Our Picks for the Week of 12/3-12/11

A proposed deal that has divided conservationists about the best way to
preserve a large chunk of undeveloped forest land just west of Bend has
been shelved by the property owner as it weighs its options.

Fidelity
National Timber Investments, which owns the 33,000-acre tree farm known
as Skyline Forest had planned to ask the Oregon legislature to sign off
on an unprecedented plan that would have allowed the company to
essentially donate most of the forest to the Deschutes Basin Land Trust
in exchange for permission to build several thousand homes on the
remaining acres between Bend and Sisters. But at this point, the
company has essentially pulled the plug on the proposal because of
state planning hurdles and a lack of local support for the deal.

All For This?If you were to enter the word "Suterra" into your Google search bar, you'd get a long list of results, the third of which would read: Suterra Buys Bend Oregon - New Bio Weapon Factory… from a California based website. That's news to those of us living here in Bend who know Suterra as a small spinoff of one of Bend's longest running and most respected high tech companies, Bend Research.

The company, which employs less than 100 people, specializes in producing non-toxic chemicals that serve as an alternative to traditional pesticides by confusing breeding insects. But to hear Internet posters tell it, Suterra is a bio-weapons manufacturer on par with a pre-Gulf War Saddam Hussein whose operations are secretly funded by the Bush administration. This information is found on page after page of Internet material and the prolificacy of blogging on Suterra has increased in recent weeks after it became public that the company was working with the city of Bend on a deal that would sell the company a plot of land in the Juniper Ridge development.

It goes without saying that blogs have reinvented the way information is consumed by the public. But blogging has also allowed for a rampant spread of misinformation and it seems Suterra has been made into an Internet boogeyman of sorts. Suterra has been the target of a wide array of groups in Northern California where the company's pheromone-based pest control products were sprayed on entire communities. Now, with the company moving to Juniper Ridge, it seems that Bend's vocal group of bloggers have jumped on the Suterra blog bandwagon, in some cases teaming up with the California bloggers, creating a sort of perfect storm of unfiltered misinformation.