The Map Is Not the Territory

Our house sits on the rim of a canyon sheathed in Douglas-fir. The creek down below is roaring this time of year. Chinook salmon still climb its torrents, spawn, and die. We find their carcasses, picked over by ravens. There are fewer dead salmon every year. This is not a good sign.

Osprey twist in the air on bent wings nearly every morning, cruising over the creek bed for live fish. Year after year they rear new broods in the craggy top of a broken hemlock, the nest an inverted igloo of found material--a model of organic architecture. The creek flows into the mighty Clackamas River a couple of miles away. At the confluence is an old mill site. The ground is saturated in creosote and PCBs, leaching remorselessly into the water, the flesh of salmon, the blood of osprey.

At least one cougar still prowls the canyon. Some nights we awaken to its eerie moaning. Dogs have gone missing. Big ones. But we hear the cat less often now. The city advances, glowing with light. The canyon is an island eroded by sprawl.

On clear days the stark pyramid of Mt. Hood flashes into view on the eastern horizon, its flanks draped with glaciers, pink as coho flesh. The glaciers are in retreat. The history of the forest is written on the face of those mountains, sixty miles distant. In winter, the clearcuts shimmer with snow, thousands of them, separated only by thin veins of ancient trees. This land is a battlefield. Perhaps the largest in the nation. It sprawls over millions of acres. There have been so many losses. Stumps twelve feet across stand as headstones of the fallen. Still it rages. And the blood boils.

In 1990, Kimberly and I moved our family from the hill country of southern Indiana to Oregon. We were looking for someplace green, wet, and foggy. We were told such weather was good for the skin, not a purely narcissistic consideration given the daily shredding of the ozone layer. There were other considerations, too: thousand-year-old trees, six-hundred-foot waterfalls, salmon, spotted owls, black bears, free-flowing rivers, progressive politics. The essentials of life.

Of course, the essentials aren't that easy to come by. The New Physicists have a saying: the map is not the territory. The conundrum is a metaphor for sub-atomic matter that rearranges itself so quickly that any depiction of its traces becomes obsolete before it is even drawn. When we arrived in Oregon, the Pacific Northwest was in the midst of Great Change. Sure, Oregon still offered most of what we imagined, but there was less of it every day. In a word (Ed Abbey's), Oregon was being "Californicated": paved, smogged, subdivided, dammed, logged, mined, spiked with cell-phone towers, bankrupted schools, malicious right-wing politicos in the ascendancy. It even sported an ailing nuclear plant named after a condom: Trojan. But there was nothing remotely prophylactic about that demon tower.

When you think of Oregon, you probably think of forests. The highway maps help pump the mystique, splashing wide swaths of green across the state. It's another illusion. Two-thirds of Oregon is desert, high desert: parched, austere, beautiful, and vulnerable. The other third of the state, a thin 150-mile-wide band from the Cascade Mountains to the Pacific Coast, harbors the mightiest forest on the continent. Now it too is becoming a kind of desert, a biological desert, an ecological dead zone.

A century of unbridled clearcutting has taken its toll. By 1980, the Cascades, that lush volcanic range running from British Columbia to northern California, had been transformed into a patchwork of a hundred thousand clearcuts, a sight so surreal that it stunned even President Carter when he flew over Mt. St. Helens to survey the volcanic damage. Carter mistook the scars of logging for the blast of the volcano. There's a difference. The forests flattened by Mt. St. Helens are starting to come back to life. The land leveled by the timber cartels isn't.

Many frail coastal mountainsides, punctured by logging roads with the forests shaved to the bedrock, simply collapse each winter in monstrous landslides, burying some of the world's most fertile salmon streams under a mega-tonnage of rock and mud. This is the pillaged landscape of Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion. Never give an inch. Don't stop cutting until you reach the bone. Suck out the marrow and move on. There's never been a better guide to Oregon than that strange muddy novel.

But now the ravaged land of the Coast Range, in a kind of death spasm, is beginning to lash back. With a fearsome regularity, the winter landslides have begun crushing the new houses and trailers that regularly sprout up on logged-over forest land. These days the clearcuts are killing more than salmon and owls.

Empires were built off the rape of these forests: Boise/Cascade, Georgia-Pacific, Louisiana-Pacific, Willamette Industries, International Paper, and mightiest of all, Weyerhaeuser. These corporations played a two-step game. Most of the companies owned millions of acres of their own land, acquired for pennies an acre through the Railroad Land Grants of the Nineteenth Century. Each one of those acres harbored tens of thousands of dollars worth of trees, mainly Douglas-fir, the wood that built suburban America. Billions were made unfettered by law or morality or even common sense. A kind of capitalist anarchy swept through the woods; cut and run was its mantra. It is a theme that replicated itself across the mountains with the mercilessness of the parasitic beast in Ridley Scott's Alien, consuming its host forest and moving on to fresh ground.

In the early '60s, the timber behemoths had blitzed through their own vast holdings and turned their sights on the national forests. They got them. By 1970, logging on the public lands in the northwest had more than doubled. The writing was on the wall for the spotted owl, marbled murrelet, coho salmon, and 800 other species that depend on old-growth forests. By the time we arrived in Oregon, the timber industry was clearcutting more than 256,000 acres of national forest land in Oregon and Washington each year. Nationwide, the logged-over acres topped a million annually. These are national forests. Public lands. Your forests. Pissed off yet?

The timber barons are masters of the art of corruption, and for decades they've had every politician in the Northwest firmly pocketed, liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans alike. It's served them very well, indeed. When pesky laws like the Endangered Species Act blockaded their way, they had their politicians declare the logging exempt from such legal constraints. When federal judges ruled against them, they got Congress to overturn the injunctions. When Forest Service employees, such as my friend Jeff DeBonis, blew the whistle on illegalities, the timber industry got them transferred, demoted, or fired. When Weyerhaeuser came under scrutiny by the Justice Department in a multi-million-dollar timber theft case, the timber giant prevailed on the Clinton administration to quash the probe. Similar investigations into bid rigging, fraud, and monopolistic practices got terminated from above.

With legal avenues of protest routinely annulled by Congress, forest defenders adopted more creative tactics. Along the Brietenbush River, Lew Herd buried himself up to his neck in a pile of boulders to block a logging road. Julia Butterfly and others took to the trees themselves, living in them as human shields against the chainsaws. At Warner Creek in the High Cascades, Earth First!ers built a makeshift fortress in the forest to fend off the loggers, squatting there through a winter that saw more than 500 inches of snow fall. George Atiyeh, a Vietnam vet and nephew of a former Oregon governor, held off Forest Service timber sale planners with a shotgun as they tried to mark for cutting the thousand-year-old trees at Opal Creek. A decade later, and despite all odds, those trees are still standing, now fully protected as a wilderness area.

Still the lost acres stagger the mind. Ninety-five percent of the primary forest, the ancient trees of the Northwest, had been liquidated by 1990, the year of the Earth Summit in Rio. At the global pow-wow, one American politician after another (except George Bush the First, who snubbed the entire show) rose to chastise Brazil for the destruction of the Amazon, where 75 percent of the primary forest remained intact. These same politicians, led by Democratic Party luminaries such as House Speaker Tom Foley, had underwritten the looting of the temperate rainforests of the Northwest and tried to crush any environmentalists who stood in their way. Of course, Foley is gone and greens helped to bring the titan down. So there's reason for hope.