The Final Cut

Clear-cutting has exploded onto the hills of the Illinois Valley in recent years. Much of this is taking place on lands owned by the John Hancock Life Insurance Company. Our reservoirs of clean air and clean water are held in trust by the living and breathing mountains that surround our valley, but John Hancock thinks our bare hillsides are just fine as long as the result is dollars for distant shareholders. Sasquatch Woods People would like to point out that it isn’t fine, and actually, it’s really just utterly unacceptable and needs to stop right now.

There are lots of private timber owners in the area, and surely some others will also do clearcuts, but the active cutter right now seems to be John Hancock. They bought 53,000 acres of Southern Oregon timberland in 2017, bringing their Oregon total acres to 300,000. Their PNW total is 1.3 million acres, and 6 billion acres globally. The timber provides “payments” of $26 BILLION DOLLARS to shareholders who live very far from here and will never see the devastation on our hillsides that should be woods but are now converted to mud. Check out John Hancock’s boasting, here. In 2020, John Hancock acquired another 149,000 acres (!!!) of timberland in Southern Oregon (Josephine, Douglas, Coos, and Curry counties). John Hancock would like us all to know that their US-based timber harvesting is 100% sustainable – you can read about it in their green-washed carbon report – a striking contrast to the clear images of the bald hillsides that formerly sustained us but certainly don’t anymore.