Managing the Forest

I happened to be in northeastern Oregon in the early 1980s when the Spotted Owl was discovered living in the old growth forests nearby. It was an interesting time and place for a young environmentalist to be.

The local residents, basically warm, friendly, down to earth folks who knew their land and loved it, were not the original inhabitants of that glorious country. They had displaced the Nez Perce Indians, a proud and peaceful tribe who in many ways epitomize our romantic notions of Native Americans. It was, in fact, that same year that the Nez Perce, for the first time ever, returned to their home land to take part in the Joseph Days Parade.

The town of Joseph, by the way, is named for none other than the Nez Perce Chief Joseph; but Indians were not welcome there for at least a century.

There I was, young and idealistic, determined to take a stand for the preservation of this incredible wilderness that surrounded the current residents of Joseph; and there I faced such extreme animosity toward the notion of saving the Spotted Owl that I decided to hold my breath and quietly listen as people railed against the notion of closing down "their" forests.

They didn't actually hate owls, nor anything else that roamed in the woods. They despised the idea of losing their livelihoods in favor of saving an animal that few of them had ever seen. They bitterly resented being less important than a bird. And they were furious about outsiders coming in to tell them how they should live.

These were a rugged people who made their living from the land, and that included logging. In the absence of a timber industry, there weren't many alternatives for some of them. The economic reality met head-on with the environmental truth.