V12 #1 November 1990 - Archives - The Evergreen State College

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BOTANIST continued from page 8 Although it is within the realm of possibility that a timber sale could be delayed or cancelled because of a plant, Potash hastens to point out that most forestry issues are not black-and-white, cut-ordon't-cut situations. "Say we find moonwarts," she says, "or any other sensitive or endangered species on a proposed timber site. It's not a matter of 'Well there's a moonwart, so no sale.' The first thing we do is determine the requirements for the species, then write about impacts: how changes in the soil, hydrology and light conditions will affect the plant. "Then we try to work with timber crews, engineers and other people in the Forest Service. For example, perhaps the road crew could change the spacing between culverts to lessen changes in the hydrology, or maybe the species can withstand flooding if a certain amount of the canopy is left intact or maybe..." Two million acres is another tough concept to grasp. Think of it this way: imagine covering the Evergreen campus on foot, from soccer fields to Organic Farm, from bus loop to Geoduck Beach, not missing a square foot. Now imagine 2,000 Evergreens, laid out together with no easy trails, mown lawns or predominantly gentle terrain. Imagine miles of devil's club, wetlands, tall timber, rivers, boulders, wilderness and clear cut. Those 2 million acres are Potash's venue, a roughly 30mile-wide corridor of forest in central Washington, extending from the Mt. Rainier area to the Canadian border. Of course, no human or conceiva- bly workable group of humans could cover that area in depth in a lifetime. What it will take to produce a reasonable profile of plantlife in the forest is nothing less than first-rate thinking, planning and teamwork. And there's the rub. Nothing manmade is as complex and mystifying as the biodiversity of an old growth forest. But the machinery of bureacracy conies close. Forestry issues involve huge, interlocking, interrelated government entities: Congress, the USD A, the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources and state safety inspectors just to name a few. Bear in mind that each agency consists of hundreds of people in sub-agencies often on the ready to fight for turf, authority and jurisdiction. Throw in lawyers, media, and advocacy groups from timber and environmental camps and you have a minefield of personal and political crosspurposes. Daunting? "This is the job," says Potash, "that I've always wanted." Her enthusiasm for the task is genuine and infectious. At her desk and in the woods itself, she emanates a zest for discovery and making things work. Her desk in Seattle is a testament to the double life of field botanist and administrator: word processing manual; phone and rolodex; a thick-asa-Bible volume entitled Final Environmental Impact Statement; a plastic-coated field guide to flora of the Pacific Northwest; a memo typed military-style (ALL CAPS) from a forest ranger; an organization chart; a metric ruler; two sizes of tweezers; a magnifying glass, and two ziplock plastic bags containing green and swampylooking plants. 14 THE EVERGREEN REVIEW "Those are sedges," she says, "It's odd to sit here at a desk, under florescent lights and examine plants. It's a lot harder identifying things in the field. You can't pick the sensitive or endangered plants. Usually I'm squatting down in the rain, crawling under devil's club to look at them." The phone rings and she engages in a lively conversation about swamp gentians. "It's a sexy project," she says, "People love bogs. I'd like to do it myself." She's talking with a Forest Service employee responsible for the rare plants program at the North Bend station. He and Potash are discussing the pros and cons of recruiting members of private conservation groups to volunteer for the enormous task of plant study in the national forests. "On the other hand," she says, "you don't want to take a lot of people out there. It's a delicate situation, socially and ecologically." After the call Potash explains it's a new ballgame with plants in the Forest Service. Some districts are very interested, others don't have the time, and some just don't want to be bothered. Creating a network of people who care about rare plants and have the expertise to identify them is one of Potash's top priorities. "Hopefully we'll train timber cruisers and other Forest Service people to be on the lookout for rare species." The image is captivating: everyone from engineers and surveyors to roadbuilders and loggers paying as much attention to what's on the ground as to the 400-year-old giants towering over them. Potash's first fieldwork took place over 14 years ago as an Evergreen student when she studied at the Malheur Bird Observatory in Oregon and observed elephant seals at the Point Reyes Observatory in California. Last year she earned a masters degree in ecosystems analysis from the University of Washington, writing her thesis on "Sprouting of Red Heather in Response to Fire." I wondered why someone so active would chose to specialize in botany rather than wildlife. One of the reasons is simple. The reality of wildlife research means hours of sitting motionless in observation blinds. She also loves the intellectual challenge of keying a plant: "You become aware of the evolutionary relationships between organisms." Three days after visiting her office, I accompany Potash to a stand of old growth timber, the Darrington sale referred to earlier in this story. We are members of a party of 15 who'll review the proposed timber site. There's a silviculturist, an Audubon Society member, a member of the Nature Conservancy, a wildlife biologist, fisheries biologist, an hydrologist, a timber management officer, foresters and the district ranger. There's also a representative for the Tulalip tribe whose interest is the shrinking area of natural forest suitable for ceremonial purposes. The hike is a traveling seminar. The group strings out into little ad hoc discussion groups of twos and threes, with topics ranging from the abstraction of policies, agencies, theories and politics to the here-and-now of this Douglas Fir, this Western Hemlock. Every now and then with no formal notice or apparent organization, the entire group gathers to discuss the implications of the sale. We stand quiet for awhile, blinking at the trees above us until someone starts to speak. I Most of the talk is over my head: windthrow, blowdown, corridors, sunscald, storage, recharge, canopy intersection, fragmentation, overstory, understory, exploding growth, edge. I am reminded of the saying that Eskimos have over 100 words for ice and snow. Likewise, those of us on the periphery of forests think generally in two words, "big" and "trees," while people like Potash and her co-workers have developed a whole lexicon to deal with the complexity of forest life. One phrase that continually surfaces is "New Perspectives." It's the new thinking that recognizes a forest as a complex, biological community rather than just a woodlot. Recognizing the biodiversity of a forest is one thing. Removing 400-year-old, twenty-ton trees and recreating that diversity of life is something else again. It's all new territory. What trees and how many do we leave standing? Should we cut lots of little sections or several huge stands? What actually lives here now? What'll happen in 80, 100, 300 years? Will we have recreated a forest or a treelot? No one knows for sure. It's like giving a pocket watch to a five-year old and asking her to take it apart and put it together again. But there's hope in knowledge. A year ago there was no botanist for this forest. Now she's up ahead with a 10pound field guide tucked into the back pouch of her rain parka. It's also safe to say that a few years ago there probably wouldn't have been an hydrologist, a biologist, an environmentalist, a journalist or a tribal representative present on this survey. There's hope, too, in communication. A fair amount of networking takes place on the hike: Potash and the hydrologist discuss what constitutes wetlands; the wildlife specialist discusses shade and seedling growth with the silviculturist; a timber cruiser and an environmentalist discuss the effects of blowdown on the edge of the proposed cut. Every exchange of knowledge and resources contributes a tiny piece to the puzzle of a forest. Later, I ask Potash about her piece of the puzzle. We're driving back to Seattle and I drop my Greener Environmentalist Chic and play the devil's advocate: "Okay, really, Laura, job responsibilities and correct politics aside, why all this fuss about moonwarts and other weeds?" Her response is calm but impassioned: "We don't know the long-term effects of our actions. It's presumptuous to assume we do. Take the fungus they've discovered on the roots of trees. They've found out that that fungus helps trees grow. "Who knows? Maybe the moonwart could be a cure for AIDS or cancer. Not protecting it would be like burning the pages of a book before you've read it." She pauses as we enter the city. "Even if moonwarts are of absolutely no use to humans, we don't have the right to destroy any species or to allow them to be destroyed." In these hard times, it takes more than compassion to do the right thing for our forests. It takes knowledge about all life-great and microscopic. What Potash and her co-workers are giving us is as precious as water. ACTIVIST continued from page 11 Olympic Peninsula from the bottom of the pile and starts flipping through orange and green overlays. Numbered tags scattered across the map indicate the known locations of spotted owls. The wealth of biological data contained in these maps is impressive. While working on a World Wildlife Fund project in the Amazon rain forest, Steel became acquainted with the concept of island biogeography: the study of changes in animal and plant populations that occur when large tracts of habitat are broken into isolated patches by natural or human activity. This is essentially what is happening in the Northwest and is at the core of the fight over how much old growth forest needs to be preserved. "Before the days of the spotted owl, conservation was a recreational issue. The 'Name it and Save it' philosophy guided legislation," he explains, referring to the point of view that it was easier to get Congress to save pretty places than to preserve animal habitat. "The ancient forests used to be thought of as biological deserts," he says, pointing out the dwindling islands of green on the map overlay. "As we learned more about their diversity of life it became evident that we needed to shift from thinking about landscapes to thinking about whole ecosystems. At last we're recognizing the importance of forests as biological areas." After jobs with the Forest Service and the Washington State Department of Wildlife, The Audubon Society put Steel to work organizing the map library. It didn't take them long to recognize his skill for organizing people. "I was in the right place at the right time," he says. He believes the Audubon Society was one of the first national organizations to shift its emphasis to "deep ecology." This required a reevaluation of what was politically possible for the FALL 1990 movement. It meant education and involving a much larger part of the population. Steel sees Washington state as particularly fertile ground for political action. "This is the best lab in the country right now to see if people can live in a healthy environment. We still have a few areas that are virtually the same as they were before the arrival of white men. At the same time we have a public that's concerned about environmental issues. The combination of both factors is something unique in the U.S. I believe that if we can't practice wise forestry in the Pacific Northwest, we can't do it anywhere." The term "grass roots" keeps coming up when you talk to Argon Steel. For him, environmentalism is a populist movement. He sees danger in the tendency to focus on lobbying in Washington D.C. at the expense of working in the community. "The next big issue for environmental groups is how to integrate youth and minorities into the movement," he said. "I'm hoping this campaign will recognize that minorities have their own agendas, and the environmental movement has room for those agendas. I'd like to look beyond saving your local marsh and look at the larger issues that surround people." For Steel these larger issues are economic. "In the near future we are going to see more confrontations between economic interests and endangered species." He doesn't believe it's going to be possible to legislate environmentalism without making fundamental changes. "I'm a little more radical than some of my fellow environmentalists," he admits with a vaguely dangerous smile. "Let me tell you what my priorities are. My first allegiance is to the environment. My second is to the continued on next page 15
grass roots, the community. And my third is to my organization." Steel is aware that protecting endangered species means making economic choices that are going to hurt people. When asked if he finds it uncomfortable to live and work in a community so polarized over the forest issue, his reply is unhesitating. "I never apologize," he says. "I'd rather deal with hostility than apathy any day." He empathizes deeply with those who are caught in the middle. At the same time he believes that environmental degradation has gone too far for painless solutions. "We can't compromise life. Extinction is the bottom line. The burden of proof in this discussion has always been on the environment and now that has to change." The people that Argon Steel has no empathy for are cynics. "We're on a campaign that's winning and I will not tolerate pessimism. I mean, what's the point? People need to be empowered. You need to point out solutions or there's no use for you," he says. "No one would do this work for the money. The thing that makes this winnable is passion, and that passion includes all your sadness and anger as well as your love. It can be hard. You can get sucked into this work body and soul and it will suck you dry, but you've got to maintain your idealism. Like I said, we're winning." LOGGER continued from page 12 Roberts performs two kinds of work. Mostly, he's a troubleshooter, dealing with permits, public agencies, insurance companies, banks, etc. but he also fills in as a loader and operator of construction equipment when needed. His days as a loader begin at 4:30 a.m., he's out on the site, loading trucks by 5:30. "We did away with a lot of luxuries during the early 80s crunch," he says. "Like the 8hour day with coffee breaks and a long lunch hour. Now it's 10-11 hours: eat your lunch in the cab; got to go? you do it off the running board-keep the engine running, hop back in and keep loading." Fortunately, today, a dazzling morning in late September, is a troubleshooting day. We'll have plenty of time to talk as we travel down Highway 8 between stops in and around Montesano, Aberdeen and Hoquiam. The company that Roberts works for employs about 50 people -more or less, depending on the availability of work. Diversity, he says, is the key to survival. Several years ago 90% of the company's revenue came from logging; now it's around 60%. The rest of the revenue comes from construction and road building, land development and two logging supply stores. On the way to the office, located about 20 miles west of Evergreen, Roberts elaborates on the theme of diversity: "Two years ago we sold off most of our heavy equipment. We made the decision that it wasn't feasible for us to log at the level of intensity it takes to cut on federal lands. If we have economic options, such as developing real estate, we don't need to log old growth to- "Hey, there you go," he says, interrupting himself and pointing to a hillside, "that's what I was talking about before." All I see are trees: dark fir on the ridge and upper slopes; alder and other leafy trees below. But what Roberts sees is an unmanaged forest. "See how the firs peter out and there's all those junk trees below? Well, that's because after they cut it, they didn't reseed, but let it happen on its own. A certain amount of alder is desirable, but not that much." I begin to ask more about this but we're interrupted by the phone. It's a call from the office, advising Roberts to make sure the local fire department has been notified of a burn that the company will be conducting on a site near Montesano. "People see smoke," explains Roberts, "call the fire department, and then there's hell to pay if they come roaring out with their trucks and find out it's a controlled burn that we forgot to tell them about. "So much of this job is p.r.," he says. "That thing," he adds, pointing to the cellular phone, "is as much a tool of logging these days as a chain saw." Most of Roberts' logging career has not been spent on the phone. He got his first job as a chokesetter when he was 18. Then he was a "whistle punk," using an electronic whistle to signal the engineer who operates the machinery that hauls the logs to the landing. He worked for his uncles in the summer while he went to school, then set chokers, blew whistle and loaded for big companies and gypos alike. He also worked for a time at Camp Grisdale, the state's last logging camp (it closed in 1985). "I've had to make an adjustment in transitioning from the production end of this business to what I do now. I mean when you're on a site, you know you're working hard. But I tell myself that what I'm doing now is just as important as loading or setting chokers. As I was saying the other day to John, the guy I was just on the phone with, most of us don't necessarily get a rush out of doing routine logging jobs anymore. We like the situations where we have to solve problems. Like you," he says, nodding toward my notebook, "You live for getting out of the office and solving the problem of how to write down what you're seeing." He's right and what I'm seeing now is a different Highway 8 than I'm used to. For years it's just been the road to the ocean. To Roberts, it's neighborhood. There's a cut that his brother worked on, here's a job he worked on, and a piece that his uncles logged six years ago- "Hey, look how well the trees are coming back. See last year's growth, the distance between the highest spikes and the top? About a foot! That's a good reprod job." The object of his admiration is a dense stand of six- to eight-foot tall firs. His enthusiasm diminishes, however, as we round a curve. Dead ahead is a great, ugly hill. It's being clear cut and stands out from the green hills around it like a scab. Roberts pulls over to the side of the road. It's not the clear cut he minds (all along, he's been showing me stands of timber grown from clear cuts), but the way it's being done. "See those dark lines up there? Those are furrows. They're caused by dragging the logs to the tower. They don't have a suspension system so the logs tear up the soil, causes erosion and makes it hard to replant. That's the kind of crap that makes us all feel bad about logging." r A few miles later, we take a two-track into the woods outside of Montesano. The first thing I hear as I step out of the truck is the high, sharp pipings of the tower whistle. The tower is the mechanism that cables the logs off the cut and up to the landing area. The whistle communicates between the crew on the ground and the operator. We walk up a short rise and look down on the loading operation. On a small hilltop there's a log truck half-full of logs, a bright yellow loader (a sort of forklift with jaws) and a fifty-foot steel tower. Cables run out from the top of the tower across a valley to a cutting site on the other side of the next hill. Two men are on the ground, limbing logs and coiling wire. They're dressed in boots, pants with the cuffs torn off (so the cloth, if snagged, will tear rather than hold) wide-brimmed hardhats and red suspenders. (Everybody, including Roberts, wears red suspenders). "Those guys are in what we call 'the F...ing Bight,'" says Roberts, referring to the narrow, dangerous corridor between tower, logs, loader, truck and cable. "Something goes wrong in there, there's not a lot of room to get out of the way." One of the men in the bight waves and walks up the hill to us. Roberts introduces me to his brother -a muscular, younger version of himself. They don't say much -a few words about Grandma and when this job will end. They stand by an ancient stump, one that was hand-notched and cut over 100 years ago (this current cut is harvesting third growth timber). The brother's stubbled face is dark from the sun; so much darker and healthierlooking than the recreational tans that I'm used to seeing in the office. He gives me a wide grin, shakes my hand, and bounds down the hill. I catch myself wondering, and not for the first time, whether it's a better life out here in the woods. "Hey, don't forget," says Roberts, reading my mind, "that we're seeing them on a good day. I mean, more often than not, we're talking cold, rainy days; dangerous, slippery logs, and being clammy right down to your underwear." The whistle blows, the cable tightens and over the rise of the far hill comes a canvas cradle of three two-ton logs. Roberts says some technical things, pointing out the suspension system that keeps the logs from furrowing the soil. But I'm not really listening. Routine as it may be, there is something breathtaking about the logs appearing over the crest of the hill; not unlike the moment when you first see a hooked trout breaking the water. It's also like the first trip to a dairy farm when you realize that milk doesn't just come from a carton at Safeway, and beyond that, that it just doesn't come from a cow (or a forest) but through immense human effort. Later in the day we drive down the streets of Montesano, a town of about 2000. It's three in the afternoon, hot as midsummer and quiet: people are still at work, children at school. The houses are older and well-kept; there's little development, no condos in sight. There are also fewer of the lime-green, stenciled signs that we saw everywhere in Aberdeen: "THIS FAMILY SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS." But that doesn't mean that "timber" isn't here: it's a universal thread through all of Roberts' memories. He points out the streets where his uncles live, only a block apart. They logged. Uncle Ken, in his 70s, still has a shop where he works on logging equipment. We drive past the house where his family once lived. His father drove a logging truck. House after familiar house contains or once contained a family he knew, a family in which members of two, three, and sometimes four generations harvested lumber. He points out timber mansions and says, "These 'mansions,' (though they're not really that big) are on the same street with everybody else's houses. They didn't take the money and run or shut themselves off from the rest of the town." Roberts, who now lives in Olympia, says "Monty" hasn't changed much. He recites the names of the stores that he knew as a kid. Most are still there. We drive by a gleaming, block-long fire station. "That's timber money," he says, "The money to build that station was donated by a retired logger. See, you can't cut that cord. Timber is a part of this town, part of our history. It'd be like saying let's have southern France without wine growers." Roberts, himself, comes from a four-generation logging family. His great-grandfather moved to the Northwest in the 1880s and cleared the land. His sons, grandsons and great grandsons worked as loggers, millworkers or hauled logs to the mills. Roberts' 93-year-old grandmother, a bright, sharp woman who still lives in Montesano, remembers the backbreaking work of former days: "Gee, it was so bard to clear the land," and you can sense from her words the massive forests looming before the homesteaders and their puny saws and axes. Who among them would've guessed that the day would come when such forests would ever be in danger? As we leave Montesano, Doug muses: "The curious thing is that I don't represent the typical logger, but my background is so typical, so intricately webbed with timber." I ask if he's ever thought of doing something else. "Sure, I've got a college education. I've got skills. I could do a lot of things, but it's tough to explain. There's a certain feel, a certain smell. It's a way I ground myself..." I mention that such sentiments on the part of loggers rarely get transmitted in the media. He laughs and says, "You know most environmentalists have never seen a logger. Loggers are environmentalists. We spend 10 times more time in the wilderness than they do." We drive for awhile in silence, while Doug searches for the right words: "I mean you can't help but be mesmerized by the sight of snow crystals on the pines when you're going to work at dawn. We're farmers, really. You know the media depiction of farmers—down on their knees with their hands in the dirt? Well, we're farmers, too. We're close to the earth." 16 THE EVERGREEN REVIEW FALL 1990 17
Page 1: view The Evergreen State College IN
Page 4 and 5: GEONEW Greeners Export Environmenta
Page 6 and 7: •Illl ACTIVIST by Ray Kelleher '8
Page 10 and 11: ALUMNEWS The 1990-91 Alumni Associa
Page 12 and 13: The following excerpt is from "Soun
Page 14 and 15: F Gregory Falken Christiane Fara-Sk
Page 16 and 17: FRIENDS Richard Alexander Jeanne Al

V12 #1 November 1990 - Archives - The Evergreen State College

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