Monthly Archives: April 2014

Growing Evidence Links Herbicides to Elk Hoof Disease

My family has hunted the forests of southwest Washington for more than sixty years and never before have they observed such a scarcity of wildlife. Twenty years ago my dad and uncle remember seeing two or three big elk herds a day. Now we’re lucky to see two or three individuals a day. Depressingly, this past fall marked the first time in three decades that our entire hunting party failed to harvest a single elk from the Coweeman unit. I later learned that the Coweeman elk population has dropped by seventy percent in recent years.

Something is afoot in our local forests, and I’m convinced that the epidemic of hoof disease currently ravaging the elk population surrounding Mount St. Helens is only the alarm. Everyone in my hunting party now believes that the herbicides Weyerhaeuser and other private timber companies are spraying on new growth habitats is one of the chief causes of our wildlife shortage which includes deer, grouse and just about every other animal out there. After several years of diminishing returns, I (like many others) have been on a path of inquiry to understand just what is happening in our forests, and so far the insights have been disturbing.

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Elk Hoof Disease | Photo by Jon Gosch

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Maria Marasigan – Community Organizer and Earthship Activist

Maria Marasigan, 35, New York, USA

Feda Maria

Maria Marasigan | Photo by Federica Miglio

So why are you here?

In all the years that these typhoons have been happening in the Philippines, there still isn’t a system, or some kind of preparedness, or a change in how rebuilds happen and what relief is like here. The government supports the people in a very hand out, reactive, short-term way.

Having done the Earthship internship in November, I saw how waste is used for housing, the systems of water catchment, solar, and all of these things that are really looking at the long-term and self-sufficiency. Having less dependency on a government that doesn’t really serve you. Not just here in the Philippines, but everywhere, all over the world, including the United States. After disasters like Katrina and Sandy, people are still waiting for relief when they should already be rebuilding, and that still isn’t happening.

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