Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance to empire. You can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers help keep this publication accessible in the face of state and corporate repression. On traditional lands of the sha’yuushtl’a people, the water levels in the river are low. The rain has not fallen as it should this autumn. Fog gathers on the forested ridgetops in the morning, and bright yellow maple leaves a foot across drift down to gather in the still, shallow waters, but no rain falls. I am walking. Along a logging road, past a locked gate, following the gravel winding through young plantation “forest” where each tree looks just like the next. “Little boxes, on the hillside” — tree edition. Despite being green, this is the equivalent of Iowa’s endless chemical-saturated fields of corn and soybeans. The entire valley of this creek I am walking in has been turned into a timber monoculture. Under the dense canopy of thirty-year-old Douglas Fir, there is no life. No ferns, no mushrooms, no salal, no Oregon grape. Just crumbly soil saturated with whatever pesticide concoction Roseburg Lumber Company applied on their crops. I’m not here for the plantation, but there is an inescapable connection between what I am here to see and this bleak extraction wasteland stretching out around me. As I crest the top of the ridge, the land ownership changes. The dividing line is bleak. On one side, the nightmare faux forest; on the other, a diverse native tapestry of trees and shrubs: bigleaf maple, douglas fir, western hemlock, beaked hazel, vine maple, red alder, and many others. This is Bureau of Land Management land, publicly owned by the American people and managed by the Federal Government for “multiple uses” — recreation, biodiversity, and yes, logging. Less than a mile away, vast clearcuts cross ridges to destroy watershed after watershed. The BLM, needless to say, is not an ecological agency. And yet remnants like this have escaped notice, or been protected through the valiant efforts of activists, biologists, and community members in the past. Boots striding off the road, I drop onto the cool north-facing slope, where sword ferns grow thick and sometimes taller than me. Half sliding down the hillside, engulfed in a cloud of yellow-brown spores the ferns are releasing, and I am among the ancients. Towering 300 feet, some of them more than five hundred years old, these trees have thick, corrugated bark like the creases on a grandmother’s weathered face. Black scars from past fires mark their skin. Woodpeckers batter at massive snags. Elk trails crisscross the hillside, and bear scat reveals seeds of native blackberry, cherry, and oregon grape. The call of a dusky grouse reverberates from a high branch, an ancestral calling perch used by generations of the birds. Nevermind that these forests store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. Forget about the astounding biodiversity. Ignore the reality that forests create rain, feeding an entire continental water cycle. Set aside the beauty and vibrancy of the land, and the inherent right of these beings to exist and flourish and naturally evolve. All that doesn’t matter, because trees can be turned into lumber, and natural forests can be turned into plantations, and this makes money. But its not even all about money. It’s about domination. According to the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, “the Forest Service’s enormously subsidized logging projects… cost billions of federal tax dollars while inflicting significant damage on the environment, wildlife, and fisheries. All to enable the private timber industry to profit off the public resource of our national forests.” They document multiple timber sales costing the federal government, and thus taxpayers, millions of dollars, writing: “A 2019 report by the Center for a Sustainable Economy found ‘taxpayer losses of nearly $2 billion a year associated with the federal logging program carried out on National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands.’ But that was before Congress gave the Forest Service tens of billions from the Infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act for more logging.” This is why the Trump administration has ordered the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to maximize timber production. The Forest Service is currently working to revoke the “Roadless Rule” which prevents some logging across tens of millions of acres of public lands. And the BLM is working to revise their “Resource Management Plans” for western Oregon. These plans previously protected most old-growth forests from logging, but those provisions are now being removed. The agency is hiring over a hundred new logging professionals to be the administrators of the death camps that public lands are becoming. This forest and many others like it are almost certain to face the chainsaw as early as spring of 2027. Even the regulations which are now being dismantled were never enough in the first place. Writing from Canada several years ago, one Biocentric reader commented: “I am recently retired from the BC Forest Service. I conducted inspections on logging, road building and road maintenance for 20 years. My zone was central Vancouver Island and many of the areas I worked in connected to what was at one time very productive salmon streams including the Nitinat River, Klanawa River and the Sarita River watersheds. The legislation regulating this work is almost useless. I documented siltation going into streams from roads and landslides all the time. In many cases we have roads running parallel to major salmon streams and there is no appetite to rehabilitate and move these roads. Since retiring I have talked to co-workers. They have told me there are almost no inspections anymore and the industry operates on “Professional Accountability” and “self-reporting”. The day before I retired an Assistant Deputy Minister called me and asked for feedback on what the organization could do better. When I brought up the legislation and the issues he said “that’s not our department “. I was told when working at one point to stand down on a landslide investigation and to quit picking on the companies. In short we fully understand the impacts from Industrial Logging and the damage that is happening but it is simply not being addressed. Instead the Ministry produces web pages talking about what a great job they are doing a great job protecting watersheds, fish and fish habitat. In my mind it was a complete snow job.” The rains are coming soon. The land is thirsty. The few remaning steelhead, Chinook, and coho are waiting for the pulse of water to point them back to their mother streams. They, like the big trees, are dwindling. There is no Hollywood ending. No one is coming to save the day. There is only us. Contact me if you’re located in Oregon and want to be part of the burgeoning forest defense movement that is building here. We’re planning additional hikes to threatened forests on November 8th and December 6th, and are organizing the community to oppose these logging projects. Excerpts from the video: The mythology of thinning: “In order to save the forest, we must destroy it” Most old growth logging in Oregon has been stopped over the last 25 years or so. There’s still been some and folks have been fighting against it, but a lot of it was stopped about twenty-five years ago. But now, with the changes that the current administration are pushing through, areas like this, trees like this right here, are threatened with logging — and they’re using new justifications for it. They’re saying that it’s for fire risk reduction. They’re saying that essentially, in order to save the forest, we need to destroy the… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxwilbert.substack.com/subscribe
