Am I Witnessing a Public Re-enchantment With the Land?

I wrote on Monday about a primary race here in Washington State for the Commissioner of Public Lands and the citizen effort to place Dave Upthegrove on the ballot. It’s a hugely important contest because the eventual Lands Commissioner will manage the fate of around 70,000 acres of nearly old-growth forest, a type of forest referred to as “legacy forests.” Citizens have coalesced around these forests and a statewide movement is rising in their defense. It’s a particularly hopeful combination—forests reemerging into their one-time glory and groups of humans discovering and defending them—one I’ve both watched and participated in. And while there is a lot of interesting things that that can be said about the political innovation and hearty determination of this movement, I sense something even deeper going on. I sometimes think I am seeing the sparks and weavings of an organized, politically-consequential, public re-enchantment with the land.

It started simply enough. One day Stephen Kropp, a water resource engineer for the Wild Fish Conservancy, was wandering above the lowland forests of Washington State in Google Earth, something he had become quite skilled at in his work for the Wild Fish Conservancy, when he noticed something peculiar. Within territory he understood to be already converted to tree plantations, he saw forests with natural, old-growth characteristics. He could tell by color and texture. Old growth is a darker green with a rougher texture due to the complex, uneven canopy, compared to the even-age, brighter green stands of plantation, interspersed with grey clearcuts.

Here is the place that piqued his interest. It’s about 60 miles southwest of his home in Olympia, Washington:

You can see the different textures of the canopy. You can also see that it is surrounded by plantations of various ages, the brighter the green, the younger the stand. The relatively younger stands are to the sides, while the older stands appear above and below, similar in color but definitely smoother than the small area, like a squat diamond, above the pointer. If you spread the image you can almost see the taller trees pressing through the canopy.

It would be great if that were original forest, somehow missed by the saws, but there is virtually none of that left, especially in the lowland forests, which are mostly private and state-owned. That area has been cut, but long ago, by hand and sloppily, and most importantly, without replanting. Rather than being missed by the saws, this little scrap of land was missed by the post-war industrial method: clearcutting, followed by spraying to kill the regrowth and then replanting with greenhouse grown monocrops. It’s a system in which the original forest isn’t only destroyed, it’s barred from return, the land fully converted to human purpose. Industry calls them “working forest,” and from ground level they look like it—even aged workers massed together, grimly marching skyward with little in the way of understory, ecological complexity or biodiversity.

What had snagged Kropp’s vision was a little more than an hour’s drive from where he lived in Tacoma, Washington, and so he drove out to investigate. What he encountered changed his life, which he describes in a letter he once wrote to supporters:

”I parked my car on the side of the road, walked into a small stand of trees, and stood in awe of what I saw around me: 120-year old Sitka Spruce shading a bed of deer fern, mint, lilies, huckleberries, wild ginger, enchanter's nightshade; and countless species of lichens, mosses, and fungi.  There were ancient, standing dead trees marked with hundreds of holes and craters, that had been excavated by woodpeckers and small mammals that had used them as nesting sites.”

Returning home to dig deeper, Kropp soon realized “there were many thousands of acres of similar older forest remnants on state trust lands, scattered throughout Western Washington.” Analyzing data of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, which manages the forests, he also discovered that most of the older lowland forests were unprotected, and that many were slated to be logged within the next 5-10 years. When Kropp said his encounter with these forests changed his life, he meant it literally. From that moment his life has been devoted to saving these places, now along with many others.

But what to call them? They weren’t original, pre-colonial forests. And since the designation “old growth” requires a minimum age of 120 years, and these forests were generally younger than that, they couldn’t be technically called old growth either. They did, however, have the characteristics of old growth, sporting multileveled canopies harboring complex, habitat-rich ecosystems, having recovered sufficiently from initial logging to have regained the forest’s original character. It was that continuance that seemed to matter, the legacy. When he mentioned the term “legacy forest” to a forest activist, Alex Harris, Harris’s reaction was so resounding he decided it was right. Now there are numerous organizations fighting to save them.

I got a chance to see and experience the difference between plantation and legacy forest myself when I visited one called “Bessie.” I wrote about it in an op/ed for a local paper, The Cascadia Daily:

“If you were to visit Bessie, you’d first walk two miles up a dirt road through DNR’s tree plantations, seeing for yourself how different a tree plantation is from a forest like Bessie. Trees pass on either side, but that is all. Just uniformly sized trees crowded with other trees, branches jutting into branches, little light or life between them, the sky dim, choked off.

Then, at the end of a spur, after plunging into the trees and traversing the side of a hill, there is sudden spaciousness and light, with fewer trees but each one individual. Some rise from yard-wide trunks, others are slender and lacy, like the hemlocks filling the understory. Snags and fall-down blaze with a wild profusion of mosses and algae. You are standing in Bessie.”

I tried to give a sense of the feeling one gets in such a place, one that’s clearly detectible but almost impossible to say in words. You can describe what you see, the particulars, but the feeling inside is more elusive. The word that comes closest, I think, is enchantment. Tree-ring scientists, Dave Stahle, was speaking to some science writers when, finding his technical definitions of old growth unsatisfying, he blurted out, “Old-growth forests are where fairies would live!” Not quite scientific, but it gets at the feeling one has in such places, some sort of magic, an enchantment.

If I were to pick a word to describe the human relationship with the land over the last few decades, it would be “disenchantment.” Screens are the enchanter now and that has been none too good for the non-human world (or the human, arguably). Despite the overwhelming turnout for the first Earth Day in 1970, and the legislation that followed, what scientists dryly call “land change” has only accelerated. And that “change,” that conversion of natural lands into “working lands,” whether tree plantation or corn field, is itself a kind of disenchantment.

To give a sense of the scale of this conversation, here is a broader view of the little patch of land grabbed Kropp’s interest:

And wider still.

Head south to California or north to British Columbia and it’s essentially the same basic pattern. It’s the work of a disenchanted culture, one we like to think we are better than. And in a sense, this movement is showing us that we are, or can be. We see that just as the land contains a will and memory that presses through no matter what we do to it, there is within us an ancient longing for that magic that also persists.

These forests may not be the scale that draws people from around the world, as a National Park would. What they draw is the people from around their counties and states, local people. They are modest, local treasures and that is one of their charms. People can relate to them. get to know about them, visit them, become enchanted by them, and play measurable roles in saving them. And it’s something we seem to be thirsting for. Since Kropp’s fateful drive, numerous organizations and a growing community of citizens have become committed to saving them. And as I mentioned on Monday, the movement is on the verge of helping place on the ballot a candidate fully committed to protecting these last shreds of what’s left.

I had thought I would be reporting the winner on Wednesday, but after the first batch of counted ballots, Upthegrove placed third. After the second, however, he was nearly tied with second place. Now after the third count, he has just edged into second place, but there are 250,000 plus ballots yet to count.

It will be a nail biter to the end, but the enchantment has begun.

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