August/September 2005

Cultivating Relational Intelligence
Nina Simons

Crimes Against Democracy: An Interview with Thom Hartmann
Jim Guiness

Rebirth in the Forest
Will Sears

Right Living, and Surviving, After The Age Of Oil
John Darling

Permaculture and Place
Steve Gabriel

Think of Local Food First
Wendy Siporen

Sustainable Living at Solviva
Anna Edey

Year-Round Gardening in Home and GreenHouse
Jeffrey M. Smith

The Greening of Cuba
Caroline Whyte

A Path of Peace, Kindness and Compassion
Jody Woodruff

From Hurt to Heart
Eryn Kalish

Epictetus' Handbook Revisited
Gay Hendricks & Phillip Johncock

The Sky of Now
Katie Davis

The Complete Book of Raw Food
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat

Whole Foods Companion
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Rebirth in the Forest

By Will Sears

For the most part, the Biscuit fire performed its ecological task flawlessly, thinning out overcrowede stands of timber, clearing up understory debris and creating more diverse plant and animal habitat.

In the remote wilderness of Southern Oregon a battle is raging. It is being fought through the courts, in the press and, as a last resort, on the ground through non-violent direct action. The stakes in this struggle, for all its remoteness, are very high. This is the first major testing ground for much of the Bush Administration’s pro-business and anti-environment policies regarding public forestland, and in particular the grossly misnamed “Healthy Forests Initiative.” What happens here may set the precedent for our forests’ future.

In the summer of 2002 one of the largest wildfires in recent history burned over almost half a million acres of Southern Oregon timberland. It was known as the “Biscuit Fire.” Most of this area is under Federally designated “Roadless” or “Wilderness” protection and is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth.

Subsequent to the wildfires, under the guise of “fuels reduction” and “salvage logging,” the Administration planned the largest timber sale in history. In the process, many Roadless areas and old growth reserves stand to lose their formerly protected status and the forest’s natural healing process may be severely compromised.

Naturally occurring fire, as this was, is an essential element in the natural progression of forest health and regen-eration. This is especially so in Oregon’s Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion where the life cycles of many plants are actually fire dependent. For the most part, the Biscuit fire performed its ecological task flawlessly, thinning out overcrowded stands of timber, clearing up understory debris and creating more diverse plant and animal habitat. The natural recovery process is proceeding beautifully and is awe-inspiring.

With the truth of nature on our side, many of us have made our bodies into barricades, using non-violent direct action to buy time for the courts, the press and public sentiment to do their work. The current focus of this shifting struggle is a bridge that crosses the Illinois River on the only road that leads into the wild area where the first of many Old Growth Reserve cuts is scheduled. This is an account of a relatively calm day on the front lines.

With one court injunction having expired and another decision not yet handed down, logging was to start Monday morning, March 7, 2005, and direct action was our only recourse. We were at the Green Bridge, a hundred strong at 5:30 am when a large force of loggers and various types of law enforcement officers showed up to challenge our blockade. Three elderly protesters were arrested for passively refusing to give way and the rest of us very slowly fell back across the bridge, allowing our adversaries to proceed to our next blockade. Farther up the road, a sideways truck blocked the way again with three protesters locked down in and under it. All in all, 11 protesters were arrested Monday and 11 more on Wednesday.

Friday evening, March 11, I drive out again in anticipation of another action and rally on Saturday. Not knowing what to expect, I prepare myself for anything. Turning off the highway onto the road into the wilderness area, I pass several of our sentry outposts and arrive at the bridge checkpoint and encampment after dark.

I slowly wander around our sleepy encampment as the rising sun begins to filter through the river fog. The pale light glances off shiny serpentine boulders and draws out the deep blue of the river as it flows into one of the nation’s largest forested wildernesses. I’m feeling drawn now to enter alone—to explore the depths of my own personal truth in this place and time.

I climb into my truck, cross the bridge onto the dirt road and begin the several mile climb to the logging area. Why do I feel so compelled to take this little journey? Obviously I will be testing the waters, seeing what the opposition is up to and scouting the road for strategic sites for future blockades and actions. I also feel something deep is pulling me. I surrender, open myself and drive on. The road quickly rises above the fog-shrouded river into the bright sunlight.

I am surrounded on all sides by evidence of the fire’s passing and reflect on the irony of the government’s claims of “enormous catastrophic devastation.” In ideal natural form, the fire has crept along the ground here, cleaning up woody debris, thinning out some of the understory brush and returning much needed nutrients to the forest soil. The blackened lower trunks of the still living trees rise up out of an incredibly lush and diverse mix of plant species that had previously been all but crowded out. This increase in plant diversity in turn provides increased forage and habitat for a much wider variety of animal species. Life here is truly born in fire.

After a couple of miles, I come upon a maroon mini-van parked sideways and blocking the road. It’s locked and no one is around. Is it a logger’s wife trying to keep us away? Is it some freelance protester? Puzzled and wanting to proceed, I walk up the road a ways until I hear the three cop cars pulling up behind my truck. I return. The cops say one of the loggers has gotten hurt and ask me if I know whose car it is. I don’t know, but stay and talk with them as they winch the van out of the road. We make an unspoken peace with each other as we talk of the demonstration, the hurt logger and the unattended roadblock. I grin and point out that when we block the road we tend to stay around to get arrested. One of the Forest Service law enforcement officers tells me that it’s his first day here and that he really doesn’t know what to think of it all. We’re all trying to make sense of things, and are, for the moment, pulling together with human compassion.

I continue my solitary drive. Soon I pass a narrow cliff and chasm. Raising my eyes to the hillside half a mile up the road I see that a large area of old growth timber that was standing proud on Monday is now lying flat on the ground like mown wheat. It really has begun.

As the road skirts this first clear-cut, I pass the loggers’ only stationary presence, a truck, small Cat and RV inhabited by a 60ish man and his wife—their “security.” We nod and raise our hands as I pass.

As always, when I drive through this semi-burned landscape, tears well up as I witness again the beauty of this ancient process of life that has passed once again through the portal of fire. Why is my most intense emotion here always joyously uplifting rather than one of despair?

Rounding a bend, I come upon a stand of Knob Cone pines, fire blackened and dead. Their strange trunk-hugging clusters of open cones are starkly silhouetted against the snow-covered mountain range in the distance. I reflect that these trees, like many plants in this fire-adapted ecosystem, have cones that can only be opened by fire. They have literally waited their entire lives to die and reproduce in this way.

Sure enough, the ground below is covered with healthy 5-inch high pine seedlings. I lie down amongst them and feel the sun on my body and my grateful belongingness to this amazing scheme of things.

I slowly wind the truck upwards again. All along both sides of the road, large swaths of timber have been cut in the last year or so. These were the so-called “hazard trees” that were sold under the ruse that they could conceivably fall on someone. Twenty nine million board-feet of timber (5,800 log trucks) have already been removed under this guise. Many of these trees were alive and healthy and all were supposedly protected by the government’s 1992 Northwest Forest Plan.

Upon reaching the ridge, I turn right onto the short spur road to the Onion Gap wilderness trailhead. Although this area is scheduled to be logged, they don’t seem to be here yet. The ridge top trailhead presents a panoramic vista. My view of the wilderness is blocked only by distant mountain ranges in all directions. Some seem fifty or a hundred miles away. I feel awed by this vastness. I wonder how many Americans even know that such places still exist in the lower 48? There truly aren’t many. Is wilderness something we think is good or useful? Do we even have the right to make such judgments?

From here it is easy to see the classic “mosaic” nature of the burn as a whole: a jigsaw-puzzle landscape of intermixed burned and green patches facilitating the natural and healthy circular succession of plant and animal regimes.

I walk through the heavily burned ridge top landscape and witness the renewal power of nature through fresh tears. It’s so perfectly amazing! The pioneering native blackberries have woven a net over the scorched soil, holding it in place while various nitrogen-fixing plants begin to rebuild its fertility. The various woody hardwood species all have fresh green sprouts shooting up from the bases of their charred stumps while foot-high pines and firs rise from the ember strewn and blackened ground. I can hear the distant low whine of chainsaws.

I climb an outcropping of rock and with the burned landscape spread out below me, sprinkle a little pile of my recently deceased partner’s ashes onto the surface of a jet black stump from a little vial I had brought with me. She had loved this place and would want a bit of her presence to be anchored here.

She was a midwife, educator and healer. I reflect that for the past 21 years she had been subtly training me too in the true art of midwifery—the conscious art of firmly standing by in a soft way, of holding space to protect and to allow the perfection of natural process, to be always ready with a helpful word or tug, witnessing and assisting as the new comes forth into the world. I feel her presence in me today, and in the air around this place. Our skills will be needed here and elsewhere.

I drive back to the main road and continue on to the beginning of today’s logging operations. I briefly talk with one of the Forest Service officers stationed there about the mini-van and its missing driver. He drives off back down the road after cautioning me to be careful around the falling trees. I remember a former Forest Service employee telling me that many of these guys were drawn to the Service because they liked the outdoors, only to find themselves squeezed into law enforcement positions to support the new government policies of maximal resource extraction and minimal stewardship.

Driving on, I see that every quarter mile along the road a pickup has been parked with a single timber faller assigned to the hillside below. These men have obviously been told to get as many trees down as possible before the impending court injunction stops them. Each logger has started at the lower edge of his stand and is falling the trees like jackstraws as he works himself back up the slope towards his truck. Never stopping to limb or buck the logs, each man is bringing down a new tree every three minutes or so. Many of these trees, so degraded by three years of decay, burst into shards as they hit the ground; worthless for timber. Many are too small. Are they doing this out of spite?
Watching a logger fall one blackened tree after another on the steep slope below me, I allow my thoughts to wander. I know the arguments: “These burnt trees are dead, why not just use them? They’re just going to waste anyway. Better than cutting live trees; besides, they’re a fire hazard and it would be good for the local economy. The government needs to sell this timber to finance its restoration of this devastated landscape.” Sadly, like so much present-day government double speak, these arguments are 180 degrees wrong on all counts. Far from going to waste, the dead trees are performing vital roles in this stressed and recovering landscape. They block soil erosion, are vast reserves of needed humus and nutrients, provide shade and shelter for emerging seedlings and seriously needed wildlife habitat, etc. Far from being a fire hazard, this already burned landscape is the most fire resistant of all! A landscape strewn with logging “slash” would actually increase fire hazard.

As far as benefiting the local economy, the majority of any short-term revenue is going out of the area. I’ve been noticing today that many of the loggers’ trucks have Idaho license plates. I’ve been told that many of the local timber workers want nothing to do with the degradation of their own homeland or with conflict in their own communities.

Our local economy is rapidly changing from one of resource extraction to one of tourism, based largely on the pristine beauty of this very wilderness. Far from bringing in needed revenue for restoration this subsidized venture will actually cost the taxpayers millions, and the process of cutting and dragging out the trees will severely disrupt the natural regeneration now well underway. Real restoration and fuels reduction are desperately needed around the human population centers, not out here in the wildlands.

The Bush Administration’s true agenda is to set a precedent for entering previously set aside roadless areas and old growth preserves. This first major test of their new forest agenda and its outcome is of critical importance.
I climb back into the truck and continue, wondering about our age-old struggle to define our relationships to each other and to the natural world. Who are we to each other? Who has power? Who lives in fear? What is money? Who does it serve? Who and what does it destroy? Who are the corporations and governments? Who are the people? Can we own nature? What is our place in the natural scheme of things? Are the boundaries among us necessary, or even real? Is there hope?

Lost in thought, I begin my slow drive back down the rutted dusty road. Feeling thirsty, I stop at a small waterfall near the stand of Knob Cone pines. Its beauty is amazing; crystalline water sheeting and coursing over the shining black and green facets of the moss-covered travertine, then flowing down into a succession of small moss ringed pools near the road. I drink my fill at one of these pools, surrounded by the contrast of the absolute blackness and shockingly verdant greenery of this post-fire landscape. I cringe at the thought of what this stream will look like in a few days after the blackened soil is chewed up and denuded by the heavy-handed logging.

How many places in the world is water like this still safe to drink? Is it even safe here? I like to think so. My thoughts turn to my father, also recently deceased, who worked for the Forest Service and loved nature passionately. I remember how he used to grin and call such cascades as this “wild water” and how, as a kid, we would usually stop for a ritualistic drink at these sacred fonts of life.

As I climb back into my truck, two trucks of loggers grind past me heading uphill toward fresh stands to cut. As we nod and look into each others’ eyes—all of us bearded and in our muddy four-wheel drive rigs—the indisputable acknowledgement of brotherhood is passed. We are all in this together, trying our best to thread our way through the beauty and the horror.

By the time I return to the Green Bridge it’s late morning. I see that the planned rally is beginning to take shape. People and press from all over the area are converging in this remote location for an afternoon of music, speakers, giant puppets, dancing, inspiration and encouragement. A general theme is “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” The time is now. If not us, who?

Prominent on the stage is the giant Scale of Injustice that I had built for another rally. A large rock on one side massively overbalances a tiny rock on the other. This is to illustrate that, of more than 23,000 public written comments, more than 95% were against logging in the burn.
Someone comes up on the stage to say that food has been prepared and that the entire rally is invited down to the main camp kitchen for lunch. An amazing organic vegetarian meal has been prepared and we sit around and compare notes and strategies for the future. The encampment itself is an embodiment of the local movement. It’s been here for weeks. People come and go as their schedules, jobs and commitments allow. Members of the local communities are constantly bringing in supplies of food and firewood, etc, and all decisions seem to happen by easy, leaderless consensus.

By now it’s late afternoon and the dusty convoy of loggers comes down off Fiddler Mountain and files by across the bridge. Someone announces that a few vehicles are leaving soon to give support to the tree-sit. I ride up in a car full of young activists, all of whom live within twenty miles of here. We park our cars near to where the road is blocked by snow and about twenty-five of us walk about a quarter mile down into the burn. The tree-sit is inspiring, a tiny platform so far up in a giant fir tree that I can’t even see how many people are there. I hear at least one voice calling down telling of the high winds the night before and discussing what type of food might be brought to him later.

This tree, on a steep slope on the edge of an older clear-cut is still green and alive. It and the other large trees in the stand have survived this fire, and probably several previous ones, while their smaller brethren have all been killed. These large trees—the most fire resistant component of the forest—are the first to be removed under the guise of “fuels reduction thinning” because of their commercial value. These surviving giants are slated to be cut, despite the government’s hollow assurances that only dead trees would be “salvaged.”

I catch a ride back down the hill with a local man and woman my own age (late fifties). Reclaiming my truck at the bridge and saying goodbye to a few friends, I begin the long drive back home to my kids and my own little sanctuary in the woods. Leaving the wilderness road, I turn onto the main highway and its speeding traffic. How many of these people know what’s going on a few miles to the north?

As I drive, I reflect upon the movement that has been the backdrop for my entire adult life. Like most, I worked for a living and raised a family but I haven’t always been able or willing to ignore the injustice and destruction passed off in my name.

I recall well those angry days of the Vietnam War; marching in the streets and calling for revolution. I can see clearly from this vantage point, that our revolution actually happened and continues to happen. It’s not stoppable because it’s about the truth and the truth is getting harder to suppress.

Most of what we called for in those early days has already come to pass and we are now fighting battles only vaguely dreamed of then. The old order is obsolete and threatened. The Internet and modern communication are making the old institutions of social and economic control irrelevant. Change is hard. I see now that the revolution is global and is happening at the fastest rate possible without involving even more disruption and bloodshed. We are collectively creating an entirely new set of diverse global cultures that will offer us our only chance to survive and take part in the awesome healing power of nature. Will the human race continue to manifest itself as a serious planetary malignancy or will we turn our efforts toward a conscious alliance with nature in her healing process?

Tears well up again as I drive through the darkness and think with gratitude and hope of the millions of fellow travelers all across the world who share this magical mystical journey.

A long time resident of Southern Oregon, Will Sears lives with his children on a forested homestead near Talent. He is a woodworker, carpenter, artist, parent and activist. He is on the boards of several local non-profits that further sustainable cultural evolution. He is filled with hope. Visit Siskiyou Project web site www.siskiyou.org to find out how you can help protect the remaining trees in the Biscuit Fire area and other Southern Oregon Forests. Photos: Lisa Shelton/Siskiyou Project.