Ray Raphael concludes Tree Talk with a strong call for a landed forestry program that would put more of the decision-making power back in the hands of th€' local forester, more integrally tied to the land. Utilizing site-specific forestry techniques, the forester' would be paid according to how much wood was grown rather than cut. Following the same line of reasoning, NWFWA and Rick Kovens have been developing a proposal for a stewardship program with the BLM that would address some of the problems raised earlier. November 1981 RAIN Page 19 The current procedures under which the USFS/BLM operate encourage the exploitation of migrant labor rather than drawing on the local community, pays by task rather than result, and contracts for piecework rather than an entire job. There is minimal quality control and no followup after the contract is fulfilled. In short, the government 1'rents bodies," offering little incentive for quality work. The stewardship proposal is for a three-year contract with BLM to reforest a 500-acre unit of recently clearcut land. Rather than use a number of crews, the BLM will contract with one crew of 12 people for all work done on the site. The NWFWA feels this type of structure can help stabilize the local economy, reduce administrative costs, and develop multiskilled expertise in the crew. A percentage of the contract will be paid immediately after the trees are planted and at regular intervals afterwards proportional to the amount of growing timber. This revolutionary method would financially reward quality work by paying for results rather than rote tasks accomplished. If the proposal passes through all the legislative channels it will be advertised on a competitive basis next summer. The BLM is making a farsighted step in risking this proposal, but if the NWFWA wins the contract, the experimental program will b~ exceptional on yet another count. NWFWA would fulfill the contract by manual methods rather than with herbicides. For further information on the stewardship program, contact Paul Vetterick at the Oregon BLM office or Rick Kovens at ' NWFWA, 795 Willamette St., Rm. 310, Eugene, OR 97401. PURPA People Heater By DAVID MORRIS Under the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) every state in the country is working out the price that you should be paid by the utility company for your own generation of electricity. They're trying to work out what the relationship s-hould be betwe~n _ you as a producer and.you as a consumer-what the relationship should be between millions of small power plants and a central grid system and a central back-up system. By 1990 there'll probably be as many as four million power plants in this country, but they won't be large power plants. Each one will be owned by a voter, and as a result you will have a very strong political constituency for decentralized power generation. , Now General Electric has in its laboratory a residential rooftop photovoltaic shingle. You put it on roofs just the way you would any shingle. It overlaps on the sides. You put nails on the top, and that makes the connection with the wires running under the eaves. G.E. is still in the electrical equipment manufacturing business but the size of its power plants has been substantially decreased. What that means is that in the middle of the 1980's when you reroof your house you will not only be protecting yourself from the elements, but you will be using one of the elements and converting it to useful power within your own house. Well, it used to be in this country that Social Security really meant social security. That is, it would protect us in our old age. What we have learned from Washington in the past six months is that that isn't true. When the inflation rate hits a certain level, the federal government will not permit us to increase our Social Security revenue income to match the cost of living. So this year the federal government is about to stop our getting 100 percent of cost of living increases in our Social Security. But there is a form of social security that we could give to low-income people and to the elderly. What if we gave them a photovoltaic device? Well, a typical rooftop of photovoltaics in 1985 will generate an average of $1,000 revenue. We pay in Social Security $3,000 today. One of the interesting things about photovoltaic devices is that energy prices rise faster than the rate of inflation. And the worse the gee-political situation in the world gets, the faster those energy prices tend to rise. So the real income level of that poor person and1that elderly person will be going up faster than a cost-of-living increase. We might begin to think of using photovoltaics as Social Security payments. In Washington over the past five years there have been studies done of how the Department of Defense could purchase 100 times our present production of photovoltaic devices and 11se them economically in remote military outposts. That is, the Department of _Defense could buy them and save money and in the process could accelerate the maturation of the industry by several years. Well, I propose that the Departm~nt of Defense buy them, but don't put them on remote military posts. Put them on the houses of the elderly and lower-inco'me people. And what we'll be doing there will be giving them a revenue-producer that is tied to the health of the economy. The worse the economy is, the better an income and revenue producer that rooftop will be. DD David Morris is director and co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C.
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