The Forest Log offers a collection of work created by participants in the Long-Term Ecological Reflections Residency program at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. Artists, writers, and musicians who visit the forest and engage with active research translate their experiences into a range of offerings, from journal entries and poems to long-form essays, audio arrangements, field sketches, photography, paintings and more. Introduced with the Reflections program in 2004, this living, growing collection gives voice to the diversity of relationships with the forest and reveals how these relationships persist or change over time.
The Reflections program values contributions from varied perspectives, cultures, backgrounds, ways of knowing, practices, and disciplines. Residents are not required to submit material to The Forest Log, and all participants in the program are listed on this site even if they have chosen a different venue for public engagement. Forest Log contributors retain the rights to their creative work, and are encouraged to publish and exhibit widely. Musical compositions have been performed across the nation, art has been exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest, and essays and poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, and National Geographic, among other venues. Work from the forest has also been featured in books, including Pulitzer Prize finalist Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush, The Long Way Home by Tom Montgomery Fate, and Zoologies by Alison Hawthorne Deming.
The Forest Log will continue to grow this cultural dataset for 200 years.
Truths reveal themselves over time, and many cannot be grasped in short glimpses. Careful study of a place over generations cultivates humility in the presence of deep time, openness to surprise, and patience when drawing conclusions.
This long-term thinking is a radical act—a corrective to the corrosive impatience of modern life. Living in a time of ecological and moral crisis means that the urgent need for new ways of thinking and being sits in tension with wisdom that evolves over generations. The Forest Log collects attempts to discern these tensions and to open sensibilities to new ways of being.