FEBRUARY 15, 2006
"Pick
one, any one," implores the magician holding a deck of 52 cards in her hand. You oblige, choose a card, place it back in the deck and miraculously, after a shuffle or two, and right before your eyes, the card jumps out of the pack and lands in your back pocket. Slight of hand has never been so slight as today when it comes to our precious environment.
One example that comes to mind is the so-called beauty strip that is along our highways throughout the nation. A strip of trees is left along roads where logging has occurred. The strip of untouched forest is perhaps a 100 feet or 100 yards wide, but behind this slight of hand attempt is acre after acre of clear cut forest. Small plane aerial photography has unmasked this deception, and the magicians trick employed by the timber companies is no longer deceiving anyone, except millions of people who drive by the beauty strips all the time.
The revealing book Clear-cut about large scale timber harvesting published by the Sierra Club, with a forward by David Brower, illustrates the extent of clear cutting and how the beauty strips were intentionally designed to deceive. A few months after seeing this book I was in Montana. I stopped my car to see for myself. I had no idea if I would have to walk for two days before I came to a clearing, but within a couple of hundred feet from the highway, and through dense forest for those two hundred feet, I came upon a graveyard of stumps and ravaged land.
I guess today we cant really believe what we see because someone is working hard to deceive us at least in some board rooms of some timber companies. What bothers me is that deception is part of doing business for so many today. If someone can get away with a beauty strip then they are considered successful in business language. For each of us we must keep our eyes open to discover the truth.
--Peter