When it comes to absorbing massive amounts of carbon and locking it up for centuries, there’s no better place in the world than western Oregon to grow trees for a thousand years.
In the first half of the 1800’s when European and Russian fur trappers first moved into this territory to start massive fires to boost their kill rate the landscape was coming out of a mini ice age that provided perfect big tree growing conditions from 800 to 1850.
These rainy wet cool long Summer days had grown unending cathedrals of trees, near 70% of which were 700 year old co-dominants with sparse numbers of even older trees among every age of younger ones as a thick shaggy blanket covering the land. By most every measure, the bounty of nature growing under these perfect conditions would be unrecognizable to those who live here today.
The giant bears and giant trees… The always returning salmon weighing over a hundred pounds, the sturgeons in crystal clear deep river water sometimes weighing over a thousand pounds provided an ecosystem for indigenous peoples that lived in integrated ways amongst them, at least until the humans that devoured this perfect world took over.
The knowledge of what once was, the continued destruction of what’s barely started to recover and our place in all of it can cause so much grief that it becomes almost hereditary. It’s a sorrow of loss that Joanna Macy does better than most at validating:
“We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don’t apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time.” Joanna Macy https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1250258
And just as this legacy of grief that Joanna Macy has personally inspired in this writer who is now starting out on the journey of writing this website, which will one day be more than just a text book of new practices in forestry, but also a process of passing on the torch to next generation’s work of forever healing from the loss of so much. This work is also akin to the legacy of what Franz Dolp created on his 40 acres west of Corvallis.
Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of how Franz Dolp, a wounded man, moved to live on wounded land at Shotpouch Creek in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, in a chapter she titles “Old Growth Children.” …In his journal, Franz wrote that he had “made the mistake of visiting the [family] farm after it was sold. The new owners had cut it all.” I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust, and I cried. When I moved to Shotpouch after leaving the farm, I realized that making a new home required more than building a cabin or planting an apple tree. It required some healing for me and for the land. My work [at Shotpouch] grew out of a deeply experienced sense of loss,” he wrote, “the loss of what should be here.” http://www.standrewpc.org/sermons/november-16th-2021
So as this journey of defining best practices for climate forests begins, we first honor our elders, our ancestors, the natural history of the land and most of all we commit to ensuring future generations hear and see our dreams in a regrowing landscape that’s finally being nurtured again.
This writer hopes the words you’re reading right now reach you in way they can eventually be revealed to all who are younger than you in a way that leaves a legacy of hard labor on the land that inspires them to do the same as they grow older.
Towards this end, it’s time to explain how nature practices forestry and how we can mimic it. This is much, much more than how an accountant manages timber investments as cash flow within their client’s own short lifespan.
These periodic withdrawals of forest value as timber might sustain the land for their bank accounts fairly well, but not for any other value, especially when it comes to future generations who are aware of what’s possible here.
Another way of sharing this same knowledge above is in poetry rather than prose, which this writer once spent too much time on:
True Knowledge Is An Ancient-Branched-Heart
Lesson 11*
True knowledge is an ancient-branched-heart.
It’s a root-dream-deep-green-shaggy-wild
feeding ocean-wood-remembering land
river clean in roaring ocean river-wind-rain
Rediscovering great heart unseen-unchained.
Bare dry earth once moist and tall.
Green moss-wood once unworried of ruin.
Once feeling-knowing a whole body,
A whole heart-gift to your deepest root.
But you changed your mind?
Now nothing to hold on to
Nothing to climb
You make more wind and
Want more wind to water you,
Yet only dry wind sweeps through.
Nothing to sway or cool you
It just keeps drying you?
Wind-thinking-lost all roots,
Green-branch-trunk
Even weeds-dried-gone.
Insatiable thirst of confused wanting
More wind, more overpowering heart’s rule,
More overthrowing life’s warm wet breath…
A mind’s insatiable toil for water
Wanting-water-buried-deep underwater
Under what wind is as its opposite
As a big missing in heart-loss-shackled
Deep wound needing better salve
Needing more then what pretends
Is only needing more wind?
And what of your children?
Where do they live?
Do you hold them with your brain?
Or do you hold them with
hands-heart-arms knowing life’s breath,
Thinking in your chest of child’s future
Wind-wound-thirst
Unresolved-chained-thought?
Top-heavy trees can not live without
Root-heart-knowing of what living long can be.
And the child you work to raise?
Is that a thin green
Farm of identical tiny trees as you and me?
You really wish to grow this wild tame
Shallow soon-to-harvest-not-knowing?
True knowledge is an ancient-branched-heart.
It’s a root-dream-deep-green-shaggy-wild
feeding ocean-wood-remembering land
river clean in roaring-wind-rain
Rediscovering great heart unseen-unchained.
by DeaneTR 4/2005
*This poem inspired by trees as framed by Lessons from the Dead Sea by James Tyman