The Other Side of the Clearcut
This would be the time to turn back. I’m two-thirds of the way up a steep clearcut, fighting for balance as the scree beneath my boots clatters down toward the gravel road. From here, where the slope grows even steeper and thick with poison oak, my rented white Dodge looks the size of a cigarette butt. The smart thing to do would be to sidestep my way back down and pick a better route. Something with shade, maybe some soil, back behind the ribs of forest that mark the straight edge of this clearcut.
Instead I pick up a bleached branch to deflect a bough of leaflets three, then lunge up the incline. Parry, lunge, clatter; parry, lunge, clatter. I’m making distance, but with each step I find the poison oak crowding closer. It loves these sun-struck slopes where little else will grow. No more sprays around the ankle, easy enough to avoid; here the bushes unfold to shoulder-height. Now I need a stick in each hand to part the crowds. I know I’ll regret this.
Believe me, scrabbling up clearcuts was not what I had in mind for my residency at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, here in the Oregon Cascades. I was on sabbatical leave from a small Vermont college, working on a book about the relationships people have (or forget to have) with the places they live. Since I grew up in Oregon, this residency might help me see how I’d been shaped by this landscape. That was the idea.
And what better place to rediscover the Oregon forests than the Andrews? (It’s always the Andrews, by the way, the article as inevitable here as on the freeways of southern California.) Over the last sixty years scientists have come to these ancient forests to study how an entire ecosystem functions, from the leafy lichens catching nitrogen high in the canopy to the millions of invertebrates building the soil below. This is where the northern spotted owl became a star, destined to change the way we use these forests.
Like other Long Term Ecological Research sites, the Andrews gives scientists a chance to gather data over decades. In a novel twist, several creative writers come here each year, beginning in 2003, to compile an aesthetic record of the forest that will span
two centuries. I trust that readers in 2203 will find these words as quaint and short-sighted as we might find those written back when Lewis and Clark hadn’t yet left St. Louis.
Even before I arrived here, I found myself wondering what I might add to this record. I have no background in science, unlike previous Andrews writers—folks like Robert Michael Pyle, Robin Kimmerer, and Pattianne Rogers, who’ve made careers of drawing back the curtains from our astonishing world. And while I have spent much of my life in these woods, most of that time I was oblivious to the details. Even since then, my study of ecology has been clumsy, occasional, and self-directed.
What I can offer, I decided, is a personal experience of Oregon—one that may shed some light on the stories that determine how we understand this land.
I grew up here at a time when timber was king, and I felt honored to have descended from among the first settlers to clear these woods for farm and pasture. Through the lens of that story, these forests played a familiar role: a wild land waiting to be made useful. By the time I returned in the 1990s, however, after a long time away, western Oregon had changed enough that a new story was drowning out the old. It featured people who fled their cramped lives back East, wishing to live closer to nature. Forests, in this story, were worth more upright than felled, bucked, and milled.
These two stories still exist side by side, conflicting when characters cross the line between them. A hero in one story—say, the lumberjack who clears the way for towns and schools—looks more like a villain in the other. It works the same way with symbols: an object that signifies success to one person means tragedy to another. A clearcut, for example. Or a northern spotted owl.
People in Oregon may share a physical landscape, but they live in symbolic landscapes that clash, sometimes violently. Through my own changes, I’ve seen this land as it appears in both stories. That makes it easier to see the symbols for what they are. And maybe, during my time here, I can even learn to see past them.
At least since World War II, the clearcut has been a symbol of progress, jobs, and efficiency in a region ruled by the timber industry. I learned in grade school to be proud that we supplied so much of the nation’s lumber. But over the last twenty-five years, as western Oregon filled up with newcomers drawn by its natural beauty, clearcuts have come to represent all that is wrong with industrial resource extraction (if not all that is wrong with our society, unsustainable and irresponsible). Both meanings remain in play—the former mostly in rural communities, the latter in the cities.
Back in the 90s, a friend of mine, a photographer, had set up his tripod on the edge of a Coast-Range logging road, hoping to capture the way that light gathered on the ridges, when a truck rumbled to a stop behind him. Two men in work clothes climbed from the cab and stepped toward him, eyeing his pony-tail and his Japanese compact, and asked what he was doing. When he explained, one of the men told him to turn his camera to the clearcut across the road. “That’s what’s really beautiful,” he declared, and I believe he meant it.
The other symbol, the northern spotted owl, emerged from obscurity in 1990 when listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Almost over night, this modest ball of feathers came to stand for healthy forest ecosystems. Of course, ecologists didn’t call it a symbol, or even a synecdoche. They preferred the term “indicator species,” but what they meant was that the survival of the spotted owl depended on preserving intact old-growth forests west of the Cascade peaks.
To those in timber communities who saw their jobs threatened by new regulations, the shy bird came to signify an unfathomable change in society’s priorities. Those of us who traveled these back roads in the 90s couldn’t miss the stickers on bumpers, or at the counters of rural cafes: SAVE A LOGGER; EAT AN OWL. (In fact, more timber jobs were lost to automation and policies that sent raw logs to Asia, but I guess neither threat fit as neatly on a bumper.)
The symbol of the clearcut stands for an industrial scale of human impact on the region’s forests, while the symbol of the spotted owl stands for minimal human impact. I don’t imagine many locals have trouble deciding how they feel about either symbol—and the way they feel about one pretty well determines how they feel about the other.
Continue reading Christensen’s “The Other Side of the Clearcut.”
