Who are those very, very, very tall men?
Who are those very, very, very tall men?
PSU students walking through the Park Blocks had some new faces to look up to yesterday. Stilted performers (Tim Ream, Laurel Southerlin) from the Oxygen Collective encouraged students to attend their performance that took place in the Smith Memorial Student Union last night.
The “multimedia, theatrical presentation,” titled “Fire and Forests” is part of the Southern Oregon group’s attempt to inform the public of the Bush administration’s environmental policies, Lesley Adams, a spokesperson for the Oxygen Collective, said. Their main objective is to raise awareness and take action to save the forests of Oregon’s Siskiyou Wild Rivers region, the most biologically diverse conifer forest on the planet.
The Collective formed shortly after President George W. Bush’s 2002 trip to Medford, Ore. where he introduced the Healthy Forest Initiative, “in our backyard, literally,” Adams said. The announcement resulted in the formation of the advocacy group, who feels that “this administration is using fire to create hysteria and a fear in the American public as an excuse to log on public lands.”
Members of the Oxygen Collective hope to educate voters about the role of fire in nature, stressing that forest fires play an essential role in the balance of Earth’s environment and should not be feared, nor should they lead to the proposed clearing of approximately 518 million board feet of wood, which is exactly what Bush’s “Biscuit Fire Recover Project” would do, Adams stressed.
That volume of lumber would fill enough logging trucks to line up in single file from the border of Canada to the border of Mexico, she explained.
Last night’s event was sponsored by the PSU chapter of OSPIRG. Students interested in seeing the next performance on the group’s 25-day West Coast tour can watch tonight at Reed College, in the student union at 7 p.m.
