Oregon Governor Kate Brown spoke in Medford

Aftermath of the Summer of Smoke. 

Governor Kate Brown: 

Kate Brown, in Medford in July

"Fires are more ferocious, more fierce, more frequent."

Kate Brown spoke to some 235 Rotarians and their guests in Medford yesterday. She understood what was on the audience's mind. As 2018 County Commissioner candidate Lanita Witt had told me in September, during the height of the smoke filled summer of 2018:  "What people want to talk about is the smoke."

She is in a tricky spot for a Democrat and an environmentalist. Her solutions are within the now-standard manner for "responsible" public officials, ones who want some safe ground of responsible forest and fire management, doing something, making progress, but within an arena largely out of their control: rainfall, wind, lightning. Whatever she does won't be enough and it will be criticized with the benefit of hindsight.

There remain advocates to return to an earlier era of aggressive logging of the 1970s--the glory days of timber harvests when the federal forests were being liquidated and timber harvest was the primary goal. Lumber mills were humming with activity, loggers were making money, and county governments had ample money from their share of the receipts from those harvests. In that era, forest management--brush thinning, road building--was paid for by the income from the harvests. Those were the "good old days."

On the other side are spokespeople for more natural, holistic forestry that assesses that nearly everything humans do to the forest disturbs its natural cycles and make things worse. They point to evidence that tall, mature, undisturbed forests burn less than do re-forested ones. Forest fires are natural, and forests adapted to fire, not logging. Less is more. 

She threaded the needle by speaking of local programs and initiatives, people working together, community councils bringing together various sides. We heard the word "collaboration" and "partnership" repeatedly. She visited an Air Tanker Base--the location of reconditioned military bombers that drop liquid fire retardant onto fires. She spoke of a grant to a Forest Restoration Partnership, a group of timber-harvest-oriented people and environmentally-oriented people who cooperatively plan and execute forest thinning activities. She praised the Oregon Department of Forestry. 

There is a safe spot politically. Favor thinning and brush reduction, everyone working together, toward the goal of making forest fires harder to start and grow, combined with aggressive fires suppression. It is OK to talk about putting out fires. Kate Brown is on this.

The other big subject: Jordan Cove pipeline. There is no politically safe spot on the Jordan Cove pipeline project. She is caught in the middle. It pleases no one.

Demonstrators outside Brown's venue

The Oregon building trades unions support the project. Business groups support the project. A likely majority of people around the port of Coos Bay support the project, evidenced by having re-elected a county commissioner who supported it over a candidate who made opposition her top issue. And the Project sponsors are lavishing money onto the media and politicians. We are good guys, they say.

However, environmental groups and NIMBY sentiment both oppose it. The project made the likely-fatal flaw of allowing opposition time to state their case and organize. The opposition moved from young activists to mainstream sentiment. It likely cannot be reversed. The project provides little benefit for pipeline pass-through counties, so there is little incentive for local politicians to rethink the issue.

Flyer to all: oppose the pipeline.

Brown encountered demonstrators outside the venue and a question from the audience, urging her openly to oppose the pipeline, She refused, saying she needed to "stay neutral," the better to be able to evaluate and judge the facts. 

But it could have been worse. The people packed into the meeting room could have applauded or jeered one way or the other. The issue was on the table. She stayed neutral. The subject dropped, without crowd response. That probably constitutes success.

If not now, when?

She observed that the Oregon economy was very strong, that unemployment was the lowest in history, that newcomers were moving to Oregon, and that tax revenue was growing in the midst of this prosperity. This is as good as it gets for Oregon. 

Oregon has intractable problems now--underfunded public pensions, low school graduation rates, unbalanced tax system, unaffordable housing and conspicuous homelessness, and people still without health care--and this is when thing are at their best. What will things look like if and when the country has its next recession? What will PERS funding look like if the stock market corrects?

What better time will Oregon have to fix big problems?

It is possible that the Oregon legislature is ready to tackle these big problems and that Kate Brown will lead that charge, but in Medford that is not what she addressed. Mostly she addressed the issue that was top of mind for the audience. The smoke.