The Book of Yaak (21 page)

And I keep pointing to the far hills—to the last wall of unroaded blue ridges—Roderick, Saddle, Gunsight, Pink Mountains—and saying, I want to know that in each valley we will set aside untouched cores, untouched places, that will always be managed only by God-as-nature, against which to measure those other areas managed by man-as-God. I do not want to take it all, I want to give back instead to the wilderness some of that with which we have been entrusted and bequeathed.

We talk late into the night about the things that could be done with the wood, the care that could be given to it—Yaak Valley bookshelves, or specialty beams, or siding; a glue-lam plant, where bark and sawdust and limbs and small, crooked trees could be compressed to make building materials.... Furniture, or cabinet-making; a finger-joint molding plant.... Any of fifty wood-products industries that could be sustainable to both the human community and to the land, rather than pursuing to the bitter, tragic end, the last dying gasps of this century of liquidation that is finally drawing to a close....

Some of them—the CEOs—want it
all.
And they don't care what happens to the communities that are left in the wake.

Champion International's exodus from this area was a good example. They were here in the '70s and '80s; they clearcut almost all of their lands in the Yaak (this served as a double whammy, as they owned mostly riverbottom lands—prime wildlife habitat). They clearcut their inventory to raise cash to defend against corporate raiders, and to hide or erase their capital. This sent an unsustainable, artificially high volume of wood through the local mills, which hired a great deal of short-term help to handle the glut (and depressed prices, spurring demand). Champion quickly ran out of their own timber, of course, and then put the squeeze on the Forest Service (through the industry-elected representa tives and senators) to let Champion cross over onto the national forests and continue to cut at or near the same high rate as on the public lands. One of the rationalizations was that no one wanted to see all those people lose their jobs—and Champion kept saying that right on up until the day they left town and took their operations to the southern United States, where trees grow faster and where, critics said, they had planned to go all along.

And on their way out of town, they divided up all their clearcut lands into ten- and twenty-acre ranchettes—a couple thousand acres' worth in a single year—the social and biological equivalent of a firebombing. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Ruffed Grouse Society, Land and Water Conservation Fund, Nature Conservancy and other similar organizations never had a chance.
Cash flow
; one-time quarterly profits. The sad thing is, if they'd tried, they could have gotten as much money, or more tax credits, by selling the land in larger biological units rather than the mass fragmentation.

In the old days, our arguments would now take this tack: Well, Mr. Environmentalist, sounds like you get yours, but you don't think anyone else should get theirs.

It's true that I put my life in hock for the next twenty years to buy the land I'm living on—that I outbid a man who intended to clearcut it and then resell it, for subdivision—and that it is a lot of land, to my way of thinking. It is land that I intend to take care of, to log selectively and be passionately respectful of. And it is not the people moving onto the ranchettes that alarm me, for I have no right to judge them. It is the volatile manner in which all the land was dumped on the market that I judge. The shock to the system. The disrespect of the corporation to both the human and biological community in which it had been operating (and profiting) those many years.

A supple, healthy system can absorb dramatic fluctuations—can withstand volatility. But an injured or fragmented one is less supple, and takes longer to heal—and must be treated more respectfully. I think it's going to take a long time to protect the last wilderness of the Yaak, and that by the time people finally agree that those last corners need protecting, those areas will be gone.

In the meantime, we can try to build, or recover, respect for the place. I believe that is the first and most important step. We'll start small. Small and true.

We dream on, in these meetings. What if we could set up a local corporation that would be comprised of the community's loggers and environmentalists—not that the two are necessarily different, or have to be—and could have project areas on the National Forest (outside of the last roadless areas) that would be dedicated to selective harvest; what if bids on salvage sales—dead and dying lodgepole and other species, rather than live green sales—could be weighted competitively toward those operators, those sawyers, who rated the highest on performance evaluations made by their peers?

What if, instead of subsidizing, to the tune of one to two billion dollars per decade, entry into these fast-diminishing roadless areas, some small fraction of that monstrosity could go toward job creation geared at reclaiming, for fish and wildlife and forest health, those lands injured in the past—and the lands which are being injured, even at this moment?

In 1992, on the Kootenai (Yaak's) National Forest, timber harvest lost taxpayers approximately $20 million; in 1993, $2 million; and in 1994, $1.4 million. (Harvest levels went down each year, too; it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that the less timber that was cut, the less money was lost.)

There
are
jobs in the woods, jobs left in the forest; and we can make there be even more of them, if we don't blow it. But they will be there only as long as the forest is there—only as long as the forest is healthy and supple, relatively unfragmented. The rancher and writer Ralph Beer tells of a funny (at the time) line uttered to him by A. B. Guthrie, author of the classic
The Big Sky,
concerning the exodus of people coming to Montana to get a glimpse of nature, and who had a blood-craving to see real and healthy cycles once again—in their communities, and out on the land itself. "They're all headed this way," Guthrie warned, "and every one of 'em's wearin' perfume." And, it might be added—if they have any backbone—registering to vote.

Kathleen Norris hits on this same emotion of insiders-versus-outsiders in her excellent book
Dakota,
when she comments on how in many rural communities there is the joke that an "expert" is someone who's fifty miles from home. Again, it's funny. But such sayings, while offering the comfort of humor, also run the risk of nourishing a brittle smugness.

We'd better save these lands that mean something to us—those of us who live on them and know them—before someone who doesn't know them comes along and does it for us.

The system is no longer supple. Nothing "locks up" a wilderness more than a two-thousand-acre clearcut on a sixty-degree slope.

I've spent most of my time in these essays trying to celebrate the wild, rather than running down or disparaging the enemies of the wild: those who would tame and kill and sell and regulate everything, from art to grizzlies, poems to rivers. But sometimes snarls of dismay or outrage have arisen, in these essays—criticisms both direct and indirect. Big business-owned congressmen seem, in my mind anyway, to be most often in the line of fire, but so too, allowing the theft of wildness of the national forests, is the bureaucracy known as the United States Forest Service.

The paradox of these criticisms is like the one involved in criticizing big business: the system sucks, but not the individuals, the workers, within the flow (or suckhole) of the system. Almost to the one, they are men and women who love the woods and who are caught in a bad situation. And doubtless, after years and years, they're getting a little tired of my squawling and bellyaching—of me scratching words on the paper gotten from trees, asking, begging, pleading, shouting that we save the last special places for all time.

There are time clocks to be punched. After a while, you get so weary—and the system seems so immovable, so static—that you'd really rather just tune it out and look ahead to five o'clock and wonder
What's for supper?
and
Give it a break; give us a break.

That said—that there are great and passionate individuals working in the Forest Service (which is responsible for nearly a tenth of all the land in the United States)—one of the heartbreaking obstacles we face, in trying to manage the forests prudently—and in trying to protect the last roadless areas—is the incentive clauses. Brad Wetzler describes the mechanics of the salary raises and cash bonuses sometimes given to supervisors of various national forests: "The more timber he sells, the more money he can spend on his forest and the more merrily his career spins along."

The performance incentives sound fine, but when excessive logging—clearcutting—and roadless entry factor into this cash-bonus equation, when both the laws of our country and the laws of intact nature are broken in pursuit of these goals of timber quotas (set by industry, via their puppet congressmen), it seems similar to a teacher's bonus that is based not on students' test scores but on how much havoc the teacher can wreak in his or her community.

Why not give cash bonuses for protecting wilderness, and for protecting the sustainability of local communities? For the recovery of an endangered species in a forester's region, rather than giving bonuses for making the list grow ever longer?

I suspect big timber multinationals will be active in the Northwest until the last trees are gone. Unchecked—much less aided and abetted by Congress—big business will eat the world. But what if the government could protect us from such raiders? Am I dreaming? Is it too much to expect of one's government?

Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, responding to AT&T's infamous New Year's 1996 stockholder gift, laying off 40,000 employees, writes, "It has become politically fashionable to argue that movie studios and TV networks should avoid lewdness or violence, even though these dubious themes generate large audiences and fat profits. Well, what about a corporation's duty to its employees and its community? The sudden loss of a paycheck can be more damaging to family values than a titillating screen performance."

Globalization, and the electronic transfer of capital, is making the notion of community meaningless to most corporations—and with increased competition, the leaning and meaning of America, corporate executives, writes Reich, "claim, with some justification, that they have 110 choice." Investors demand ever-increasing quarterly profits; and then when one corporation merges or melts down, the investors wire their money over to another corporation.

Reich suggests that "If we want profitable companies to keep more employees on their payrolls, or place them in new jobs that offer similar wages and benefits, or upgrade their skills, or share more of the profits with them or remain in their communities, we will have to give them an economic reason to do so.

"Perhaps the benefits of incorporation should be reserved for companies that demonstrate such responsibility. Alternatively—and more realistically, in these parched political times—perhaps corporate income taxes should be reduced or eliminated entirely for companies that do so.

"Don't blame corporations and their top executives," Reich concludes. "They are behaving exactly as they are organized to behave. If we want them to put greater emphasis on the interests of their workers and communities, society must reorganize them to do so."

We are all complicit. Shareholders pour gallons of fuel into the maw of the beast, but as consumers, we are almost constantly, daily, checking the oil and changing the wipers—helping to keep the giants in such good running condition. We may have the briefest spat of a boycott, once in a blue moon, as with Exxon, or Union Carbide, but for the most part we keep on breeding, consuming and forgiving—breeding, consuming and forgiving beyond thought, reason or balance. We know we are at the edge of the last of the public wildlands—we know there are no more—but we do not turn back, we do not turn away: almost as if we feel powerless to do so. As if we are afraid that big business will get angry at us if we clamor that they do so. As if big business owns us, rather than the other way around.

We are all complicit. We live in wood homes, we burn wood, we read and write books etched on the skin of trees. The heft of a phone book in your hands as likely as not comes from the fast-disappearing virgin rain forests up on the coast of British Columbia. Are
telephones bad?
No. We are all complicit.

It is our very complicity, however, that gives us the right—the responsibility—not to be silent, but to speak up. We have to begin putting the brakes on. We're hurtling down the rapids, with big business at the throttle, grinning a mad grin for history.

We are the ones who have let it get taken this far—all the way to the edge. It is our duty to speak up, and to stop at the edge of that which we have allowed to go so far.

It's obvious I love the place. Less obvious, perhaps, that I love the people who live here. There's a deadly dull and dry section of the story I have to tell here, one of mind-numbing criminality and excess. No one wants to hear the kind of story I have to tell next: no one. Simple eco-rant; simple math. But I must tell it, because it is my home.

In 1995, the Republican-dominated Congress, reading the invisible ink they used to draft the Contract on America, passed a bill called the Salvage Logging Rider. The bill, written by the timber industry, would eliminate environmental appeals of illegal logging in the national forests. It stated that it would apply only to "salvage" logging—traditionally the term is used to refer to the harvest of trees that are already dead or dying. But in the hill, industry lobbyists expanded the definition to include any and every tree in the forest.

The bill was tacked on to the end of the 1995 Budget Rescissions Bill. President Clinton vetoed it, but then a month later changed his mind and passed it, in the summer of 1995.

Not just the Yaak, but a hundred other valleys across the West, began to crumble. A place that was already hanging by a thread was exposed to a savage lawlessness, perhaps undreamed of even by the greediest bureaucrats.