Improving The Public Image Of Loggers and FORESTRY

[slowp]

This is a spin off from a post in the Falling Pictures thread. Here's my suggestion.

You guys working can start out by encouraging log truck drivers and yourselves to drive courteously in the woods. I think a lot of you already do this. In the bad old days, we delighted in hearing about tourists being run off roads or scared. That didn't help. There was a timber sale with a yarder set up that blocked one lane of a busy touristy road here. The gypo logger answered questions when he could and I even gave him some maps and trinkets to hand out. He seemed to enjoy it and mentioned that we should pay him for his good work.

Elsewhere, I have low expectations. The news reporters are not at all well versed in forestry and most likely are not interested or unable to learn about it. A headline about old growth trees to be clearcut gets more people to reading it than root rot patch to be treated in state parks. I've seen a picture of what is obviously a landing to those of us in the know labeled as a fire line that destroyed acres and acres of habitat. No recent movies about logging have been made that I know of, and loggers are usually portrayed in bit parts as evil men.

Guess you guys need to start or continue a small PR movement and work up from that.

Every once in a while, a commercial comes on about forestry but it is negated by a huge number of teachers in our education system who teach that cutting down a tree is a bad thing. Maybe some of you could visit schools in the cities and suburbs. Develop a program that overcomes the touchy feelie aspects and uses friendly sounding SCIENCE. I'd be glad to help if you did such a thing.

Pictures are everything! I got tired of hearing "specialists" misname equipment and making up rules for equipment use when they had no idea how it operated or even what it looked like. I took pictures out in the woods, printed them up, and made a little display. I also took Logger's World to meetings. It helped a leeeetle bit. Those folks have huge egos and are hard to get through to. Videos and photos are necessary.

In Wisconsin, they had Log A Load For Kids day, where loggers donated the proceeds of a load for some kind of kid's charity. I have forgotten what it was but I'm sure somebody on here knows about it. In NE Warshington, we had a field trip where we took a group of folks out to discuss a controversial timber sale. Luckily for us, Yellowstone had burned that year (our sale was a lodgepole salvage to reduce fuels in bug kill) so folks had seen how it burns. There was a little boy who was the son of one of the main appealers of timber sales. The logger on one spot that we visited put a hard hat on him and put him up on a piece of non running equipment and the kid was in heaven!

It'll be an uphill battle, for sure. Come November, everybody forgets about wildfires until the cycle starts again the next year.

 

[slowp]

On the forestry side, I once muscled my way in with the 'ologists and had a station at a school Natural Resources type day. It was with elementary aged kids and the little ones really got into measuring trees and they could do it. At my station I'd ask them how tall a tree was. For the little ones, we'd discuss whether it would smash the school bus or picnic table if it tipped over. Kids like smashing. Then I'd hold the tape and two kids would go to the tree and others would take turns reading the clinometer. It was cute with the little ones and they could do it. The older ones showed a bored interest.
The teachers liked it because it showed how to use math. I ended the time with the kids memorizing Pseudotsuga menzizeii and told them to bring it up at the supper table and heard from a few parents that the little ones did.

 

[northmanlogging]

Used to be a camp out here, Silverton, for elementery/middle school kids, I can neither confirm nor deny that I was a counselor there for... anyway it was a good way to get city kids into the woods, and they did their best to show what timber management does, though the back country hikers and camp cooking where probably more entertaining.

Forestry is portrayed as a bunch of facts and figures... kinda boring.

Farming is portrayed as a salt of the earth, workin mans man, etc (even though mega farms are pretty much giant factories)

Before Farm Aid, most folks thought of farmers as ignorant hill billies, guess what... Loggers are considered ignorant hill billies now. Not sure how to fix that, unless we give ole Willie a jingle and get us a massive concert? Perhaps we can all drive our cats, skidders, trucks, loaders and clog up DC and demand a change?

 

[slowp]

Schools send kids here to the Cispus Center. Oops, I think it has Environmental in the middle. I'm not sure what they learn, there is a ropes course and trails. Have heard that some of the teachers tell them that trees that were planted in the last century are old growth. It might even be more interesting now because it had to be pretty much clearcut around it, due to root rot in the camp area. It's at an old Job Corps center so camp is buildings.

 

[northmanlogging]

Camp Silverton was a CCC camp, its some other **** now, for innercity kids or sumthing... not sure but there just isn't money to send kids out there anymore.

I worked it 3 years while in high school (2weeks a year or sumthing) was a bunch of fun, mostly cause it was coed councelors, and this is back when I could run 3 miles up hill like it was no big deal.

 

[bitzer]

Log a load for kids is still going on. Schools in northern Wisconsin take trips to a working woods. Not so much around here though. I make sure that my children speak up about cutting trees down at school. My oldest came back one day with a answer wrong on a test. The teacher believed that trees were a non renewables resource. We got that changed and I know it stuck because I've had 2 other kids go through her class. Axemen is NO help for our PR especially when filming guys who are clearly junkies doing incredibly stupid things. No one ever wonders how the land got cleared and continues to get cleared for the wonderful farmers.

 

[1270d]

Here loggers/truckers/foresters are still kind of looked down upon by those who take their side by sides and pickups into the wood only on weekends and hunting season. We do our best to be friendly but many won't wave or acknowledge you. Then they carry on about muddy roads, or dusty roads, or equipment parked along roads. Nevermind the fact that the roads were created by loggers for loggers. Besides it's been a few years since someone pushed a car out of the way with a skidder.

 

[HuskStihl]

You could try a bath?

 

[Gologit]

You could try a bath?

Every day?

 

[Westboastfaller]

You could try a bath?

Yeah!
And take the higher road and not have bumpers sticks like;

"Save a logger, eat an Owl"
" First we log earth, we'll log the other planets later.
" Bugger a hugger "

 

[sawfun]

Great thread Patty, I think you hit the buzz word " environmental". If you can get forestry work as considered integral and synonymous. Do this with regard to stressing environmental future as serious science, then you may be able to approach & introduce the movers and shakers of school curriculum to give it more than a passing consideration. Unfirtunately you will likely have to start in the more rural areas where this is more understood. However if it's legit science in these areas, not just communities, then it may have the ability to spread toward urban area.

 

[madhatte]

I make sure to always answer people's questions thoroughly when I run into them in the woods. They usually walk away nodding their heads, surprised that we're not all a bunch of gorillas who eat trees for breakfast and poop out slash piles and stumps.

 

[Gologit]

AxMen sure didn't do us any good.

 

[madhatte]

I don't even know where to begin with this one.

 

[2dogs]

AxMen sure didn't do us any good.

But that TV series learned me up real good! Zippercaught showed Cody a whole new way to climb them trees.

 

[Woos31]

But that TV series learned me up real good! Zippercaught showed Cody a whole new way to climb them trees.

And those examples are the image left in everyone's skull of what a 'logger' is. Falling trees at each other, hitting the hook tender with a log and the shovel. Not that they are tending the forest for the next several generations, or that they are the biggest real environmentalist in the literal sense.

 

[newforest]

I've been on several hundred harvest sites though never as a logger. I work in young-age management. Sometimes called "Silviculture." But since I plant trees some months of the year, I get earfuls about how horrible logging is sometimes. I patiently explain it all to some people but if they are too overly obnoxious about it I always pull out the phrase from the bumper sticker - "If you object to logging / try using plastic toilet paper." Wish I had my own copy of that sticker. Some of those people really freak out when I refuse to plant their site because it is covered in 1-2" tall seedlings, or sometimes even waist-high stump sprouts. "But there are no TREES out there!"

Anyway I would say that loggers can often be their own worst enemies in one simple way - leaving empty/crushed/half-full five gallon buckets of hydraulic fluid or oil of some sort on the site after they pull off to the next job. Often right on the deck, right next to the public road. Weyerhaeuser and USFS ride herd hard enough to keep this from happening, but elsewhere... The public hates the sight of a harvest site even before they notice plastic trash. When that trash is leaking mysterious chemical compounds....

 

[Gologit]

I don't even know where to begin with this one.

Start right in the middle and work out to both ends. There's plenty of room for comment. Unfortunately.

 

[Gologit]

And those examples are the image left in everyone's skull of what a 'logger' is. Falling trees at each other, hitting the hook tender with a log and the shovel. Not that they are tending the forest for the next several generations, or that they are the biggest real environmentalist in the literal sense.

Well said.

 

[Gologit]

But that TV series learned me up real good! Zippercaught showed Cody a whole new way to climb them trees.

Let's hope not.