DiVA STREETS in conjunction with the DiVA FAIR, NEW YORK 2007
The action of transplanting footage gathered from an old-growth heritage forest in Oregon to a commercial shipping container in the midst of Manhattan reinforces the mental disconnect between nature and its conversion to consumables. Presented by Bleu Acier.
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In late 2005 we traveled to the eastern side of the Oregon Cascades for an artists’ residency, in an area that had been decimated by fire eighteen months earlier. Coming from the east coast, where the news hadn’t received adequate attention, it was a shock to arrive in a landscape where scorched earth surrounded clusters of towering trees.
The official cause of the 90,000 acre fire was deemed by the Arson Task Force to be “holdover” lightning from storms occurring several weeks earlier, though controversy surrounds the cause. Many locals have suspected that the fires were intentionally set by the Bush administration as a backdrop for promoting their Healthy Forests Initiative. President Bush held his scheduled press conference preaching the fear of fire and extolling the virtues of controlled burns as flames blazed in the background.
Like the rest of the cognitive dissonance coming out of Washington the past eight years, the labels given to Forest Service policies like “controlled burn” and “healthy forest initiative” are not always what they seem. Both the government (from liberal to conservative) and environmentalists wrestle with semantics while old-growth forests continue to burn at an alarming rate. The Forest Service actually mandates that fires stemming from causes deemed to be "natural," like lightning, be allowed to burn without early intervention. The result of that policy is that public lands with old-growth forests subsequently open up for salvage timber harvesting.
Consider that the Oregon B&B Complex fire of 2003 opened up 10 million board feet of old-growth lumber, the equivalent of 5500 ranch-style homes.
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