate reform.
—ethanay

In Bed With Big Wood
Having worked at OSU for the better part of two decades, this sort of thing happens all the time, and not only in COF. Land Grant research is largely funded by industry and commodity groups...it takes strong and brave graduate students and faculty members to do "real" science. Bravo to Ringo for exposing what's under the rug in COF. Look closer...there's plenty more.
—another osu employee

In Bed With Big Wood
There has been a Ringo chasing ambulances in Corvallis for their own good for 40 years. That is not news. When the Sierra Club funds a chair in Forestry at OSU, or any other protectors of conservation values do the same, they can use their influence to chart the academic course.

I can only imagine the embarrassment of Salwasser when this grad student paper was accepted by the Journal Science. A paper that extrapolates an end to a century of life in a forest from two short years of a small slice of forest fire recovery is a stretch, and its acceptance by the environemental community without criticism appears to be more political than science based.

A Forestry school without tree farming, logging, and milling is not needed. At that point, you need a police school, to keep the locals from selling the trees into the black market. You only have to look at the level of protection Mexico now has to provide to keep the firs that host the Monarch butterflies in winter.

It is a shame that opposition to logging is so virulent and pervasive. I write this on a computer that is made from raw materials that are not renewable while living in a house made from renewable lumber. On this very same subject in WW there are discussions about the inadequate funding of education. I have lived in Oregon for 60 years. When the populace was more rural oriented, not so hip, not so high tech and urban driven, when we did log trees and there was a little mill in every county, we did fund education adequately in Oregon. If there is a problem, it is in the urban areas, where the majority has voted not to tax themselves or allow others to do likewise, across the state, in support of education.

The tiimber fortunes of past are in educational support trusts. Pappy Ford and Hallie Ford of Roseburg Lumber have or are putting thousands of kids through college. Same with Rex Clemens, Collins Pine, Fremont Forest Products. I would bet that as I write this, there are other educational trusts from forest products beneficiaries being put in place to fund education in the future. I have yet to meet a kid with a Sierra Club scholarship that pays all his/her tuition and books to college. Hell, in state like Oregon, with 60% of the land in public hands, most off limits to economic exploitation which would put taxes in government hands, you would think there would be Forest Service scholarships or Nature Conservancy scholarships in the same abundance as there are employees and lobbyists. There are none, and those entities work tirelessly to limit economic opportunity in the rural West. They, like Donato, can't see that trees produce seed almost every year, and every year that there is open ground for that seed to germinate and put down roots, it will, and it matters not whether that ground is open because it has been burned, burned and logged, or just logged. The seeds will find the open ground. Just observe how that weed Douglas Fir has invaded the oak savannahs of the Willamette Valley.

OSU Forestry, without a forest products industry to support it, is nothing. Oregon without a meaningful forest products undustry, can't support public services, let alone a world class education system. How long has it been since some good jazz and a decent latte have provided the raw material to build something as small as a bird house, or a scholarship to a university?

—gumboot

In Bed With Big Wood
As an OSU College of Forestry grad student, I DO NOT feel unsafe in the COF. I do not think that Salwasser, Sessions, or Newton should be fired or otherwise reprimanded in any way. We must remember who these people are. They are scientists, teachers, and foresters. They have put their lifes’ work into forestry and they DO know what they're talking about. They have contributed endlessly to this college and to the science of forestry. It's very close minded and immature to disrespect such intelligent, knowledgeable people even if you don't agree with them.

Science thrives from controversy. The College of Forestry needs to move on. Dwelling on this for what is now nearly 5 months and saying that distinguished professors should be "FIRED" is definitely NOT helping to mend the growing “dark spot” in the reputation of this school.

—OSU grad student #2

Are there no ethics? None what so ever? And to have made Donato attend congressional hearings to defend his research? What a chill that put in the grad students. Heck should just used some of that salvage wood, had a CHI helicopter drop some fire ping pong balls and burned him on the holy timber industry pyre. That young man has guts and I for one do not want to see this interfere with his career. He should be one of BLM's science gurus (since he actually has academic credentials) or with PNW.

I am a retired US Forest Service employee. I retired on the exact day I was eligible.

I knew top Forest Service management was much more interested in pleasing Western GOP politicians. Most USFS managers thought the best way to do this was to please the timber industry. This started decades ago. Salwasser was in the middle of this.

Dr. Dombeck was appointed Chief by President Clinton and began cleaning the "timber beasts" (like Salwasser) from top management in the Forest Service ... and then came Bush.

Dr. Dombeck saw his chance to reform the USFS halted. Dr. Dombeck resigned rather than struggle with a president that makes up the laws as he goes along.

Please don't blame the timber industry for degrading your public land. They just follow the contract prepared by the Forest Service. Timber corporations are in business and would be very poor businessmen if they did NOT purchase USFS timber sales.

I have seen hundreds of USFS timber sales and some logging on private industrial land. The logging on the private industrial land clearly showed fewer adverse environmental impacts.

Under the current Chief and her boss USDA Asst Secretary Mark Rey the public lands are orders of magnitude more at risk now, than ever before in history!

The motto of the USFS must be changed to "get the cut out in any way you can, at any expense to the ecosystem ... just don't get caught."