Two of my sons are cross-country runners, one at the local grammar school and one at the local high school. I began training with Jake, the high schooler, but I ride my bicycle while he runs. Lenie has now joined us, alternately walking and jogging. Yesterday, as Jake ran off down the lower logging road, Lenie and I walked the upper one, which has turned into a beautiful young cedar forest with trees between 8 and 12 feet tall. Just about five years previous, I had walked up the same logging road with a friend who was a committed environmentalist as well as a writer for the magazine. The forest had just been felled and my friend could not hide his disgust at what he perceived as widespread environmental destruction by a logging company. I tried to explain to him that the logging represented a good use of forest land, and that I was familiar with the practices of the local timber company, Southcoast Lumber, and they did things correctly, namely, they logged, then burned, then replanted according to a very long-term logging schedule. “They have an economic stake in taking care of this land,” I said. “Thousands of homes will be built from the timber, then in another 20 or 30 years, they’ll log again and repeat the process.” I tried to explain to him that even the burning they do after logging is good for the land. “Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem of these forests. What could be more environmentally responsible than that?” He dismissed my explanation, as I knew he would. He was one of those environmentalists who seem to treat their beliefs as a religion. He blocked out explanations that showed timber companies doing any kind of enlightened logging. He simply looked at the denuded land and saw its ugliness. He couldn’t see the productive beauty that was eager to spring up as new trees. For him, logging was simply bad! Now here my wife and I were walking through this beautiful new forest. The logged timber has long ago become new homes. The land sloped away from us to the Pacific Ocean, and we could survey miles of new trees leading to the ocean. But I could see this in my imagination five years ago, amid the heaps of stumps and slash. Why couldn’t my environmental friend see that this was a responsible use of land, not a rape of a forest. Would he acknowledge it even now? I’ve lost track of him so I can’t ask him. I’ve met a lot of people like this. They are committed to a line of thought, and no amount of reasoning will sway them from their beliefs. And their thoughts DO become beliefs, as far as I can tell. Thought and reasoning implies listening to alternative views as you search for knowledge. Beliefs imply that you have reached your decision. There is no more room for talk. Too many environmentalists have become “true believers,” rather than pragmatists looking for sensible solutions to environmental problems. They have become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Companies like Southcoast Lumber are part of the solution. They are making money by caring for their forests. We’ll cut our Christmas tree out of this new growth of forest when there’s snow on the ground. We take care to cut out a crowded tree to help the timber company improve the new forest. Reminds me of a Robert Frost poem: Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though, He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. … I’ll skip to the end: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

I’ve been health conscious ever since I underwent triple bypass surgery nearly two years ago. Very often for breakfast I have a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and craisins (dried cranberries), plus whole wheat toast with a garlic and oil spread. The oatmeal keeps my cholesterol lower by as many as 15 points, the raisins and craisins supply me with two of the recommended nine servings a day of healthy fruit and/or vegetables, whole wheat at almost every meal is now recommended by the latest medical research, and garlic is the next best thing to a wonder drug. It is my garlic spread that I enjoy the most, however. I keep a little bowl on the counter that I fill with extra virgin olive oil, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and lots of chopped garlic. The raw bitterness of garlic mellows after a day immersed in the oil and it makes a delicious spread (applied with a small paint brush) on my toast. About three days a week I drop an egg fried in healthy canola oil onto the toast. The latest research shows that an egg a day does not raise your cholesterol. Our eggs are also home grown by our chickens who free-range so pick up a lot of phytochemicals in their eggs, and phytochemicals are very healthy for humans. Lenie and I try to pass on our healthy eating to our kids. They have come to like healthier olive oil, rather than butter, on their toast. They don’t like the straight garlic chunks or balsamic vinegar of my mixture, but those two things separate and drop to the bottom of the bowl, so I just paint their toast with the olive oil from the top. And they like their eggs cooked in healthy canola oil; if you stop cooking with butter or lard or other unhealthy oils, your taste buds will get used to the healthy oils. Our kids have also gotten used to turkey bacon, which is at least 65 percent less fat than pig bacon. And they prefer whole wheat bread over that worthless pasty white stuff. Now is the time to get the kids used to eating healthy foods. Autopsies done years ago on our young dead soldiers during the Vietnam Conflict revealed a surprising level of coronary artery blockage among these young men. It sent alarm bells through the medical community, as doctors began realizing that heart disease can start at a very young age. The best book I have read on eating healthy and putting all these things in perspective is Eat, Drink, & Be Healthy by Walter C. Willett. After I read it, I bought five copies and sent them to my brothers and close friends, then put it in the Books section of the General Store of the website. We live in an age where there is plenty of accurate life-extending information about disease prevention; my bypass surgery compelled me to go out and read it. A publishing tip — promotion in a changing world Publishing a magazine like BHM is a lot of fun. I go my own way when it comes to the editorial content, dismissing the “experts” who say I can’t write about this or that because it will hurt my sales. But I do keep in mind that to publish a magazine you must earn a certain minimum amount of money to stay in business. Since I’m not very good at keeping track of what that minimum amount is, I let my wife, Ilene, do it. She doesn’t mess with the editorial content of the magazine, but understands you must send out a lot of mail solicitations if the magazine expects to get a lot of subscribers’ checks in the mail, so she is always hunting down appropriate mail lists we can solicit. No mail out equals no mail in. My editorial approach sometimes makes certain subscribers cancel their subscriptions, but Lenie finds new subscribers. The subscribers who do stay with us tend to treat us like family, because I think they appreciate the magazine’s editorial candor and honesty in a publishing industry that is easily intimidated by special interest groups who want only politically correct topics discussed. So promotion of the magazine is a key to success. The internet, including this blog, is another arm of our attempts to promote BHM. But the internet, so far, earns BHM very little money; our income comes primarily from the sale of our print issue. But this blog and our internet website will hopefully alert potential subscribers to the value of our print issue. As publisher of BHM, I am betting that the amount of money and time put into our internet presence will eventually translate into print issue sales. But I’m not sure! The jury is still out on internet sites for all publishers. We are treading on new ground here, as no one really knows how to make money from the internet because readers’ have come to expect all information on the internet for free. But the internet has one attribute that plays into the hands of a good magazine like BHM: It allows readers to select what they want to read. Before the internet, readers had few choices, being forced to choose from among a few magazines covering their chosen topics, and those magazines were typically produced by large corporations who served up a sort of bland mush of politically correct topics. Readers have many choices on the internet, including the choice to stop reading the bland mush and search out quality in-depth articles about subjects in which they are interested. So I’m betting that if BHM offers its typical quality articles, as we have done for 18 years, readers will automatically migrate to the BHM website. Magazines who continue to offer the bland crap that they have offered for years will lose their readers. The internet, I believe, will force all publishers to either offer a lot of quality material free, or they will lose subscribers to those (like BHM) who do. I believe that the BHM website, and vehicles like this blog, will stimulate the conversation about BHM and what it has been offering readers for 18 years. The internet, by its nature, forces the cream to the top. It will eventually eliminate the need for the large sums of money to do the large snail mailings a publisher must now do to let people know you offer quality material. The internet is the greatest equalizer of the publishing playing field in history. If you do not already subscribe to the print issue of BHM, I invite you to do so. It is even better than our website and the four blogs we have recently launched from its Home Page. If you are contemplating ever becoming a publisher yourself, look to the internet as the key ally of the future. The world of publishing is changing rapidly, thanks to the internet, and it is those people with good ideas and products who will benefit most. — Dave

It’s been hot–in the 90s–the last couple of days a mile away from the Oregon Coast. This is when I’m glad I installed a “Whole House Ceiling Fan” in the far bedroom at the other end of the house a few years ago. When the evening cools down, as it always does here, I turn on the Whole House Fan, which is an exhaust fan which sucks a large volume of air out of the house and empties it into the attic where vents transfer it outside. It’s big enough (30 inches square) to create a nice draft through the house, sucking cool evening air in through open windows at the opposite end of the house, thus cooling the whole house with the evening air. Wonderfully simple device. My house never gets really hot, as I am well insulated and have an additional fan — an automatic attic vent fan — just below the main roof gable. When the air in the attic gets hot enough, the fan kicks on and sucks it through a vent in the roof. Get rid of the hot air that collects in your attic, and it makes cooling your house much easier. But some heat still builds up in the interior. This is just a stick house built on a foundation, with no thermal mass in it or design features that allow me to tap into the constant temperature of the ground. (For some BHM articles that discuss “thermal mass”, just type in “thermal mass” in the search window on our Home page.) But the Whole House Fan works pretty well. My three sons have other innovative ways to cool off. Jake, your typical teenager who will try just about anything, will take a dip in the horse trough if he’s hot enough. He doesn’t mind that there are mosquito fish in it. Sammy and Robby will wade in the little fish pond we’ve been creating for the last couple of years. There are lots of big — 6 to 8 inch — goldfish and salamanders in the pond, but the boys don’t care. A publishing tip We’re just shy of three weeks from deadline for the Christmas (Nov/Dec 2007) issue, so we’ve been working behind the scenes with various writers and examining submissions. If you submit something to us, whether via snail mail or email, you have to be patient. It can take a while for us to decide. Sometimes it’s just a quick read and a “yes” or “no,” but sometimes we have to think on it. We tend not to keep in touch with writers during this process; there’s just too much other stuff to do to keep people informed of every move we make. So if you are a writer, please be patient and we’ll get back to you eventually. Organization is one of the key talents a publisher must have. If you can’t keep track of vast amounts of information, you’ll have trouble being a publisher. As the years have gone by, I’ve been lucky enough to hire people who can organize and keep track, so I tend to delegate many of these tasks to my employees. I’ve already told you about Lisa in a previous post, who helps me organize the editorial side of the business. My wife, Lenie, takes care of the details of the business side of the business. It’s scary what she has to keep track of. One person cannot handle the organization of both the editorial and business sides of a publication like this; there is simply too much pulse to feel.