Some supporters of “25 x 25″ have wondered why I spoke out just now about Proposal 3 or “25 x 25.” I will tell you why.
But first about the points I made. Now as before they say little bio-massacre will occur under “25 x 25.” They keep repeating that.
Do we believe their rhetoric, or their written “25 x 25” reports?
Do we believe their rhetoric, or who they are in bed with?
Do we believe their rhetoric that they can “control biomass,” or the fact that in Michigan WE ALREADY HAVE FIFTEEN TIMES more biomass burning as “green energy” than wind?
Do we believe there rhetoric, or their actions in allowing (or not knowing) “get off coal” plans include biomass burning in East Lansing and Holland. When is the protest?
Why did I speak out now? Well I have done two radio shows, so I am not a newcomer to the debate.
But maybe it also has something to do with the fact I was just in the woods.
I just got back from driving across the UP. Down every highway is a parade of logging trucks. Trains with logs were sitting on tracks. Huge lumber yards were filled with trees. Matchsticks they look like, pile after pile of toothpick trees.
I went to a woods where I have camped for a years. It is National Forest. I often thought to myself, here finally is a stand of trees, that might if they grow look like nice trees. Here I can relax. And what was in the forest the last time I was there? Loggers. In the National Forest CAMPGROUND and surrounding lands.
Random people in restaurants in the UP complain to me about the hellacious level of logging. You can see it for yourself. You can see clearcut or “thinned” forest lands coming up with scruffy trees and weeds, or nothing. I see woods cut thirty years ago struggling to re-grow.
We have brusheries, the result of working our woods as an ATM machine.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that every round of logging, whether someone signed off on it as sustainable or otherwise, produces a crappier, more stressed forest.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that air pollution and climate change are weakening our trees.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that when in parks there are signs saying “do not leave path” to protect the delicate forest soil and plants from FOOTSTEPS, that logging machinery forever changes things.
I am not saying we’re never going to cut a tree. I burned wood for many years myself.
But what’s happening now is beyond the pale. We just keep stepping aside, compromising, and nature is in trouble.
Go visit a green energy biomass plant. They run on tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of tons of chipped up trees and forests. And produce very little energy.
Go learn about the creosote soaked railroad ties tossed in the biomass plant in L’anse poisoning the air and water in the name of green energy.
Go to Detroit where they sickened people for decades by burning trash as green energy.
Go to Grayling where they have burned tires along with whole trees in the biomass plant.
Go online and see Mascoma with a 150 mile bulls eye targeting hardwoods to be dissolved into ETHANOL.
Why speak out now?
Because the environmental groups have not done their job.
Because many people tried asking questions and got told don’t worry about it.
Because we have lost the chestnuts. We have lost billions of passenger pigeons and flocks of fowl that darkened the sky for days. For DAYS!
We have lost the grayling, most of the moose, elk and caribou we once had in Michigan.
The sturgeon hang by a thread, a few thousand where there used to be millions. We burned them in steamers for fuel.
Of tiny piping plovers a handful are left. When I was a boy every shore was filled with peeping shorebirds. No longer.
The chestnuts are gone, gone forever. The elms are decimated. Our beech trees are in trouble. The ash are going extinct.
Two white pines just dropped dead in my yard, and the oaks and maples are so stressed on my block nearly every single day someone is cutting them down.
Nature is in trouble. And it’s our fault.
Our environmental movement has to stop doing what’s funded, and start doing what is right.
They have to stop gearing information on renewable energy to get “a win” but to be true and accurate.
Either you stand with the trees, or for more logging and burning of the trees.
Trying to have it both ways means everyone loses.
And no amount of windmills will green-wash that.