Lincoln Elementary School - Olympia, Washington

#6 The Logger's Perspective
Claudine Reynolds
 

The purpose of these questions is to lure the child into the boots of a logger.  We want the children to try to understand that a logger is doing his or her job in part because our world had created a huge demand for wood. Logging the way that we do today may not lead to a future of sustainable forestry, but it is changing and we must ease away from our impulse to blame others. If a child is able to stand in the boots of a logger (or any one of the stake holders involved), he or she may be more likely to comprehend the complexity of the salmon decline. We all affect the salmon in individual ways through lifestyle choices and job commitments. It will take every single one of us to make personal changes in order for the salmon to recover.

These questions may be used as a starting point for research ideas considering how a logger's job affects salmon survival and how the listing of the salmon under the Endangered Species Act affects a logger's job. We strongly recommend talking to someone who would know first hand about the timber industry or who has worked in it.

Thoughts for Consideration:
Walking in a logger's boots:
1. How do you feel when you wake up early everyday, through all kinds of weather, and set out to work in  the woods?
2. Imagine the range of smells that fill your nostrils throughout your day in the woods.
3. What do your feet tell you as they walk along the forest floor?
4. How has the texture and strength of your hands changed since you've been using them strenuously day, after day, after day?
5. What thoughts are provoked within you as you witness, overtime, the life cycle of a tree?  Of a forest?
6. How does it affect you when diverse plant and wildlife continuously surround you?

Further thoughts for consideration:
7. Why would logging in the woods require immense skill?
8. In what ways would you imagine logging in the forest to be dangerous?
9. How have the regulations in the width of the buffer zone affected a logger's job? (Width may be anywhere from 0-70 meters depending on the current condition of the stream.)
10. What is it about wood that makes it special and important to us as humans?
11. Are there ways to log the land sustainably?

Swimming is a salmon's skin:
12. Why is streamside vegetation, including diverse species of plant and tree growth, important for your well-being?
13. How are you affected when many trees are felled consecutively into your stream and then yarded out?
14. How are you affected when a bank, cleared of vegetation, slides into the stream where you live?

Becoming yourself again:
15. Imagine how you will individually be affected if the logger can't log anymore?
16. What will it feel like if you are no longer able to eat salmon?

Internet Links:
Temperate Forest Foundation: http://www.forestinfo.org
Ask a Forester: http://www.forester.org/ask.htm
Environmental Education: http://eelink.net
One Man's Experience: http://home.cdsnet.net/~tyson/logging

Vincent Sanders, Jaya Bremer, Trae Marks III, and Devlin Sweeny finishing
their skit about why salmon are special to loggers