Clean Up Your Mess For God’s Sake!!!!!!
November 18, 2008
For those of you that know me, you know that I am a huge advocate for property rights and I will fight tooth and nail to help every person I can to maintain those rights. That doesn’t mean certain things are acceptable when it comes to being a good steward of your land. Case in point:
While I was in Maine in early November 2008 for the annual Maine deer hunting season, I got to cover a considerable amount of territory due to the fact that I have wonderful friends who are willing to loan our hunting camp a 4-wheel ATV and we have permission from the landowners of most everywhere we go to access their land for hunting and the use of ATVs. One of the reasons I use it is it allows me access to hunting places I couldn’t always go because of my bad back.
Having been raised by a good father who taught me to respect everything, when I enter someone’s land, I am fully aware and alert to the surroundings around me so that when I leave, I leave it the same or better than when I went in.
In one instance, I would have needed a dump truck to haul out the mess.
I have permission to access a parcel of land which requires the use of a shared right-of-way. I knew from hunting this area last year that a logging operation was going on at the lower part of the mountain. It didn’t take long upon entering the right-of-way to see that the operation was complete and the cutters had left. What they left behind is totally inexcusable!
This was one of the first things I saw upon entering the land. I might explain to readers that the pictures that follow encompass perhaps an area of several acres. At first, when I saw the old chains from the chainsaws and the cutter bars, I found it interesting. Then I got looking around.
A bit further along as I neared one of the bigger log landings, I spotted more chains hanging in a tree.
Not too far from the tree where the chains hung, I found a stump that seemed to be home to a variety of discarded items. Not only were there chainsaw cutter bars, old chains and files but plastic bags, old paper towels and broken parts probably from a skidder or automobile.
I turned from the stump and tree where the bar chains hung and couldn’t hardly believe what I saw. Right next to a small stream that fed a bigger brook, a stack of empty plastic bar and chain oil containers, among other refuse like cardboard boxes, plastic tarps and personal garbage.
This should give you somewhat of an idea of what the main log landing area looked like. You name it and it was left to rot here. I saw no indications that whoever put this there was coming back. Not only on this site but at another location I saw two discarded chainsaws. Under the tarps mostly empty containers that once held hydraulic fluid, bar and chain oil, engine oil, etc.
This of course should be the responsibility of the outfit who did the logging to clean it up. The landowner should demand it, or it may well have been the landowner who left the mess.
This is just totally unnecessary and is certainly not good for the land and the environment. Whoever left this like this should be ashamed.
Tom Remington
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Usually, there is a clause in the contract between landowner and logger that would require the land to be cleaned up…..or not! Irregardless, it’s up to somebody to raise enough hell, and notifying the landowner, or the logger should be the first step….sometimes the logger doesn’t know how his crews have trashed an area, if he’s busy with other crews…If he knows, and hasn’t cleaned it up, then he’s probably subject to fines…and the loss of his reputation.
That is awful. I get so irritated by people who don’t take care of the land, and this is so far beyond that. I can’t even imagine a company, or and individual, leaving such a mess. I won’t even leave a candy bar wrapper in the woods, and these folks left this?
What a damn shame.
I too was raised in a way that says when you are loaned anything of someone else’s, you leave or return it in BETTER condition that it was when you were alowed it’s use. This type of thing is all too common. Where we deer hunt here in Idaho, there are getting to be a lot of people. This year, the sides of the dirt roads looked like those of freeways in need of litter duty, and this was in the boonies! It’s sickening and hurts all of us. Thanks Tom for this post.