After visiting Douglas County is it very clear that the Hinkle Creek study that I am focusing my praxis project around is quite controversial.
This last weekend ENVS 350 headed on down to Roseburg once again to spend some quality time with Gardner in the museum and meet with Ken Carloni and Jim Long, two of the county’s brightest and finest.
When I brought up what my project was about both Ken and Jim were quite eager to share their thoughts, which was wonderful! I had been reading articles from The Roseburg News Review all morning as was craving some different opinions, and boy did I get them. Both Ken and Jim believed that the work done at Hinkle Creek was “not science for science’s sake” and motivations were flawed to say the least. Right off the bat, Ken even said that the supporters of the research “were looking for ways to prove what they already believed to be true.”
Back to the News Review, articles seemed to be in line with Ken’s assertions. Even though official reports state, “in every discipline, contemporary forest practices resulted in detectable changes in a parameter of interest,” writers reported things like “clear cut logging is more environmentally sensitive” and other similar findings.
I’m not saying one person is right and one person is wrong here but what I am interested in is how two parties drawing from the same reports can come to such different conclusions. What information are they choosing to take as fact and how are they interpreting those facts? The polarization represented between the media and Jim and Ken is also apparently widely seen in the Oregon State Forest Sciences Department. My next step is to try to get a hold of someone from the Forest Sciences Department who is on the other side of the spectrum (compared to our two interviewees) and see what they have to say.
As far as outcomes of the Hinkle Creek study itself, there are a bunch of political implications. Policy makers in Douglass county will be citing it to approve land management legislation while environmental advocates will likely use it to oppose those legislative efforts.
I have yet to work ethics into the mix but I think I just need to do a bit more thinking and I’ll come up with something.
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