June 01, 2004
Twenty Years and It Still Ain't Over

I first came to the Siskiyou in 1972. I had dropped out of high school and moved onto a communal farm near the small town of Takilma. Back then I knew little about the United States Forest Service (USFS) or the more than two hundred million acres of public lands they managed. I had assumed, like most Americans, that they, the forests, were protected from abuse and held in trust for future generations.

In 1982 I returned to meet with local activists about two very large roads that the USFS had proposed to build through the wildest remaining areas on the West Coast of the U.S. mainland. This region contained the largest remaining tracts of old growth forests and was dissected by almost a dozen free running rivers. The roads were to be used to haul logs to the booming lumber mills that had been built to process the trees that were coming off the National Forest. These two proposed roads, the Bald Mountain Road and the Gasquet-Orleanes Road in the Siskiyous were considered the most serious threats to the landmark Wilderness Act, passed in 1964 to create a national wilderness preservation system for lands held in the public trust. If built, they would sever the northern and southern ends of the Siskiyou and open up hundreds of timber sales in the very heart of the last best place to experience large expanses of untouched Ancient Forests.

In 1982, Oregon and Northern California were a hostile place for conservationists to work. There were very few environmental groups operating here, and the larger groups had only a handful of members south of Eugene, or north of Arcata. And while for wilderness activists, the region had global significance as the most diverse conifer forest on Earth, locally very few were aware of its existence, let alone the risks it was facing due to these two proposed roads.

Today we are facing the same threats, if you get into the nitty gritty, some of the names of changed, some are still the same. What hasn't changed is the game of logging. The rhetoric of our federal government has been their greatest ally, keeping the debate about logging going, while they continue to remove our trees, not one by one, but acre by acre, or timber sale by timber sale.