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Guest forum: Decisions on our Watershed must make water quality the No. 1 priority By Eric Navickas Ashland The City of Ashland's Forest Lands Commission is planning to helicopter log forests high in the Ashland Creek Watershed that contain significant areas with old growth characteristics. The most critical is a 160-acre parcel above the reservoir known as Winburn Camp. The City Council has scheduled a noon Study Session for March 5 in the Council Chambers to discuss this logging proposal. With so many citizens concerned about local opportunities for hiking it is unfortunate that the city is not working to protect intact healthy forests nearby. If you are concerned about logging in our Watershed please come to the meeting and speak out against this proposal. Winburn Camp is named for its second owner Jesse Winburn, a wealthy New Yorker who bought the property in 1920 from Nimrod Long who had homesteaded the property and built a small summer cabin. Winburn made his fortune through selling advertising boards in New York City subways. He played a significant role in Ashland's early history, contributing to the city through building the Community Center that still exists on Winburn Way, building a Women's Hospital that has since been demolished, and actually buying Ashland's first swans for Lithia Park among other things. Winburn referred to his home as "Sap and Salt in the Woods" where he proceeded to expand Long's Cabin, built various outbuildings and a swimming pool on the site. Several rock walls and the swimming pool still exist. Winburn sponsored large community gatherings at "Sap and Salt" with theater and festivities for the youth and it was often used as a stopover site for hikers climbing Mt. Ashland or Wagner Butte when trails were the only access to these destinations. The fairly intact old growth characteristics of the property make it even more interesting. Two major forks of Ashland Creek converge at the site creating large riparian areas with deciduous trees and impressively large Yew groves. The upper areas away from the creek are predominantly fir forests with occasional pines. These are generally intact although some areas were logged about 10 years ago. One exceptional grove of even aged Douglas fir appears to have been initiated about 100 years ago. This was most definitely a major landslide as it rests directly beside Ashland Creek and there appear to be landslide scars above. This is one of the stands were the city intends to remove significant volume. Extensive non-commercial thinning, piling, and burning have already been completed on the site without opposition. Similar to the Bush Administration, those involved in the project are arguing that non-commercial work is not adequate to deal with fuel loads and forest health and that helicopter logging will be necessary. Their prescriptions appear to be designed around plantation forestry with the interest of producing maximum timber yields. Though, as we see with federal agencies, their rhetoric is always imbued with references to providing wild-life habitat or stand health though the conclusion is always the same; we must LOG! Logging only results in degraded forests, worse fire problems and long-term soil instability. This is a site above the reservoir in our municipal Watershed with old growth characteristics and historic value. Water quality must be the first priority with any management decision in our Watershed. This is not a site that should be used as a plantation for timber extraction. Please come to the meeting on March 5 and speak out. The suffering and pain to be struck in Iraq are not items on a balance sheet By Hal Jamison Ashland Republican-Democratic partisanship aside, as a country, as a people, aren't we berserkly loony to be at the threshold of war? With multiple crises facing us, unemployment and jobs, housing, health, education, shortfall panic in the states, we find ourselves psychologically dragooned, accepting as rational a plan to attack a small country of 25 million people, 10,000 miles away, on the pretext that country, battered already into submissiveness by imperial military and economic might, is a threat to our nation, the superpower of all time. We have handed over our government to nincompoops and fanatics, mostly left-overs from Reagan days, whose answer to the suicide raids, Sept. 2001, on behemothic USA has been abrogation of the Constitution and installation of a not-so embryonic garrison state. Further, the very agencies that were supposed to protect the country and failed so dismally have received new grants of power and further engorged budgets from a supposedly competent Congress. Even our once dutifully subservient allies are drawing back as they watch the antics, with the puppet Prime Minister of Britain, Blair, plagiarizing obsolete reports, trying to veil the coming aggression in historical respectability; Powell assembling trivia and lies for the same purpose, a sham actor of patriotism pretending that perfidy comes from the other side. War looms, rather, what looms is mass murder by missiles, bombs released far beyond the range of possible defense, depleted uranium shells poisoning those they don't kill or wound, the harvest of the sowing of mines in the fields of Iraqi farmers; "shock and awe" with collateral death to get maximum kill for minimum risk; that's how Rumsfeld and team seem to pick US targets. We don't even figure the cost in the US budget, already 300 billion short, of what Bush et al are confident will be conquest of Iraq, nor of indefinite military occupation. The lives to be lost, the bodies to be maimed, the suffering and pain to be inflicted are not items on the balance sheet. As for the probable repercussions, the military-industrial state coming to its final soulless realization, spreading economic crisis in international economic affairs, mounting terrorism against the American people at home and abroad; the price will be beyond present imagination, I believe. LINKS: DAILY TIDINGS: Main | News | Sports | Obituaries | Opinion | Columnists | AP News | Subscribe | Archives | Weather | Classifieds | Contact Us | Privacy REVELS: Main | Calendar | Dining | Movies | T.V. OTHER: Road Cams Copyright 2003 Ashland Daily Tidings 541.482.3456. 1661 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. - Advertisers -