Clearcut...Not So Clear Cut
Clearcut...Not So Clear Cut
The Complex Relationship Between Consumer and The Environment
By Elizabeth Clare
Clearcut I: Explaining the Distance
1979. Each day after school I run the six miles from Highway 101 to my house. The road follows Elk River. I pass the dairy farm, the plywood mill that burned down three years ago, the valley's volunteer fire department station, the boat landing where recreational fishermen put their boats in during salmón season. I have the curves and hills memorized, tick the miles off, skin salty with sweat, lungs working a hard rhythm I know most of the people who drive by. They wave and swerve into the other lane. The logging trucks honk as they rumble by loaded with 10 or 15 skinny logs. I remember when one or two huge logs made a load. Pushing up the last big hill, my lungs and legs begin to ache. Two curves before my house, I pass a yellow and brown sign. It reads: United States Forest Service. Entering the Siskiyou National Forest.
1996. I live in southeast Michigan on the edge of com country. Book-browsing I happen upon Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry (Sierra Club Books & Earth Island Press, 1994). The book documents clearcut logging throughout the U.S. and Canada. I glance at the big full color photos of new clearcuts, second-growth forests , old growth forests, and tree farms, read the captions and descriptions. The book is divided by state and province. I look tor Oregon and suddenly find myself in the Siskiyous, the photograph overwhelmingly familiar. The ground is bare, heaps of branches, stumps, and half logs hanging to the slope. There are no standing trees, only snatches of green, the new sprouts of huckleberry, greasewood, gorse, and tansy ragwort.
I used to cut firewood on clearcuts like this one. Up river near Butler Basin and Bald Mountain after the last logs were driven away, loggers bulldozed the remains - branches, shattered logs, trees too small to buck into logs, stumps - into one enormous pile. Rather than burn these piles, the Siskiyou National Forest issued firewood cutting permits. My father and I would spend the whole month of October on these clearcuts, cutting our winter's supply of firewood.
I tum from the photo to the caption: Bear Creek, north of Bald Mountain. In 1993 thousands of tons of rock, mud, and logging debris caved off this clearcut into Bear Creek, washing downstream from Bear Creek to Bald Mountain Creek to Elk River to the Pacific Ocean. Elk River river of my poems, real and metaphor, river of my childhood where I swam, skipped rocks, watched heron and salmon, learned to paddle a canoe. I read and reread the place names and the explanation. On steep slopes trees literally hold the earth in place, and thus, clearcutting can destabilize whole mountainsides, inviting catastrophic slides called blowouts. I know all this but can't stop reading.
Later, I tell a friend about finding this photo. She has never walked a logging road, listened to the idle and roar of a chainsaw, or counted growth rings on an old-growth stump, but we share a sensibility about environmental destruction. I describe the photo, explain blowouts, talk about watersheds. What I don't say is how homesick I feel for those place names, plant names, bare slopes. I don't say this because I can't explain the distance between my politics and my homesickness. She asks, "If you went for a walk along Elk River now, what changes would you notice?" I try to describe the images that have rumbled around my head in the days since that afternoon of book browsing. Winter '93, the river must have run chalky brown as it flooded storm-high over the gravel bars. Summer '94, the kids who live on the river must have found different swimming holes, the deep pools shallower, the current faster. I describe spawning season at the confluence of Elk River and Anvil Creek. Salmon flounder into the creek, thrash up the shallows, dig nests in the gravel, flood the water with spawn. They are almost dead, bodies covered with white rot, the gravel bars littered with their carcasses. The following summer the river teems with Chinook fingerlings, three inches long, as they head downstream to the ocean. I can barely register that the spawning bed at Anvil Creek might be silted in with rock, mud, and logging debris, might not exist anymore. My friend expresses dismay and sympathy, then we move on to something else.
For years I have wanted to write this story, have tried poems, diatribes, and theories. I've failed mostly because I haven't been able to bridge the chasm between my homesickness for a place thousands of miles away in the middle of logging country and my urban-created politics that have me raging at environmental destruction. I have felt lonely and frustrated. Without the words for this story, I lose part of myself into the chasm.
I am the girl who grew up in the Siskiyou National Forest, in second-growth forest that won't be logged again for a long time. The hills weren't replanted in the '40s when they were first clearcut and so grew back in a mix of alder, tan oak, myrtle, and madrone, trees the timber industry considered worthless. I played endlessly in this second-growth forest I followed the stream from our house uphill to the little dam where we siphoned water off to the holding tanks that supplied our house with water year-round. I loved taking the covers off the tanks, listening to the trickle of water, watching the reflection of trees waver in the cool dark surface. I drank big gulps straight from the tanks, my cheeks and chin growing cold and wet. Then I continued uphill, kicking through the alder and tan oak leaves, scrambling up slippery shale slides. I pulled the bark off madrone trees in curly red strips, crumpled myrtle leaves to smell their pungent bay leaf odor. I knew where the few old-growth firs still stood, their bark rough and brown. I walked out onto rotten logs to inspect the moss, liverwort, lichen, and shelf mushrooms, tried to name the dozen shades of green, tan, and brown, poked at the snails and banana slugs. In the summer the hills were hot and dry, the sun reaching easily through the trees. I scrambled across clearings tangled in berry brambles and gorse, through and around undergrowth, uphill to the rock out of which the stream dripped.
I grew up with chainsaws, the high whine of a logging operation the next ridge over, the clatter of the plywood mill. When the warning whistle squealed through the valley, I knew that logs were being pulled up out of the gullies toward the loading areas where empty logging trucks waited. I grew up to the sweet smell of damp wood chips being hauled north on Highway 101 to the port in Coos Bay or the paper mill in Gardiner. I watched for hours as gigantic blowing machines loaded mountains of wood chips onto freighters bound for Japan. I reveled in plant names: huckleberry, salmonberry, blackberry, salal, greasewood, manzanita, scotch broom, foxglove, lupine, rhododendron, vine maple, alder, tan oak, red cedar, white cedar, Port Orford cedar. I wanted a name for everything. I still have a topographical map of the Elk River watershed, each quadrant carefully taped to the nexL
I am the backpacker whose favorite trails wind through old-growth rain forest, the trees standing so tall I can't find their tops. The sun barely reaches through the canopy, leaving small pools of light on a forest floor layered inches deep in fir and spruce needles. Everything cascades green, moss upon moss, swordtail ferns sprouting from rotten logs. The trail bends again and again around Sitka spruce, their roots sticking up high above ground, knobby and twisted. There is no undergrowth, only a thousand shades of greed.
I am the activist who has never spiked a tree but knows how. The activist who has never spent a night in the top of a Douglas fir slated for felling the next morning but would. The activist who has never blockaded a logging site or a logging execuüve's office as I have military complexes. I am the socialist who believes the big private timber corporations, like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific, are corrupt, and the government agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service, that control public land are complicit. I am the adult who still loves the smell of wood chips, the roar of a lumber mills, who knows out-of-work loggers and dying logging towas. Living now on the edge of corn country, I am the writer who wants to make sense. In the white, Western world view that I learned as a child, trees, fish, and water were renewable resources. Only fifty years prior, they were conceived of as endless resources, a myth white people brought west into the "frontier." Sometimes when I hiked upriver toward Butler Bar and saw ridge af ter ridge covered with alder and tan oak, mixed with Douglas fir and Sitka spruce, I believed trees were endless. Or when I went to the cannery and saw a day's catch of Chinook, I thought fish were endless. Particularly in the middle of winter when rain drenched the valley every day, I knew water was endless.
But in the 1960s and '70s, the powers-that-be in the public schools, government, and industry taught us that trees and fish, rather than being endless, were renewable. If clearcuts were diligently replanted,we would never run out of trees, paper, or lumber. If the salmon runs were carefully maintained by hatcheries, we would never run out of salmon. No one even bothered to explain about water
Clearcuts, our teachers said, were good. They encouraged the growth of fir and pine, the so-called good - meaning profitable - trees that as seedlings need direct sunlight to grow. The practice of replanting and the superiority of tree farms were placed at the center of these lessons. But our teachers went far beyond trees in their defense of clearcut logging. Clearcuts, my classmates and I were told, provided bountiful browsing for deer and other wildlife. Hunters and their supporters quickly added that because this abundance of food caused a cycle of overpopulation, deer hunting was not just a sport but a necessity . And so our worldview developed, layer by layer. How did the forest and its wildlife ever survive before clearcutting, replanting, and sports hunting? We didn't ask because we were children taught not to question. We believed the propaganda
No one told us about old-growth forest. They didn't say, "Understand, a tree farm differs from an old-growth forest. "We didn't study the 300-year cycle of an ecosystem that depends upon rotting logs on the forest floor and a tree canopy hundreds of feet high. I knew big old trees existed. I remember the winter my favorite for blew down. After my father cut it into rounds for firewood, I hunkered down by the stump and counted its growth rings, one for every year of its life. It was 400 years old. But I didn't know about
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thousands of acres of big oíd trees. Nor did I know about animals, like the northern spotted owl, that live in old-growth forests, that can't make do with a tree farm. No one told us, and the logging industry had quite a stake in the silence.
1979. I am part of the Youth Conservation Corps, a summer work program for teenagers. All summer we have made trails, picked up trash, maintained campgrounds, and built fences in the Siusilaw National Forest. This week we are camped east of Mapleton, near a ten-year-old tree farm, thinning the trees. Each morning we fan out into the woods to cut down all the trees less than four inches in diameter. The remaining trees will grow faster and bigger. In thirty or forty years the U.S. Forest Service will bid these acres out to some private company to clearcut and then replant. I am learning to swing an ax, to know what angle to start a cut at, when to stop chopping and let gravity do the rest, how to pull a tree all the way down to the ground so it won't lean against neighboring trees and kill them. It's hot, dirty work. A girl on my crew went back to camp early yesterday after she stumbled into a bees' nest and was stung thirty times. Hardly anyone likes this job. At lunch I sharpen my ax, the file flat against the beveled cutting edge. The sun is hot against my hard hat. Sweat collects under its band. I love the way the woods smell.
Along with trees, I studied salmon, fascinated with their three-year life cycle from spawning bed to ocean back to spawning bed. Most of what I knew carne from the salmon hatchery two miles upriver of my house. In the winter I stood at the fish ladder waiting for a fish to come leaping up the cascading stairs of water, then go count the big scarred fish in the holding tanks. Sometimes I visited the lab where they held the spawn and incubated the fertilized eggs. In the summer I rode my bike around the holding ponds and watched Glen and Paul feed the fingerlings, their hands dipping into five gallon buckets of feed, sweeping through the air, water coming alive as the fish jumped to catch the pellets. Other times I went across the river to the spawning bed at Anvil Creek. I knew two kinds of salmon existed, hatchery salmon and wild salmon. I thought they were the same, just as I thought a tree farm and an old-growth forest were the same.
I didn't know why hatchery salmon needed to be grown in Elk River. I knew damson the Columbia and urban pollution in the Willamette had nearly destroyed the salmon runs in those rivers, but there were no dams and minimal pollution on Elk River. The propaganda that passed as outdoor education didn't speak of the effects of clearcutting on salmon habitat. No one explained that as spawning beds silt up with logging debris and disappear, fewer and fewer wild salmon can spawn. I never heard that if the trees shading a creek are cut, the direct sunlight warms the water, raising the temperature of all the streams in the watershed, endangering the salmon runs, which require relatively cold water to survive. Nor did the propaganda speak of over-fishing. The commercial salmon fishermen who made their livelihoods fishing the summer salmon runs off the coast of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska hadn't yet heard of sustainable yield. The salmon runs seemed endless.
The powers-that-be didn't teach us that hatchery salmon differ from wild salmon, that they are genetically more homogeneous, more susceptible to disease, and less hardy once at sea. To raise salmon year after year in a hatchery, biologists use formaldehyde and other chemicals each summer to combat recurring diseases that kill thousands of hatchery fingerlings. The continuous pumping of water from the river into the hatchery's complex of tanks and back to the river washes these chemicals into the ecosystem. And each winter when hatchery salmon don't return to the hatchery in large enough numbers, the biologists go to the natural spawning beds and net wild salmon, taking them to the hatchery to augment the supply of spawn. Soon wild salmon might not exist. The propaganda neglected these details.
My classmates and l were taught by teachers who worked for schools funded largely with timber taxes, by U.S. Forest Service rangers and their brochures, and by industry-supported textbooks, displays, slide shows, and tours. The point isn't simply that we, like schoolchildren across the country, were taught half-truths about trees and salmon. Rather we learned even more fundamental lessons, that trees and salmon are endlessly renewable commodities. This view of the natural world, which puts clearcutting, replanting, and hatcheries at its center, conveniently supported the two industries, logging and fishing, that sustained the towns we lived in.
Not until I left Port Orford did I come into contact with other worldviews. Living in a city for the first time, I met people who knew salmon only as frozen patties, who used paper but had never been to a paper mill. For them trees were the tall skinny maples.oaks, and beeches that grew along sidewalks. They navigated the seemingly impossible parking structures and bus stops with ease and comfort. Some of them didn't believe that trees and salmon were simple commodities.
They created a fuzzy, romanücized version of nature, combining memories of Walt Disney nature movies with their occasional summer vacations to overcrowded National Parks. Or they believed in a white urban version of tree spirits and Mother Earth. Either way , my new acquaintances held trees and fish in an awe-struck reverence as they talked about the dangers of nuclear power and the destruction of rain forest in Brazil. I simply listened. Surrounded by concrete and highrises, I slowly stopped taking the familiar plants and animals of the Siskiyou National Forest for granted. When I returned home to visit, I caught glimpses of what was beautiful and extraordinary about the place I grew up and what was ugly and heart-breaking. I started to believe that trees and salmon weren't just harvestable crops. I read Sierra Club literature, the Earth First! Journal, and Dave Foreman's ecotage manual; learned about Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Nevada Test Site, Big Mountain; and started to turn from a Libertarian-influenced childhood toward a progressive adulthood. I never grew into the white urban reverence of tree spirits and Mother Earth, a reverence often stolen from Native spiritual traditions and changed from a demanding, reciprocal relationship to the world into something naive and shallow that still places human life and form at iLs center. But I did come to believe that trees and fish are their own beings and that I - as activist, consumer, and human being among the many beings on this planet - have a deeply complex relationship with them The people in Port Orford who had known me since I was bom - Les Smith, the retired logger who ran the Port and Starboard Pizza Parlor; Venita Marstall, the cashier at True Value Hardware; Gerla Marsh, the teller at First Interstate Bank - no longer really sured the anonymity of the city and relished the multitude of cultures, ideas, and differences I encountered there. But still I ached for the trees, the river, the sleep, quiet Siskiyous.
1989. I am backpacking alone on Washington's Olympic Península. I have spent the last three days camping on the beach near Hole-in-the-Wall, reading and wriüng, letting high tide and low tide control my life. Now I am camped at a state park, amidst new clearcuts. I replenished my food supply at Forks, a familiar little logging town, five or six one-ton pickups parked outside the chainsaw shop. I caught a ride to this campground with a man who works as a hoedad, replanting clearcuts. I am planning a three day hike in the old-growth rain forest before I head back to Seattle.
In the morning I set out for the trailhead. The logging road I'm on follows the Bogacheil River, winding through rolling pastures and second-growth forest. I hear chainsaws idle and roar the next ridge over. For a time I hear the logging trucks on Highway 101 downshift as they chug up a hill. I hear the high whine of the warning whistle. I haven't heard these sounds in years. They mean home even as I remind myself about Weyerhaeuser, their union busting tactics, their language of timber management, their defense of environmental destruction. A great blue heron startles me as it lifts off, flapping downstream on dusky blue wings. Home is also the damp, rotting log smell, the fog lifting to broken sun and wind. I am climbing steadily now, the two lane shale road becoming one lane.
I round the next bend and am suddenly in a new clearcut: stumps as far as I can see, the great heap of tree parts left behind, bulldozer tracks frozen into the dry mud. I don't want this to mean destruction but rather to be home. I strain toward the memories of happy, exhausting trips to Buüer Basin to cut firewood.sweat-drenched days east of Mapleton learning to swing an ax. Instead I see a graveyard, a war zone, the earth looking naked and battered. I imagine tree ghosts as real as crows. Whatever metaphor I use, this is what white people have done to North America for 500 years, laid the land bare in the name of profit and progress. I walk two, three, four miles , knowing I am seeing for the first time, seeing not as an outsider, a tourist horrified by some surface ugliness, but as someone who grew up in this graveyard. I climb up onto a stump and count its growth rings, trace the drought seasons marked by tight rings wrapped close together, the wet seasons marked by loose rings spaced farther apart. I want to rage and moum, but instead I feel ordinary, matter-of-fact. I walk, waiting for my heart, my bone marrow to catch up to my politics, round another bend, and am suddenly back in second-growth forest.
I find the trailhead. These trees are marked every fifty feet with neon pink ribbon. Markers for a new road? A profit assessment? I tear the ribbon off each tree, stuff the plastic into a pocket, raging not at the impending destruction but at the audacity of neon pink amidst all the green. I cross a stream on a narrow moss-grown bridge. And then I am in old-growth forest, National Park land, the Unes between old growth, second growth, and clearcut sudden and unmistakable. I live in a very different landscape now. The land is flat and open. The trees lose their leaves in an explosión of red, yellow, and orange every fall; regrow them in a burst of green every spring. In winter the snow comes wet and heavy, lining all the trees, or light and dry, drifting in billows. The green here isn't layered and shaded in a thousand varieties. Often I hunger for the ocean, the spawning beds, Douglas fir, rain that blows horizontally across the hills. I have filled my house with photographs, maps, stones, shells, sand dollars, fir cones, and wood to remind me of that landscape I still call home, a landscape that includes the sights, sounds, and smells of logging and commercial fishing.
Clearcut II: Brutes & Bumper Stickers
The northern spotted owl is a little brown bird that lives in the Pacific Northwest. For years environmentalists and biologists in Oregon have known this bird is in trouble. It is a solitary creature that lives in pairs and nests in old-growth forest. Each pair of owls needs thousands of acres of old growth to survive. As more and more of its habitat has been cut, the owl has neared extinction. In 1991 after much pushing by environmentalists, the federal government declared the spotted owl a threatened species, protecting not only the bird under the Endangered Species Act but also some of the remaining old growth in the Northwest. This move created an uproar, which caught the attention of the national media. All of a sudden the spotted owl and clearcut logging became a story in Time Magazine and on the AP wire, in the Utne Reader and on the cover of Backpacker, as if this crisis were brand new. I was already living in Michigan and hungrily read the articles, looked at the photos, recognized the place names. The journalists, both in the mainstream and progressive press, seemed fixated on a certain bumper sticker they found on loggers' pickup trucks. It read "Save a logger, kill a spotted owl." Depending on the political viewpoint of the journalist and the publication, this favored detail led to one of two analyses. The first focused on unemployment and economic hardship, and the logger became a victim of impending environmental regulations, which would put him out of work. The second scrutinized the big timber companies, their timber management and profiteering; and the logger became an accomplice. Both analyses were easy enough to document, and in both the logger was a brute. As a victim, the logger is a poor dumb brute lashing out (rightly or wrongly) at the environmentalists. As an accomplice, he is a loyal brute aiding and abetting the timber industry.
Take for example an arücle in the Earth First! Journal, the newspaper of radical, in-your-face, direct action group Earth First!, describing three non-violent blockades of road building operations and logging sites in British Columbia. The activists involved in the blockades write of the violence and harassment they encountered at the hands of loggers. Throughout the article they use language and images that turn the loggers into dumb brutes. The loggers are described as "neanderthal thugs" and "club wielding maniacs," likened to the Ku Klux Klan, and quoted as saying, "People like you are gonna die." To clearly and accurately report unjust, excessive, and frightening violence is one thing; to portray a group of people as dumb brutes is another. After the description of the blockades and the response to them, Forest Action Network (FAN) then analyzes the logger violence:
The anti-environmental movement has been created and funded by the [timber] corporations and FAN holds the corporations responsible for the growing atmosphere of violence and hostility between loggers and environmentalists in British Columbia.... Forest workers [are] indoctrinated to believe that we, in our "quasi-religious zealotry" are trying to take away not only their jobs, but their entire "way of life. . .." After a decade of layoffs due to increased mechanization and overcutting, the forest industry is playing on its workers' fears about job security and using them to fuel the fires of hostility against us, the new enemy , the dreaded "preservationists."
This analysis is more articulate than most in outlining corporate responsibility, but the change in language is remarkable. Loggers are no longer neanderthal thugs but indoctrinated forest workers. FAN wants it all three ways: they want dumb complicit brutes, and dominating corporate interest. This article is unusual in the environmental press only in that it embraces all three at once.
Complicit brutes, dumb brutes. I sit at my computer and imagine you, my reader. You have never seen a clearcut, or if you have, you were a tourist. Regardless of your analysis of the timber industry, you believe loggers are butchers, maybe even murderers.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying. Maybe your people are coal miners or oil drillers. Maybe you're a logger or fisherman. Or maybe, like me, you grew up among them. If so, you will understand my need to talk about complicity and stupidity, although our understandings may differ dramatically. Maybe you're intimately involved in Native American land right struggles: forced relocation at Big Mountain, fishing rights on the Columbia River, preservation of sacred ground in the Black Hills. If so, you will know white people are butchers and murderers. You may get lost in the jargon but understand the politics or vice versa, or you may understand both and wonder why I'm wasting paper. Whomever you are, let me tell you three stories.
1977. My family is building a big wooden house. This summer my father and I are framing the walls, putting the roof on, pounding 2x4s into place, and cutting beams to length. We get our lumber from Tucker's Mill, a one-family sawmill 20 miles north of us. Most of the other milis have closed permanently; the Siskiyou National Forest is nearly logged out. I love the lumber drops. Mr. Tucker comes driving up our logging road driveway in his flatbed truck loaded high with wood. I know the dimensions - 1x6, 2x4, 2x6, 2x12, 4x8 - by sight, some rough cut, others planed, the 2x4s and 2x6s stained red on both ends. The wood slides off the flatbed with a crash. After Mr. Tucker leaves, we cut the steel bands that hold the load together and begin to stack the lumber. My hands turn sticky and rough from the pockets of sap oozing from the fresh-cut wood.
Then one day we stop. We don't have the lumber we need. Dad grumbles about Mr. Tucker. We need the support beams - the biggest 4 inches thick by 16 inches wide by 24 feet long. They have to be free of heart center, sawed from the strongest part of the log, avoiding the central core. We wait for two weeks before Dad finally calls the mill to complain. Mr. Tucker explains he hasn't been able to find logs big enough or long enough to cut a 4x16, 24 feet long, free of heart center. A week later the beams arrive. Mr. Tucker has obviously found the logs he needed.
Unless you're a carpenter, house builder, architect, logger, mill or lumber yard worker, you probably don't know how big a 4x16 beam 24 feet long is or how big the log from which it comes has to be. The trees felled, bucked (delimbed and cut into sections), and milled to make the beams that supported our roof had to be gigantic Douglas fïrs, undoubtedly old growth cut from small stands of trees on privately-owned ranches. My father and I never questioned our need for beams this big. I never truly connected those beams to trees. This is complicity. Now stupidity.
1991. This is my first visit to Port Orford in four years. Three of us - my sister, a neighbor from up the river, and I- bask in the sun at Butler Bar, the river cold and green, the rocks we sit on warm, speckled gray and white. Ian tells us about the environmental battles that nis stepfather Jim has won in the last few years. Elk River is now classified a Wild and Scenic River, providing a certain level of protection to its spawning beds. Grassy Knob will remain a roadless area, protecting thousands of acres of old-growth forest. Both have been won though protracted struggle against U.S. Forest Service policy and practice.
I think about Jim, a timber cruiser turned environmentalist. A timber cruiser goes into an area targeted for clearcutting, looks at the lay of the land, estimates the board foot yield per acre and the costs of building roads, marks trees, and reports back to the Forest Service or the private timber company about feasibility and potential profit. Jim knows the hills well, a mountain man who believes in Bigfoot, a bird watcher who built his house with a chainsaw. He and his family live across the river from the salmon hatchery. To get to their house, they wade the river, take a canoe, or hope the gas-powered cable car is working. Not an easy way of life but one that certainly suits Jim. The spawning bed at Anvil Creek borders his land. I remember the winter drunk teenagers tried to snag spawning salmón from the creek, an illegal but common source of entertainment, equaled only by shooting seagulls at the local dump. Jim heard the ruckus and appeared with his shotgun, ready to shoot.
After that, snaggers left Anvil Creek alone. I ask Ian where Jim is this summer, thinking I'd like to see him. "Oh, in British Columbia, making good money that'll last all year,cruising old growth."lan explains, "He's made too much trouble here. The Forest Service won't give him contracts." The man who fights to save the Siskiyous and the Elk River watershed prepares the slopes in British Columbia for clearcutting.
Jim's work as an environmentalist is that of an insider, a logger whose relationship to trees and fish is complex. They are both resources to be used and beings to be respected and protected. The ecosystem of an old-growth forest is neither the untouchable, romanticized forest of many urban environmentalists nor is it the limitless raw material of North American corporate greed. For Jim and others like him, the woods provide sanctuary, home, and livelihood. What takes Jim to B.C.; why is he willing to cruise timber in any state, province, or country? The answer is simple: money, food on his table, gas in his truck, so he can be a hermit, a mountain man, and an environmentalist during the long rainy season.
Is Jim the dumb brute you expect a logger to be? Probably not, but you don't like the ambiguity. Or maybe you're feeling tricked. Did you expect a story about a working-class redneck, a f aller or choker setter, a bucker or truck driver, or maybe the man who pulls greenchain (puiling the fresh-cut lumber off the saw) at the mili? That's my third story, but these men are no more complicit than the 13 year-old who loved lumber and helped her father build a big wooden house, no more stupid than Jim.
1986. My mother teaches composition and literature at the community college in Coos Bay, a logging town that almost collapsed when Weyerhaeuser permanently closed its big mili. Every quarter she teaches out-of-work and injured loggers and mili workers. If these men had their druthers, they'd still be in the woods, but because of work-related disabilities - either permanent
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or temporary - or mill closings and the depletion of limber, they need to find other ways to put food on their tables. They have spent years working in the forests and milis. Some started as choker setters, working their way up the ladder to become fallers or foremen. The most dangerous and lowest paying job on a logging crew, a choker setter wraps chain around each log as it lies helter-skelter on the slope so it can be pulled up to the loading area. Others own their own logging trucks, know how to navigate the steepest, narrowest logging roads carrying tons of logs behind thera Still others have fed logs into the roar of the sawmill, pulled lumber out the other end. They know logs, trees, the lay of the land, chainsaws, and forklifts as well as urban folks know the criss-cross of streets in their neighborhoods. If you want to see a marbled murrelet, a bird - like the spotted owl - almost extinct because it's losing habitat to clearcut logging, ask one of them. They'll know where to look, even give you directions if you're lucky.
Some of these loggers and mili workers write about their work to complete assignments my mother gives them. She says some of their essays break her heart, essays written by men who love the woods and the steep hills of the Siskiyous, who feil and buck the trees, and know the tensión between their work and their love. They also know that the two aren't diametrically opposed. Their long days outside, their years of trudging up and down impossibly steep hills, chainsaws balanced over their shoulders, bolster their love. And their joy at the morning fog lifting off the trees, the sound of woodpeckers and gray squirrels bolster their willingness to do the dangerous, body-breaking work of logging. Other essays make my mother grind her teeth: pieces about conquest, the analogy between feiling a year-old Sitka spruce and raping a woman only thinly veiled. Trees are jobs; trees are endlessly renewable resources; trees are lumber and paper.
All these loggers and millworkers are fighting poverty, struggling to pay the rent, the mortgage, the medical bills on a paycheck that has vanished. There are no unions in the logging business. The timber corporations all have long histories of union-busting. The last time the mill workers tried to unionize at Weyerhaeuser's Coos Bay mill, the company threatened to pull out completely if organizing efforts didn't stop. The mill workers wouldn't back down, and Weyerhaeuser did in fact shut the mill down for months. In Coos Bay when people can't find timber or fishing jobs, they work the tourist season May through September and eam minimum wage. So these loggers and mill workers enroll at the community college and sit in my mother's classes, maybe hopeful but more likely consumed by anxiety.
You, my reader, maybe I am imagining you wrong. Rather than believing that loggers are murderers and that logging is rape pure and simple, maybe you place loggers on some sort of pedestal, as the quintessential exploited worker in a capitalist economy. Maybe you believe that logging is ugly but somehow romantic. But make no mistake: there is nothing romantic about logging. It is dangerous work, fraught with hazards. Mr. Rodgers, the father of my best friend in junior high and high school, lost his left arm to a sawmill. Jim Woodward, who lived upriver from us, could barely walk, his back broken in a logging accident years before. In addition to the catastrophic accidents, there is the routine hearing loss, the nerve damage caused by chainsaw vibration, the missing fingers. Nor are loggers romantic, larger than-life characters. Some of them hate my lesbian, socialist, feminist, tree-loving, fish-loving self, but their hatred isn't unique. They share it with many people in this country.
They are not brutes by virtue of being loggers. Or if they are, then so am I, so is Jim, and so are the journalists who write about the bumper stickers they find on loggers' pickups. Do these journalists ever look for bumper stickers on logging executives' sedans? Do they ever wonder why the sticker, "Save a logging exec, kill a spotted owl," doesn't exist? What story would they write if they stumbled across the bumper sticker I fondly imagine, "Save a logger, save the owls, kill a logging exec?"
Clearcut III: The End of the Line
I have lived long enough with my current politics, long enough away from the ordinariness of clearcuts, to believe clearcut logging is acri me. At the same time, I am still the girl who lived on the edge of a logged-over national forest and understand the anger behind "Save a logger, kill a spotted owl." Who is going to save the logger? Is this country - or more accurately white people - finally deciding after five centuries of cultural and environmental rampage across North America to save the spotted owl and fragments of its attendant ecosystem? If so, the whole country needs to be accountable for the people who will be unemployed, possibly homeless and hungry, because of that decision. To not take responsibility is to act as if loggers and logging communities are more complicit with environmental destruction than the rest of us.
In truth every one of us who is not poor benefits materially from the belief that we live in a country of endlessly renewable resources. We not only benefit, we perpetuate it. Most of us recognize, in this era of recycling, how we use paper in endless quantities: paper napkins, paper plates, paper towels, toilet paper, newspaper, paper and cardboard packaging, paper bags, xerox paper. But do we know the true cost of a sheet of paper, not the mere cents we pay at our local copy center or office supply store, but the real price? Would we be willing to pay 50 cents or a dollar a sheet? Think about the lumber from which our homes - if we have homes - were built. How many of us know where it came from? If our houses are new, were old houses torn down as they were built? Was the lumber reused or thrown in the dump? Are we prepared to never buy another new piece of wood furniture? If we use fireplaces or wood stoves, can we commit to never cutting another tree down for firewood, to only burning already downed wood? The point isn't to feel guilty but rather responsible,to recognize how of-control consumption creates the logic of and need for clearcutting. In order for trees and salmon to become truly renewable resources again, we will need to consume much less for a long time. The life-cycle of an old-growth forest is three hundred years. If we value old-growth forests and the life they give the planet, we will have to leave the Siskiyous and other logged-over areas alone for at least three centuries, probably much longer.
Of course this analysis is far too simple. It ignores capitalism and free market trade. At the expense of the environment, loggers, and mili workers, Weyerhaeuser and the other big timber corporations have made billions of dollars of profit in the last decades. Today they are making big money by cutting old-growth trees as fast as they can and exporting the unprocessed logs to Japan. Their profits are not only reaped off of private land owned by the timber companies but also off of public land, bidded out by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Who is complicit and how? The net reaches far and wide, and many of us want to duck.
Part of the answer lies inside capitalism, that economic system we've been brainwashed to accept as inevitable, a system that insists upon profit as the supreme value. Working within this framework, logging executives and stock holders in the timber industry are only doing what capitalism expects when they destroy the last of the old growth forest to make a buck. Still to blame the system without also holding individuals accountable is to leave the system untouched. The question of complicity follows twin paths, one tracking the course of capitalism and the other tracking the people who sustain and benefit the most from capitalism. To end environmental destruction, we have to acknowledge who becomes rich and who pays the price for the destruction. And then we must make the accrual of wealth based upon that destruction impossible. In short we need to dismantle capitalism and replace it with an economic system which doesn't place profit ahead of people and the planet.
Blame is easier. Often when middle-class urban environmentalists start talking about the spotted owl and environmental destruction, loggers get blamed. Like most working-class people doing the dirty work - whether it be oil drilling or coal mining or logging - loggers are easy, accessible symbols. In contrast logging execuüves, like and upper-class corporate America in general, spend much time, energy, and money on being more slippery and less accessible. Middle-class activists so easily forget about the bosses, the rich white men in suits who run the world, when they face the workers, the working-class men in caulk boots and flannel shirts who run the chainsaws.
Loggers' livelihoods are threatened. Many environmentalists skillfully use statistics to argue that overlogging and mechanization dramatically reduced the number of timber jobs ten to fifteen years ago. Concurrently they argue that the recent legislation to protect the spotted owl and fragments of old growth forest won't really affect the availability of timber jobs. But the bottom line is that loggers' livelihoods are in truth being threatened. Fifteen or twenty years ago when the jobs in Port Orford dried up, loggers and mili workers moved to Coquille, Bandon, Myrtle Point, and Coos Bay and found other logging and milljobs.Now when timber jobs dry up in the few towns that still have meager timber economies, there is nowhere to migrate. The people most intimately affected - those running the chainsaws and forklifts - see the end of the line, and so up go the bumper stickers, "Save a logger, kill a spotted owl." Just as loggers are easy, accessible symbols for the anger of middle-class urban environmentalists, so is the spotted owl an easy target for the unemployed or soon-to-be unemployed logger.
At stake are small, rickety logging towns like Port Orford. Cars sit in every third front yard, waiting for new spark plugs, an oil change, or a rebuilt engine. The trees on Main Street, mostly scrubby shore pine, grow leaning north.shaped by the southerly storms that beat the town during the rainy season. The buildings all need new paint jobs. Loose signs bang in the wind. At stake is the fabric of a rural white working-class culture. I never carried a house key; we simply didn't lockour house. Noone at the bank ever asked me for identification; all the tellers knew me by name. It is a culture that believes in self sufficiency and depends on family - big extended families not necessarily created in the mold of the Religious Right. A culture that has a huge amount of tolerance for local eccentricity and yet is extremely racist. A culture that doesn't know the meaning of anonymity.
I remember in second grade when the plywood mill closed for the first time, half my class moved out of town. Those families simply migrated to Bandon, where they found similar work. Fifteen years ago when a salmon season was tight, commercial fishermen knew the next season would more than make up for it. Today there are no logging jobs in Port Orford and no logging jobs in Bandon or anyplace else in southwest Oregon. Today salmon don't run in the hundreds of thousands, and a small and flourishing drug trade, not the fishing fleet, keeps the cannery open.
Today Port Orford is a tourist town, a retirement town, and a hippie artist town, barely hanging on. To thrive in its new makeover, Port Orford would need to be fairly accessible to an urban area, have pleasant warm beaches, and attract rich people ready to spend their money. In reality it's a remote backwoods town that people pass through on their way north up Highway 101, not a place where the rich come to vacation and buy funky art. It's a town with wild, rugged, chilly beaches that tourists admire briefly from their cars, not a resort teeming with people dressed for the sand and sun. lts biggest employer is the public school district. The loggers and mill workers have left, gone back to school, or make a living by piecing together odd jobs, brush picking (collecting ferns by the pound to sell to florists in the city), and welfare. The fishermen have left, lost their boats and gone bankrupt,work the drug trade, or struggle by, catching dungeness crab, red snapper, and ling cod. Schoolteachers, ranchers who own land free and clear, and people who retired to southwest Oregon seem relatively unaffected. In short Port Orford is dying and has been for a long time.
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This story of slow death and abandonment has repeated itself in many Northwest logging and fishing towns, and the alternatives offered these towns are disgusting. In July, 1994, I heard two reports on National Public Radio about dying logging towns, one about Aberdeen, Washington, and the other about Weed and Crescent City, both in northern California. In Aberdeen the reporter went to the construction site of a Walmart store, where the reporter's guide went on and on about how this site represented the revitalization of town. In Weed the reporter explored local reactions to the possibility of building a maximum security prison nearby . The California state government specifically pushes the placement of new prisons in towns with failing economies as a way of creating new jobs. After the reporter had toured Weed, he traveled to Crescent City, a coastal logging and fishing town where one prison has already been built and a second one has been proposed. Yes, Walmarts exist across the country. And yes, with the current overcrowding of prisons, the astounding rates of imprisonment, and the "three strikes and you're out" legislation, the government will build more prisons. But Walmart and maximum security prisons as solutions - even partial ones- to the economic crises in fishing and logging towns? I don't think so.
Rather than talking about Walmarts and prisons, we should be considering forest and watershed restoration projects, alternative sources of paper and ways of utilizing existing paper and lumber milis, truly sustainable logging using techniques that don't destroy entire ecosystems, and so on. I don't know how the working-class culture I grew up in will negotiate the changes that must happen in order to save the old-growth forests, but after watching Port Orford struggle for twenty years, I do know there isn't one simple answer.
In the meantime, I have a modest proposal. I suggest that environmentalists turn their attention to timber companies and logging executives. Radical, direct-action activists: go plan violent, confrontational blockades of Weyerhaeuser' s corporate offices. Find out where the CEO lives. Pickethis house. Heat nis life up. Disrupt board meetings. Monkey wrench logging execs' cars. Among the demands: all the profits made off of old-growth trees in the last century be returned to a coalition of logging towns. Passionate, committed lobbyists: spearhead legislation that makes exporüng logs a crime, that outlaws making a profit off public land and old-growth forest. Work the electoral system Find the working class politicians-to-be who understand environmental destruction and rural working-class culture, and get them elected. Logging towns: use the blood money from Weyerhaeuser and its ilk to figure out what's next. As citizens of the most powerful imperialist, resource-greedy nation in the world, as white people, as consumers who have forgotten the meaning of sustainable yield, are we now serious about changing our relationship to the planet and its resources? Are we changing our attitudes toward trees, fish, water, and land? Will we change our assumptions about profit made at the expense of the environment? If so, we need to be equally serious about what happens to the people and towns that arose from the old belief system. Towns like Port Orford have their history rooted in Üie European- American westward conquest of the U.S. For a long time even the land was perceived of as an endless resource, was used as an endless resource. White people killed millions of Native people - are still killing them today - to claim ownership of this piece of the planet. White men came to the Northwest greedy for resources, looking for good farm land, gold - the gold rush being one of the major resource frenzies of the 19th century- and timber. Additionally they came to convert Native people to christianity. Rich industrialists latched onto the market for timber, setting up logging camps that were worked by the same men who had come looking for gold and land. Small to was grew up around the logging camps, around the ports and rivers used to transport the logs, around the missions and army outposts. They were towns built upon a certain world view about resources, a certain unquestioned greed, a certain racism, a certain set of convictions about christianity. They wouldn't exist if capitalism hadn't created a gold frenzy, if wood hadn't been in great demand and hugely profitable, if trees hadn't been conceived of as endless raw material. And today these towas still rest upon the same beliefs. If we are serious about protecting the remaining old-growth forests, about saving the spotted owl from extinction; the beliefs, policies, and practices of the U.S. have to change. We have to be accountable for the towns and people who will be shaken to their roots by these changes.
If we are not serious, then lo put the spotted owl on the Endangered Species list and protect, at least in the short-term, a mere fraction of old-growth forest, is to in truth pit loggers against the spotted owl. It is to apply a band-aid to a mortal wound. I don' t believe that progressive people in this country truly want a bandaid. I know that I - the girl who grew up in the Siskiyou National Forest, the writer who now lives on the edge of corn country, the activist of multiple loyalties - I want more, much more, than a band-aid.
I find myself reaching toward a bigger context. The crisis of trees and fish in the Northwest is only one example of a global environmental crisis. It is a crisis about resources, the use and abuse of the environment for profit, and our collective and individual relationships to the planet; The connections between coal mining, oil drilling, uranium mining, clearcutting, agribusiness, whale killing, and so on are vital. The planet is not a playground for our greed but a being with whom we have a complex relationship. We must question our use not only of paper, lumber, and salmón meat, but alsö of cars, non-renewable fuels, asphalt, concrete, bombs, and and hormone-laden food to name a few in a seemingly endless list. I am not advocating a return to hunting and gathering, a dismantling of the urban technological world. But I do know that saving old-growth forests in the Northwest is far more complicated and revolutionary than putting the spotted owl on the Endangered Species list. I ache for those complicated and revolutionary solutions in the hills and towns, among the trees I still call home.