[ Applause ]
-Thank you, Stesha.
Thank you, most of all, to all of you for being here tonight.
It is just a joy to look out and see so many friends.
Some of you in the audience actually have been
along for some of this ride.
You maybe saw yourselves in the pictures.
This is just a sample of what the last three years
reporting this book have been like.
I've been all over the Northwest,
across the border into BC,
all the way over into the east of the country
to tell this story
that I'm going to bring to you this evening.
It's just a moment to say thank you, though,
also to the Seattle Public Library,
which I treasure, to my employer, The Seattle Times,
we make your journalism for you fresh, local, every day.
Craft, brood, not industrial.
The Blethen family has been publishing the paper
through five generations since 1886.
I'm so lucky to work there.
I've been there for 27 years and 40 years
as a daily newspaper reporter.
So this Pulitzer thing, you know, it was exciting.
It was fun.
I couldn't figure out why my phone was ringing so much.
It's like, God, someone's really trying to get a hold of me.
And I want to say thank you to Elliott Bay Books
for being here tonight, you know,
local bookstores, libraries, supporting local writers,
and you, the community,
coming out to hear our stories
and this is what keeps us connected
and it's just very, very precious to me.
Seattle is a special town and this is one of the ways
in which it's most special.
So, I want to tell you a little bit
about what we're going to do tonight.
I want to just kind of fly through the book quickly
because Rena and I want to talk to you but I thought, well,
people need to know like, well, what are we talking about?
So I'm going to quickly take you through this story.
So buckle up. Here we go. So we all love wood.
We all need wood.
I live in a house that was built in 1910 with giant wood.
I'm a complete and utter wood pig.
My husband will attest to this.
I burn wood. I write with a pencil on paper.
I work in a newspaper, for heaven's sakes.
I write books. So I get it.
I was raised in a -- I was very lucky,
I was raised in a place with seven acres of woods
and my mom would say every day,
"Go outside and find something to do."
And every picture of me as a kid,
I've got a black eye and I'm covered with calamine lotion.
I'm in my Girl Scout shorts.
So, you know, and we burned wood like crazy.
We split wood. We stacked wood. I love wood.
And so, you know,
this story for me is both a story of love and grief.
I began this book because I have long revered Jerry Franklin.
He's one of the world's foremost ecological geniuses.
But his particular focus is old-growth trees.
He was the one who really brought us the understanding
that old growth is a thing.
That these older trees are not just bigger.
They have special attributes.
Old and mature forests are -- they're unique in our world.
And so, I was talking to Jerry
actually for a story at the paper and I said,
"Hey Jerry, what are you working on?"
He said, "Oh, well I've got this idea for a new book.
It's going to be about old trees
and what they taught me for the general public."
And I thought that is a great idea and he'll never do it.
So, I called him up a couple of weeks later and I said,
"Hey, that sounds fun.
Why don't we do it together?"
And he thought that was a great idea.
And so we started out that way.
And then I got a call after our proposal from Nicole Mitchell
at the University of Washington Press, the director.
She's quite a diplomat.
Here's what she said, "I think you need to write it."
You know, sole author.
So I thought, "Oh God, this is kind of a tough call."
So I called him up and I said, "I think I need to write it.
And would that be okay?" Well, he was really glad.
He was delighted. He didn't want to write it.
He just wanted to team up.
So we did.
You know, this is what I thought I was going to do on this book.
We went and we saw the rushes,
old growth of the Pacific Northwest,
you know, these incredible forests, the giant trees,
the 1,000-year-old trees,
and, you know, here we are at Cedar Flats natural area,
and he's talking to me about these trees
and how they're so special, so unique, so wonderful,
and I'm digging the mushrooms and on the web again,
and I'm thinking,
"Yeah, this is exactly where I went on my leave.
Thank you, Ben, my editor at The Seattle Times, back there."
You know, but amid all the beauty, amid all the wonder,
was the inescapable fact that there's so little of it left.
And for me, the day this book changed,
the book that I thought I was writing, completely vaporized.
It wasn't only about this. Trees like this.
Science about the trees like this.
All the wonder of even the soil that a forest like this makes.
It became about this.
You know, we left Cedar Flats' natural area
and went just a couple of miles down the road.
This is in the Gifford Pinchot natural forest.
And that's Jerry going off basically.
He's a soft-spoken guy.
But when we came into this clear cut,
he started to go on about, you know,
people need to know all is not well.
This industrial forest remodel where we, you know,
convert a natural forest to basically a crop.
It's not okay.
And people need to understand it.
And I'm not going to shut up about it.
I thought, oh, all right.
So this book needs to be a very different book.
Not only about the wonder of old growth
and how important it is in old and mature forests,
but how we lost so much of them,
and how in the Northwest we saved 24 million acres
of forests on federal land under the Northwest Forest Plan.
But right across the border in BC,
same ecology, same precious trees, same salmon,
depending on these forests,
and trees like this are still being cut today,
now, 1,000-year-old trees.
And I went up to BC to see some of that with Suzanne Simard,
who's another famous forest ecologist.
One of her breakthroughs
was looking at really the relationships between trees,
how they actually not only compete with one another
but help one another and even communicate between one another.
And in my time up there in the forest with her crew,
what we were doing,
I was watching her and her crew
taking data of some of these last unprotected
old-growth forests and even looking at the soil
because the soil in a forest like that
is very, very different.
And meeting Teresa Ryan, one of her leading scientists
in her team who was all about the relationship
between the salmon and the trees.
And what came through in these conversations with Teresa Ryan,
Hu Xin Xian,
and with some of the other native people
that I worked with up there in British Columbia,
and through the teachings in the Big House,
which were generously shared with me,
is that what we're really talking about
when we're talking about forests isn't only about trees.
It isn't certainly only about lumber.
It's about relationships,
and that the relationships between the trees
and the salmon, it's not just a woo-woo thing,
this is so real,
you can see a different color of greenness
in the canopy from space
when there's been a big salmon run in the Adams River.
You can see in the actual rings of the trees,
they're fatter during a really big salmon run.
You can actually see the signature
of marine-derived nutrients,
nutrients from the sea that came home to the forest
in the fish brought into the woods by bears.
So this is a beautiful,
intimate, eternal relationship between these beings
and between the first people of this place
and these beings who knew how to use the forest
for thousands of years, many thousands of years sustainably.
This is a tree, a cedar tree with a bark scar.
That piece of bark was used for something.
It could have been for clothing.
It could have been for even baby's diapers.
And that bark scar was made many hundreds of years ago.
And you can use a tree in a sustainable way.
We know from these trees
that we see all over the Pacific Northwest.
Native people who lived here knew
that the living wealth was kept in a living forest
for future generations.
And I thought to myself where did this idea come from?
That you cut it all down and send it somewhere else,
money that goes to somebody else's bank somewhere else.
Where did that come from?
And so that's what this book then became about.
Not only the wealth of the forest,
not only the original knowledge systems
that stewarded that wealth,
but commodification.
That was the through line and is the through line of this book.
Across 500 years, 3000 miles, the movement from Maine,
which is where this photograph is taken by me
of a massive clear cut all the way across the country,
and now still in BC.
This is what happens
when forests are treated basically as places
for growing wood,
basically as places mostly
to make money for distant shareholders.
From a small plane, which I rented for this book,
this is what the northern forest of Maine looks like,
like corduroy.
It doesn't look like a forest.
It's been cut and cut and cut and recut,
smaller and smaller and smaller.
Look how tiny the logs are.
Those are about as big around as a coffee can.
And that was for the pulp industry.
And on the Penobscot River today,
which is the second largest river in New England,
you see a lot of dead pulp mills.
And the wood that was cut for these
to make pulp for these mills is what leaves us
with these scarred forests.
Many communities today are home to these dead pulp mills,
and they're looking for a way forward.
It's going to be difficult, but a lot of them are trying,
as many of our natural resource towns
are trying to remake themselves.
So I didn't want the book only to be about loss
and about trouble.
I wanted it also to be about hope,
and that's where Molly London, Logger of the Year comes in.
That's Molly right there with her newest baby
in the cab of her processor.
Now this is a very expensive piece of equipment
that she and her husband
managed to buy for their independent logging company.
And it makes sure they're cutting the woods,
but what they're doing is actually what's called
pre-commercial thinning.
Try to take out small stuff so that the trees
they leave behind get bigger. And believe it or not,
their biggest client is the Appalachian Mountain Club,
an outdoor club that is setting aside land for wilderness
forever, providing other land for recreation access,
and then rehabilitating it with logging practices like these,
using local people and their local knowledge.
And what I loved about this was spending the time in the cab
with this logger
and watching how he does his job and understanding that,
you know, we all need wood products
and how are we going to get those products more responsibly.
And what came home to me was this idea
that we need to bring back the original stewardship
of these lands, the sense of connection to our forests.
We need to be local about our forests the way
we are about our food.
Think about where do our wood products come from.
How is that woodcut?
We need to reconnect our rivers and our forests.
In Maine,
I was happy to see the beginnings of fish passage
on a river, the Penobscot,
that was completely taken over for basically the pulp industry,
with many dams to create hydropower and to power the dams
and also to basically sluice the logs,
turning the river into a sluiceway for logs.
Well, this funny-looking thing is --
it's an elevator for fish to get them over one of the dams,
but happily, some of the dams just like in the Elwha,
just like in the Klamath, just like in the white --
in other rivers that are still waiting out there
for their rehabilitation.
These dams are coming down.
This is the site of the former Visi Dam.
And to sit there on a spring night
and look across the Penobscot River
and smell the shadbush
and see the lavender light of the coming evening and know
that those fish are coming back up river, Atlantic salmon.
Millions of Atlantic herring is to know that nature,
if you give it a chance, actually does come back.
That's an Atlantic salmon.
They're trying to do with their Atlantic salmon
the same thing we're doing with our Pacific salmon.
And I was so struck as a reporter
who spent so much time on salmon and rivers
in the Pacific Northwest by the unity,
the connectedness of these stories,
and the connectedness of all of us
in this quest to use what we need to use responsibly
to restore these beautiful places that we love
and stop breaking more.
Here you see a couple of scientists
I went out with on the Penobscot River.
This is a river that was so polluted it turned colors.
Today, all kinds of creatures are coming back to that river.
But I think the part I liked the best
was this rather modest accomplishment
that actually is quite big.
This is what's happening all over the Penobscot watershed
where former culverts are being taken out
and being replaced with better bridges for better fish passage.
So this should sound familiar.
The thing that I love about this is the people
who are doing this work never thought
that they'd be even thinking about trying to bring fish back
that have been gone for a century,
and the people doing the work are some of the very same people
who built the logging roads.
This is Molly London's father-in-law,
and he's so proud of every single one of these bridges
that he's building, he signs them with welding bead.
So that's what it's about.
It's about change.
It's about transition, and honestly, it's about bravery,
each and all of us, to stand up for forests,
to stand up for these places that we love.
And with that, Rena and I are going to have a nice juicy chat.
[ Applause ]
-So... [ Speaking native language ]
Thank you, Lynda, for inviting me to talk to you
tonight about your beautiful book.
And, you know, as I was reading it,
it's just -- I went through so many emotions,
you know, because, you know,
you really render the landscape so beautifully,
and it's like you're there in this forest.
But then you talk about what's at stake.
And so then, you know, you just go through this,
like, emotional roller coaster of being like,
oh, it's so beautiful.
And then just, urgh, you know, urgh.
What are we doing here?
And so, I really appreciated, though,
how you really shared what was at stake.
And in the early passages to talk --
where you're talking about the nurse logs,
I really loved how you described the life
that springs out of the things that people think are dead and,
you know, the tree itself is just mostly just dead,
like it's dead underneath that surface layer,
but the nurse logs, the fallen trees are home,
like hosts to just hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of species.
What you share about the idea of the forest,
the old-growth forest as bio deserts initially, right?
The science and all that.
-Right.
So this is the thing that was shocking to me
in talking to Jerry who's, you know,
his initial work goes back to a much earlier time,
the '60s, the '50s, the '70s, the '80s,
when actually the idea was to get rid of
this decadent old growth as quickly as possible.
This is regarded as a desert, an unproductive place.
Get rid of that old stuff
and make room for thrifty young stands.
I mean, personally, I'm offended as an older tree myself.
So here's Jerry,
who's basically a curious person with an open mind,
and he's noticing a lot of things about the forest.
For instance, all the dead wood in the forest.
Logs everywhere.
In an old-growth forest, you can't walk in a straight line.
There's everything in the way
and in the way in the most glorious way.
And unlike all this sort of formal bench science
and experiments
that were typical of the East Coast colleges
where all the textbooks are being written
about these forests and how they work and so forth,
he was being instructed by the forest itself
and understanding its richness
and being curious about how it really worked.
And to me,
that was just so exciting
because that idea of the humility behind that,
to think the forest could teach you something.
The idea of seeing the complexity of the living place
and the arrogance
that you could just replace that with, you know,
a monoculture of all the same trees, all the same age,
that was going to be just as good.
In fact, it would be efficient.
And it was for making capital, right?
For making lots of money for distant people.
But if you're talking about biodiversity,
if you're talking about water quality,
if you're talking about species,
if you're talking about human well-being,
you're talking about something else.
You're talking about a forest and a farm.
It's not a forest.
And the nurse log is a perfect example.
What you're really seeing there is the ability of the forest
to regenerate itself eternally,
just as the returning salmon coming back and back and back,
these cycles, these beautiful productive systems,
self-maintaining, abundant, rich,
they will go on forever
if you just allow them to keep their own capacity for renewal.
In the forest,
that means you don't cut it all down.
That means you don't put herbicide all over it
and burn whatever is left, and then plant a monoculture.
It can never recover to become a true living forest.
-Yeah. Yeah. -Sorry.
-Welcome.
-So, I'm going to read a little passage because,
you know, we were talking about poetry
and this is -- it felt poetic like I say
as I was reading your book.
Many times I thought, "Oh, that's so beautiful."
"Living dead,
these words don't really make sense
and an old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest
were alive trees mostly dead
but for the growing live layer of cells
under its bark called cambium.
And what does dead mean for a decomposing log
that holds even more living beings
than this tree did when it was alive?"
And then -- so, yeah,
that's just like this whole passage here
is one of my favorite passages.
It's just beautiful.
And then when you're talking about the relationship
between hydrology in the forest,
thinking about how the rivers -- well,
you and I had talked about the Andrews Forest
and the work that they're doing there,
studying like how these systems work together.
-Right.
-I talked to a scientist from the Andrews Forest
for a book that is coming out in the fall,
and he shared that the --
what's the name of the network, the Wood Wide Web,
but it has a technical term. -Mycorrhizal fungi.
-There we go. Mycorrhizal fungi.
But the way that that works is in theory,
he has this theory that a fish trying to spawn
could send out a signal into the forest
that there was nowhere to spawn,
and that the tree could potentially hear
this fish in distress and fell apart of its,
you know, a branch or whatever over the part of the river
that the fish needed to spawn in
to create an eddy there just for this fish.
And this relationship of the beings in the forest
that hear each other and react to each other
and relate to each other.
It's so beautiful.
I love that idea, but will you share about Suzanne Simard?
Did I say that her name right?
-You did. -Yeah, about how her work.
It's just that's a fun -- that was a fun part of the book.
-Sure. So Suzanne is a brave scientist.
She works up in BC.
And I spent a bunch of time with her
for the newspaper writing about the Fairy Creek blockades,
and perhaps you followed that in the paper,
these protests about the cutting of old growth up there.
And, you know, I went back to spend more time with her
in the woods for this book a week, actually.
And what she's doing, I think, is so interesting
because she's really looking at the soil in the forest,
which is really the last wilderness.
We don't know much about what's going on down there.
And I want to be clear, her work has been attacked.
She's taken a lot of criticism for her work.
There's a lot of skepticism about her work.
And she is persisting.
She's continuing with her work to probe, to experiment,
to understand exactly how trees are actually connected
as a community and sustain one another.
Don't just compete with one another.
And what I hear from other scientists is,
you know, they dig it.
They get that. They believe that.
They know that trees support one another.
Where they go off the rails is
when any kind of intentionality
is brought into the conversation.
Like, well, they're not like, you know, deliberately doing it.
It's just happening.
And it's just so interesting. I'm trained to listen to people.
And I so often wish
that the people that I'm listening to separately
would talk to one another, you know.
You guys have the fight and let me listen in, you know.
So that's what that science is that she's persisting with.
And, you know, I have so much respect for her.
She really went through a lot
because she was working for BC Timber
when she started and she was curious
why the trees weren't growing really well.
Because they were being planted in a monoculture,
they didn't have any of their companion plants.
They didn't have any of the mycorrhizal fungi
because that had been burned off,
herbicide had scraped away, and they just weren't thriving.
So like any good scientist,
she was curious about what's missing.
And that's when she started doing these experiments
where she would literally put a hood over one tree
so it can't photosynthesize,
and it's next to another tree which is photosynthesizing,
and then she would use radioactive isotopes
to notice some of the photosynthate from over here.
What do you know? It's over here.
How did it get there?
It came over through the mycorrhizal fungi.
So that was the beginning of her work.
And it's just, to me -- people often asked me, you know,
how did you get into being an environment reporter?
What interests you about it?
It's exactly that.
It's these myriad beautiful connections between species,
between processes.
For me, it's endlessly interesting,
the more you know, the more beautiful it is.
But frankly, the more humble you are about messing with it.
And as a human who needs and uses things,
lives in a house, you know, keep my money in a bank,
all the usual stuff,
it just makes me want to know more about
how we can do that more carefully,
because everything that was here before
and all the people who were here before are still here,
and they're trying to survive among billions of us
in a changing climate, hotter, drier.
I think one of the messages of this book,
this book has so many characters in it,
so many people, so many places,
but one of the main messages I want people to know
is this business about logging
is actually a little bit of a sideshow at this point.
It almost seems quaint to me as a question.
That at least is within our control.
It's a dial we can turn on and off.
This other stuff, climate change, hot drought,
bugs, fire, disease, these are cycles of destruction
we have set in motion by doing nothing, next to nothing,
about climate change with our controlled global commerce,
bringing in all kinds of pests and diseases.
On the East Coast,
we are losing entire species,
ash trees used by the native people there for basketwork,
the oldest art form in New England.
They don't know if they're going to have ash trees
for the next generation.
Eastern hemlock, it's going away.
Why? The hemlock woolly adelgid, it came in on packing material.
It's the thing I want you to know is that I worked with
scientists working in forests in the late stages of decline
and protected areas, parks, reserves.
It's not about logging there.
It's about these changes in our world
that we have set in motion.
So, this is about us
and it's about how we will change our behavior
so that these beautiful systems that know
how to do what they know how to do
and are so beautifully interconnected
if they are allowed to persist.
-Yeah, we're all still interconnected.
-Yes, and we're so interconnected to it.
And, you know, the subtitle of this book,
"Dispatches from the Salmon Forest,"
I mean, it was kind of a shock to me
to encounter these people 3000 miles away doing the same thing
we're doing, taking down dams, trying to bring back salmon
because they have the same problems
we do of having cut it all down and trying to bring it all back.
It just started earlier. -Yeah.
Gosh, I got to tell you, this is a little side note,
but when I was reading this,
I was also following the Canadian elections
and how they're responding to the tariffs.
And I was just so like,
"Oh, listen Mark Carney, he's so smart."
And then he started on his thing about build, baby, build.
And then I thought, oh, no.
And he was talking about taking down the forest,
you know, we're going to do it with our own timber.
And it was like,
oh, like thinking about how we're interconnected,
you know, like what we have somewhat created, you know,
economically in another country.
And then I read your quote in here from Teresa Ryan.
And after you talk about that beautiful old growth,
visiting that beautiful old-growth forest
that they're cutting down in Canada, she says,
"Anything in this district can be logged and will be."
Oh, my God, it just ripped my heart out.
-Yeah.
-So, I think -- what is my question?
I think that it's important to acknowledge that --
so an Indigenous role and stewardship and, you know,
when people would ask Lee Miracle, whose writing I love,
when they would say, "What can we do?
You know, what can we do?"
She would say,
"Well, we have laws that we live by,
and you're not exempt from them.
That's what you can do."
You're still disobeying the laws of the original peoples
when these forests come down like that.
And I think that, you know, we know that it's wrong,
the forestry practices that we engage in because, you know,
the thing that stuck out to me in this book, too --
is the -- is it the beauty strip?
Will you tell us about the beauty strip?
-Ah, the beauty strip. Yeah.
So a lot of you have traveled to Vancouver Island just like I do.
And when you're going along that main highway,
you're getting the beauty strip.
So, it looks okay, right? It looks fine.
You're basically driving through a tunnel of tall trees.
We also see this on the Olympic Peninsula.
It's all over New England.
This is the little fig leaf over the action, right?
I mean, you get up either with a drone or in a plane,
as I did, and the truth is revealed.
And honestly, it's shocking.
I mean,
when you go up in an old small plane
over the northern forest of Maine,
which is like 10 million acres of privately owned forest.
You can wrap your mind around that.
Basically, it looks like one kind of clearcut
or another for as far as you can see.
And that's quite a sight. -Yeah.
-I mean,
our action out here in the Olympic Peninsula
is pretty impressive too.
Josh Wright, who's here tonight,
forest activist extraordinaire,
he sent me a photo that he took from a plane
over the Olympic Peninsula just a couple of days ago.
And, you know, it's -- none of us should be shocked by this.
We all live with the benefits of these wood products.
All that I ask is that we care about the workers, number one,
they're not throwaways.
We care about the forests, they're not throwaways.
And we figure out how to do this more carefully
and more intelligently.
We're trying to do it for food, we need to do it for wood.
We did a big series in the paper recently.
It's called "Forest Feud,"
where we very deliberately ran into the complexity
of this story,
rather than write about how great trees are
and how awful logging is.
We didn't want to do that.
We wanted to go meet people who actually cut trees for a living.
We wanted to go to a plywood mill.
We wanted to meet the families that are supported by these jobs
and encounter the reality of the world
that we built for ourselves.
We all rely on these systems, and we rely on these forests,
we rely on these products. And in that series of stories,
you know, what I really think came out is that we all
live here together now,
and we need to make this work for everybody,
the rural people,
the city people who mainly recreate in the woods.
So that's the heart I have for it.
I can't hold up a solution other than the bravery
of a lot of small communities
that I did visit and people that I talked with there
who are trying to do things differently in their place.
There is not going to be any one-size solution.
It has to be locally driven, locally understood,
and locally executed.
And it's not unlike what we're doing with salmon.
I mean, we have so many of these beautiful local recovery groups
that are working hard.
But you also have to have a policy,
a higher-ranking policy in order to set things right.
And if you look at our forests here in Washington State,
just for example,
you know, most of the forest lands are privately owned
and industrially managed.
On the face of a clock, it would be from six till two.
And then you've got a little bit of the state,
you've got some federal lands
and a little bit of a much smaller bit of tribal land.
So, you know, the big action is
on the industrially managed private lands.
We don't hear much about them, do we?
-No. -No.
-I really loved how you really talked about,
well, the one section where you were talking about solutions,
the community that is so polluted and so in the hole
with the forest,
the destructive forestry practices,
and then the pulp mill practices,
and then just kind of like abandoning them
with this big problem.
But I love that their solution is just to start
a whole bunch of nonprofits to try to get as much money
as they can to kind of like focus on every little thing.
It was just hopeful in a way that, you know,
people are trying so hard and so efficiently and just,
you know, kind of like throwing everything
they've got at it with --
can I just -- I'm going to read that part too
because we're running down on time.
But this is my favorite part of this book
is this passage right here.
-I can't wait. I wonder if it's one I like.
-So this is an elder from the Penobscot Nation.
He talks, before saying this,
about everybody kind of fighting and splitting hairs
and, you know, word choice in policy and everything,
and that he went to a meeting
and looked each one of them in the eye and said,
"This is --" you know, "this is what you're here for."
But then he says, "That is the lesson.
That is what matters most.
One aspect of this was to show
that if people want to work together, they can.
That was the big thing that gave me hope
that a group of dedicated people
can come together to try to fix something.
That is what you can learn from the Penobscot Project,
that if people put their differences aside
and work on what they have in common --
have a common vision to do,
so many people came together with a vision
for the future health of the watershed.
The benefits go beyond the river to the larger landscape.
It's bearing fruit.
People are starting to come around to understand
there are other values with the forest other
than just making money cutting trees."
And so I think that that message is kind of what you come to
again and again in this book.
And I wondered, one last question,
is I wondered if, you know, this kind of reckoning is hard,
and I wondered if you got any push-back, like,
and how that might have come to you.
-Yeah, I mean, when you do what I do
as a newspaper reporter
and as a writer, I actually look for conflict
because that's very often,
you know, you have to kind of go into the fire,
that's where the reality is and that's
where the answers often are.
So in this situation also,
when I'm working over on the East Coast,
I'm kind of a stranger, right?
I don't know anybody.
So I thought what I would do is I would introduce myself
starting out at the University of Maine in Orono
and tell them who I was and what I was trying to do,
and that's how I met the Londons, the logger of the year.
I was so grateful for them because,
you know, it's a lot of trust to bring a reporter,
a writer out into your job
and introduce that person to your crew,
the people that you care about who are doing this job for you
that is, you know, it's your whole livelihood.
She let me spend the whole day with their people.
And I think there's something really magical
that happens when people get to meet face to face.
Who knows what they thought about the media
before they met me?
And who knows what I thought about loggers, capital L,
before I met them?
But in that face-to-face, those conversations
where we actually spend time together
and become frankly amazed at what the other person knows
how to do and has even just lived through.
You know, for me,
those were transformational moments
because they are based in respect, mutual respect.
So it felt to me
that this work of getting to know one another
is probably really actually at the base of all the other work
that we need to do.
And I'm feeling that particularly now,
and I think that, you know, in terms of push-back,
I'm always determined not to stop there and keep going.
Because I just still believe that it's possible to keep going
and get to a better place, a better conversation.
-That's beautiful.
So I think we are here at the --
unless there's -- do you have anything that you --
that I didn't bring up that you want to share about?
-Well, of course,
there are all these things I'm dying to read.
I want to go back to where we started
and talk a little bit about modesty and humility.
Modesty and humility.
Being willing to be instructed by the forest.
This is Jerry Franklin talking
and he's talking about learning about something
nobody thought mattered.
Dead wood.
"We learn by looking at the old forest.
That is how we were taught,
and the richness and complexity
of it also taught us to be humble.
It was a tremendous object lesson in humility and respect
as well as knowledge.
The lessons in terms of knowledge,
but also lessons in terms of you have to be pretty arrogant
to just assume this is nothing more than a source of wood,
and you can essentially duplicate it
by planting rows of trees.
We took a lot of shit from ecologists
that thought this was just a hobby thing.
We had a lot of negative feedback on the dead woodwork,
attacking it as just hobby stuff
that had no relevance to science.
A place like Harvard would have nothing to do with it.
It wasn't the sexy sort of stuff,
the hypothesis testing the academic scientists
are so excited about.
I was often angry at the eastern ecological community,
the ones writing all the papers, writing all the textbooks.
What they were writing wasn't taking account
of the forests that I was in.
And I was bound and determined that one of the things
I was going to do
was to see these theoreticians have to take account
of these forests. We established it was
an important structural element of the forest.
It has to do with mortality of trees,
not just leaf fall or branch fall,
that means an investment of time."
That's the end of his quote,
"This lack of respect for time
is what's wrong with industrial clear cuts," Franklin found.
"The plantation-style forestry that robs everything
the old trees had taught him was important.
The herbicide that kills the young growing understory
that feeds the soil, replacing with a monoculture
that will never have the complexity of structure, age,
or species of a true natural forest.
These conversions of natural old forests
to plantations were stealing from the future.
These naturally forested sites were now croplands
that could never become the old growth of tomorrow.
'I refer to plantations as one of the forestry's
great dissections,' Franklin said, "We were fooled.
People have to realize that all is not well.
Foresters deceive themselves into thinking plantations
are forests, and they are not.
These are great for the stockholders, but nobody else."
[ Applause ]
So, "The Trees Are Speaking."
There's so much in here that I hope you will enjoy.
So many people, so much science. Yes, it's true.
But also a lot of just quiet listening and looking
and description of the forest at "The Trees Are Speaking."
But now I want to hear you all speak.
We want to take your questions.
Ready?
-So as they make their way up with the mics,
I just want to say really quick that Simard's --
there's a video about Simard's Wood Wide Web
together with my poem
"The Forest for the Trees" on poets.org in their section
"Teach This Poem."
So another little like relationship
between the poetry theme
that she was mentioning earlier and this.
Yeah.
-[ Speaking native language ]
Hello, everyone.
So my name is Amy
and I'm a member of the Samish Indian Nation
and I think that there's been challenges to forests,
not since 1952, not since 1852,
but since 1492 in this continent.
And I think,
you know, I often say that I'm on like cedar tree time, right?
Because we know that there's generations and generations
of like cedar trees like that are impacting people.
And I think one of my questions for you,
and, you know, you said one of your teachings
through this was humility,
but how do you talk to people who are stubbornly
or fearfully ignorant and obstinately so?
And like where -- like,
how can you teach humility when there's been a culture
that hasn't --
that the basis has been manifest destiny for a very long time?
-I think you might be better
at answering this than I would be.
-So there's one thing that I was going to mention.
In this book, Lynda talks about how -- there's a quote,
"After 400 years of intensive logging,
less than 1% of old growth remains."
And, you know, I immediately thought, okay,
over 400 years of intensive logging,
less than 1% of old growth remains.
There are less than 1% of indigenous peoples
in the United States of America after 400 years of colonization.
And I feel like that should be a direct -- I mean,
because we always say, you know,
let me -- thinking about the orca whales, right?
That's an indicator species.
And we say what happens to them happens to us.
And, you know, if they go, we go.
It's the same with the trees.
If they go, we go.
And I can't think of a more precise correlation
than less than 1% of old growth
and less than 1% of indigenous peoples in the United States.
It's like it demonstrates that completely.
And when people resist,
because of course people resist, hard things are hard, right?
And America's history,
the history of the Western Hemisphere is hard.
And I often feel like there's no place for it, for my voice.
And so, I don't know what the answer is,
except I don't know what the answer is.
I don't know what the answer is.
I sometimes feel like I'm shouting into the void.
And things like this, my most recent collection of poetry,
I can't find a home for it.
And people ask me at every reading,
"When can we get your book?"
And I think because it deals directly
with what you're talking about manifest destiny
and the doctrine of discovery
and that papal bull -- was it 1495?
And, you know,
all of the oppressions of religious freedoms
of indigenous peoples, I think people don't want to hear.
Like, it's just too hard.
There's another passage in this book
where an elder talks about his father
trying to resist the logging companies,
and he was arrested for potlatching,
and his children were taken from him.
And, you know, you talk about like -- you talk about --
I can't think of, let's see, where is it.
"Put in jail for potlatching."
Oh, elimination of resistance by any means.
So if you're standing in the way of somebody making money,
they're going to find a way to get rid of you.
And you see that in Indigenous history over and over
and over and over again.
So there's no easy answer except to kind of sit
in rooms like this
and say these things and hope
that they fall on compassionate ears, and hopefully,
ears connected to voices that can share these truths as well.
Haishka.
-Yes.
[ Woman speaking indistinctly ]
Yes. The question was,
where do spotted owls fit in your story if they do?
Well, I can tell you the only spotted owls I saw were stuffed,
which tells you a lot right there.
You know, the Northwest Forest Plan,
when it was enacted in 1994,
was the most sweeping multi-species conservation plan
anywhere in the world,
24 million acres, three states on federal lands
to conserve not only the spotted owl,
but salmon of course,
and all the other creatures that rely on old growth forests
to clean the water, shade the water, cool the water.
Salmon are creatures of the forest, understand that.
If you don't take care of the trees,
you're not going to have the fish.
If you don't have the fish,
you're not going to have the orcas.
So again, it's back to those connections.
The Spotted Owl at this time is in terrible decline.
We overcut the forests and, you know,
we are seeing recovery in the areas
that have not been cut since 1994,
but let's face it, we eliminated a lot of other habitats.
We've also cooked the climate, so we're having a lot of fires,
so we're losing even force that we set aside.
The situation with the spotted owl
at this point is it's being driven out
by an invasive competitor, the barred owl.
The barred owl eats anything,
and it requires actually not much space.
It breeds more successfully and more often than the poor spotty,
and so this animal is being driven from its home.
And so, at this point,
the federal Fish and Wildlife Service,
its big plan was to kill off a bunch of barred owls
to try to make space for the spotties to revive.
That's how bad it is, killing one owl to save another.
What does that tell you about where we are?
But I don't know what's going to happen now under the new regime.
The Northwest Forest Plan is up for an update.
Does that make you nervous? It should.
And I don't even know
if they're going to go forward with this spotted owl
and barred owl management plan.
Whenever you hear language like that,
you know you're not getting any.
So I would say to your audience
that it really is time to be paying attention.
You've been reading the paper, I hope,
about all the executive orders coming out of
the Trump administration and so forth.
Look, we still have the Endangered Species Act,
the Clean Water Act,
all these other national laws are still on the books,
and let's wait and see what happens.
When these first forest sales start coming out of
the federal government, what do they really look like?
And if it's time to litigate, litigate.
If it's time to tree sit,
there's one going on right now in the Elwha over a state sale.
Tree sit.
This is not a time to sit on your hands,
be polite, quiet, or tune out.
Great ships are made to sail, not stay in the harbor.
Yes, in the big hat. Yes. I can hear you.
-Lynda, in your recommendation,
I read the book "Managing Species."
And it was pretty depressing reading that book
how management has failed fisheries.
But I thought in your book,
you're doing an excellent job of showing what
the future could look like and how we can help the government.
I heard you say there's no one-size-fits-all
solution for the timber problem
but you go into your vision of what could be done
to help find a solution. -Yes.
So the question is, okay, it's not one-size-fits-all
but what could we do? Okay.
I never thought I would find a solution
at the Appalachian Mountain Club, right?
It's a hiking club for many states in New England.
It happens to be one of the oldest,
largest outdoor clubs in the country.
Here is what was so exciting to me about them.
They were looking at the land
that they care about in New England through multiple lenses.
They continue to pay their taxes,
even though they are a non-profit.
And they do that mostly for the local community
because they know that will be appreciated
in impoverished rural communities.
Number two,
they are setting aside
in a very intentional way wildlands and woodlands
just to let nature take its course on those lands
without intervention by us.
There are lands that they're setting aside
and utilizing wonderfully for recreation.
They really believe in the connection of people and place
and that this idea of fencing people out
of places is a wrong turn.
So they really go out of their way
to create very accessible public access to these lands.
And finally, and to me most excitingly,
they are hiring local people with local knowledge
to work in the woods,
rehabilitate these perfectly cut-over landscapes
that are really zombie forests today.
They can't reset to natural forests no matter what.
They have to be reset by opening them up,
making open spaces so that trees can grow bigger.
There were a lot of things that struck me about that,
the respect for local people
that that's where the knowledge was and the skill sets are.
And they're refusing to be sort of stopped by
the enormity of the problem and the determination
that the solution for young people in that town
wasn't going to be if you want a future,
you can't have it here,
you have to go away because we used up our place.
There's nothing here for you now.
I found that really exciting.
It's modest, it's small, but to me,
it had all the integrity of local concern, care,
and participation.
And so in terms of bringing back salmon,
in terms of reconnecting these main landscapes
so that they can once again function,
I think it's going to be a lot of things like that.
But don't fool yourself,
it's also going to take national policy.
And that's really true about climate.
And it's really true about the management
of these larger public lands.
And also, honestly, changing regulations on private lands.
So nothing is a throwaway landscape.
Right now, the largest amount of forest land
in Washington state is really managed for one value -- money,
private capital for distant investors.
If you manage anything for only one outcome,
I don't care what it is,
it's not going to come out in a in a balanced, healthy way.
-We have time for two more questions.
I see one down over here. I don't know where Samsia is.
Okay. Let's take one up there first and we'll walk to you.
-Thank you both for your comments. Very, very interesting.
I'm really looking forward to reading your book, Lynda.
It sounds fascinating. I love old-growth forests.
I spent a lot of time there.
And I wanted to, you know, kind of underscore,
but also ask a little bit more.
Like my understanding basically is
without the Northwest Forest Plan, it's unlikely
would have hardly any old-growth forest left in this region.
I mean, they were cutting like 12 million acres a year
or something like that.
They were just logging like crazy before it went in.
And one of the plans of the Forest Service
is actually to change,
including in the late-successional reserves,
change the age of what they can log from 80 to 120 years,
which would open up,
I think it's 828,000 more acres, and then on top of that,
you have Trump targeting all of the national forests
in Washington state, including wilderness areas for logging.
So, given that, you know,
and then there's this whole thing with the Forest Service
where they're really pushing this whole thing
about active management,
including thinning forests and so forth,
which in a lot of places is just a cover for clear-cutting.
I know I've talked to people
with a group called Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project
in Oregon, and they say these are the words that they use,
and then they'll just clear-cut an area.
So how do you see us dealing with this situation?
I know litigation is going to happen and it's important
but I really think that we need to be active.
We need to -- you know, this forest sit you mentioned.
The other things people are doing for legacy forests.
But how do you think people need to respond to some of this?
Because Trump calls it an emergency.
I think it is an emergency from our side too.
-Right, I do think that this is a time to be vigilant,
to be engaged, to be paying attention.
Right now, there's no specificity to any of this.
It's just words on paper and meat for the base.
So once those timber sales start coming out of
the National Forest offices, let's see what they look like.
I mean, look, what's been called for so far is
either illegal or impossible
because they got rid of most of the people.
So, I don't really know what this is going to look like.
And I don't think any of us
knows what it's going to look like.
And I would say that it is a time
to be doing what the Northwest has always known how to do,
pay attention, get involved, work with one another,
and stand up for these landscapes.
Once they're gone, you don't get them back.
I mean,
the miracle of what we did with the Northwest Forest Plan
is we stopped before it was all gone.
In BC, they haven't managed to do that.
They're still cutting.
It's going to be gone eventually.
So do you want to do something before it's all gone?
-So we have another question right over here.
[ Man speaking indistinctly ]
-So, did you all hear the question?
This is about the importance of urban forests
and the losses of trees in our cities, including in Seattle.
And, you know, this is very real.
There's a real conflict here
between wanting to densify the city to make more housing
for more people
and losing these beautiful trees in the side yards,
losing the side yards themselves.
This is a hot mess
that we're all right in the middle of
with the Mayor's plan for rezoning the city,
large parts of the city.
I live in -- my husband and I, Doug,
live in Greenwood and it's one of those neighborhoods
where, you know,
big gracious old trees change the look of the street
and it's cooler and it's beautiful because of the trees.
And we did some stories at the paper about the effects on,
you know,
the urban heat islands and how much more intense
they are in places in South Seattle and the Rainier Valley
where they don't have as many trees.
And there's a very direct correlation
between higher income ZIP codes of the city
and more tree cover and just better health outcomes
than in other parts of the city where they don't have trees.
So, your point is right on as to equity.
It's right on as to human health and, of course,
all the other things that matter.
Birds.
You know, you're not going to have any birds
unless you have trees.
And I just think that, in Seattle,
I'm a little shocked, honestly,
that we're doing as badly at this as we are.
I've been out on too many stories
where some heartbroken person is calling me because a gigantic,
beautiful something is being cut down in their neighborhood.
And usually what we hear as well,
it would have cost more to develop the land
if we had to keep that tree and we're past that point,
and it wouldn't make our project pencil, etc.
And somehow when we went through this tree ordinance exercise,
we seem to have made it worse rather than better.
So, I honestly am a little mystified by this.
I don't cover city politics,
that's not my expertise,
but I do know a lot about trees and their value.
And I'm not sure
why it is that we've done such a good job caring about --
caring for forestry, clear cuts, all that stuff,
but somehow in our own backyard,
we're not getting through to the city.
I don't understand that.
I also care about affordable housing and people
having a place to live that's truly a home.
And look,
if we're smart enough to do all the other things we do,
I can't believe we can't figure this out,
but we certainly have not.
I would agree with you there.