June 2, 2024
Dear Margo,
I thought all wildfires were bad, until I took a second job the summer my daughter was born. I was young and we had a new thousand-dollar mattress on a 12-month payment plan. So, three days after she came into the breathing world I was on the second floor of the old Woolworths building in Medford Oregon, signing employment documents in a cluttered corner office. I joked about sleep deprivation with my new coworkers to mask the ache in my heart—this was what being an adult was about; a paperwork agreement to $15.50 for every hour I would be away from her. Pretending to need the keyed bathroom down the hall, I lingered behind its locking door with my battered plastic flip phone opened to a pixelated photo of her.
Most days that summer, I led a small crew into the mountains and hills around where I grew up—navigating to random, computer-selected points in the Siskiyous. We would start the day with our assigned coordinates, drive a battered grey Toyota Forerunner until we got to the closest point we could on a dirt logging road, then strike off into the forest from there. Crunching through madrone leaves and dodging stands of poison oak with our clattering load of survey equipment, lunch, and water bottles, we hiked until we reached the designated place. There, we’d pile our gear on the ground, fish out the three-pound hammer from someone’s backpack and drive a steel rebar stake into the ground. This was the center of our plot.
We were there, driving stakes into the land to study what these forests looked like 200 years before. A neat, sterilized question funded by the US government that covertly yearned to understand the forest stewardship of the Takelma, Degelma, and Shasta before the Europeans showed up. Or, perhaps we were just there to help justify the government selling more logging contracts. That was the end result anyway.
—
Many workplaces have a mythology; a context that holds the worker to their tasks more powerfully than their wage. We worked for a massive environmental nonprofit and that story went like this:
We were there to look for clues that would help researchers understand how the forests were before settlers brought their saws and distaste for wildfire less than two centuries ago. The subsequent era of firefighting and Smokey the Bear clamped a lid on an old rhythm of forest fires across much of California and Southern Oregon—both fires started by lightning and those set with intention by the indigenous people of the area.
Early settlers wrote of encountering towering forests that you could ride a horse through at a full run. There were fewer, bigger trees; those that had a long-standing relationship with fire. Low-intensity burns cleared out thick brush and less fire-resistant trees like the fir, leaving the more flame-proof pine and oak trees with their edible nuts. The heat from these fires killed the weevils that destroyed these acorns, leaving more for people and the wild animals they ate. Burned shrubs re-sprouted from their roots in new straight shoots; materials for the baskets and fish traps. Patterns of flame left a patchwork of meadows. Here, people tended blooming carpets of perennial wildflowers like Camas and Tarweed, harvesting these for their edible roots and seeds.
A story with little of the depth I have since learned from you, but even this husk of an understanding whispered the new, rebellious idea: These forests were a garden that people maintained through cultural burning, stewarding a resilient process of life—nourished on the charred wood and mineral ash left patterned across the forest floor. Humans have a place in the ecology.
—
One day a set of coordinates led us to a north-facing hillside just a couple miles from where my wife and daughter were going about their day. The forest was quiet and dark—a stand of middle-aged Douglas Fir trees—their trunks stretching with no break in every direction like narrow posts topped by a thin green crust of canopy. There were no verdant grasses, flowers, or patchy shrubs; little sun reached the forest floor to support any such understory. No whine of insects or singing birds; the air smelled musty, like an over-grown Christmas tree farm in the summer sun.
We measured and tallied these trees—drilling small cores from their trunks to count rings— they were all under 150 years in age. Then, like a forensics team at a cold-case murder scene, we dropped to our knees and started combing through the forest floor. Under the fir needles we found bodies, massive rotted stumps of oaks and pines that once covered the same hillside. A ghost forest of big trees, spaced 30 to 40 steps apart from one another. Not that long ago, this had been a forest where you could have galloped a horse through small meadows under ancient trees.
The big, straight-grained sugar pines were all cut down, hauled into town and spun apart on a lathe into thin sheets of wood for pear-packing boxes. The old oaks felled to make room for the fir trees because they make more valuable lumber. Some oaks were simply overtopped by the young firs that now surrounded us and died for lack of sun, while others—the survivors—were labeled “trash trees” and poisoned by the US government with Agent Orange leftover from the war in Vietnam.
—
If you cut into the base of an old standing dead tree and take out a slab of wood from the uphill side, you can see the charred stains of every fire that burned past its trunk. These fire scars look like sooty fingernail marks tucked into the rings of growth from a time when this snag lived before the era of settlers and their cultural dislike for fire.
On many of the ridges over the valley where I live, these trees tell of fires that came past every 7 to 14 years. Looking at a disk of wood cut from one of these old snags, it’s clear when fire suppression begins—the regular pulse of black char through the years abruptly flat-lines.
—
My boss gave a signed copy of his PhD thesis to an attractive young woman who worked for him, bestowing it to her like it was some artifact that would grow ever more valuable over time. When I told him I was starting to see the truth in this story; that the signs I was seeing in the woods seemed to back up the claims he was making, to echo them, he grinned and slapped me on the back.
“So you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid!” He said.
Pulling open the wide desk drawer below his keyboard, he offered me a swig from a cheap silver hip-flask.
—
That summer I combed the forest floor, looking for clues of how the Takelma, Degelma, and Shasta managed these forests through their cultural burning. But back in the office, I saw no evidence that anyone leading this study actually went to talk with the real humans whose grandparents had done this burning. Nor did they seem to have asked the neighboring Yurok or Hupa tribes to the south, even as you all are actively stewarding forests in the old way.
We are told that coordinating research with tribes is a vital, but sensitive business, where only the people at top levels of leadership (with appropriate training) should engage. If you’re one of those people tasked with walking the land and observing things, just drink that workplace Kool-Aid and keep the data coming. You may cause further harm with your words if you casually talk to the neighbor who’s lineage is deeply tied to this land. Remember your fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and leave the “tribal relations” to the trained experts.
Like this guy I knew once who was in charge of an entire region of land for the Bureau of Land Management; the leader of their field office in Grants Pass, Oregon. He didn’t “get out the cut” (sell the annual quota of trees to logging companies), so he got reassigned by bosses in Washington D.C. to lead “tribal relations” for a pipeline project. A Canadian company was planning a pipeline through to the ocean so they could sell liquified natural gas to China. Government was all for this plan, the people who live on the land were not. I walked past him some months after this prestigious re-assignment. He sat alone in a corner of the office he used to run. The cubicles around him were used for storage.
Profits are still made in severing and dragging trees from these mountains, “mechanical prescriptions” that now often claim to mimic indigenous cultural burning. Like those dime store doctors in old cigarette ads, there’s an unsettling contradiction between the glossy pamphlets that advertise these “treatments” and the reality of what takes place in the living world.
—
And so I write you—passing notes in class while the self-proclaimed experts are busy about their “education and outreach.” Their words spill from the front of the room and out across our forests and communities:
“Over 50% of the Rogue Basin forests are too dense. Forest conditions threaten our communities, air, water and old-growth. We have a plan…[that]… lays out what’s needed to repair and protect these invaluable forest resources. There are no easy solutions, but we can make things better. We can reduce wildfire intensity, enable safe, effective fire suppression, and increase landscape resilience. And in doing so, we’re also creating and maintaining jobs in the forestry, wood manufacturing, and natural resources sector.”
I have heard it said that the idealism of an age is the cover story for its greatest theft.
—
In the meantime, my kids and I burn the meadows around our cabin in the fall. We are muddling our way through as we learn our human place in this ecology, watching the land’s response for clues on what we are getting right. Rick has been up to visit a couple times; we’ve walked the land together and he’s offered guidance. My daughter turns ten this week, and when the time comes for her and her little brothers to fold these bones into this soil, they will know more of this responsibility and dance than I did. And so it goes.
Thank you for keeping the flame alive.
Jakob
Thank you all for the kind words
You're such a great writer, Jakob.