While advocating for the irreplaceable value of trees and wild, unmanaged forests, and while advocating for wild lands free of the ravaging impact of domesticated cattle (i.e., dairy and beef cows grazed for profit), a common theme emerges.

Cow farmers and so-called foresters, it turns out, have much in common.  When the massive environmental damage that both these professions wreak on the land, waterways and atmosphere is exposed for the public to see, both farmer and forester double down on their industry’s propaganda to keep their businesses up and running roughshod over Mother Nature. 

Meaning when the proverbial shit of truth hits the fan, they start shoveling more of it.

Their excremental defense, their counter-arguments, are time-worn, market-tested thickets of myths, half-truths, exaggerations, critical omissions and of course outright lies. Taken together, it’s fair to call all this what it is: propaganda.

I don’t mean mean this rhetorically, I mean the dictionary definition of propaganda, below (the important part is bolded):

prop·a·gan·da

/ˌpräpəˈɡandə/

noun

1. information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
   

Today’s forestry professionals — and please, let’s call them what they do: de-foresters — today increasingly argue that millions more of acres of wild forests, especially western forests owned by the publc but overseen by agencies including the U.S. Forest Service that need monies to function, need desperately to be “managed.”

This so-called forest “management” is a euphemism for killing and/or cutting and/or “thinning” and ultimately clearing forests. Meaning also, killing trees and forest plants… by the millions.

Yet the de-foresters argue with a straight face, that “active management” (the latest term of deadly de-forestry art) is necessary, even essential, to improve poor forest health, or to reduce the risk of wildfires, or, as if by magic, both at the same time.  To, uh, cut to the chase, de-foresters argue for running chainsaws and masticating machines into forests.

Forest masticators are like giant, industrial lawnmowers that can destroy all the understory vegetation in a breathtaking matter of minutes.  These machines are simultaneously impressive — WOW! – look what Men can build! — and terrifying to the core: WOW, look how much life Man can destroy, in an instant.

Forest masticators come in sizes anywhere from 6-foot to 60-foot long, and anywhere from 3-to-10 foot high (!), are all variations on the same theme: machinery with rotary drums equipped with steel chipping teeth or blades that spin and shred living plants and shrubs and even small trees by the grove. 

Witness mankind’s ingenuity…  

Mastication Edification:

VIDEO SHORT #1 – MASTICATING A FOREST:

 

Here’s a sentence no forester will never speak in public, and certainly not on camera (despite its accuracy): 

“Masticating machines move quickly through a forest, shredding every living plant and young tree in their path, also killing almost every organism larger than a tick (whose plant home is shredded) if it couldn’t slither, scurry, hop, jump or fly away in time.”

Forests don’t talk like this because they don’t think like this. An ecologist, a biologist, a botanist, a mycologist, or an entomologist might. Treehuggers and nature lovers (like me) sure do. 

I recently had an affable, well-meaning and sincere forest “manager” in his 30s tell me during our walk in Tomales Bay State Park forest, with a straight face, that running a masticating machine over the forest did nothing more than “rearrange and distribute organic matter.”  He likened it to laying down mulch in a garden.

I wanted to tell him that I could say the same thing about feeding him head first into a chipping machine; that that visceral process could also be described as rearranging organic matter, but I thought that might he might not fully appreciate the wit of my analogy.

The most disturbing aspect of his explanation was his utter lack of empathy, of feeling, of compassion for how much plant-killing was involved in his helpful rearranging process. Not to worry, it all grows back, was his thinking, and even better than before. Better, because he and his fellow “restoration” specialists know how to “tend” the forest better than the forest itself does.

Earlier on this forest walk, a California State Parks representative likened their de-forestry “treatments” to those of Native Americans.  I assume she meant if Native Americans used gasoline-powered industrial chainsaws and masticators and tractors and chippers. And did so for make-work projects, for money.

VIDEO SHORT #2 – MASTICATING A HUMAN:

And now let’s turn from bough to cow, to the coastal prairie or wildland field equivalent of a masticating machine: the sweet and innocent domesticated cow.  Thousands of them have been let loose on the land in Point Reyes, to profit man.  A picture here is worth more than my thousand words:

But the cow ranchers who make money from putting their thousands of cows “out to pasture” and feed off the land in Point Reyes National Park go to immense lengths to convince you that cow-grazed “pasture” looks like this year-round:

Cows, in fact, sweet, gentle creatures that are, are like a swarm of locust on wild lands, but do far more damage. Herds of cows compact, desiccate, trample and defoliate grasslands and scrublands and leave huge amounts of manure piles in their silent but deadly wake.

And all the farmer king’s workhorses, and all the farmer king’s public relations men, put together a tapestry of myths, fantasies and outright lies about being “stewards” of the land.  In reality, cattle ranchers are closer to being open sewers on the land. (In the case of Point Reyes’ “small,” “historic” organic “farms,” some indeed had leaking human sewage pipes that spilled human waste onto park land where it could wash into streams.  But not, perhaps, before mixing with much larger quantities of cow manure down on the farm.  Ah, the smell of it!

As environmentalists, activists and citizens work diligently to expose and repeat these ecological truths about the damage cow farmers and de-foresters do with their money-driven activities, and repeat them often enough to beat back industry propaganda, these nature-destroyers double down on the lies that prop up their industries.

For de-forestry professionals, “active management” — deforestation — is their recommended, must-do “treatment” for a non-existent problem, the mythical yet terrifying “overgrown” forest.

Wild forests, you see, are big, and dense, and messy, and overcrowded; they arre out… of… control!  And these overgrown forests are going to catch fire and burn “catastrophically” and kill you and everyone you love, and burn your house down if you don’t do “active management” to stop it!!!!  Aiyeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Fear is the powerful, effective weapon used to shut you up, so you won’t speak out or act up against all this nature-killing. And, to be clear, deforestation only increases wildfire danger. De-forestry treatments of all kinds only make forests less healthy and more likely to ignite in a wildfire and burn even more quickly. READ MORE ABOUT THIS CRITICAL TOPIC.

Mother nature is out of control and must be MAN-aged, by men (and a few women) with big, powerful, mechanized phalluses — oops, I mean machines — to tame Mother Earth’s errant ways.  She’s been a very naughty girl, and she must be trimmed and thinned and controlled, and always, always, by killing parts of her.  But not to worry – – Man may not be Kind, be he is wise and will only kill the Wrong parts, the Bad parts, the Overgrown parts that should not be there.

Mother Nature will be healthier and happier for more & more MAN-agement “treatments” of killing. And then, like the cattleman’s castrated calf, or mother pig trapped inside a tiny “farrowing crate,” she will not give us so much trouble. Nature will be rendered not as unruly and dangerous. Man will finally be safe. (And in any case, billionaire men are building rockets to colonize other planets, even if these other planets don’t have water — or atmospheres.)

Man is wise, and man is good. Mother Nature needs Man, to help Her survive. Bring on the Monsanto Roundup and the Dow Garlon.  Kill for Peace!  Death is Life!  Chainsaws and chippers help make the forests healthy!  Cows trampling the land make the land healthier!

And to Hell on Earth we go.

___________

Addendum:

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