song for the blue ocean PT 1

song for the blue ocean, an outstanding book by Carl Safina, is 440 pages long and I'm nearing the half-way point.

Already I highly recommend it to you.

[For a few details, use the link under 'Read This' in side margin.]

This morning I read a paragraph that relates to an earlier post of mine re job creation. (We need jobs all across Canada. Unemployment rates are high. I made a brilliant suggestion, do you recall?

(And it's not like me to throw the word 'brilliant' around lightly.)

This may help:

"Throughout the 1980s, timber companies cut lands owned by the American people at record rates, while selling more and more raw logs overseas. Oregon and Washington lost about twenty thousand lumber jobs to exports and automation. A 16 per cent increase in wood taken off public lands accompanied a 15 per cent drop in logging and milling jobs. While wood prices - and company profits - rose to record highs, management exacted pay cuts up to 25 per cent." (pg. 173, song for the blue ocean)

An observer said the following:

"They should be giving the processing jobs to people in mills here. Allowing them to export raw logs makes no sense to me at all."

I have to agree.

Whether we are talking about the USA or Canada, processing jobs related to raw materials should stay in our own country.

Fat chance? Likely. Some economists will say that we have to let globalization and certain efficiencies take their course. I say, horse feathers.

Also, automation means that machines are doing the jobs that men and women can do.

I say, as I did in an earlier post, fire the machines. Put a tarp over them. Let real people have jobs and communities have a better chance to survive.

***

Q: Why do trees figure prominently in book about the ocean?

Good question.

More to follow.

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