The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  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.

  Free of the restraint of laws and regulations, the Forest Service moved quickly, planning six salvage sales in roadless areas on the Kootenai that will log more than 10,000 acres, and which will build and rebuild more than 138 miles of road. One clearcut that is scheduled will reach a size in excess of 1,700 acres. Prime grizzly bear recovery zones will be entered. Knapweed and other noxious invasives will follow these new roads into the wilderness, displacing the native grasses that elk rely upon: weeds spreading into these logged areas like wildfire. There are at present eighteen clearcuts planned that are in excess of what used to be the maximum allowable limit of 40 acres per clearcut.

  Kim Davitt writes, "The Kootenai National Forest has become a regional horror story. Approximately 60 percent of all the salvaged timber scheduled for harvest in Montana comes from the Kootenai. Environmental organizations believe that the cost [to taxpayers] may exceed $1 billion."

  Late summer 1995, Gunsight Mountain in the Yaak. Steve Thompson, the northwest field organizer for the Montana Wilderness Association, a volunteer, Susan LeValley, and I have gone up into the roadless area to investigate Forest Service claims that this area has been devastated by a nearly total sweep of high-intensity fires. We have the Forest Service maps in hand—the ones that show where all the clearcuts are planned.

  It's a lovely August day. You can feel autumn lying just ahead: a week or two away—maybe three weeks. But soon. Flickers move through the woods ahead of us. It's been only a year since the fires moved through here. But the undergrowth is green and lush. The vaccinium bushes—many of them chest-high—hang heavy with purple huckleberries. Moving up an old game trail, our clothes soon become stained purple from brushing against the ripe berries, and our hands and faces soon take on the purple coloration as well. It's a cool morning. There's a lot of wildlife sign—deer, bear, moose, elk.

  We stop often, and examine the maps: believing them at first, and then unable, but still trying to believe them—repositioning them, trying to give the Forest Service the benefit of the doubt—but it soon becomes evident to us that the maps are, at best, simply erroneous. Up near the ridge, for example, we do finally find a sta
nd that has burned intensely, as the map indicates, but this could not be one of the stands slated for harvest—the trees are all only about twelve feet high and as thick around as your wrist. They are overstocked — growing too close together—which is one reason they burned, and burned hot.

  We move higher, to the ridge itself, and then laterally, into the heart of what the Forest Service has labeled the red zone: the burn of greatest intensity. The landscape folds and twists — rock slopes, creeks, seeps, springs—- and at times, even only a year after the fire, it is hard to tell there had even been one. Giant larch and fir tower above us, a lush cool canopy sending down a pleasing mix of sun and shadow: old growth. These are immense trees, and even more amazing, they are immense at an elevation of 6,000 feet. Sometimes you'll still find an occasional stand like this down on the valley floor, around 3,000 feet—but almost never this high, where the growing season's so much shorter, and conditions so much harsher. These giants have had it at least twice as hard, and have taken perhaps twice as long to grow to this size—and in the process, they have orchestrated an incredibly complex, earned place in the world—relationships that we do not understand yet, at this or any other elevation: the interplay of the thin soil, insects, pathogens, bacteria, temperature, moisture, wildlife and wildfire. We can feel the unnameable quality of this forest, however—its complexity. We can feel the difference. It is not subtle.

  It's a zone of cool fire, if anything—patchy mosaics of charcoal lie beneath the lush green huckleberries, and occasionally we'll cross a zone of moderate intensity burn, where some young understory fir and thin lodgepole and spruce burned—but there certainly doesn't seem to be enough timber up here to justify building new roads up this steep rocky slope. Helicopter logging might work, perhaps—though we have seen better salvage sites down lower, in areas that have already had roads built into them. (At a meeting with the Forest Service they had explained that helicopter logging would not be economically feasible. I'm not extraordinarily naive, but I was shocked nonetheless: it was the first time I'd ever heard them admit so bluntly that they were in the business of managing the forests for the timber industry rather than for wilderness or wildlife qualities or the future. I'd never heard it discussed so openly. I guess that the fact that environmentalists were powerless to stop them due to the salvage rider is what elicited the confidence of truth-telling.)

  We pass through a one-acre patch of hot burn—- there are fifteen, maybe twenty good sawlogs standing—trees that are dead or will die. The ash is deep and the slope is very steep: if machines operate here, heavy erosion will surely occur. If the snags are allowed to fall on their own, however, landing downslope, wind-gusted, they'll act as small dams, strainers of sediment. They will prevent erosion; they'll hold the ash and fragile soil in place and allow new seedlings to regenerate.

  We pass through a stand of the rarest of things: old-growth, high-altitude lodgepole that survived the fire. These trees have the genetics we need: they've survived beyond their years, avoided bug infestations, evaded the infamous fire of 1910, as well as this most recent 1994 fire. They've lived up here at the top of the world, immersed to the hilt in the glories of natural selection, and now we're going to erase all that work, all that grace, all that meaning.

  The slopes are so steep. These giant trees clutch little pockets of soil. If we cut them once, at this elevation, there will not be enough soil, nor soil nutrients, for regeneration. I have seen too many other areas in the Yaak clearcut in places like this, and know what the results will be: permanent moon-scaping.

  We stop by a creek that the fire burned across and gather a backpack full of fist-sized morel mushrooms, apricot-colored in the light. We sit, stunned, in a shaft of sunlight, on a newly burned log resting among the rocks. We try to believe that there has been some mistake: that we are on the wrong mountain; that the satellites got it wrong. The immense trees—many of them untouched by fire—sway above us.

  We see movement below. Three men are moving through the forest, among the old giants, with cans of spray paint. We're surprised: we didn't know anyone else would be up here. We watch as they spray an occasional tree blue, indicating that it should be saved. The theory is that it will not be a clearcut if they have one or two healthy trees left behind—and that the remaining tree, or trees, will continue to drop seed cones, saving the expense and effort of tree-planting. Better yet, from the timber companies' point of view, the remaining trees will often increase seed production dramatically, in an effort to compensate for the sudden loss of all the surrounding forest.

  The men do not see us. We watch them for a while, then announce our presence. "You missed some," Steve says, king of understatement. The men are churlish, sullen. They want to know who we are and what we're doing in the woods.

  My inclination is to tell them that it is none of their damn business—that I'm a citizen out here on the public lands—but Steve tells them that he's a wilderness advocate and that he came out here to see what was going on.

  "We've got to get to work," one of the men grumbles as they drift away—implying that we do not—and they move off, getting paid for being in the woods, for tearing down the wilderness, while we sit there, unpaid, watching the wilderness get torn down. They do not spray any more trees to be saved; they do not even look at the old giants. We know then that the bottom line, the answer to the equation, has been filled in by the timber companies— we need this much wood from this sale for it to be economically feasible —and they are merely juggling things, to make sure that the answer, that volume, is achieved.

  There's not a damn thing we can do. Except write books. Congress, and the president, has seen to that.

  We gather huckleberries. We hike home—worried, sickened. The day blossoms beautiful around us, but further and further, what is being done to our home, and to our country, erodes and endangers our capability for joy.

  I do not want to add up the hours I spend staring out at the disappearing forests and wildness, feeling troubled or saddened, agitated or angry. I do not want to know the sum of this loss.

  Later in the fall, Steve coordinated a return trip to Gunsight, with representatives from the local forest service, the timber industry and the media. On that field trip, timber industry people agreed that the giant trees were actually more of a bother—- almost too big for the mills to handle efficiently—■ and that often the value of such giants was merely to use as foundations on which to deck the other logs—stacking them in the mud—and to butt other logs up against, in the lumber yard. Steve Thompson wrote that no one on the field trip—Forest Service personnel included—suggested that any of the old-growth larch and fir trees would die from the Gunsight fire.

  On behalf of the Montana Wilderness Association, Thompson wrote an editorial criticizing the proposed massive clearcut in this, and other roadless areas in the Yaak and elsewhere. A Forest Service official rebuked MWA, admonishing critics of the salvage logging rider to "go out on the ground ... and see the reality." And the Republican senator from Montana, Conrad Burns, told a radio audience in Billings that salvage logging covered by the rider takes only timber "that is on the ground."

  "Ironically," Thompson writes, it is the Forest Service official "who has refused to see the reality on our national forests. Twice MWA has invited him to join us on field trips to see his agency's plan to clearcut green, healthy timber in roadless areas. And twice he has demurred or ignored the invitation, preferring instead to defend the indefensible from his Missoula office."

  Thompson writes, "The Gunsight Mountain clearcuts would violate the forest service's own standards for protecting wildlife habitat. This sale is opposed by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks because of the impact it would have on wildlife security and hunting opportunities"—chiefly elk, which require large secure roadless areas. "This opposition attracted the ire of the Montana Wood Products Association, which said that instead of protecting roadless areas, the elk-hunting season should be made shorter."

>   The Montana Wilderness Association's executive director, Bob Decker, wrote to the Forest Service official who refused to come to the Yaak and who criticized MWA's stance on wilderness and salvage logging: "MWA believes that salvage logging has a place on public lands in Montana. That place is defined by gentle terrain and stable soils, and it is accessible from existing roads. Emphasis should be given to small sales to local operators, and salvage operations should be completed in phases. Salvage projects should not entail clearcuts, but leave, as a rule of thumb, at least 30 percent of trees in every salvage unit."

  Again, the organization is fighting for wilderness on one hand and for community and sustainable, independent economies on the other. They're burning the candle at both ends. They're not trying to obstruct—they're trying to create solutions and repair damages. If a way of life is preserved in the Yaak and northwest Montana, I think it is largely MWA who will deserve credit for keeping the woods that loggers, hunters and wilderness-seekers alike share.

  In April 1996, the proposed Gunsight sale was finally canceled by the forest supervisor after consultation with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, who confirmed what we'd been saying: it would harm the elk and grizzly habitat. Other areas in the Yaak, however, were not so fortunate.

  The Forest Service official's refusal to visit the Yaak; the disparity between what is said and what is done; between what is mapped and what is out there or not out there— ground truthing. I wake often thinking of the fights of local conservationist Chip Clark. Through information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Chip and others discovered that the Forest Service, when reporting to Congress how much mature timber was left on the Kootenai, claimed that 40 percent of the clearcuts contained mature timber. The real number was zero. But based on the hyperinflated figures—the "phantom trees," as they came to be known—Congress, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and Forest Service officials allowed a larger cut from the Kootenai.