Adventures
The greatest adventure of all is harmonious living with land; how is it going?
Books are helpful. I was reminded of this recently when a fascinating book prodded me to recall a chapter in my family’s life that had been back shelved in my memory by recent responsibilities. The book’s central focus is a young couple’s remarkable, arcing travels across a large swath of northwestern North America (The Sun is a Compass). While checking out their route on a map, my mind strayed to a similar line across the map marking travels that my wife, Pam, and I made many years ago. Though our wanderings were much less impressive than those described in the book, I found myself reminded of our’s. Pam and I were fortunate to, more or less accidentally, link multiple adventures into what became a traverse from the Arctic Circle to New Zealand’s southern tip and on to Australia. Walking the salt corroded divider across the atlas’ dusty pages, I find that the line spans roughly 14,000 miles – transported by the power of curiosity, foot, river, and wind, at a rate seldom faster than a brisk walk. A second looping line on the map shows our path on a later 10,000 mile circuit, supervised by our children, around the eastern Pacific.
For the past fifteen years we have traded paddle, sextant, and skis for chainsaws, hard hats, and sawmill as we work to be responsible stewards of our family’s 1,000 acres of working forests in Oregon’s Coast Range. I am surprised how often friends, who know of our long adventures in the past, ask some variation of “Don’t you miss having adventures?”. When the question pops up, I am surprised by the deep feelings it stimulates in me. While those asking the question are well meaning, the question reflects large apparent differences between my friends’ perspectives and my own. I look on our work to rebuild the land’s ecological health and vitality while generating enough financial return to allow us – and others – to use these approaches, to be not only an adventure, but the greatest adventure that I can imagine. In its micro scale way, this adventure of seeking harmony between land and people is the greatest challenge our young species faces; our future depends on it. I will share the reasoning behind my claims shortly, but first some explanation might be in order. In outlining a few details of our past adventures, I want to be clear that I don’t think of them as being particularly significant, but the lesson’s we learned through what might be looked on as practice or warm up adventures prepared us for the great adventure that we now find ourselves in the thick of. This adventure is worth considering because I believe that it is not just my adventure but the greatest adventure that we all must take.
In the 1970s and ‘80s we had the good fortune to be able to arrange our work and lives to allow for these travels. They taught us many useful things, all of which we continue to call on. Here is how they fit together:
Leg 1 – From Skagway, Alaska by foot across the Coast Range to the headwaters of the Yukon River, then by paddle through sections of Yukon Territory and Alaska to the village of Circle, where the big river slows, widens, and begins its westward swoop toward the Bering Sea.
Leg 2 – Again starting on the tide flats of Skagway but this time climbing the mountains to the east and descending onto the mountain smothering network of ice fields reaching to Juneau and beyond.
Leg 3 – In an open 21 foot yawl from Ketchikan north to Glacier Bay and south, pushed by solid summer northwesterlies, home to Puget Sound.
Leg 4 – Following summer wanderings up and down the Northwest coast in our 26’ cutter, we set off on what became a 12,000 mile, Zoro-like “Z” diagonally across the Pacific from Puget Sound to New Zealand, New Guinea and south to Australia.
Leg 5 – Outside of, and overlapping with, the relative simple elegance of the linked legs outlined above, we completed a 10,000 mile loop from Puget Sound to the Sea of Cortez and home via Hawaii.
Winds, river currents, and human power allowed us to cover these 24,000 miles relying on engines to assist for less than 1% of the distance. Destinations and accomplishments seemed to never be the point. Instead, as curious, young folk, we set out to see what we could see, trying to make better know and understand the world and our possible place in it. How fortunate – and changed - we were.
Let’s look back to a blustery, dark night in what must of have been October of 1986. Our ocean-tested, little boat rode securely at anchor in the welcomely snug protection of Hunga Lagoon in the Kingdom of Tonga’s northern island group, Vav’au. When darkness fell on what had been a blustery day of tradewind driven squalls, we’d watched as dim lights illuminated the windows of small huts and home in the shoreside village. As sleep came to us snug in the forepeak, little did we know that in the hour before dawn illuminated the eastern horizon, we’d be jolted awake by villagers energetically knocking on the hull and calling to us in their lilting Tongan. These visitors taught us a valuable lesson, but first let’s consider other lessons our travels taught us between home and dropping anchor in Tonga.
The list of lessons learned across 24,000 miles of adventures are more than we can name – and, no doubt, more than we are aware of. Though some of the lessons, like “take waterspouts seriously, they can kill you”, don’t have direct applicability to caring for rebounding northwest forests, experience shows that we have benefitted from applying nearly all of the lessons taught by our “warm up” adventures. Here is a sampler of ten of the most important:
· Imagination – None of these adventures would have happened without our having and using an ability to imagine what might be both possible and desirable – “If we can keep the air on the inside of the boat – and the water on the outside – and have enough food – just imagine where we might go….”
· Strategic and Planful Work – Over and over we benefitted from approaching the adventures with careful research, analysis, planning and preparations. From sailing south out of the tropics before cyclone season arrived, or leaving the arctic circle well before freeze up, or having the right antibiotic in the medical chest to beat an infection or the right spare part squirreled away, we reduced risk and avoided problems by building awareness and thinking ahead.
· Flexibility, Adaptability, and Resourcefulness – Time has taught us to expect the unexpected – and to be ready to learn and creatively adapt when it comes. There was the evening high on the wide open ice of the Juneau Icefield when powerful winds made us weary, sled dragging skiers realize that our thin tents were unlikely to provide us adequate protection until dawn. Flexible thinking led us to the good choice of leaving the tents folded and instead enjoy a quite, restful night secure in our igloo. Similarly, when our self steering vane broke in gale force winds 100 miles off the California coast, causing “Lissome” to surf, broach and roll over, our frightened and shaken selves had no choice but to adaptably find ways to secure the boat, repair the damage, and sail on toward the Golden Gate.
· Learning Focused – Seeing how ignorant we were reminds us of how ignorant we remain. Sailing at night driven by the less than benign trade winds, we were quickly schooled in the difference between the procession of squalls that came over us in the inky blackness. Some came with heavy rain and little wind while others could knock us flat with a tripling of the windspeed faster than we could shorten sail. How quickly we learned to tell one from the other. Travelling the coast in a small, open boat taught us how best to make the decision of when to prudently stay safely at anchor until the wind dropped, or when to scoot across to a safe harbor ahead of the next blow. And one of the wonders of surviving and enjoying the exotic islands of Vanuatu and the Solomons was gaining basic fluency in the mishmash language known as pidgin. Through all, daily life was about learning – and applying what we’d learned.
· Persistence, Patience, Determination, and Resolve – How many times did the experiences teach us the importance of calmly sticking with a situation until circumstances improved. Whether it was knowing that an ocean gale must eventually blow itself out, or that the lethargic current of a side channel of a big river will eventually carry you to where you hope to go, or that wind will eventually waft across the glassy waters of the doldrums filling the sails and moving the boat, or that sliding one ski ahead of the other will somehow take you to the glacier’s pass that you’ve been looking at for the last two days, experience taught us the value of following nature’s lead in the dance of adventure.
· Journey Focused Versus Destination – Twenty four hours after the Golden Gate Bridge dropped below the horizon astern, we carefully plotted our day’s run on the vast chart of the Pacific. Because of the tininess of that centimeter long line compared to the feet of white paper between us and New Zealand, we learned that survival and happiness depended on finding pleasure and reward in each day and in being right where we were.
· Reverence – Adventurers are supposed to go looking for treasure and bring it back home. We did that in the form of building an ever deepening sense of reverence for remarkable mysteries around us – and our relative insignificance. I carry with me memories such as crawling out of our tent on a cold, clear, still morning on the icefield twenty miles from anything other than snow and rock to discover fresh wolf tracks ascending from the west, and passing ten feet from where we obliviously slept, before carrying on to the forested plateau of the interior – and having dawn’s first light show us that we were sailing through a sea completely covered by the blue glowing fins of By-The-Wind-Sailor jellyfish – or having our minds shocked and hearts stirred by the blasting and unfamiliar harmonies of singing in Tongan churches on remote islands. The list is long – and vivid memories remain.
· Faith and Confidence – Success and survival depend on making sure that ones confidence does not exceed ones competence, but over and over when circumstances became dodgy and we asked ourselves “what were we thinking….?!” we learned to put trust in our belief that our judgment was sound and that a path through would be found. When our little engine’s starter irreparably expired 1,000 miles from the nearest mechanic in Australia, it seemed no problem to just carefully travel as an engineless vessel for the next two months. “We can figure this out…”.
· Meaning of Wealth – Growing up in circles where it was easy to assume that the wealth that matters is measured in dollars, for me, the most enduring treasure found through our adventures was the discovery that in many ways those people who are the poorest by materialistic measures are often the richest in so many other ways – and that, conversely, those with excess dollars may easily live impoverished lives.
· The Power of Healing - Reaching the end of this list brings us back to the pre dawn knocking on the boat’s hull. Grabbing available clothes and scrambling up to the deck, our light illuminated the upturned worried faces of four islanders in a canoe. Between seeing that one held his arm wrapped in blood soaked cloth and their anxious, broken English we sorted out that they had come seeking help with the man’s deep machete wound. What happened next is too long to recount, but using our well stocked medical chest and or basic skills and common sense we, working with the villagers, succeeded in stopping the blood flow, and bandaging the arm up well enough for the three hour boat crossing to the nearest clinic. In this situation, what we did was small, but the feelings that were generated remain strong. After so many months and miles of following our own selfish interests and inserting ourselves as useless spectators of the many human communities through which we passed, it was a welcome change to engage with people in ways that were directly useful to them. The bleeding man healed, and in our small way we helped make that happen. Little did I know the role that trying to advance healing would play in the rest of my life.
At this point I’d be surprised if you weren’t asking “what’s the point of you sharing this list of what your adventures helped you learn?”. That is a good and fair question. Whereas I don’t think our “warm up” adventures or the lessons learned from them are of significance, we’ll now turn our attention to an adventure that is. I believe that our shared success with that adventure calls on us to apply all that we have learned – including the lessons shared above.
There is work to be done. If you are among the fortunate to have excess time and energy to invest, beyond the basic tasks of providing food, shelter and home for yourself and your families, how do we decide what to do with that excess? Where will we try to put our weight in the world? What’s most worth doing? For reasons I’ll never fully understand, the answers to these questions have been clear to me since midway through high school. Fortunately a significant book found its way to my homework list. Its messages about the many ways that our culture’s directives often run counter to our self interests and the long term interests of the culture were seeds that landed on fertile ground. By the time I was handed a diploma, long simmering feelings had coalesced into my conviction that the current relationship between humans and the rest of nature is untenable; if we continue to ask more of the planet than it can provide we are on a road to a place we don’t want to go. My young self decided that this deserved attention. Over the intervening forty five years I’ve had the pleasure of encountering the words of wiser folk that frame these issues better than I can; here are a few:
“We end, I think, at what might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
“When the land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer, we do not.” - Aldo Leopold
“The care of the earth is our most ancient and worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.”
“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. …We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. …For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.” - Wendell Berry
Like many others, I find observations and exhortations like these to be compelling, but as a believer that talk is, indeed, cheap, I wonder how such philosophies might connect to on-the-ground realities; how do they become more than platitudes? While they might help in shaping the thinking, and more importantly, the feelings, of those who compose large scale proclamations of intent like agreements signed in Rio, Kyoto, and Paris, it is clear to me that the most powerful levers may be the smallest and most easily overlooked. This would be the millions of people, including farmers, foresters, and ranchers, working in their own small corners of the world to simultaneously heal and nurture the land while also using the land to sustain themselves and their communities. They are working – and often struggling – to rise to meet the challenges articulated by Berry and Leopold – to help turn the ship of our cultures from being exploiters to forward looking nurturers. Like hillside springs that feed a network of tributary streams flowing into increasingly powerful rivers, micro scale efforts are coalescing into macro scale forces. What ultimate difference will this make? Who knows? But why not try?
In our own small way, our family’s work in our forests aspires to serve as one of these tributary springs. Like our far flung kindred spirits, each day, informed and motivated by big ideas and goals, we tend the land trying to sort out what the “right thing” might be – and do it. The cautious side of me would state that this work is A great adventure. But the bolder me feels that the case is easily made that this is THE great adventure – because it is work that all that care about the future of our species is called on to do. When I compare my feels about this current work to our earlier warm up adventures, while I don’t regret our wanderings, I do have trouble not judging them as relatively less important – but life changing - self indulgences. Yet when the feelings that came from the small act of helping stop a blending machete wound focused my attention on the power of engaging with communities and working for healing, such travels clarified what future roads in life would be most important to me. Will what any of us are trying to do “save” our species? Probably not. But perhaps we should be mindful of Sydney Smith’s observation – “It is the greatest of mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little”. But perhaps the work of trying to might, in some way, help us, selfishly, save ourselves?
Our boots make that characteristic scrunching sound as you and I stride up the road into our Mt. Richmond Forest on a chilly, cool morning. In answer to your questions, we will ascend 1,000 feet through the forest, covering roughly two miles. Along the way I will introduce you to the eight main strategies, or searches, that we hope will lead us to caring for ecologically complex, economically viable, socially just forests. Along the way, we’ll explore signs of the progress we’ve made since 1986 as well as the remaining challenges with which we continue to wrestle. After huffing up through the steep switchbacks, our route levels off, taking us through an area of large, savannah oak, and on to an area of young fir and maple. Our first search is for an approach to silvaculture (logging) that effectively takes us toward our goals. Of all of the eight searches, we’ve had the most success with this one. Through carefully planned and implemented logging we have shown that we are accelerating the forests’ transition toward greater complexity. Stopping to scan the diverse forests surrounding us, you and I can see what has become a multi-age, multi-species forest where each area is adapting to its own microscale conditions – ash in the wet swales, oak on the rocky knolls, fir and maple on the well drained soils, and cedar in the cool, shady draws. This transition is being accomplished by a mix of different logging approaches – including variable density thinning, small patch openings, variable retention cutting, and restoration of open land back into forest. You ask the good question of “how do you know whether your silvaculture is successfully taking you toward your goals?”. The goal most easily measured is whether our logging projects end up compensating contractors fairly while also providing our business with sufficient economic return. A second measure is whether our work results in a healthier and more durable forest - improved habitat, excellent water, reaching toward the potential for storing carbon...... We will continue refining our silvacultural approaches and learning from our many mistakes, but so far they seem to be working well. Our feelings of relative success are tempered by ongoing surprises and challenges – such as the 2 acre area of twenty five year old fir in which nearly every tree rapidly died soon after the less vigorous half of the trees were thinned. We can never fully know what factors caused die offs like this and others in the forests, but it seems clear that our forests are being increasingly shaped by forces linked to the ever deepening climate crisis.
Continuing another quarter mile up the curving road we reach a junction with a wetland area ahead backing up into stands of mixed oak, ash and fir. This is a good spot to consider how fortunate we’ve been to build and benefit from a wide range of mutually beneficial partnerships. These partnerships range from the most familiar and customary – such as having good loggers, accountants, and truck drivers who look forward to working with us, to unique and unconventional partnerships. One example of the second category is responsible for the transformation of the wetland area in front of us. Early in what has grown into a strong relationship with the science faculty and students of nearby Pacific University, all of the students in the introductory level Biology course joined us in doing battle with the jungle of non native blackberries that once overwhelmed this wet area. Students in the Ecological Restoration course followed up with three years of restoration work, supported by funding secured by the local watershed council from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board. Rising high behind the wetland is one of our many stands of oak that has been rescued from death caused by overtopping fir, thanks, in part, to our ongoing partnership with our helpful friends at US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners in Wildlife Program. One of the more heartening shifts in the forest-supporting partnerships is the change on the part of many conservation groups from looking on all forms of logging as something to be fought to discovering their power of being actively supportive of those who are working to create better approaches to forestry. Spread across this region and world is a wide, loosely connected network of what I look on as land healers, aspiring, like us, to become rational land heelers. Our supportive partnerships with these forward looking foresters, farmers, and ranchers is a welcome source of inspiration and motivation. Over the years, all of these partnerships have both enriched our lives while, more importantly, driving the forest’s ongoing restoration, and also benefitting the partners.
Leaving the road we ascend a forested track through the mixed oak, maple and fir until we intersect a larger track that takes us to a rounded ridgetop and our most imposing oak stand. I know the spot well because it is one of the stops where we have done early morning, spring bird counts over the span of eighteen years. The spot took on new meaning in the past year since our three minutes of careful listening and recording of data turned up a bird singing that we had long hoped to hear, but never had. The White breasted nuthatch, along with the Acorn woodpecker, is an important indicator of valuable oak woodland habitat. The bird monitoring and analysis is one of many components of forest health that we, with the support of skilled helpers, actively monitor and analyze. With this third “search” we seek the types of new and useful knowledge that serve as a foundation for good stewardship. Without these measures of outcomes, we’d be flying blind.
A short walk from the oak stand we enter an oval, one acre stand of ten year old trees surrounded by 90 year old forest. Here we created an opening large enough to provide enough light for vigorous growth of young trees while being small enough to maintain essential biological connections between the old and the young. One component of this experiment is our fourth “search” – developing and testing silvacultural approaches that don’t require the use of herbicides. Past logging projects in this forest unintentionally created soil disturbance that ushered in serious problems with invasive, non native plants – primarily scotch broom and blackberry. With this experiment and others throughout the forest, we have developed and tested new approaches that require little or no herbicide use. There is no risk of our being too pleased with ourselves, because we are all too aware that with each piece of equipment entering the forest comes new risks of importing seed of unwanted, new invasives.
With the rising sun now lighting up the forest, we loop back to the forest road and make time up through the forest. When our conversation is interrupted by the faint tinkle of running water, we cut left up to the pond (where rare red legged frogs breed!) and follow the pond filling creek up to its headwaters spring. Your doubts about why I’ve made you bushwack up to this spring are forgotten when we see the cold, clean water bubbling up through the sands of the headwater pool. We also see one of the oldest remains of human activity in the forest – a rotting away, wooden walkway leading up to the pool. Perhaps the largest dilemma of this forest adventure is the disjoint between the larger number of valuable things that people want from these forests (good water, quality habitat, stored carbon, released oxygen, cooled air, food, recreation, medicines…) and the reality that society currently solidly rewards the landowner for maintaining and providing just one of these outputs – saw logs. In hopes of resolving this dilemma, our fifth “search” is for ways to shift from being a multi-value, single revenue stream operation to becoming multi-value, multi revenue stream forests. Until this happens, rational forest owners will continue to manage for maximum timber output, while putting as little effort as required into the other values. In contrast to other efforts explored on our uphill walk, our efforts to connect with “more-than-wood” markets have led to little of no progress. As the rotting wooden walkway suggests, people have long valued the excellent, spring-fed water that flows from this forest toward a world that badly needs it, but efforts to reward forest owners, financially or otherwise, for providing a wide range of outputs and values remain illusively in our future. Until markets evolve, our efforts to enhance all forest values remain decisively irrational. Society is called on to shift from pointing out the economic irrationality of projects like ours to figuring out how to make quality stewardship the most rational choice.
Leaving the spring, we continue on a steep climb headed for Mt. Richmond’s 1,200 foot summit. Just short of the top, you notice and ask about a freshly constructed trail and trail sign crossing our route. This interpretive loop trail was imagined and created by a hard working high school student as his senior project. Knowing that his efforts both changed the forest and, in small but real ways, changed him, leads us to discussing the most fundamental and illusive of our eight “searches”. Experience has shown us that the lynch pin in developing a forestry where people truly do well by the land while the land does well by the people requires a new kind of person. It’s all about values and priorities and the willingness and ability to live by those values and priorities. Our forest work includes working with a wide range of students and educators – spanning from second graders to doctoral students. We are careful to avoid preaching and indoctrination, but we work hard to help all who come to the forests build strong affinities for the place, do useful work, wrestle with the essential questions, and consider the role that forests and land do and will play in their lives. As part of this work, in the past decade the forest has played a role in a variety of film and publication projects that continue to connect with ever widening audiences. These types of narratives are essential ingredients in efforts to inspire and motivate people to drive and support innovation in land stewardship. This type of social change is hard, slow work and faces aggressive resistance, but experience shows us that we can and do make a positive difference.
Cresting the final rise to the summit, we flop down in the grass to enjoy a refreshing drink of the cold water we collected from the spring, and you ask “what is that big building?”. We’re looking at a hilltop structure that shelters our small sawmill and is a solar powered kiln capable of drying 12,000 board feet of lumber per year at the thrifty energy cost of one dollar per day. This successful experiment is part of the seventh “search” of our morning’s walk – working proactively to develop forestry approaches that boost energy efficiency, effectively reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and help mitigate climate change. In addition to energy efficient wood drying, we’re having success with reducing the amount of transport involved in the wood chain and caring for the forests in ways that explore and test climate smart forestry approaches. Our small scale choices matter, but achieving the large scale changes that circumstances call for requires leadership in and commitment to policy and market change on the state, federal, and global scales.
Having caught our breath from the long climb, we circle around the kiln and mill to check out the recently sawn lumber stacked and drying. Once again, you ask the key question “why do you process wood right here in the forest instead of just selling your logs like most other forests do?”. I explain that this eighth and final “search” for improved wood markets is driven by two factors. Our diverse forests, with their twelve beautiful species of trees, are a valuable ecological asset, yet in the larger surrounding landscape of ecologically simplified forests and plantations, sawmills only pay for two or three of the twelve species. Because of this, our diverse forest is an economic liability. Similarly, nearby wood users want and are willing to pay a premium for wood from forests like ours that have earned a high level of certification for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), but sawmills have not yet chosen to meet this demand by creating differentiated wood markets. This leaves us with a challenge similar to being a grower of organic produce with higher costs of production but no reward in the marketplace. For fifteen years we have experimented with processing and direct marketing our wood in hopes of addressing this pair of issues. Many thousands of board feet later, we find that it is possible and rewarding to connect the forests’ beautiful wood with appreciative people all across the region. We have also concluded that we have yet to develop a business model for this aspect of our business that makes solid economic sense. After years of experimentation, we are not seeing promising new roads to achieving the profitability needed to continue. Since the majority of wood removed from the forests is sold to other mills in our region, the most important dimension of finding and creating improved wood markets involves motivating mid and large sized mills to provide the essential, missing link connecting solid supplies of FSC certified wood and the strong demand for this certified lumber. In contrast with the general sense of success we feel for our efforts to rebuild the forests’ complexity and vitality, efforts by us and our partners to improve the economic viability of regenerative forestry remain discouraging at best. Informed by the many lessons learned in our “warm up” adventures, it might make sense to learn from a mountaineer’s efforts to reach the summit of a peak. Sometimes, instead of pushing harder, in stormy conditions, to get up an unclimbed ridge that is more challenging than anticipated, the prudent choice is to back off the route, wait for better conditions, and/or explore for more promising routes leading to that summit you are still determined to reach.
Feeling the fine day beginning to heat up, we head back down into the relative cool of the old forest. As we retrace our steps, you take the lead in steering the conversation. “So, am I right that the results of your thirty plus years of experimentation is a mix of successes and failures?” you ask. Though I understand the question, it takes me aback, probably because my perspective on failure seems at odds with yours. Perhaps it is just mental gymnastics, but what you might look on as failure, I view as “not yet”. Not unlike the woman who turns down my marriage proposal, hope endures when I look on the response as “not yet”, instead of “no”.
In response to this, you choose a different approach - “What’s the upshot? What are the most important things that this adventure has taught you?”. Given the mile of descent ahead, I take my time in considering my response. My answer falls into two parts. The first is that we’ve affirmed the many parallels between this vast, complex and amorphous adventure and the smaller adventures taken on earlier in our lives. Time has shown that all of the traits that served us well in the past are more important than ever here in the forests – imagination, strategy, flexible adaptation, learning, persistent patience, community connections, reverence and humility, faith and confidence, understanding of real wealth, and the rewards of advancing healing. There is no doubt that our actions have shaped this landscape – hopefully for the better, but it is even clearer that our work with this landscape has changed us – our values, thoughts, feelings, priorities, and attitudes. Though we are many years and miles from helping patch up the bleeding machete wound, experience has affirmed the importance of trying to help the healing process – particularly in a world where harm seems to increase with each passing day.
I’ve learned that our efforts might be best divided into two categories – those that we can carry out largely on our own with little or no outside resistance, and those efforts where success depends on recruiting and maintaining the engagement and commitment of others. The major work in the first category is that of healing and restoring the ecological vitality of the forests. This goes as well or better than we could have expected and is, rewarding and energizing. I’m confident that we have risen to Leopold’s challenge of “living on a piece of land without spoiling it”. But the question remains, can well stewarded land do right by the humans who depend on it? Improving the economic viability of good land stewardship – which is the driver of developing appealing and replicable models, falls solidly into the second category; progress depends not only on our drive and commitment but also on the drive and commitment of many others in the larger community - policy makers, architects, sawmill owners, investors, story tellers, builders, and elected leaders. Embarking on this adventure we knew that we were working with large, slow moving forces, that we would encounter inertia and resistance, and that, accordingly, we would need to be patient and realistic about what rates and types of change might be possible. Regardless, we’ve learned that we underestimated how slowly changes in the larger links of our society would come. I have learned to look on this second category as being similar to rowing a boat. All vessels have what’s called a hull speed. While it is possible to row the boat faster than its hull speed, it requires much more energy and effort than moving the boat at, or below its hull speed. Experience has taught us that the rates of change needed for many of the innovations that our vision requires has a similar “hull speed”, where is it possible to frustrate and exhaust oneself quickly if you insist on trying to push it faster that it is willing or able to move. All of your efforts in the “not yet” category are limited by their apparent hull speed – which we’d be foolish to ignore.
As we pass the spring and pond and turn onto the downhill curving road, you shift to the next logical question: “so what are you going to do with what you’ve learned? – What next?”. Passing the big yew tree growing near the spot where a sawmill operated in the early ‘50s, I answer – pushing harder is not the answer; we need to focus on and put energy into those areas where we find we can make the most difference – such as forest restoration, and we need to respect the hull speeds that limit rates of change in areas requiring larger societal commitment and change. (Omit?) If radical means “going to the root”, we must learn to be more strategic in understanding the root causes of our problems and find ways to address them. It is clear that one of the most powerful drivers of the disharmony between humans and the rest of nature is the stories we continue to tell ourselves. Whether it concerns Oregon forests or any number of other issues, we must shift from telling and believing the stories that have been told to allow and support exploitation of land and people to sharing and attending to a new set of stories – focused on honesty, reverence, healing and longer term, more reliable prosperity. Until this becomes a priority, none of the rest matters.
Passing through the Big Oak Junction, we turn left and continue down through a cathedral-like corridor enclosed by the arching limbs of old oaks. Probing for a workable path forward in those areas requiring larger societal engagement you ask “OK, let’s pretend that we have a magic wand. If we could use it to change the dynamics that limit your ability to improve economic viability enough to create useful, new models of forest, what would be your top five uses of the wand?”.
Now that’s a good question. By the time our route brings us back to the Bear Pear Wetland (I’ll tell you the story behind the name one of these days!), I’ve narrowed my long list down to six.
1. Stories We Tell – Replace our extraction/exploitation based narratives with ones that honestly highlight the problems and their causes and shares news of successful, new models.
2. Climate Smart Forestry – The forests of our region have large and mostly untapped potential to mitigate the climate emergency by capturing and storing carbon. Harness this potential with interwoven public policy and markets that motivate and reward forest owners for innovation and leadership.
3. Wood Markets – Just as organic markets have reshaped agriculture and eating, create differentiated wood markets that reward forest owners for higher levels of stewardship while helping wood buyers increase integrity between their values and their actions. Link the already solid supply and demand. The diverse forests we need call for diverse markets for wood.
4. “Beyond Wood” Markets – In addition to creating viable markets for forest carbon, there are many other areas where markets should be used to advance the public interest. One example is biodiversity credits. These could be used to stop and reverse the declines in our region’s forest-dependent animals by blending policy and markets to reward forest owners who provide valuable habitat for both the common and troubled species.
5. Rising Generation – Because our adventure requires and demands capable, committed leadership over time spans longer than any one individual’s life, create a supportive and encouraging environment for the rising generation of forest stewards. Help them find their path toward earning a solid living doing the work that must be done.
6. Functional Democracy – Use campaign finance reform and other approaches to redirect the focus of elected officials away from advancing the interests of the corporate funders who assist in their election and to enacting policies that advance the long term interests of this place.
Reaching the end of outlining this list I realize that if we could be successful with even half of these changes, the improved profitability of businesses like ours would tip us into the zone of having replicable models of rational stewardship. I also realize that we can look to examples of each of these changes being successfully imagined and implemented elsewhere in the world - so why not here?
The time has come to bring my relating of this story to an end, yet we all know that it is a story that will never come to an end. It can’t because the story will be forever driven by tensions that are inherent to our species. These tensions include:
- The tension between using nature on the one hand and caring and sustaining it on the other,
- The tension between people learning to cooperate, because our survival depends on it, and competing with one another, because that seems to be part of any species’ nature, and
- The tension between doing “right by the land” and “right by the people” and the ongoing difficulty in getting enough people to realize that, in the long run, we can never do right by the people without learning – and choosing – to do right by the land. We are a species inclined to categorize stories. To what degree is the story shared above a tragedy, or a comedy, or something else? Perhaps our survival calls on us to look for the comedic dimension enough to have the strength to keep dealing with the tragedy. If it is to a large degree a tragedy, and I think it is, another strategy for continuing our roles as bit actors in the larger, never ending drama, is to adventures that let wild places restore and reenergize us, while also reminding us why we are committed to this work? Sleep under the stars in the deep quiet – be shaken and fully consumed by a wild rapid or two – run for our lives off of an alpine peak before the lightening snuffs out our inevitably brief lives – closely observe, in awe, the many species whose success we should be learning from? Henry David Thoreau was ahead of us when he observed “in wildness is the preservation of the earth”.
How fortunate many of us were to have wild country adventures shape us and teach us lessons that have proven to be of practical use and value – and fortunately we continue to be restored, reenergized and refocused through our vivid interactions with the wild.
What if Ed Abbey was right when he shared this advice? “....... do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.” But then again, perhaps he was mistaken in simplistically assuming that the “enemies” and “bastards” are, more often than not, someone beyond who we each see when we look into the mirror?
