Just another mouth to feed

I met an old friend of mine at the barbershop yesterday. We talked about time when there were tree huggers, the spotted owl, the eco-terrorists of sabotage. Also, the save our beautiful forests, and Wilderness Act, and forests being trampled by loggers that made locking up useless roads for review.

Those days required employers in the Pacific Northwest to cut down in production or close up completely. They did this without any thought about the economic impact costs associated with those acts.

Most affected by the spotted owl listing as an endangered species were Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Northern California. Oregon almost went into economic collapse as the state relied heavily on the tax support provided by these industries.

Federal tax money had to be spent to retrain employees and extend unemployment compensation. The loss of state taxes for lumber board-footage produced had to be paid to states from our federal tax funds over a long span of time (just recently refreshed temporarily). The loss of those taxes in Montana, for instance, was used to primarily support education and road and transportation needs, requiring the state to tax elsewhere.

A guy now couldn’t build an outhouse without going through an environmental impact statement and other countless agency regulations.

My old friend said he has a brother east of the mountains who was “giving up raising sheep” because “he was tired of going out to get the hay that fed the sheep that fed the coyotes.” His brother’s comment caused him to think about problems concerning the gray wolf and its Endangered Species Act regulations.

Because he always religiously bought his Fish & Game licenses as soon as they came out. He knew what good it did for out wild animals and fish, etc. But he questioned buying it now because “he rarely went anymore with his health not as good as it once was, and why feed the wolves?”

I said, “Yeah, I know, but you still buy them don’t you?”

He said, “Yeah, it’s just another mouth to feed.”

A.G. “Jerry” Jackson

Columbia Falls