Four.
"There is, of course, no story, no broken law back in Louisiana,
no warrant, no ferry logs.
I am no fugitive other than from myself.
Here, the story falls away.
It, storytelling, has gotten so damn weak and safe.
I say this not to attack from within,
only to call a spade a spade, a leftover lesson from art.
I read such shit and see such shit paintings
that I want to gag.
One could spray one's vomit across the canvas
and more deeply affect or touch the senses, what
remains of them, than the things that are spewing out
into the culture now.
The left has vanished, has been consumed by the right.
On one day, the Sierra Club announces
it is against all logging on national forests, zero cut.
And the next day, it turns around
and endorses President Clinton for re-election, who has just
endorsed the industrial liquidation of $5
billion board-feet of timber in one year alone.
Hell, yes, employment is up this year.
What about after the re-election, when the $5 billion
drops back to zero because it's all
been cut or washed away by erosion?
Clinton tosses in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska,
old-growth coastal rainforest, gives the timber company
a 100-year lease on it.
And the Sierra Club, bastion of radicalism, endorses him.
Trying to shore up his base among the environmentalists,
a long nasty word for which we should start substituting
human fucking beings, Clinton designated a couple million
acres of Utah desert as a national monument.
The year before, he signed a Senate bill
protecting California desert.
He's made some moves in the direction
of protecting some Pacific Northwest old growth, too,
but nothing for the Yaak.
Whether planned or not, he's making a political trade of rock
for timber, trading the currency of Yaak's wildness
for votes in Red Rock.
And this is an alteration, a transformation,
which will not bear scrutiny.
It is not grounded in reality.
It cannot be done.
It is surficial, flimsy.
It is theft.
He is not the environmental president.
He is trading rock for timber.
Each has its inherent values, but each is different.
The Yaak, perched up on the Canadian line
like some hunch-shouldered griffin high
in a snag looking down on the rest of the American West,
can act as a genetic pipeline to funnel its wild creatures
and their strange magical blood down into Yellowstone,
in the bitterroot country, and back out toward the prairies,
too.
It can still resurrect wildness.
There is still a different thrumming
in the blood of the Yaak's inhabitants.
The damn Nature Conservancy won't even get involved up here.
The timber companies own the land along the river bottoms
in the Yaak.
And they clear cut those lands and left town
rather than waiting for the trees
to grow back as they're always bragging they'll do.
But before leaving town, shutting down
the mill behind them so that now we
have to export our wood and jobs to Idaho,
the timber company subdivided the hell out
of those clear-cut lands, turned them into ranchettes like cow
turds all up and down the river.
And still I couldn't get the damn Conservancy
to become active up here.
When I wrote to them, they wrote back
and told me the valley wasn't important enough.
They hadn't even ever seen the damn place.
Now the vice president of the timber company, Plum Creek,
that's selling off those lands in such tiny fragments,
sits on the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy.
I don't mean to speak ill of anyone,
and certainly not of a man I've never met,
but Plum Creek's got several tens
of thousands of acres in the south end of the Yaak
in the Fisher River country, which
is the only route by which a wandering grizzly can pass down
out of the Yaak and into the rest of the West.
Plum Creek owns the plug, the cork to the bottleneck.
These lands were given to them by Congress over 100 years ago.
And so, now, the situation is that one man, one human,
more heroic than any artist or group of artists ever dreamed
of being, will do either the right thing
and protect that land, or will do the wrong thing
and strangle the last wildness.
If you think I'm going to say please
after what they've already done to this landscape,
you can think again.
It is not about being nice or courteous.
It is not even about being radical.
It is simply about right versus wrong, and about history,
that which has already passed, and that which is now
being written and recorded.
I can hear my echo.
I recognize the tinny sound of my voice.
I know when an edge is crossed in art, when a story floats
or drifts backward or forward beyond its natural confines.
And I understand I am a snarling wolverine snapping illogically
at everything in my pain, snapping
at everyone, at fellow artists, and at fellow environmentalists.
I'm going to ask for help after all.
I have to ask for help.
This valley gives and gives and gives.
It has been giving more timber to the country for the last 50
years than any other valley in the lower 48.
And still, not one acre of it is protected as wilderness.
I load the logs slowly into the back of my ragged truck,
and drive them slowly to the mill in protest.
The valley cannot ask for anything.
It can only give.
And so like a shell or husk of the valley,
I am doing the asking.
And I'm the one saying please at the same time
that I'm also saying in my human way, fuck you.
Somebody help, please help the Yaak.
Put this story in the president's or vice president's
hands or read it aloud to one of them by firelight
on a snowy evening with a cup of cider within reach resting
on an old wooden table, the firelight on the spines
of books on the shelf flickering as if across the bones
or skeletons of things, and outside
on that snowy night, the valley holding tight
to the eloquence of a silence I can no longer hear over
the roar of my own saw.
Somebody, please do this.
Somebody, please help."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.