People and Trees 1999

Transcript of the Voices of the Wild Earth episode. Lightly formatted from the original production script.

Lisa, welcome to sound print. I'm Lisa Simeoni. Who would have thought that something as natural, as common, as simple as trees would ever become a source of controversy, whether we live in the city or in the country, doesn't matter. Trees are a part of our life and our language. We climb trees. We build houses in them. As kids, we picnic under their shade. We decorate them at Christmas, we plant them. We cut them down. We try not to stand under them. During thunderstorms, we speak of the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of family trees. We use complimentary terms like conservationist or disparaging ones like tree hugger to describe people who take a passionate interest in trees, whether viewed as symbols, resources or commodities, trees mark a modern battleground. Some of them will live and some of them will fall. Today's program from producers Jane Fritz and Susan Davis is called people and trees.

I grew up in Ohio, in the country. My childhood playground was a native forest of poplar, beach, oak and other hardwood trees. It was home to deer and raccoon. My large family wasn't a close knit bunch like the Waltons on TV. I was often harassed by my older brothers, so mom would support my occasional need to run away from home. Since I was just a little kid, she knew I'd venture only as far as the closely planted pine trees separating our place from the neighbors. She packed me saltines and a canteen of water, and I'd escape the world by crawling underneath the low branches of those cool, dark pines, safe and alone. Sometimes I'd curl up like a fox and sleep in the soft blanket of needles until mom called me for suffering. As a teenager, I'd seek the refuge of other trees, this time, usually running away from my mother. I'd wander deep into that forest behind our home, walking along the bank of Swan Creek to abandon the stream or a huge, sprawling oak tree still grows. I'd sit beneath it, knees to my chest, and cry. The tree was always so accepting of my adolescent angst. I still visit that old oak whenever I go back to the place I'm from.

Unknown Speaker 2:38 That's a black walnut tree, and

Unknown Speaker 2:40 that's black on it too.

Unknown Speaker 2:43 And then, and then there's the sycamore, yeah,

yeah, the sycamores are the bigger ones with the broadly pomade leaves that look like resemble Maples out there in the maple family. You know a lot about the trees here. Oh, a little bit just from being out and running around in the woods for Well, since I was, yeah, I can't really handle modern life too well.

A few summers ago, I met Scott Russell on the campus green of Ohio University, a college I attended in the mid 70s. It was the first time I'd been back since then, and I just couldn't believe how the trees had grown. They now dwarf the old stone buildings. Scott's a soft spoken country boy, tall and slim with well worn denim overalls and blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. It's his first year of college. He's thinking of studying cultural anthropology or maybe horticulture. He says the tall trees here keep him from being homesick for his family farm, which is surrounded by the rolling hills and hardwood forests of Appalachia near the Ohio and West Virginia border.

I come up here every day being underneath the canopy here, to me, it's always serene. No matter how busy it might be, there's that same serenity no matter how much it's disrupted by human activity, even when they're cutting the grass, usually through the day. I only have an hour to sit here, and it's the longest hours a day. You just kind of lose touch with a lot of things a lot of times, until the clock strikes the time, the time that you know you have to leave, and it's just back at

it. Do you think people appreciate what's here, you

can always tell the people that do appreciate it, they're always looking around, looking in the trees, they're not watching the sidewalk, trying to avoid eye contact with other people. And nine out of 10 people don't pay any attention. They just they're so caught up in their routine that they can't i. Separate themselves from it and take a look around

at all. Scott developed his passion for trees exploring a virgin Oak Forest called Dysart woods, located in Belmont County, Ohio. Dysart Woods is all that remains of the vast primeval hardwood forest that was cut by settlers clearing the land for farms, mines and town sites, preserved by several generations of the Dysart family. The 50 Acre Woods is now a nature preserve owned and managed by Ohio University.

Dysart Woods is significant because it's one of the last remnants of the type of forest that covered virtually all of what's Ohio now and in the Midwest. And if you can imagine the pioneers coming across, the Appalachians and finding unbroken forest like this for hundreds and hundreds of miles, and Dysart Woods is one of the few pieces that remains of that forest.

I first visited Dysart woods as a young college student Scott's age, I remember walking among the towering oak, beech and tulip trees, acres of them, their cathedral like presence overwhelming me at first, then a cacophony of bird song transformed the forest silence into a pleasing and welcoming sound. In 20 years, little has changed here, except that now the university employs caretakers, a married couple in their early 40s, Mitch and Ann Bartels. They live in an old farmhouse near the edge of the forest with several dogs and cats. The Bartels jump at the chance to take me on a tour of the old club.

People compare a cathedral in a forest, you know, in the same sentence, because the high ceiling, the hushed feeling,

Unknown Speaker 7:10 the respect for what's around you,

the music. I mean, that would be like, too corny. I suppose I always come in here and just get reflected. You know, immediately,

a lot of the large white oaks are dying, and nobody's sure if it's just a natural part of the life cycle or if it's something that man has done. But there's been so few chances to study an oak forest through its maturity that quite honestly, there's still research being done on that

individual ornamental oak trees are abundant in yards and city parks, but a whole forest of oaks, especially old growth, and these trees are Hundreds of years old, is very rare. Oak is considered a valuable source of lumber as a hardwood. It's commonly used for making cabinetry, flooring and furniture. So dysert Woods provides a unique and critical study area, a valuable perspective on the natural cycles of a virgin forest managed with little human interference.

That's very hard for some people to understand, because they visit this woods and they have to climb over tree trunks, sometimes several feet in diameter, and hike around them, and they really just don't understand why we don't cut those trees or clear those trails or drag the following logs out and sell them for timber, but that's what designates this as a virgin forest.

It's really hard to find the trail when all the leaves fall. I usually try to hike through before we have a group and I couldn't find a couple of our markers, so I thought, well, I'll just see where usually people walk. Unfortunately, it was carpeted with leaves, and for a moment there, I lost my bearings. I just stopped, and it was just like everywhere there was color, and I had no idea where I was.

Getting lost in a forest is possible, of course, but for some people, spending time in the woods can help them find themselves.

There's a there's a lightning strike.

Unknown Speaker 9:37 See the spiral line coming down that tree?

Unknown Speaker 9:41 Yeah, you see it?

Yeah, that's a that's lightning hit that tree long ago and spiraled around, made that scar, those marks down there, and that little cedar and this other cedar. You see how the bark. Scraped that's from a buck rubbing the velvet off his antlers. Bill

Martin sought the refuge of trees after the Vietnam War, he moved to the cabinet mountains of northwestern Montana from Berkeley, California. He was burned out on living in the city and fighting its steady encroachment into the natural world.

It's been really good for me. I am a Vietnam veteran. I was really disconnected, shall we say, for my society. When I got out of there, I really didn't quite fit into what we're doing on this planet and the way we're going about doing it.

Unknown Speaker 10:41 And it's been really healing for me to

find some place I can plug in to the planet, so to speak, so where I live, and it's where I've made my living. You know, I've moved here to be in a more natural, healthy, sane surrounding. I like trees. I feel a certain affinity for trees. Trees are part of me. How do you mean? We depend on oxygen to survive? Can't last more than usually five minutes without it, and it comes from from trees, largely plants, generally. I just love being out, walking about and being part of it. I've been in it enough, working in it and learning about it. I've sort of integrated into it.

Unknown Speaker 11:41 I I just feel like a squirrel

or some kind of deer. I'm a creature of these woods. This is where I live. It's my native habitat. It's a connection to being part of this planet.

Unknown Speaker 11:57 I don't feel cut off by concrete

Unknown Speaker 12:01 and noise and electronics.

The forests in this part of Montana supply millions of board feet of dimensional lumber to the rest of the country for building homes for the first 18 years that Bill Martin lived in Montana, he worked as an independent contractor for the US Forest Service planting new trees, his crew returned millions of conifer seedlings to the ground that had been clear cut and couldn't regenerate on its own. Clear cutting completely levels a forest and sometimes destroys the fragile soils and ground cover. Today, Bill's forest management work centers around a cedar Hemlock forest that also grows Douglas fir, spruce and birch trees. It's been his home for 25 years. He practices selective logging, cutting down certain trees and letting others grow so that one day there will be a grove of old growth cedars for his grandchildren to enjoy.

It's pretty magical. When you look at these living things here, this huge, this tall, and of course, they get much taller. They're transforming sunlight into life, making life possible for all the other life forms, including us.

Several years ago, I went on retreat to the Benedictine Monastery of St Gertrude in Cottonwood, Idaho. It's home to a small community of Roman Catholic nuns. The monastery sits high on a forested hill overlooking an agricultural prairie below it's a peaceful setting that's shared with people who need healing or a break from the stresses in their lives. I came here because my father had just died after a prolonged illness, and I needed some spiritual comfort. The sisters agreed to let me sleep outdoors in the forest of the hill, as long as I stayed near the cemetery. So at dusk, I threw my sleeping bag down under the tallest of the Ponderosa pines that stand like sentinels over the monastic community below. By day, this seemed a friendly place, but with darkness, the trees loomed over me, and the small white granite crosses that mark each grave created a visage in the moonlight that was both beautiful and eerie. I lay there, I suppose, a little afraid when an owl landed on the branch above my head and gently hooted until I drifted to sleep, I slept well and awoke feeling somehow stronger and more at peace. Being at peace is in keeping with the philosophy of the Benedictine Sisters. Here, they value tranquility, hospitality and simplicity.

The tree is very rooted. It's in the ground. And so to me, as a Benedictine that speaks of stability. Sister Lillian Englert is the monastery's retreat Minister, the branches reaching upward, moving sometimes in the breeze, sometimes breaking off. In the winter, when we have heavy snows, there's the whole need for flexibility, bendability. And by being rigid, a Christian or a Benedictine or any person in the world, I think is more likely to be broken. And so I see a tree reflecting that need in our world to be able to bend, to flex.

The steward and chief manager of the monastery, 1000 acres of forest land is Sister Carol Ann Wasmuth. She had been teaching school for many years when she decided to come home to live several years ago, at the same time, the sisters were outlining a stewardship philosophy for the land they owned. In the past, the women had hired out all of the forestry duties, but Sister Carol Ann, in her late 50s, stepped forward to take on the task. She spent the next year in Woodland management seminars and workshops, learning how to care for what the sisters call their hill of healing, and she learned to manage their much larger tract of income producing forest land nearby. The philosophy

that we wrote some years ago as a community puts into words our belief that the land is a gift from God and that we have a responsibility to care for it, not only for ourselves, but to share it with those who who come to share our monastic life with us, whether that's for a weekend or for months. This is our little section of the world that we're responsible for, and we need to be serious about taking care of it. After

marking and hiring out her first tree thinning job, Carol Ann contracted breast cancer right after surgery and therapy, she returned to the woods. She says she knows God loves her because he gave her the woods before he gave her cancer.

I'm convinced that a good part of my healing came from being able to be outside in the woods. I'm fine now. All my doctor's reports are good. I am feeling great, and I just give a lot of credit to being able to go outside work, do physical work in the woods, be around the trees, and also the whole thing of having a something very important to get up in the morning to do, there is a healing, a strengthening that comes with being connected with the world around us, and then connected in a healthy way, a life giving way. And so for me to be able to come up here and just feel the ground beneath my feet, feel the, you know, the rough texture of the bark of the trees, and spend time working up here, doing what I could, the peace, the listening to the birds, the sunshine, the sound of the wind,

Unknown Speaker 18:26 that to me, is so important.

For 20 years now I've lived in the mountains of northern Idaho, the forests here are home to an abundance of native fish and wildlife. One morning, years ago, I awoke from a nightmare about the forest around my home being logged so heavily that it looked like a nuclear wasteland. It was owned by a huge timber company, and the dream came true five years later, facing bare ground where there was once a mature and diverse forest is pretty hard to take when you've known and been inspired by the beauty of huge cedar trees, pristine streams and the smallest Wild Orchid at your feet. The land that had so richly inspired my creativity had been radically, if not permanently, altered. Author Rick bass is well known for his collections of short stories like the watch and non fiction studies like the Lost Grizzlies. Rick also writes environmental essays hoping to gain protection for the remaining unlogged forest wild land where he lives in northwestern Montana, a mountain river valley called the Yak. It's interesting how he wound up here just wandering,

just looking for a place that was remote and a place that had this feeling to it of a fit which, which yak did and and still does. You know, it's so wet, so good. Old, so rainy, so dark, it doesn't strike you immediately as a place you would ever fit, but each year, more more and more I find myself fitting it. It's a real nice process. I really like the dark, dense woods and getting into them and exploring them.

Unknown Speaker 20:22 How does that contribute to your writing? Any

landscape influences any artist or any person, I think, and certainly, the landscape here is so strong and powerful and dominant that one instance would be of how maybe I'm trying to work more with subtlety in my stories worse earlier. I didn't I'm more aware of small things. I think, as a result of Well, in this country, you have to move slower just because of its density. And as a result, you may notice smaller things by moving more slowly. There are really four very distinct seasons here, unlike so many places in the world, I think living, living in the cycles of the seasons here is really affects my work in another way. There's Justin every direction, every dimension, the landscape, I do find it affecting my work.

Rick's Writing Studio is a one room log cabin. You won't find a computer here, just a simple wooden desk and chair, an oil lamp, wood stove and book shelves heavy with books. A Wolverine skin is spread out on a table in the center of the room. Rick writes all of his first drafts with pen and paper here during daylight hours, in the warm autumn sunshine, we stand outside the cabin along the edge of a marshy meadow. We're surrounded by a tall, dark forest.

You've got incredible diversity of trees, especially for this far north. Got three species of pines growing with in the midst of cedar and hemlock forest, Doug firs, spruce of alpine fir, the most common form of old growth in this valley is old growth larch, which is paradoxically the rarest form of old growth left in the West. It's a very rich, lush forest. That's one of the reasons it's been logged so hard, is because it grows big trees and grows them everywhere, all the way up over the top of the mountains and down into the river bottoms. We have less and less wild places where the systems of nature are proceeding at their own pace, in their own grace. This mass industrial logging that is going on up here, the road building and mass clear cutting. It has no respect for the place. It has no grace. It has nothing that's sustainable or, in my mind, honorable to it. It's heartbreaking to love a dense forest and see those dense forests being erased, scrape clean. They're beautiful, Peggy. What are they called? I

look at those. Have you ever seen a pink like that?

Unknown Speaker 23:30 It's beautiful here.

This is lovely. Thank heavens, it's saved.

You don't have to be a writer, nun or forester to love trees and want to care for them, and you don't have to have been raised around trees to be interested in them. On a rainy, cool October day, I joined 70 other adults of varying ages and lifestyles to tour a small part of the 1000 acre old growth cedar Hemlock forest in northern Idaho that was saved from clear cutting by a local environmental group. Leading the tour is Doc Partridge, a retired professor who taught forestry for 37 years at the University of Idaho. I

don't see any reason for the massive type cutting we've gotten into, I could take and make stewardship allocations for horse loggers here, and I could put 50 or 60 horse loggers on this land, taking out timber for the rest of their lives. You wouldn't even know it was coming out a bit at a time, the local economy would benefit, the forest would benefit, and everybody would but I would demand that the person working there emulate precisely what had happened on that piece of land before he got there. Horse

logging is gentler on the land. Horses halt. Trees out of the forest, instead of trucks, eliminating the need for roads to be built. Doc taught forestry the usual way breaking the ecosystem down into its economically useful parts. He regrets not having related all the intrinsic values of a forest to his university students. It might have made a difference. He says, with how woodlands are managed today,

I blame myself for not doing this years ago, and that is to develop and each person who works in the forest a sensitivity to everything out here, that everything indeed has a reason for being in here, of function, and we have to be sensitive to the interactions if we're going to work out here and we're going to preserve it and yet utilize it at the same time, you know, I'm going to invite a new College of Forestry. And when you come into my College of Forestry, you're not allowed to use the word board foot, you're not allowed to use the word timber. You're not even going to hear about a tree until you're in the third year. You're going to start building that forest with moisture and with carbon dioxide. That are the two things that combine in this world to form those trees and those that vegetation. So this is how the whole system starts. So you're going to learn what the chemical composition of this whole thing is. First, how life originates, how it goes on, and then you're going to talk about soils, the medium that's necessary for growth. And I'm not going to let you talk about just water holding capacities and mineral exchanges. I want you to tell me the name of every one of the organisms that lives in the soil

that Partridge digs into the layers of organic material and soils beneath our feet, to show us their depth and fertility. I think about the three to 4000 years that it took to build this up from rotting and decaying trees, it's awesome to meet the interrelating communities of forest life, soil microorganisms, insects, plants, birds, animals and trees and how I fit into the picture. One of the women on the tour has left the group and is lingering under an ancient city. There are tears in her eyes when I ask what she thinks about the tour, and these trees

contrast between the clear cut area and when we got into that next grove of old growth, to me, there was a real, palpable energy and the old growth of I don't know. It's just this real strong sense that I had that these were ancient organisms, and this was an ecosystem that was functioning and that this is, this is what it was all about, and that clear cut area was not what it was all about. That's, that's the danger part. But I don't know it. It makes me feel really sad. That's, that's what I'm feeling right now. Is it touching this tree, thinking that, you know, these, these old guys are, are gone, and I just

Unknown Speaker 28:24 feel incredibly sad.

Last year around my yard, I planted a couple dozen pine and large seedlings that Bill Martin gave me. It was my first experience at planting conifer trees. Several of them didn't survive the winter snows, but those that did are now knee high and are bright with new green growth, the color of spring I

Unknown Speaker 28:59 music,

people and trees was produced by Jane Fritz and Susan Davis. For more information about today's show, you can visit us on the web@soundprint.org

Unknown Speaker 29:19 or send email to info@soundprint.org

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