Are We Giving the Land Something Like Alzheimer's?

Ask the Lakota.

In 2017, descendants of Crazy Horse, the legendary Lakota warrior, went on a tour to promote a book they had written about their ancestor, and I got to attend one of the events. They had decided it was time to tell their own story about the man, based on the stories that been handed down to them, directly, scrupulously, generation to generation. And that’s what they did. Rather than read from the book, they sat in a semi-circle, in jeans and caps, and shared with us the stories that emanated directly from Crazy Horse’s relatives and the events around them, the truest possible account of his extraordinary and heartbreaking life.

Those stories weren’t the only thing I heard that night. As I waited in line for my copy of Crazy Horse: the Lakota Warrior’s Life and Legacy, I head a visiting Lakota tell some local indigenous that elders were reporting “something like Alzheimer’s” in the mountains, as if the hills were forgetting.

~~~~~~

At the time, I didn’t quite know what to make of the information. I was a carbon warrior then, thinking mostly in terms of numbers, looking skyward at the atmosphere, counting molecules. Forests had slid from my consciousness, becoming carbon quantities in a planetary equation. I filed it away as another mysterious consequence of global warming, never considering the more immediate threats of chainsaws, feller bunchers and road graders. Admittedly, when it came to forests, I was pretty ignorant.

That began to change, however, when I got involved in a local effort to save Legacy Forests. What are Legacy Forest? That answer can be complex, but for me it has become pretty simple. Legacy forests are forests that remember.

Let me explain.

Indigenous people everywhere seem to agree on the basic principle that “water is life,” that the two are so intimately entwined they are of a common nature. In that regard, the area where I live, the western, seaward side of Washington State, is particularly blessed. Except during a brief pause in summer, when rain is rare, natural atmospheric currents bring continual flows of moisture inland. We are spring-fed by an ocean, and over time life here responded with giants—1,000 year old cedars growing thirteen feet thick and 240 feet high, Douglas Fir 300 feet high, not to mention a plethora of mosses, lichen and fungi, salmon tall as a man and so thick in the streams and rivers it was said one could cross on their backs.

Humans thrived as well. From coast to mountains, scores of indigenous cultures flourished amidst the abundance. They used the trees of course—for canoes, post-and-beam cedar-planked long-houses, totem poles and fiber—but did so without significantly altering the forests themselves. They were part of the forests, rather than the other way around.

Those forests however, but for about 3%, are gone now, cut and converted to agricultural fields, cities, suburbs and, of course, timber plantations. But not all. Amidst the green-toned mosaics of modern tree plantations, speckled tan with fresh clearcuts, are dark seams and scraps of forest yet to be converted. Yes, they were logged, once, but the logging was done prior to industrialization, by hand, when the work was “sloppier,” with shrubs and smaller, harder-to-get-to trees left standing. Most importantly, the forests weren’t clearcut, sprayed with herbicides and replanted with monocrops, general operating procedure since WWII. Rather, they were left to recover on their own.

That last part is the key detail. It’s not just their age, it’s their proximity to the original. Had they been converted—stripped, sprayed and replanted—that connection would have lost. But they escaped that fate, and thus still carry the biotic legacy of the primordial forests. They hold the last of the memory.

~~~~~~

What I’m describing here, though, is hard to quantify into measurable terms, let alone in terms meaningful to a society so focused on economic returns. It’s even harder to articulate in the two-minute public-comment slots allotted to citizens during the monthly Board of Natural Resources Meetings, during which the fates of these forests are decided. And what’s a congressional representative supposed to make of the value of biotic legacy?

Though hard to locate in words, it can be understood, seen and felt, and that drew a small army from around the state into a sudden and dogged movement to save these places. People dove in to the hard work and wrote letters to their papers, attended hearings, called representatives, and organized to help elect a new, legacy-forest-friendly lands commissioner.

Of course, the new commissioner, Dave Upthegrove, is now under immense pressure from industry and is beginning to waver. The work thus continues. But it would anyways, for the community that’s arisen around these forests continues to grow and deepen. There are book clubs and forest hikes and rather than simply saving these places, we are learning about them. And we are asking questions. What is the history of the forest? How much biotic legacy has survived? Just as these places remember what was here before, they’re calling on us to do the same

~~~~~~

In my own life, I was encountering Alzheimer’s in it’s human form. Between 2005 and 2018 My brother-in-law struggled with early onset Alzheimer’s until succumbing in 2018. During that time, I made frequent trips to Denver, Colorado to help my sister with the difficult work of caring for someone with dementia. Meanwhile, in 2016, my father was diagnosed with Lewy Body Alzheimer’s, dying in 2019.

I saw first-hand just how much of a person is made of memory, how as their memory goes, they seem to follow, as if they are memory. And not just deep memory over long time spans, but the moment-to-moment memory that binds time into linear cohesion, makes a conversation, or a task, possible. How simple most thinking is. We sense, we choose, we remember, we repeat, a seemingly banal yet continually magical cognitive routine. But take out the remember link and the circle collapses, leaving the victim stranded in perplexities. Which is why getting Alzheimer’s sufferers out into nature can be so helpful. There, cogitation isn’t needed. You don’t have to remember the scent of the pine tree. It will remind you on the next inbreath.

On my last visit to my father, talking had become a challenge for us, so every hour or so I would wheel him out to the elaborate cactus garden behind the Southern Nevada State Veterans Home. It was blooming season, with explosions of color in every direction. As we circled around and around the same paths, he would point this way and that. “Wow, look at the one.” and “Hey, look over there.” Except when dancing to swing music of the big band era, I had rarely seen him so animated.

At one point, under the shade of an Acacia, he asked that we stop and that I put the brake on his wheelchair. He began to stand, waving me off when I tried to help. Holding the arm of the wheelchair he steadied himself as he slowly rose and then let go, rising all the way up, feeling his way deep down into his feet and onto the earth. There he stood a while and just looked around. He wanted to remember what it was like.

~~~~~~

A few months ago, this story came around full circle. A friend sent me a 2021 Associate Press article about a particularly intensive logging effort that happened in the Black Hills in the early 2,000’s. In 1998 a pine beetle epidemic began sweeping through. In response, the forest service initiated massive tree thinning projects, killing more trees through thinning than beetle infestation. By 2017, when the epidemic officially ended, the black hills had lost half its timber volume, and subsequent Forest Service studies showed the work to be unsustainable. More wood was being taken out than the forest could replace.

2017 was also the year I overheard the comment about Lakota elders detecting “something like Alzheimer’s” in the hills. Of course, modern science doesn’t know what to make of such an observation, but we’d be wise to consider it. It raises many questions. What have we forgotten in our rationalistic, science-directed approach to the natural world? What might we be missing by keeping our intuition and moral sense out of the equation? And given the ever widening scope of tree thinning across our public lands, what sort of damage are we doing? Are we, indeed, inflicting forests with something like Alzheimer’s?

These are the kind of questions we’ll take up in the next installment. I hope you’ll join me.

---

Thanks for reading! I’m glad you’re here. I keep this page free for all but still depend on reader-generosity to make this project, and the research involved, possible. Please consider a paid subscription if you can and don’t forget to hit the “like” and “share” buttons.