THE SACK OF THE WOODSTHE SACK OF THE WOODS
The very fact that I wrote the letter shows my callowness when I came here. I must have thought they were honorable men, these timber bosses. The loggers I knew were not only honorable but likable. Tutored at two forestry schools in the romance of the early logging days and the righteousness of modern industrial sustained-yield forestry and determined not to let my environmentalist bias get in the way of good relations with my neighbors, I somehow expected more of the company. There is that in goodwill that expects reciprocity. When it doesn’t come, when you extend your hand and get kicked in the face—that’s when you wonder.
The Timbered Tor stood across the valley from Swede Park. It was just a second-growth hillock at the base of a bigger Willapa Hill. The south bound of the Gray’s River valley is a broad, flat-topped, old river terrace backed by emergent lumps of old ocean floor. The part to the west had been clearcut in the mid-seventies and stood mostly denuded and brown. The part to the east had been left for longer and never sprayed, so now it formed an almost New England-like mosaic of hardwoods and softwoods, pleasing to the eye. And between these lay the Timbered Tor—only ten or fifteen acres or so but the largest tract of tall, old, second-growth Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, and western hemlock visible from the valley floor—the centerpiece of the scene.
Fresh from England where the range of topographic terms equals that of the playfield of proper names, I called the logged-off mountain the Grim Fell (for it was very grim); the wooded, unmanaged hill already had a good name, Elk Mountain; and the tall-tree knoll in between became the Timbered Tor. A fell, in British geography, is a barren hill; a tor is a jutting hill.
From Swede Park, the Timbered Tor dominated the view along with the covered bridge, the river itself, and the water meadows. Through my window each morning I watched the mists disperse among the green-black ragged tops of the trees upon the tump of the Timbered Tor. I came to love those trees more and more. In a land where trees fall daily, one can’t afford to fall in love with any particular stand. But I did and began to worry about the fate of this beautiful grove. The more time I spent watching them, walking among them, studying their community, the more I wanted these trees to stand and worried that they might not. My neighbor Veryl Chamberlain used to own the land on which they stood, but he told me that Crown Zellerbach had bought it. He didn’t know the company’s plans.
So one day, unable to sit by and enjoy the Timbered Tor without some word of its future, I wrote the letter.
19 October 1979
District Manager
Crown Zellerbach Corporation
Cathlamet, wa 98612
Dear Sir:
I am a local resident with an interest in a parcel of land which I understand belongs to Crown Z. I would very much appreciate your taking time to respond to my query.
The land I speak of is a forested stand, second- or maybe third-growth, situated in the sw quarter of Section 17, T10N R7W. This is just opposite (south) of the historic covered bridge in Gray’s River. It is the only mature stand of timber in its vicinity, and I would guess the stand occupies no more than twenty acres. I believe this land was purchased relatively recently by the company. I have heard that it could be logged off soon.
My interest in this parcel comes from two or three different angles. First, my wife and I live directly opposite the timbered hill, and it makes up an important part of our view. These are the only big trees visible in the same view as the covered bridge, the hills around there having been logged off recently. Second, I am a writer and a biologist, and I am interested in doing some long-term research on the hill. I checked it out when we arrived here, not knowing to whom it belonged, and found that it is quite rich in wildlife and plant life. I don’t know whether anything rare or unusual lives there, but it is certainly a rich site, the best in our vicinity by far, as most of the rest is under intensive management. My wife is an artist and she does wildflower prints, often finding her material on the land in question. As I mentioned, I would very much like to be able to carry out long-term research and writing on the natural history of that forest.
Obviously, we would like to see the area set aside from logging. We appreciate the vital role of the timber industry in this area and we certainly don’t want to impede that. But this is a very small stand, and I wonder if it is necessary that it be cut. I would be interested in talking about options for this tract, which might involve purchase by myself or a conservation group, or donation of a conservation easement on the land to a nonprofit group such as The Nature Conservancy. There could be significant tax gains and public-relations advantages for Crown in such a case. I have worked in this area of private land conservation and I would be very happy to have an opportunity to talk with you or any of your colleagues about the possibilities.
In any case, I would appreciate being informed as to whether you have scheduled timber operations for this site, and if so, whether they might be delayed long enough for us to mutually explore any alternatives.
Please feel free to copy my letter to any other Crown people who might be interested or willing to look into this matter with you. I will look forward to your reply, when convenient.
I received no reply. After a few months I decided I never would, that such a tiny parcel of land couldn’t interest the corporate giant anyway. And I proceeded to try to forget about it. Then one morning I awoke to the sound of howling chain saws, coming from right across the valley.
“They’re cutting the Timbered Tor!” I exclaimed without looking as I jackknifed upright in bed. I was right: scanning the far side of the valley, mistless that day, I could see the loggers moving antlike among the hundred-foot trees they were about to fell. I could see the orange trucks, and the bulldozer scratching a road diagonally across the slope. I could hear the sharp, irritating hoots of the signal whistle. The big trees began to tumble.
It only took a few days for them to finish it off. They left nothing, even took some trees right on the unclear border with the neighbor’s land. Mud and sawdust, slivers and stumps, remained where the beloved wildflower wood had stood.
At first, bitter at the fact and resentful of the company’s failure to even discuss it beforehand, I consigned it to one of the mounting acts of philistinism one encounters in the country; acts, I thought, that cumulatively would one day cause me to avert my eyes and go. How could they trash that fine little forest for the few trees it held, I wondered, without even discussing the matter? But I noticed that many handkerchief patches of woods were going, as Crown liquidated their mature holdings prior to their rumored pullout: cut and get out, just as in the bad old days. It appeared that it was quick profit, and quick profit alone, that motivated the managers.
But it was worse than that. When I told the tale later to a friend who knows the woods in ways I never will, he laughed, with a disgusted snort. I’m not sure whether his contempt was aimed at me or the company as he said, “Why, you just performed a timber cruise for them—they oughtta pay you for that! They probably never woulda noticed that little patch of logs if you hadn’t rubbed their noses in it.”
I flushed as the likely reality dawned on me: I had fingered the Timbered Tor. I might as well have let the contract on the cutting and called for bids in the Eagle. Loggers have a term for the likes of me: they call us tree huggers. True, I had hugged some of those old firs and hemlocks; but now I’d given them the Judas kiss. I saw to the logging of the trees I loved.
Of course, I cooked in chagrin and self-recrimination over this for a long time. Every time I looked out at the raw, miniature clearcut, the view served as a reproach instead of the balm it had been. I still regret my impatient advance, although I realize that they might have cut the trees at some point anyway. But most of all I marvel at my own ignorance: I really thought they would answer that letter.
Not long after the felling of the Timbered Tor came the poisoning of the Grim Fell. It is common practice in the Pacific Northwest for logged-over lands to be sprayed from the air with herbicides designed to prevent the regrowth of alder and other hardwoods and brush. This permits the desired conifers to take over faster. The use of herbicides on public land has received a great deal of attention in recent years due to well-established health risks. Court cases brought in Oregon resulted in the banning of the dioxin-bearing chemical 2,4,5-T, related to Agent Orange, on both public and private forestlands. Another decision placed a moratorium on the use of the related chemical 2,4-D on the public domain until a proper environmental impact study could be conducted.
In another fit of naïveté, I thought these actions might cause the private companies to think twice about spraying their lands. Not a bit of it. By their own admission in public statements to the press and to anyone who asked, they intended to continue using 2,4-D to suppress alder and scrub on their timberlands. And so they did. On May 10, 1983, a helicopter sprayed the alders on the Grim Fell, back and forth, for a long time. What an awful time to spray, I thought, just when the alders and shrubs would be full of birds’ nests. I watched ruefully as the deathcopter blurted its venom over the greening scene.
More philistinism. I tried to console myself with the words of E. B. White in defense of his imperfect but beloved Northeast. In reply to Bernard De Voto’s description of Highway 1 from New York to Maine as a “slum,” White wrote: “Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness.” I tried to apply White’s logic. But with the razing of barns, vandalism on the covered bridge, the butchering of K-M Mountain and the Timbered Tor, and now the spraying of the river terrace hills, I wondered how much a sense of belonging could be worth. Would familiarity soften these repeated blows?
Those episodes, though painful, were instructive. To live here, one must understand something of the way the woods work—and I mean economically, not ecologically. For the great majority of the small number of people here, the woods have meant money: wages for workers, profits for bosses, and coins on the counters of the shops and taverns; kids for the schools, taxes for the roads, and customers for the utilities. That’s the way it’s been since the felling of the giants. Farming and fishing have filled in around the edges and sometimes taken over here and there for a while, but logging has been the economic mainstay of most of western Washington and Oregon since soon after they were settled. Understanding this, one can hardly begrudge the taking down of trees, and in that context my concern over the Timbered Tor may seem petty and unrealistic. It’s a logging world, and you like it or lump it.
To a point. But it turns out there is more to it than that. My complaint has to do with the way this particular episode was carried out and with the way a lot of logging has been carried out from the start. It is only starting to come home now that more and more logging-dependent people are lumping it instead of liking it. And in that respect, the sack of the Timbered Tor and the sack of the woods are just mini- and jumbo-sized versions of the same sad tale.
I almost despaired of trying to write this essay. The woods of Willapa have been ravaged, along with its soils, rivers, and communities. It’s a simple tale in many ways—great trees gone, boomtowns busted, fragments of forests struggling toward a kind of recovery, only to be logged again, too much, too fast. But the telling of it cannot be done simply. It carries too much satisfaction and pain, injury and age; it holds too many promises and lies; it weighs with too much labor and hope, profit and loss, heroism and hypocrisy.
In the end, it’s just people and trees, money and time. And it’s living with what we have wrought, coping with how the ax has fallen. But no writing of it can tell the whole tale. All I can do is to give my view, which will no doubt differ from the telling others might give it.
This is a land of logging. The fact lives with us, supports many of us. We live with logging, by logging; many live for logging. It won’t go away (even though it seems to be trying hard to do so at the moment). It is in the nature of the place, and to wish otherwise is as to wish the rain would go away: it won’t happen here, not soon.
Logging was not the initial raison d’être of the arrivers. The immigrants came, mostly from Scandinavia or the Midwest, for cheap or free farmland and fish. To get to the soil they had to clear the massive forests that stood in the way. At first the big trees were seen chiefly as an obstacle to the rich agriculture everyone presumed would grow up in their wake. Then someone figured out that, since the work had to be done anyway, and since the farms often turned out to be stumpy or swampy, might it not be better to cut the forests systematically for timber and export it to San Francisco and other cities where it was needed for building? So this was done.
There ensued a frantic period of heroic logging, powered by mules, oxen, draft horses, steam donkeys, and men. Railroads entered and laced the hills with hundreds of miles of iron, ties, and trestles. Camps went up and the woods came down. The timber companies acquired vast holdings from the railroads, land grants, fake or abandoned homesteads, and an array of other deals. Boosters broadcast their pathetic hopes of the new cosmopolis as broad backs bent under the broadax, the misery whip, and the rain. And a lot of money was made, though not usually by the men who cut the trees.
This era, its wonders and spectacles, toil and spoils, feats and folly, has been amply documented in works such as Murray Morgan’s Last Wilderness and Edwin van Syckle’s They Tried to Cut It All. I’ve neither the knowledge nor the appetite to retell the true tall tales of that time. You’ve seen the pictures—twenty men in soiled long johns and drooping mustaches, or twenty-five women and girls in frilly dresses and hats, all perched in the slabcut of a huge Douglas-fir. You marvel at the spectacle and romance at the same time you weep for the giant trees.
Local heroes emerged. In fact, the only son of Willapa to be named to the Washington Centennial Hall of Honor was a logger: Oscar Wirkkala, a Finn who logged out of Deep River, was named to the elite list of one hundred luminaries for his development of equipment that led to aerial logging: a new way to take the trees. You might have known it would be a man from Wahkiakum who would be feted as a great logger.
There certainly was romance to the old logging days, and humor, heroic ambitions, and endeavors, as well as much pain, misery, and death. But there was also profit: large profits flowed from the bodies of the felled behemoths into the ledgers of the Weyerhaeusers, the Bloedels, the Simpsons, and their ilk. New behemoths grew in the place of the trees or, rather, in corporate buildings that scraped the sky where trees used to tickle the low clouds.
Meanwhile, the great old-growth timber proved exhaustible, a fact few were prepared to admit, believe, or even imagine. There were those, however, who looked into the cellulose ball and came away mindful of the future: a future where the fiber river ran dry when the timber bounty we’d taken for granted ran out like matches from a broken box.
As long ago as 1909, at a conference of governors in the White House, Frank H. Lamb of the Washington State Forest Commission wrote: “Western Washington has the heaviest and most uniform stand of timber in the world. It is primarily a forest-growing region; climate, soil and precipitation all are conducive to forest growth, but generally unfavorable to agriculture. . . . Originally we had about 300 billion board feet of standing timber in the State; 50 billion feet has been lumbered, about the same burned, leaving us about 200 billion feet remaining.”
Lamb questioned even then the propriety of the process. “The homesteader who makes two spears of grass grow where one grew before is entitled to encouragement to the extent of free land,” he wrote, “but under our land laws the lottery-like disposition of our resources has only bred a species of subsidy-seeking, graft-encouraging, perjury-promoting public spirit that has pervaded every department of our public life.”
Lamb went on: “I hope that I have proven that the days [of our virgin forests] are numbered, that the hour glass is inverted. As surely as the grains of sand will seek the lower level, so certainly is the day coming when these forests, now the wonder and admiration of the world, the Nation’s last reserve stock of timber, will be but a memory of the past; when the reverberating sound of the wielded axe and the roar of logging engines will cease to waken the once sylvan solitudes; when the smokestacks of a thousand mills, their days of usefulness past, their machinery gone to ruin, their thousands of busy laborers forced to other fields, will stand desolately forlorn, grim monuments of a past commercial era and a perpetual testimony to the heedless disregard for nature’s treasures on the part of her servants.”
The pioneers were not inclined to see themselves as nature’s servants; quite the other way around. Yet the fact that Lamb would be proved right (as he largely has been) did not keep a few farsighted decision-makers from trying to head off the hourglass at the pass. Their results have been about as mixed as that metaphor. National forests and parks were created in an effort to save something back from the timber barons. John Muir and Gifford Pinchot clashed ideologically over given issues of conservation, yet their sparks led to national parks as well as national forests—places where the saws were to be stilled or slowed, respectively. Teddy Roosevelt created the basis for Olympic National Park and Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded it, ensuring that something of the grand lowland rain forests of the maritime Northwest would be saved. If not for those moves, our forest heritage would be gone today. None of this occurred in Willapa. One of the greatest forests on the grizzled face of the earth, and no national forest or other reserve came to its rescue. A bit of state forest school trust land was designated here, the only appreciable public lands in the entire Washington Coast Range south of the Olympics: but under the dictate of state law, the Department of Natural Resources was charged with producing the maximum income from state-owned forestlands. This meant that the DNR administrators were forced to become timber barons in their own right, stripping state forests in such a way as to maximize profits if not long-term prospects on behalf of the people of Washington. Virtually all the rest of the forested uplands came into the ownership of Crown Zellerbach, Weyerhaeuser, Longview Fibre, and a very few other large companies.
As the timber giants were amalgamating their properties, an ideology of exploitation arose to justify their every action. As far back as 1923, apologists could be found for the supercutters. In that year, in Basic Industries of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington business-school dean Howard T. Lewis wrote this odd piece of circular reasoning: “The Pacific Coast region needs a prosperous lumber industry and abundant forests. Without a sufficient lumber industry the new timber crops that can be raised on the non-agricultural and non-grazing lands will have no value, and without the raw materials produced by continuous wood crops we can have no lumber industry of importance to the future.” Come again?
Lewis went on, “This does not mean that a curtailment in the production of lumber to husband the supply would be a good thing. On the contrary we should develop our lumber markets to the fullest extent so that the old virgin forests . . . may be replaced by vigorous young stands. If this old timber were gradually removed and the new growth established the land would again become increasingly productive. The problem can only be met by a proper encouragement of the use of wood and by immediate provision for reforestation. When it is known that the present stand of timber may be exhausted before a new crop of merchantable timber can be produced, the problem becomes particularly urgent.”
At least Lewis recognized that the forests were exhaustible. Armed with convoluted rationalizations such as this, the axmen went to work. Yet reforestation did not match the cut; and the supply was certainly not husbanded. Nor could one really have expected anything different in the region, without any federal or state restraints whatever: after all, logs were life in Willapa.
And so the trees were cut. Of the old growth, next to nothing remained. And in many places, such as the Timbered Tor, a second or even third harvest has been taken. This has sustained, until recently, the towns and villages that arose from or adapted to servicing and housing the loggers and to moving and milling the wood they cut. As agriculture declined in the region, the people came to depend more and more on the economy generated by the logging industry.
But now the second growth is largely gone too, what’s worth cutting. A recent study in forest trends shows that nearly all of the standing softwood timber in the Cathlamet district belongs to age classes between zero and eighty years. In fact, throughout the region, most of the trees are well under thirty years of age. Such sticks can go for chips but they don’t make sawlogs. Nor can they support much of a local economy, especially since the wood-products industry is nearly moribund today.
So the wood-and-paper products corporations are pulling out, but when they’ve been the self-imposed only show in town for so long, it’s difficult to back out unnoticed. As they go, the timber towns are hurting—really hurting. Why? If the trees came back for a second cut, why not a third? Along with other putative forest reforms came “sustained-yield logging” and “tree farming”—what has become of those admirable practices? Were they ever, indeed, put into practice, or were they just good ideas?
Here’s where the story gets complicated. For in addition to the debate over how to manage forestland for long-term benefits and who’s to blame for the timber turndown, there comes this inescapable fact: the land has been damaged along the way. Perhaps what follows should properly be accompanied by voluminous two-sided testimony, numerous citations, and statistics to back my assertions, as well as analyses of all the viewpoints. But this is no symposium. In fact, treatises on the subject exist, and they tend to back me up. Or one may consult several excellent books documenting the topic, among them Clearcut: The Deforestation of America by the propitiously named Nancy Wood (Sierra Club, 1971). Just as aptly named, syndicated columnist Steve Forrester has written penetrating columns on the ins and outs of the timber industry’s malaise. Or read The Forest Killers by Jack Shepherd (Weybright and Tally, 1975). They’ll give you the numbers. I am not so much concerned with statistics as with intense personal experience.
Nor do I pretend impartiality. In spite of two advanced degrees in forestry, I have my bias, revealed in the title of this chapter. All I can do is stick to it, ride it down, defend it, and follow it through. My perceptions and observations make up the meat of my story, and Mr. Weyerhaeuser can fire his figures in defensive volley if he cares to. All I know is what I read in the woods that have become newspaper. Or to put it another way, what I know is what I see—and I see the signs of the sack of the woods.
After the first cut, much of the land lay burned over and barren through the Depression. When a lot of it was sold for taxes, the companies were able to consolidate their holdings still further. Honest efforts were made to bring it back, on the part of foresters and nature. Erosion and soil compaction had not been so great with the oxen and the donkey sleds, not to mention the mileage of road building. Recovery happened fairly fast in many watersheds, at least in basic terms and on shallower slopes. The complexity of the primeval forest could not come back quickly, but in forty or fifty years trees stood tall again over many of the former stump fields. And, as planned, the loggers then moved in again.
Fair enough. Trees as a crop. We’ll buy it. What went wrong? This time, no oxen, no railroads. Giant trucks. D-9 Caterpillar tractors. Loaders. Skidders. Bulldozers to scrape out the roads for the rest to ride on. An arsenal of ponderous toys with which to play pick-up-sticks in the forest. Sure, they were economical, and you can’t stay progress on the logging side. But these new machines required tens of thousands of miles of new logging roads and spurs and platforms, and when they got there, they mashed down the already-poor lateritic soils into a hard, red glaze or exposed them in thousands of acres of crumbly cuts. In these roadcuts the loose, pebbly stuff rolled and eroded downward, leaving an arid, unstable slope unsuitable for most plants; the most adventive European weeds might grow here, along with horsetails, club mosses, the tough evergreen violets, and lower plants such as rocks invite: certainly not forests.
Meanwhile, the managed forests—the intensive forest—the high-yield forest—the forest people—the tree-growing people—the tree farms proceeded apace. What it meant was steep-slope, mechanized clearcut logging, followed by obnoxious slash-burning, followed by some replanting either by helicopter seeding, ground-level planting, or chance together with aerial spraying of herbicides that prevented the regrowth of nitrogen-fixing but competing alders and brush, fertilization to try to replace what’s been lost, and (in theory) the creation of an even-aged, single-species stand of (preferably) Douglas-fir or (in Willapa) western hemlock: a boring, unstable, artificial monoculture.
All of this is justified by one or a thousand studies. Clear-cutting is deemed necessary to the reforestation of shade-intolerant Douglas-fir. Herbiciding is necessary, so they say, to create an economic density of trees (which must, nonetheless, be thinned later). The bears and ungulates must be heavily hunted to prevent their depredations on the young trees. It’s all in the book. The many roads and spurs are required for economic access. And as I am told at county planning sessions when I raise the issue of erosion, “There isn’t any erosion in these hills—the companies are doing a good job up there.”
In fact, all I have to do is ask them—they’ll tell me. In a publication entitled The Environment: A Crown Zellerbach Commitment, I read that “the company has developed a series of environmental standards for its woods operations to protect soil cover and watersheds and provide the conditions for the earliest possible regeneration of the forest.” Au contraire—the way I see it, what Crown makes hereabouts is growth-resistant laterites, ipso facto. When I take visitors through Crown lands in Wahkiakum County, they sometimes ask me to stop—they feel the need to vomit. The Environment: A Commitment? I’m more inured to the sights, but that title makes me ill as well.
That particular publication is absolutely typical of the gaping gulf—the yawning universe—between nearly all timber corporation public-relations material and the reality I see on the ground. The apparent hypocrisy of the industry at corporate levels shows itself nowhere better than in the glossy fairy tales it gives out to schools, Granges, Rotary, anyone who will take it, to present its misleading view of the situation in the forest.
I, like most people, have been exposed to this misleading flummery for most of my life. Lately I’ve been collecting it, just for fun. In my file I find, in addition to the above-mentioned piece of Crown apocrypha, a beautifully designed Georgia Pacific booklet entitled To Grow a Tree. It tells me that “wildlife abounds” on their leavings, and that logging leaves “little if any erosion.” The document carries a redwood branch-and-cone motif embossed in its Key-lime cover. It was produced shortly after GP logged redwoods around the clock in critical areas in an apparent attempt to sabotage the proposed Redwoods National Park. In the process, they felled the only tree ever known to top four hundred feet in height. The booklet ends with a litany of the tree species of America—just a straight list—as if not God, not Evolution, not Pan, but Georgia Pacific were responsible for their existence.
In a packet from the American Forest Institute I find a booklet entitled It’s a Tree Country, which paints as pretty a picture as you could want of logging. “Man and Nature Work to Assure Tree Crops,” reads the cant. Note the priority. The National Forest Products Association makes its entry with a brochure named The Clearcutting Issue. It cites all the tired reasons for relieving a stand of all its trees, dismissing the research-supported shelterbelt method as inconsequential. It informs us that clearcutting is nature’s way; that the forest manager’s greatest interest is to protect the soil; and that some clearcuts look “more ‘virgin’ than a virgin forest.” I need not comment on that. How dumb, really, do they think we are?
Well, I guess we are dumb. In fact, in high school I was even dumber than when I wrote that letter to Crown. So dumb that I believed the Weyerhaeuser cartoons that have since become my favorites for their sheer gall. In those days I pinned the PR on my wall as inspiration for my planned career in forestry. We live and learn.
A pre-zip-code, pre-video Weyerhaeuser flyer from my file advertises the film Tomorrow’s Trees as “a cinematic achievement” and “one of the most thrilling motion pictures imaginable.” Subtle. (Intriguingly, the film is twice recommended as suitable for adult groups; perhaps “wildlife of the forest in its natural habitat” and “the towering majesty of nature at its best” are not what they seem!)
The accompanying pictures show a bear cub, watched over by its mother, the two of them surprisingly having survived the bear hunters Weyerhaeuser employed at the time, sniffing a precocious flower in the snow, snug within a tidy clearcut where the snag in which they’d hibernated was somehow spared. I can just hear the music and the narration of the film. The unsuspecting viewer would naturally elevate Mr. Weyerhaeuser to his pantheon of forest gods, placing him right up there with Robin Hood and Paul Bunyan. Somehow I doubt that the rest of the rustic deities would have him.
The surrealism of the old Weyerhaeuser style, I am forced to report, has not exactly been sacrificed to the whole truth in their modern offerings either. The 1983 company calendar shows all the sights we are likely to encounter in the “high-yield forest”: goldfinches basking on a blooming rhododendron; prancing striped skunks, carefree in the sylvan setting of the clearcut; a young bear flipping a trout out of a stream in view of landscaped green clearcuts, beside a startled logger (he should be startled—knowing that company policy remains antibear to this day); a doe and fawns, peacefully drinking from a stream beneath a star much like that of Bethlehem (the month is December), which shines its approbation down upon the managed forest and its blessed dwellers; four quizzical otters, a family of juncoes, and a bunny rabbit all benignly regarding the beholder from a streamside in a mature forest (this one telling, perhaps ironically, more than it intends: for I can read in the otters’ expressions, “What does that orange flagging all over the place mean?”); mountain goats on high surveying with obvious satisfaction the timbered land below; and a bald eagle feeding young on a nest above a landscape of little clear-cuts—never mind that the companies fight tooth and talon against practically every snag and eagle-nest buffer sought by the wildlife authorities on behalf of this endangered species.
It goes on: raccoons, fat from the fruits of the tree farm, play with tiger swallowtails, having nothing better to do, as ranks of perfect young firs grow up over lawnlike grass among abundant saved snags. (I suppose I should be grateful to see butterflies included in paradise, but tiger swallowtails, I curmudgeonly note, assiduously avoid both clearcuts and coniferous monocultures.) These pretty pictures bear no relation to reality.
My favorite Weyerhaeuser pinup shows a big mamma puma recumbent on a broad rock ledge. Two green-eyed, spotty baby cougars tussle over her broad paw, while a third peers coyly from her shadow. A hawk sails by and the mother mountain lion shares eye contact with the raptor. Her expression can only be described as a beatific smile. She and the hawk must be sharing benevolent thoughts (we are to infer) about the charmed land in which they live, the joys of motherhood, the sweet life of the wilds (when slightly tamed), and the benevolence of their landlords. From the small, gentle-slope clearcuts in the background, we can tell that this is the “high-yield forest.” From the contented-cow look on the pretty kitty, we can also tell that the tree farm is a great place for wildlife to live the good life. I wonder if the wildlife has been informed of this?
These classic ads make me want to create my own calendar for the company. I would use stark photographs from the grim depths of the Willapa Hills and captions such as this from David Wagoner’s poem “The Lesson”: “. . . a familiar forest/Clear-cut and left for dead/By sawtoothed Weyerhaeuser.” But Wagoner’s forest elegies I found on a remainder table in a city bookstore, while the Weyerhaeuser publications—which I see as fairytale forestry—go out in the millions of copies annually. That people prefer the comforting pap of slick PR to the disturbing poetry of reality would seem to be the lesson.
If Weyerhaeuser has remained as sophomoric as ever in its appeals to the public (probably finding such an approach effective), other companies have grown quite sophisticated. Boise Cascade (only modestly represented in Willapa) has been running ads recently showing the forester as wizard—conjuring trees and tree products out of nothing at all, to the astonished delight of children who, thereto, had wondered where such things came from. From Boise Cascade, obviously, and all the rest of the “tree people.” Of course, the survival of the true pumas and real raptors does not depend on the company’s commercial artists, but on its executives and shareholders. The fate of the forests themselves comes straight out of the corporate boardrooms. The directors being wizards, as we have seen, perhaps that’s as it should be. The board giveth, the board taketh away. Only this time they’re going to need more than a little legerdemain to produce trees on some of the damaged lands they’ve left behind.
One of the wizard ads invites parents to bring their kids out to the woods. “Show your kids how a forest is logged,” it offers. “You’ll discover how lumberjacks and foresters work with computer programmers and lab scientists to sustain our forests and their yields forever. Your kids will go ‘Wow!”’ I don’t doubt they would: logging is pretty interesting. But I could take them to some other sites where their “wows” would have an entirely different sense behind them. To a Boise Cascade forest in the Cascades, for example, where the company decided to make a park for birders because of the diverse and abundant avifauna of a fire-damaged valley on Wenas Creek. I used to go regularly, with many other bird-watchers, for the spectacle. Then one spring we found that Boise Cascade had “cleaned up” the area, ostensibly to make it a nicer park. By removing many of the snags and dead, hollow trees, it also did away with the feeding and nesting sites of the woodpeckers, bluebirds, nuthatches, wrens, and other birds that depended on the deadwood and brought the birders. This wizardry I saw for myself, and when I did, I went “Wow.”
If it seems arrogant for Boise Cascade to depict the blessings of the forest as strokes from its magic wand, the height of pretentiousness appears before Georgia Pacific’s former headquarters in Portland. GP commissioned two sculptures to represent their corporate image. The first, known as The Quest, depicts three nudes afloat on the ether, in search of something higher and better. Known among Portland sculptors as Three Groins in a Fountain, they appear—and I am not surprised—to be looking away from the building. Claire Kelly, director of Portland State University’s art and architecture program, described The Quest as “a very shabby piece . . . an expensive mistake.” But as art critic Paul Sutinen says, “It is impossible to ignore,” in which respect it does represent much of what the company has committed.
A poll to determine Portland’s worst public sculptures conducted by Jeff Kuechle for the Oregonian and published in that newspaper yielded these comments. The critics also panned Georgia Pacific’s second corporate work, which bears the modest title Perpetuity. Kuechle describes it thus: “a hollow cross section of a monstrous cedar, speared through with twisted splinters of bronze. In the center of the piece is a withered brown seedling. The colors are grim and drab, the theme vaguely disconcerting to anyone with an ounce of environmental sensitivity.” Kuechle’s colleague Alan Hayakawa pointed out that Perpetuity might not be entirely inappropriate, making “a great corporate symbol for a company in the logging business.”
I’ll say. Both works were commissioned from sculptor Count Alexander von Svoboda. Kuechle speculated that “von Svoboda, a Canadian, must have been a major GP shareholder to so blithely foist . . . his works on the giant wood products company.” Perhaps it was partly to escape these embarrassments that Georgia Pacific retreated to its new headquarters in Atlanta, a move that foreshadowed a general exodus of corporate commitment (if not cutting) from the Northwest woods. At least they didn’t bother to take the sculptures with them. They’d be better off going back to banal calendars, which would in any case be much cheaper.
Just as Boise Cascade maintains model sites where it delights in giving tours, Weyerhaeuser and the other biggies maintain demonstration forests along stretches of U.S. 101 and certain other heavily traveled routes. Here the lush regrowth admittedly resembles that on the calendars (minus the frolicking bear cubs and pleasant pumas). These picture-postcard forests boast broad buffers between the road and the rubble, smaller clearcuts than usual and on gentler slopes, intensive reforestation, and interpretive signs telling when a given stand was last harvested and replanted. They have been fertilized and cultivated to the state of the art, and they look pretty good. These exceptions to the norm are the picture a lot of travelers take home with them, making the calendars and ads seem all the more plausible.
But let me take you back into the hills, where tourists seldom go. There you will see miles and miles of scenes no company would dare advertise on a calendar or otherwise. Vast, interweaving clearcuts stretching ultimately for many thousands of acres; cuts that straddle stream and ridgetop, making no allowance for the limitations of the land; cuts that run steeply up one slope and down another, taking the slope out with the wood when the rivers run brown in winter.
Here is a passage from my journal, notes recorded during a crossing of the Willapa Hills that I made several autumns ago. “Such is the butchery of the clearcuts and accompanying erosion that, in places, waterfalls and cascades follow stone runnels unbordered by vegetation of any kind—like blood pouring over bones—bare, unbuffered runoff unable to be absorbed, to nourish and slake. Strange hills. The chopped knob of K. O. Peak has a knockout of a view of the Cascades and Olympics, but the near hills look shaved, butchered and lobotomized. . . . Down to the Willapa Valley groaned the most devastated hills I’ve seen, eroded brown mounds with half-burnt slash and virtually nothing growing, whereas other cuts on this side of the divide are grassy or weedy, and most on the Gray’s River side are coming up in elder and vine maple or foxglove. Clearly, there is no average way for a mountain to respond to torture.”
Many of the cuts are so ugly that first-time viewers sometimes retch or weep as they ask, “How can they do that?” They can do it because they’ve always done it however they wish, and they’re not about to stop now. “But isn’t there such a thing as a Forest Practice Act?” they ask. Yes, but it was written by a legislature dominated by big timber interests, and it has more loopholes than an afghan. Basically it says don’t do this, this, or that, unless it costs too much, or unless merchantable timber is involved; in which case, never mind.
The word is that the standards have just been toughened; but you can’t temper rubber, and besides, it’s a little late. I’m a skeptic: I’ll believe it when I see it. Substantially, there is little or nothing in the law to protect the streams, soils, and future forests from the worst effects of intensive logging.
A major conference convened recently in Seattle entitled “Streamside Management: Forestry and Fishery Interactions.” Observers considered it more than mildly surprising that the sponsors of the event, the College of Forest Resources and the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, both of the University of Washington, were at last getting together to discuss the impact of logging on streams and fisheries. An interdisciplinary approach has been conspicuously lacking in the past. If a joint initiative is not forthcoming, Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist John De Yonge suggests, the governor and legislators should “take a look at the training programs, with an eye to reform.” I suspect they’d better start looking.
After the first day of the meeting, a news summary vindicated my bad attitude. One of the key speakers for the timber side had maintained that no scientific evidence exists to show that streams or fish are hurt by logging. I slapped my forehead, in exasperation if not surprise. That guy should go to work for the tobacco industry if he wants a career change.
I await the published proceedings of the conference with interest, but without great expectations. Professional schools in both disciplines receive much of their funding from their respective industries, which are not likely to take kindly to costly reforms. While fisheries have much to gain and might be more open to cooperation, forestry has a lot to lose. Reform might mean, for example, that the industry would have to accept a new Forest Practice Act, one with teeth in it.
I myself couldn’t quite believe that the existing law was so impotent until I saw it in action on K-M Mountain. K-M is a low shoulder of the Gray’s River Divide that separates the Skamokawa Creek and Gray’s River drainages. State Route 4, the main north shore of the Columbia River highway from I-5 to the ocean beaches, passes over K-M, carrying many thousands of travelers annually toward the shore or the interstate. K-M and the hills around and below it near Skamokawa carried a fine second-growth stand of timber until recently. Then they were barbered like a Marine recruit.
About the time K-M was due for logging, Crown Zellerbach adopted an incentive program to cut corporate costs by paying workers according to production shares instead of by hourly wage. It worked to a degree, for a while, until Crown decided to save even more money by contracting with its own workers as if they were gyppos (independent loggers), making them responsible for their own costs, and finally, to pull out altogether. These decisions and their aftermath have been reported in the Wahkiakum County Eagle. I don’t know whether the incentive plan caused the men to log with greater fervor than usual, or if it was all in the company’s plan; but whatever their reason, they logged K-M and the surrounding scenic lands as if trees would be extinct tomorrow. Indeed, to anyone driving over the pass today, it looks as if they might.
Right down to the road, right across streams, right over the next ridge, that cut goes. The first great horned owl I’d heard calling in the county occupied a beautiful little hill in a pretty valley at the base of K-M on the east. They all went with that supercut: the owl, the hill, the scenery. I have never seen a better or worse example of the utter failure of the Forest Practice Act to protect a sensitive area along a public right-of-way and a watershed from the harmful effects of logging than on K-M. No effort whatever was made to leave a scenic buffer strip as along 101. When I asked a company official about this, I was told that Crown Zellerbach could not accept the liability from potential windthrow of standing trees onto the highway. But to me it looks as though, in retreat, it just doesn’t care. If it had to cut the whole of K-M or not at all, then it should have been not at all; and if that meant a public buy-off of the timber rights, or a swap of state land, then so be it.
Okay, so the view down to the Columbia has been opened up; but K-M is now one ugly drive, and it causes travelers that the county seeks to lure for a visit to step on it, to get out of Mordor in a hurry. I mean, it is ugly. Everyone I’ve asked considers what went on at K-M to be a travesty, and that includes loggers and their families and the families of corporate officials.
In fairness, I should add that Longview Fibre Company was involved in the K-M cut as well as Crown. In fact, out of this operation came a marvelously instructive symbol: an attractive, routed wooden sign placed by Longview many years ago, calling attention to the presence of the Longfibre Tree Farm and admonishing passersby to “Keep Washington Green—Help Grow Trees.” Someone forgot to take the sign down with the trees, so it still stands, vaunting its message to the disgusted passersby, backed by a shattered landscape reminiscent of newsreel clips of scorched-earth perimeters in Viet Nam. This ironic juxtaposition, the tree-farm sign in the midst of the logged-off mess, makes a suitable counterpoint to the calendar fibs.
I know that logging was never supposed to be pretty. Actually, it can be close to attractive, as I have seen it done in Mexico and Austria. But that kind of logging won’t go here, where big trees need shifting over rough land. It is bound to cause something of a mess for a while. However, attractiveness isn’t really the point. Health of the resource is the point. And when a forest straddles a major public scenic route, reasonable effort to protect the scenic resource becomes an issue. At K-M, the public interest in the forest resource has been miscarried in every way I can think of.
Now, spleen vented, fingers pointed, perhaps it is time for me to say that I am not antilogging. I am, after all, a product of two forestry schools, at the University of Washington and Yale. I have worked in the woods myself. I read (and write) books and burn firewood and use forest fiber in many ways. And in an indirect way, I am dependent on the forest economy. Repeat, not antilogging. The trees on K-M were ready to harvest. What I object to is the way it was done, with seemingly no regard for other values of the forest. And that is my objection to much of the history of logging in Willapa.
Likewise, my beef is not with the loggers themselves. They are seldom in a position to render decisions on the ground. They have a job to do, and skills, and families and bills, and they’ve gotta live. Nor is my quibble with the thoughtful managers in the companies, for there are some; I know a few. They believe in their mission, their profession; they may even believe their own PR. Rather, my gripe is with the decision-makers who should know better but still permit and promote the sack of the woods and with the stockholders who, by demanding maximum dividends, force untenable decisions in the office and unsuitable actions on the ground.
Of course, neither logger nor boss is likely to be sentient to some of the values I care about, and can’t be blamed for that (after all, forest dwellers such as wood roaches and Johnson’s hairstreak butterflies are fairly esoteric in their appeal). But a healthy, diverse, stable, and regenerating forest is in everyone’s interest, biologist and logger alike. Unfortunately, it provides smaller short-term profits than short-cycle, high-slope cutting followed by monocultural management in some sites and no management whatever in other, forsaken places.
Make no mistake: they have done damage. Everyone says, “The woods come back.” And to a point, they do. This land is the best for coniferous timber growth, the best there has ever been. The woods of Willapa were, in fact, one of the greatest forests on earth. The first cut, even with much waste, was the grandest anywhere in board-feet per acre, with the exception of the redwoods. The second harvest has not been bad. And—I admit it—in many places a fine new stand of fir or hemlock is coming along and will eventually furnish a part of our future fiber budget. Forestry after all, has its successes.
But it isn’t coming back the same. There are reasons. First, the biomass and nutrients of an already rather poor soil base have been drawn upon so heavily that the fruitfulness of the hills has suffered. How could it be otherwise, between the removal of the cellulose skyscrapers and the burning of their branches? Empirically, the fertility must be down.
Nitrogen, in particular, has been depleted, most of it removed with the big trees, much of the rest rendered unavailable through slash burning, and replenishment prevented by herbiciding the alders. Nitrogen depletion may turn out to be forestry’s downfall in these rain-leached hills.
Second, the remaining soil (such as it is) has been seriously eroded. I estimate that the Willapa Hills contain ten to fifteen thousand miles of log roads, spurs, and landings, or approximately fifty square miles of wasted, eroded, compacted, barren soil. The streams and their fisheries have suffered dramatically as a result, along with the woods.
And third, the complexity of the forest has been much reduced. The manager’s ideal of a single-species, even-aged stand may make sense in the ledgers, but it leaves much to be desired on the land. Any monoculture under examination will be seen to be wanting the richness of parasites and predators that help regulate pest species and the soil fauna and decomposers that rebuild the fertility of the earth. This is especially true where a harsh chemical regime comes into play in maintaining the monoculture, as is true in the industrial forest. Lacking the usual issue of pests and their enemies, forests lose resistance, so that when any pest moves in it may thrive uncontested, and epidemic conditions may result. Then massive spray programs follow in response, costing dollars and further taxing the diversity, robustness, and stability of the forest. The managed forest of selected supertrees may produce more fiber in a shorter time under ideal conditions, but it stands vulnerable to decline and disaster in reality. This model is oversimplified, and it may not always happen this way; but it can. A diverse forest will be a healthier and stabler forest, and in the long run more profitable as well, than a monoculture.
I certainly do not oppose forest management for particular objectives. As Northwest Land Steward, I managed lands throughout the Pacific Northwest for The Nature Conservancy. Our “product” was natural diversity rather than wood, but I became highly sensitive to the need for management whenever natural processes and succession interfered with our objectives for the land in question. There can be no forestry without management of forestlands. But once again, I come down to how it is done, as well as where and how often. Smaller cuts, spaced over longer cycles, with minimal chemical manipulation and road-building, would mean better forests.
The logger may not care about the fact that a monoculture forest is a boring forest, from the naturalists’ point of view. But he can relate to the ultimate threat to his job that overharvested, overmanipulated forests can bring about. Ironically, my plaint comes down finally to a duet with the loggers about their jobs, a blues riff if ever there was one this side of the Dust Bowl. For the logging industry is in the process of collapse in much of the Pacific Northwest, and no one in the corporate offices bothered to shout “timber!” or even “fore!”
The decline of the Northwest wood-products industry is a very complex story, and I do not pretend to understand all of its ramifications. It has to do with competition from Canada, whose mills are better tooled to deliver hemlock to Japanese specifications and are gaining a market edge from the strong U.S. dollar—you can buy Canadian two-by-fours cheaper than American ones in Portland, Oregon; a soft market for wood in general, leading to defaults on bids for public timber; a dramatic shift of logging action from the Northwest to the Southeast, where the companies have found they can make more money for now in long-needle pines with cheaper labor; and many other factors. One of them certainly has been overcutting. The accelerated cycles demanded by “intensive management” have left too much of the private land stumpage as just that—stumps. I hear it mostly from the loggers: “There isn’t the timber up there; they’ve taken too much, too fast.” The sack of the woods.
In other parts of Washington and Oregon, the pressure is on to increase the allowable cut on the national forests. A sympathetic administration responds by permitting money-losing operations on the public estate, and the liquidation of public old growth continues in order to shore up the sagging timber sector. One hears rancorous complaints about timber withdrawals for wilderness and national parks. These make dandy scapegoats for the malaise in the industry. An Oregon logging family patriarch carps, “Every time you turn around, there’s another piece of forest closed off from logging.”
Looking jolly in a hardhat in company with a Weyerhaeuser vice-president during a campaign stop, Ronald Reagan gave a pep talk to laid-off Oregon loggers as reported in the Oregonian. The president said that he could not support wilderness protection “in the wholesale amounts they are talking about. . . . Our private sector has not been guilty of rape of all the natural resources. There is today in the U.S. as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge.” But what kind of forest? When he retires, he could do ads for the forest-products companies. We all know what Reagan said about redwoods.
Of course, when land is set aside, it removes the standing timber from the allowable cut. But the amount so reserved is minuscule compared to the acreage of land open to forestry, and in any case most of it exists at high altitudes where noncommercial species of trees dominate the scraggly subalpine forests. Little prime lowland forest has made it into the parks and wilderness areas. And when Mount St. Helens belatedly received protection as a National Volcanic Monument (it was the only Cascade volcano with no special status; in my view that is why it blew), conservationists succeeded in getting some unlogged forests included. In addition, the monument was to protect a large expanse of timber felled by the eruption, so that it might contribute to natural regeneration of the ecosystem. But before Congress could act, Weyerhaeuser made a killing from log salvage in the blast zone. Timber interests, blind to the need for protection of the greatest geologic phenomenon of our time, opposed the inclusion of any forest within the monument—standing or felled.
If all of the reserves were opened up tomorrow, it would not help an industry whose chief present problem is low prices for logs. Anyway, there are no such reserves in Willapa whatever, so the excuse just cannot be invoked here. No, the timber industry is in trouble, and it can’t be blamed on the Sierra Club, the Canadians, the Arabs, or anyone else in particular. If there is any target for blame, it might as well be the companies, whose policies of liquidating the standing-timber base did not allow for a sustained flow of wood and wages. Blame, at least, for the manner in which the logging communities have been treated by the bosses—much of a oneness, it seems, with the way the woods were treated.
The companies have good reasons for cutting back: soft market, export competition, too much wood nationwide, too little wood in Willapa, some of it too big for scaled-down mills in Raymond, most of it too little for anything, ports and mills too far away and retreating farther annually, everything too, too unprofitable. And so the cutbacks and pullouts began, and with them the headlines: “Weyerhaeuser Shuts Down”; “End to Logging Means End to Paradise: Big Woes for S.W. Wash. County”; “Crown Cuts Forces”; “Crown Pulls Out.” In the space of a couple of years, both of Wahkiakum County’s biggest employers and landowners took a powder, leaving scores of families without a livelihood and several towns severely injured economically.
The closure of Weyerhaeuser’s log camp at Deep River and Crown Zellerbach’s operation at Cathlamet left an incredibly high percentage of the work force jobless—and with stunning suddenness. Used to high wages, the men had mortgages, kids, boats, RVs, TV satellite dishes, VCRs, and lots of bills. Now most of their houses are up for sale, with scarcely a chance to sell a one in the near future. The banks have begun to move in.
It was chilling to be witness to the slaughter. The talk in cafés was of drunkenness, depression, divorce, abandoned homes, Grapes of Wrath-type desperate moves in search of work, illness, expired benefits, crippled schools, damaged tax base, repossessions, and, occasionally, successful transfer or clever adaptation. There was also talk of the company; most often, the goddamned company. These families had been loyal to their employers, many for twenty years or more. Most families had suffered the death or severe injury of one or more of their menfolk in the dangerous occupation of logging. They couldn’t understand why they were getting this in return. There was nothing to negotiate: the big boys held all the cards. They made paltry contributions to the Economic Development Commission, held conferences with the workers, and did what they intended to do. To myself and to other local residents, these looked like guilt payments and mock talks. Restitution was meager and compromise nonexistent. No one was surprised when the yellow trucks were gone, along with the jobs and taxes they represented.
The dust settles as after the felling of a forest giant, and the chips fall where they must. But these people’s lives can’t be dismissed by clichés, except perhaps in corporate boardrooms where mill and yard closures make clinical, bottomline sense. The communities survive, diminished, toughened; the people, mostly, survive, though many have to leave the land they love and where they chose to live. Life is preparation for change.
As one Seattle Times article had it, “Families will break up. Businesses will fold. People will move. The only natives likely to benefit are the elk and the eagle, shielded finally from the scream of the chain saw.” All that came to pass, except for the silence, for the gyppos will continue to bid on state and company stumpage, insofar as they can turn a buck. The trees will grow where the soil remains intact, and in time, as markets change, the companies may be back. But timber will never boom here again.
Unnoticed among the sob-story features, perhaps, ran the following small headline: “Despite Poor Timber Markets, Crown Z Earnings Are Up.” One of the reasons given by the then chairman of the board, William T. Creson, was “the improved organizational effectiveness of our people at every level.”
Am I alone here in detecting a similarity to the logic employed in Crown’s booklet, The Environment: A Commitment? “Environmental Commitment” is to the sack of the woods as “organizational effectiveness” is to the sack of the towns. And they both add up to cut and run. Life may be preparation for change for the common people, but for the timber barons, not much has changed at all. I wonder if it helps the out-of-work, out-of-benefits, out-of-hope loggers to know that the “improved organizational effectiveness” achieved by laying them off has helped keep the company’s earnings up?
Faith in the timber companies had a lot to do with the failure to diversify the local economy when it might have been feasible to do so. Everyone worked in the woods, or depended on others who did. Then, as Bob Dylan wrote, “I had a job in the Great North Woods . . . then one day the axe just fell.” Now, the ex-loggers wait for the trees to grow and the jobs to come back, as their unemployment runs dry in the rain.
It may seem to the reader facile and opportunistic of me to side with the loggers against the companies when my quarrel lies with the cutting of the trees in the manner in which the loggers have been employed to do it. But my quarrel has broadened. I live here, in a land of logging. My attitudes have changed since I came. I am more tolerant of the demands of forestry upon the landscape. I am able to edit (not ignore) the ugliness necessary to the logging economy, to an extent, in order to enjoy what’s left. But I cannot edit the gross abuses that I don’t believe are necessary. And I am a part of this community, albeit a relative newcomer. I am as abashed and offended by the callous crunching of these communities and their families, businesses, schools, and lifestyle as I am by the overzealous savaging of a wood. No, my quarrel is not with those who are here to make a living off the forest. I do the same, harvesting words instead of wood; and the pulp of the trees they cut, or others like them, mixed with their sweat, will carry these words. It would be churlish to oppose a professional activity that renders my own work possible.
I address my grievance, rather, toward those who dictated the destruction of almost all the original forest; who ordered the cutting of the Timbered Tor and places like it without the courtesy of discussion; who cut off the jobs of the men who logged the Timbered Tor, again without the possibility of appeal. In other words, toward all those corporate officials and stockholders (comfortable in their own feathered nests) who place profit above the people and the land from which they profit in the first place.
In February 1986, George Weyerhaeuser himself addressed mill and woods workers and their families in Longview, as reported by André Stepankowsky in the Longview Daily News. The president of the timber company that bears his name, the nation’s largest, had come to ask his employees to accept cuts in their contracts of up to 45 percent in wages and benefits. Naturally, feelings ran high.
Refusing to stick to the subject, the exercised audience shot questions about the lack of company compassion for the widows of men killed in the woods; the absence of options for those laid off, many of them fired shortly before retirement was due them; how to cope with alcoholism and depression arising from being laid off; how to meet the family budget on lower pay than the men made a decade ago; lapse of a magnanimous company policy to treat twenty-five-year employees to coffee and cake or a free dinner; and other matters both weighty and pathetic.
But whether out of awe, or believing Weyerhaeuser’s line that the company could not survive without the cuts, no one asked George the question I’d most like to hear him address: is he planning on taking a 45 percent cut himself? If he and a few of his directors and executives would do so, it ought to shore up the company’s finances pretty well; and there would be no need to squeeze the workers any more. “In the last analysis,” Weyerhaeuser said, “the customer is hiring all of us.” Right you are, George. But somehow I doubt that he’s worried about a pink slip in his paycheck or making the payments on his manse.
Ultimately, the workers struck. The company broke the strike, in the spirit of the times. And George got his way. The same week, Weyerhaeuser was named as one of the three worst polluters in Washington by the Department of Environmental Quality. It’s nice to have good neighbors.
Decisions made a long time ago delivered the state of the present—decisions to liquidate the original timber base, fuel the boom towns for the present, and leave the future to fend for itself—along with the able midwifery of the midterm middle managers who similarly squandered the second growth. They say you should never spend your capital but live off the interest. That’s what genuine sustained-yield forestry—real silviculture—is all about: living of the interest of the land. But when it comes to spending capital, there’s never been anyone like the captains of corporate capitalism turned loose in the woods.
Looking long and hard at the literature on the subject, I find some cause for hope. Andrew Johns, of Cambridge University, writing in the New Scientist on wildlife’s struggle to survive in heavily logged regions, concludes thus: “The timber industry and wildlife conservation are not mutually exclusive. The sooner that conservationists work alongside the timber companies to find ways of limiting the damage and preserving as much of the original fauna and flora as possible, the greater the prospects for survival of many rainforest animals.”
Great, glad to hear it; but I think he’s got the emphasis all wrong. As I think I’ve shown in this chapter and those that follow it, the above admonition might better read “The sooner the timber companies work alongside conservationists,” not the other way around.
In a Natural History article, Richard H. Waring describes why the Pacific Northwest is the “Land of the Giant Conifers.” Waring explains how conifers’ shape, physiology, and ability to photosynthesize in winter contribute to their ability to thrive and grow immense in the maritime Northwest, rendering it wintergreen. The climate of the region and characteristics of the plants would seem to augur well for dramatic regrowth again and again.
But Waring sounds his own cautious refrain: “Perhaps the biggest threat to the giant conifers today is human activity.” They dominate far less land than in Lewis and Clark’s time, Waring says (Ronald Reagan’s version of history notwithstanding!), and the processes that restore them—episodic fires, waves of hardwoods, and even epidemics of pests”—are excluded from both parks and reserves and commercial forests. “In human hands now lie the knowledge and responsibility to perpetuate—or doom—the largest forms of life this planet has ever known.”
So it would seem that it may not be too late for intelligence and restraint to be applied in the woods. Wildlife and trees, according to these authors, have the resilience to respond to wise stewardship. The toughness of the people here tells me that they too have the stuff to survive, if given the chance.
But what of communities? Once disassembled, they come together again Humpty-Dumpty style: with difficulty. This goes for both natural communities (the elements of the ecosystem) and human communities. We’ll not be here long enough to know about the former. As for the latter, the boom that came with the felling of the original forest led to expectations doomed to remain unsatisfied. The PR and promises of the timber companies promote similar false hopes today. The profit centers move, the woods struggle to their knees, the people evacuate or adapt. Tough trees, creatures, and people will survive. But the old woods, and the bright young towns of the log-train days, have been sacked.
What hurts most is the disingenuity. In the 1950s, Weyerhaeuser ran ads in Lower Columbia papers promising jobs for generations to come. In 1983, scarcely one generation later, a Weyerhaeuser vice-president spoke to the Seattle Times about the closure of the Gray’s River logging camp. “It’s almost more of a mental burden than I can handle to be the last big industry to pull out,” he said. “There were once some pretty vigorous towns there. But the [Gray’s River] operation is pulling the rest down.” So it’s Gray’s River pulling Weyerhaeuser down, instead of the other way around. If the executive’s sympathy is marvelous (I imagine he will handle the mental burden better than most of the loggers he left behind), his ability to shift the blame is virtuosic.
Ironically, the VP said that too much wood for too few customers necessitated the pullout. Others say the overcutting of quality timber, leaving acres and acres of young trees and stumps, caused the crash. Either way, Weyerhaeuser maintained, there was no more profit to be made. Yet when Sir James Goldsmith, the British financier, took over Crown Zellerbach’s Northwest wood operations in 1985, his group had profit in mind. Former Crown woods in the Northwest and South, nearly two million acres of them, have been reorganized under Cavenham Forest Industries. In its press release of May 8, 1986, Cavenham president A. J. Dunlap said, “We intend to be a well-focused natural resource company and a competitive producer of quality wood products.” How Crowncum-Cavenham/Goldsmith actually plans to treat the woods remains something of a mystery. But based on the new act’s first couple of numbers around here, it doesn’t look good.
First, bailed out by Goldsmith, Crown copied Weyerhaeuser’s vanishing act, orange trucks following yellow ones down the road. That gave eastern Wahkiakum County an unemployment picture to match that of Gray’s River on the western side of K-M Mountain. Then the new company, in its first move as an absentee landlord, began contracting with gyppo loggers to provide pulpwood for its mills and peddling stumpage to other small outfits. One of the first stands to be cut was the Abe Creek Unit, a steep and beautiful drainage adjacent to a scenic stretch of the Columbia River highway. The huge clearcut that followed is now plainly visible from river or road.
Even a little company park, just outside the county seat of Cathlamet and for many years a favorite pleasure spot for locals and visitors alike, failed to escape the chain saw. Apparently no longer needful of local goodwill, the company included the park—name-labeled trees, rare yews, peaceful paths and picnic spots along with a small amount of merchantable timber—in the sale. A highway buffer one tree thick was left standing, the sheerest veil between passerby and travesty. Many were shocked. So was I, though I shouldn’t have been; I’ve been there before.
Now I look across the valley at the scar that was the Timbered Tor and it seems less a reproach than a lesson. Foxglove has come to turn it purple in summer, vine maples redden it in fall. Eventually the surrounding woods will spread a graft of green over the torn slope. I will continue to miss the tall trees as the morning mist slips past, no longer pausing to dally in their crowns. As long as I am here, that cut will be a hole in the horizon. But it will become a more interesting hole as natural succession hurries to fill in the gap with whatever will grow.
Next door, the Grim Fell grows less grim each season. After the clearcut, after the herbicides, the new trees are coming in like a neat hemlock haircut. Having been spared the heavy erosion of many hills one can see from its summit, the old river terrace grows green once again.
The Grim Fell even shows signs of becoming good-looking in our time. Yet it lacks most of the interest and richness of Elk Mountain, across the creek to the east, where the alders, grand firs, spruce, hemlock, and other plants have come in helter-skelter, as nature saw fit. By contrast, the Grim Fell is a mere plantation; yet it seems to be a place where forestry is working better than in many others. It might even, one day, become a forest.
But how will these places be treated in the future? Will cutting cycles remain as brief as possible? Will the companies duck back in to make a quick buck as soon as today’s young trees begin to mature, to raise hopes for a while before ducking out again and leaving the land and the people still more depleted than before?
Or will they begin to view the woods with a longer vision and the people of the woods as more than tools to pick up and put down and leave out in the rain when it suits them?
As forester Frank Lamb put it, concluding his 1909 address to the Governors’ Conference: “Shall we see our children stripped of everything provided by a wise Providence for the sustenance of untold generations? The earth does not belong entirely to the present. Posterity has its claims.”