NOT A CLEAR-CUT DECISION

I was born in Seattle and grew up in the Pacific Northwest.

When I was in the third grade they showed us pictures of clear-cutting operations in the Cascade Mountains. It was, we were told, a process that made lumbering more efficient. Just how efficient I could plainly see, every time my family traveled over Snoqualmie Pass from Yakima to Seattle. Each trip presented me with an ever-expanding patchwork of gray barrenness eating up the finite slopes of green timber.

It was obvious then, even to a child, that clear-cutting could not go on forever. As logging trucker Barbara Mossman is quoted, “We couldn’t see this (the end of logging) coming . . . we couldn’t comprehend it.” Indeed! Maybe she should have consulted a third-grader.

DAN MOLITOR

Glendale