from Listening to the Land:  Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros by Derrick Jensen, Sierra Club Books, 1995

Activists worldwide are fighting desperate rearguard actions, hoping to maintain whatever wildness they can until the culture either undergoes a change of heart or collapses. Every time activists preserve a run of salmon or a patch of old-growth forest, they preserve that much beauty, wildness, and evolutionary potential. If, one hundred years from now, there still survive grizzly bear, fisher, marten, and great blue whales, it will be due in part to the devotion of these activists.

]ohn Osborn worked for seven years fighting fires as a seasonal employee for the United States Forest Service. He later became interested in the history of the Forest Service, and extensively researched the early years of the agency. In the early 1980s, while doing an internship as part of his training in internal medicine, he formed the Spokane Resident Physicians Action League to oppose the destruction of the forests within the Columbia River Bioregion. This later evolved into the Inland Empire Public Lands Council.

Through educational programs, the journal Transitions, and grassroots activism, the council has been pivotal in helping the public increasingly acknowledge the transition that inevitably comes with the exhaustion of the forests.

JOHN OSBORN: In the three hundred years we've been cutting the forests of North America, we've always had one more great stand of native forest on the other side of the ridge. So it was in New England, so it was in the Midwest, and so it seemed in the Northwest. But today on the other side of the ridge lies the Pacific Ocean, and we are cutting the last stands of ancient forest.

We have an opportunity to save these stands, in part because our system of government allows us to potentially influence decisions made about our public lands. The situation in the United States is telling - if we can't save the forests in the Pacific Northwest, where there are still forests left to save and where the Constitution guarantees us freedom of speech, where on earth can we do it?

One obstacle to citizen influence in governmental decisions is what Hedrick Smith, in The Power Game, calls "the iron triangle." Iron triangles, and there are many of them, are fundamental to the flow of power in Washington, D. C. With the forest issue, one point of the iron triangle would represent politicians, one would represent corporations, and the third point would be the Forest Service bureaucracy. Each of these three components benefits from cutting down the forests: politicians because of corporate contributions to their campaigns and because of the votes this money can buy; the corporations because of profits; and the Forest Service bureaucracy because for decades the budget of the U.S. Forest Service has been dependent on building roads and cutting down forests.

To save the forests you have to break the triangle by separating the three points. This probably has to be done simultaneously: politicians must receive pressure nationally, through publicizing the damage to the forests and by revealing the close connections between politicians and industry; the corporate component of this mess must be overhauled; and the Forest Service, particularly its budget, must be reformed. All of this is difficult, because we're faced not only with the enormous and entrenched forces of Congress, and not only with an entrenched Forest Service bureaucracy, but also with, in just the Pacific Northwest alone, well over $30 billion worth of timber corporate assets.

What's worse is that when you take on these timber companies, you find that they are not separable. Instead, they are linked by marriage and interlocking boards of directors, as well as by the common history of fraud and corruption associated with Congress's land-grant railroads. The wealth of four of the major timber corporations in the Northwest - Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascade, Potlatch, and Plum Creek - is derived directly from land conditionally granted by Congress in 1864.

This means it's impossible to understand the forest crisis in the Northwest without considering the 1864 Northern Pacific land grant. This grant, signed by President Lincoln, was a contract or covenant creating the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, intending that it build and maintain a railroad between Lake Superior and Puget Sound. For this purpose, Congress and President Lincoln conditionally granted 40 million acres of public land. This land, originally intended for settlers,  instead ended up establishing corporate empires, including those of the timber companies I just mentioned.

From the beginning to the present, the grant has been characterized by fraud and flagrant abuse of the public trust. There have been numerous attempts to revest part or all of the grant lands, the most recent of which occurred between 1924 and 1940, at the urging of President Coolidge. Another congressional investigation of the 1864 Northern Pacific land grant would be one way to get at this iron triangle.

DERRICK JENSEN: How did you get started on the railroad issue?

JO: I started this journey when I saw the first square-mile clearcut in a place I cared for deeply. After that, I watched as one square mile of forest after another went down. And I was helpless to stop it. I had read about this occurring during the last century in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but I couldn't believe it was happening in the watersheds of the Saint Joe and Clearwater Rivers of Idaho.

DJ: You've said before that many environmentalists begin by wanting to protect a piece of ground and end up questioning the foundations of Western civilization.

JO: I'm not alone in this. There are people all over the region who care deeply about the forest, who live in or near the forest, take their drinking water from the forest, who fish and hunt in the forest. When you see the forest being destroyed, and when you systematically set out to stop that destruction, you begin asking questions you never asked before and end up doing things you never thought you would do.

I remember holding my first news conference - reading my Sierra Club media handbook and then actually facing the reporters and cameras. I was so nervous. And I remember the first time I ever testified before a congressional subcommittee. Even though people had told me it wasn't like the Watergate hearings where the hearing rooms were packed, their assurances didn't allay my high levels of anxiety about testifying before Congress.

But more than just taking the concerns to the public and to the public's decision makers, the desperate nature of the issue - of trying to stop the relentless destruction - takes you on a journey.

In the physical context, I can tell you I started out with a few of those little cardboard filing boxes. And I had a typewriter. Today, I have twenty-two filing cabinets in my apartment and a laptop computer with a modem.

Beyond just the physical appurtenances, I have come to understand that the threats are really symptomatic of a much more serious underlying process. I have realized we are not dealing just with Forest Service bureaucrats and profit-driven corporate executives, bur instead with the symptoms of an enormous historic transition. How else can we explain the senseless destruction? Why does the Forest Service spend millions of dollars building roads to nowhere? Why do corporations want to cut down the forests in the backcountry, in wildlands that are not even the good growing sites? Questions such as these, that I couldn't answer before, became comprehensible after I had come to understand the transition.

Let me give you an example of how the concept of this historic transition helps explain otherwise inexplicable, tumultuous events here in the Pacific Northwest. During the 1980s, I was the lead author of the appeal of the Forest Service's plan for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. As part of that appeal we asked for a stay of further activities in roadless areas. The Forest Service had never granted broad-based stay requests during this nationwide forest planning process. But in 1988, on the Idaho Panhandle, the federal agency granted our request for a stay. The Forest Service agreed to stop further timber activities on 800,000 acres of roadless lands on the Idaho Panhandle. This decision was significant, although you have to remember that the Forest Service had aIready trashed the Panhandle's watershed with ten thousand miles of logging roads and had clearcut away most of the commercially valuable forest.

The timber industry's response to our stay was entirely unexpected. In reaction to our efforts on the Idaho Panhandle and other challenges by environmentalists in the region, the companies orchestrated a huge logging-truck convoy down Montana's Bitterroot Valley. It became the timber industry's most successful media event of the 1980s. As I watched the media buildup and anger among the workers, I felt the awesome power of these huge timber corporations.

There are many reasons for the industry's extreme reaction. The first and most basic is that the overcutting of the forests had created a timber supply squeeze. The second reason, and I think a more fundamental one, is that the industry, which had largely controlled the region for more than a century, was being challenged. Timber interests felt compelled to crush even the tiniest threat to their hegemony, tolerating nothing that might jeopardize their historic influence and control.

But the trees are gone. The forests are overcut. The timber industry's tactics were extreme. For what? For the roadless areas? For the least productive tree~growing sites, for the remnants, the little pieces of what was once the fabric of a forest? The timber industry's unwillingness to publicly acknowledge the transition left me troubled,

The media didn't help. The timber lobby has always been extremely effective at choreographing media events, at manipulating timber workers, and at manipulating the public. During the logging-truck convoy I talked with a reporter about the inaccuracy of what the timber industry representatives were saying, effectively making environmentalists scapegoats for the transition. I suggested that the lack of critical reporting by the media was extremely misleading for the public. The reporter responded that in these kinds of cases facts aren't particularly important. That wasn't the first time I'd heard the refrain, "Don't confuse us with the facts."

DJ: Where do we go from here?

JO: I think the goal, or at least the challenge, is to continue to focus on the discrete problems - the clearcuts, the effects overcutting has on our forests and on our communities - and to continue to help people understand the connection between overcutting and how it affects people on a personal level, on every level from economic dislocation to the destruction of the natural world around us.

During the past ten years I've seen a marked increase in concern about overcutting. That is heartening. I know, however, that a hundred years ago there also was a national outpouring of concern about the forests, which led to the creation of America's National Forest System.

The public memory is altogether too short. If we as a community could have remembered the magnificent forests of New England, if our collective memory included the tremendous white pine forests of the upper Mississippi River Valley, and if we could have remembered the devastation of those forests, we would not have allowed our national forests to be devastated in the same way.

I often ask myself, how could this have happened? We created the National Forest System as a response to the devastation of the forests of the Great Lakes region. And what did we do to the National Forest System? I know what we did. I've walked those watersheds. I've driven those logging roads. I've photographed clearcut after clearcut. I've watched those forests go down. And I know firsthand that not only has there been a tremendous betrayal of the public trust by the U. S. Forest Service, but that the public either didn't know or didn't care and couldn't remember that there was a time when people fought very hard to protect these forests as National Forests.

DJ: Is it so hard to remember? We can go downtown and see Spokane Falls. The Indians used to put boxes under the falls, and 100-pound salmon would fall into them. The salmon are gone. But we can see the dams. We can see Grand Coulee Dam. We can see the clearcuts.

JO: I think in terms of a human lifetime the changes are so gradual that we don't see them. If you could imagine the Columbia River Bioregion as it was when Lewis and Clark walked into it, and then look at it today, you would be horrified at what has happened here: the liquidation of the forests, the destruction of the greatest salmon runs on earth, some of the worst nuclear and mining contamination on earth. If we look at the Columbia River Bioregion as a microcosm of life on earth, it demonstrates our lack of clarity and capacity to recognize the extremity of these problems.

DJ: How did you commit yourself to conservation work?

JO: I am a physician, and I originally went into medicine expecting to work in the third world. I worked for a time at a mission hospital in northern Thailand, and after that I worked at another mission hospital in western Kenya, near the border with Uganda.

But at the time I left Spokane for Kenya I was very deeply troubled by what was happening here. The timber lobby was going after the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, attempting to dismantle the agency in the Idaho legislature. Resource specialists in the Forest Service were under enormous pressure to overcut the forests. And it was becoming increasingly clear to me that then-Senator McClure of Idaho, who later became a director of Boise Cascade Timber Corporation, was manipulating the forest plans for north Idaho.

I really struggled with all of this during the time I was at the hospital at Lugulu. I can remember one night when a runner came and dropped a message through the screen and woke me up. The message read, "Daktari, come quickly," which usually meant that a patient was seriously ill. And I remember walking into the pediatric ward, which was an open ward of about forty beds, with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. At night oftentimes many members of the same family shared the same bed, and since the treatment area was in the middle of the ward, there was a sense of being on stage, being surrounded by 150 people, all watching you, underneath this one bare lightbulb hanging from the rafters.

A child had been brought in who probably had pneumonia from measles. She was gasping, and her nostrils were flaring. It was clear she was going to die. I called for a nurse to bring over the oxygen, which she did. But perhaps because she was so used to death as a daily occurrence, she brought it in a less-than-prompt manner.

I remember as this little girl was dying we tried to get the oxygen hooked up. We finally did that, and we got ready to do mouth-to-mouth. We turned the oxygen bottle on. The oxygen bottle was empty. The little girl died in her father's arms.

After she died, I remember going outside. It was about three in the morning. I struggled with this whole issue, and just sat and thought about which way to go, whether to come back and make some sort of sense of this whole mess here, or to continue my commitment to third world medicine.

I suppose that each of us has a point in our life where we've made a conscious decision to follow a certain path. And I made a decision that night to try to stop the insanity of the destruction of the forests here in the region.

DJ: What is the prognosis for the forests?

JO: I think the prognosis is not good.

I take care of people with chronic, multisystem diseases. Many of my patients are nearing the end of their lives. At some point in the dying process, a moment comes when the hospital chaplain should be at the bedside. That's because, although there are some things for which I can be helpful, my patients have spiritual needs as well. If I were the physician managing this larger case-the transition underway in the Northwest, which also is a multisystem case-I would be calling for the chaplain.

DJ: How do you deal with the pain?

JO: In many ways my environmental work is an extension of my work with patients. As a physician my responsibility is to do the best I can to diagnose and to recommend treatment options. There are times when people I care about reject my advice. They continue to do things that are damaging - they continue to smoke, they continue to drink - and put their lives at risk. And so too my work on the environment. Ultimately, all I can do is present the information and make recommendations. People continue to do things which are destructive to themselves, to our communities, to future generations, and to life on earth. Ultimately all I can do is find solace from doing the best job I can possibly do.

DJ: Are you happy?

JO: I feel a sense of peace that comes from knowing my work is the right thing to do. Yes, the problems may be overwhelming, and at times they seem absolutely insurmountable, but working on them provides a sense of peace. To not work on them would be very difficult.

DJ: What is point B? Where are we trying to go?

JO: I don't know. I think we'll get to point B by a series of approximations. We may not know what will work, but we will know pretty quickly what won't work. We know that overcutting the forests, destroying diversity, continuing to increase the numbers of our own species on this planet will get us to where we don't want to go. It's the old saying, "If you don't change directions, you'll end up getting where you're going." Another way to say this is that people who care, and who are willing to act, can make a difference. Collectively that difference may not be enough. But I have come to understand that if people who care don't act, then assuredly it will never be enough.