How Green Activists Destroyed America's Most Intense Beauty, Lothlórien, the Valley of Singing Gold

It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest. And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.

It rained all night last night which means this morning the sun is not occluded by the forest fires which rage now every summer, blocking the sun, leaving us breathing smoke. The next three pieces are a deep dive on why this is happening. It is an easy fix, return to the 150 years of German silvaculture that managed forests all over the world. Forestry is an exact science. It knows when and how to burn, when to thin, and importantly how to manage. All over the world, courtesy of the cursed U.N., forests are not-managed deliberately. And so they burn and burn and burn.

Why are people all over the world so angry? Because the regime described below is being forced everywhere and it is destroying people, economy and land. Why is the economy in such a treacherous dangerous position? Why do we teeter at the edge of collapse? This. It started right here. Let the lady sheep-farmer describe just how surreptitiously screwed we have been. All of us. Everywhere.

It’s Not About the Spotted Owl

I am standing on the flatbed of a three-quarter-ton pickup with Kathy McKay of the K Diamond K Ranch in Republic, Washington, hanging on to a bale of straw as the truck rocks its way down a steep incline into a vast field. It is snowing and the snow is already two feet deep. As we lurch and grind, about a hundred horses spot us, turn, and as if animated by a single puppet master, start to run toward us. They are backlit by snow-covered trees ranked up the snow-covered mountain.

For the next ninety minutes, we peel six-inch layers of hay off the bales and kick them in pieces into a gaggle of horses, then jerk on to the next stomping, nickering group. A slip on the mud and slush and I’d be under the feet of six or seven dancing hungry horses. But the exhilaration is inexpressible, and not for the first time I envy the people who live out here, who live like this, working outside every day no matter the weather, using their muscles and sinew for a purpose other than “health” or longevity. There is a sense here that there is no place else. For me, Ferry County, Washington, has a kind of limerence—I’ve known about its drama for years, and seeing its beauty, I understand the dedication of those who are so beaten, so thoroughly thrashed, outmatched, and ruined. It is as if giant psychotic five-year-olds had moved into their county, ripped out its industry, pulled up the train tracks, broke the weirs and dams, introduced predators to kill cattle and horses, and methodically ruined family after family, ranch after ranch, forest after forest. And then left, delighted at their “progress,” never to return.

“We’re dying here,” says Republic Mayor Shirley Couse, whose life has been lived so hard, she looks twenty years older than she is. She has a cold today, so she sniffles through our meeting. She is a volunteer mayor. At first she stepped into the post when someone fell sick, and since then no one has run against her. There’s nothing fun about managing decline. She ticks off her problems, then adds, “The only thing that’s saving us is the gold mine that was recently reopened.

And even with it, we are a welfare county.”

Ferry County is the poorest rural county in the state and is the U.S. county most affected by the actions of environmental activists. Once rich, with a high median income, now desperate, still it shimmers with gold, and an occasional fantasist like me can see the glitter underneath the snow and trees, the narrow valleys, the wide flat rivers and strip malls, junkyards, and gas stations. Gold founded Ferry County, and surveyors claim the region holds all twenty-nine minerals named in the Bible. Ferry and its neighbors—Stevens, Colville, Okanagan, all the counties in the Columbia basin—together form a lost fairyland of dense forest, white-capped mountains, narrow valleys, rivers, creeks, and wetlands—like Lothlórien, the Land of the Valley of Singing Gold from The Lord of the Rings.

The action that started the ruination of Ferry County is the most stunning success of the modern environmental movement, the northern spotted-owl campaign in the 1990s, which shut down 90 percent of the productive forests of the American West. It required only a few months of marching, political pressure, direct actions (sometimes called ecoterrorism), and a typical Clintonesque deal, which drew off some of the Left’s fire for his ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but embedded in that campaign lies the corruption at the heart of the modern movement. Andy Stahl, then resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, declared: “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s the perfect species for use as a surrogate.”

And a surrogate it was. The reason the bird was so convenient was that it ranged over an extraordinarily large home area, each breeding pair apparently depending on thousands of acres of old-growth forest. Eric Forsman, the doctoral candidate in biology whose three studies were the only studies cited during the listing hearings on the bird, admits to this day that knowledge of the bird is limited at best. According to forest policy analyst Jim Peterson, despite sixteen years of research, no link between old-growth harvesting and declining owl populations has ever been established. Those few logging companies still operational from California to Alaska are required to provide owl habitat and actively manage their lands. They report the highest reproductive rates ever recorded for spotted owls. Two years after the ban, more than eleven thousand northern spotted owls were counted, many of them nesting in second-growth forests and clear-cuts. But the Fish and Wildlife Service would not delist the species. It was fruitless to claim, as many disinterested biologists did, that the northern spotted owl’s decline was due to its being preyed upon by the larger barred owl, which had begun moving west a hundred years ago. Or that federal scientists flatly rejected critiques from biometricians who questioned the statistical validity of evidence on which the listing decision was based. The movement got what it wanted. The largest, most productive, fastest-growing temperate rain forest in the world had been shuttered.

“Culture is far more fragile than nature,” said Alston Chase as we said good-bye.

Indeed, the culture of the Washington, Oregon, and Montana forests was pitched almost immediately into trauma. According to timber consultant Paul Ehinger in Oregon, 430 sawmills have closed in the West since 1988, when the war of the woods began. The job losses in the milling and logging industries exceed fifty thousand. And for every forestry job lost, up to five jobs are lost in the businesses and industries that serve the forestry sector. Two hundred fifty thousand family-wage jobs is a mighty blow, and the impacts just keep rolling. Today in Eureka, Montana, there are half as many school-age children entering the system as leaving it. Says County Commissioner Marian Roose: “We have a new eight-million-dollar school and we have no idea how we’ll pay for it now. Who is going to contribute to our local charities? Who is going to contribute to Little League? Who is going to buy the children’s stock at our annual fair 4-H sale? I bet it won’t be the attorney for the Ecology Center.” For the past decade, the only businesses making money in Ferry County are the U-Haul franchise and storage lockers.

In the nearby Kootenai National Forest, whose 2.5 million acres grow almost 500 million new board feet every year, 300 million board feet die due to windthrow, insects, and disease. Salvaging and selling that wood could have fed the families of the counties surrounding that forest. “If we don’t remove some of this fuel,” says Bruce Vincent, a third-generation logger, “we are simply stacking 300-million board feet of firewood in our forest, in our watersheds, around our communities, and around our homes.”

In fact, says Holly Fretwell, the shutdown of the forests, the banning of both thinning and the removal of dead trees, even burned trees, has set up a once-in-a-millennium event. More than 700 million acres of once productive federal and private lands have been set aside under stringent land-use restrictions by federal mandate—three times the size of Texas, or 30 percent of the entire nation. Fretwell says that Forest Service experts are convinced that 90 to 200 million of those acres are at risk of cataclysmic fire.

The death of wildlife and endangered species in those fires will far outweigh lives lost to industrialization. Fretwell reports that Theodore Kaczynski, a freshwater biologist working on salmon recovery strategies, says, “No single forest practice—not timber harvesting, nor road building—can compare with the damage wildfires are inflicting on fish and fish habitat.” Not to mention the dead birds, elk, deer, bears, voles and salamanders, trees, and other vegetation, as well as lower summer water volume and increased erosion. The forest can be regenerated. The fish may never return.

Banning thinning has caused 80 percent of the trees in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to become infested with root rot and beetles. The elk and the antelope are gone in many of the forests; the deadfall is too high to climb and the forests too choked to browse. The large predators, wolves and bears, reintroduced at the insistence of the movement, are driven by the twenty-foot-high deadfall barriers in the upper forest ranges to forage close to inhabited areas. The resulting loss of sheep and cows can be a blow to a family now merely subsisting. In some rural communities in Montana, school bus stops look like cages, and investigations are now confirming wolf kills of humans. The behavior of introduced wolves is changing, and not in a good way. And if the movement, despairing of pure wolf stock in North America is indeed bringing in Russian cadaver wolves with average weight 250 pounds and a taste for human flesh, who among us is going to leave a paved road in the backcountry?

“I wish,” says outgoing county commissioner Joe Bond, “that when these people showed up thirty years ago asking where there was a nice place to eat, we’d pointed them three hundred miles west to Seattle. I say that as a joke, because I enjoy the people who came. But some of those people moved in here and said we don’t need the mill anymore. That was when we were running three shifts a day at Boggins Mill and people had good jobs, the kind of jobs that can support a family.”

Joe Bond was head saw filer at Boggins Mill for twenty-nine years until Clinton shuttered the Western forest on behalf of the spotted owl. “One guy loses his job, but he has a wife and three kids, so five people move out of the county. Each good forestry job creates between three and five service- or industry-related jobs, so that means if 150 of us foresters lose their jobs, that means 600 jobs lost. If 600 family-wage jobs are lost then, you lose 3,000 people. One time our school had 600 kids; now it’s 325 kids. Our hospital is in trouble, because the older people who move here to retire, when they go to a doctor, they go to Spokane, so it’s just the younger families who use it. Even people my age have left.”

Bond’s voice is low and gravelly, and I’m not sure—it’s late at night, the snow is deep on the ground, getting around was hard today, and we are all tired—but at times I think he is trying to suppress tears. His house is comfortable and well appointed; it gleams through the dark. His wife, Nicole, who runs a beauty salon out of the house, sits with us. They keep a few horses, pets now, since their children had to move to find work. “We watched them take the mill apart,” he continues. “It was heartbreaking for our community. After the mill went away, the railroad was bought by a company that bought it for two million and scrapped it out for four million, and rail-banked it with the county. From cutting a hundred million board feet a year, we went to one million.”

“What happened to the forest?”

There is a long pause. “It’s dying.”

He clears his throat. “The forests are warehoused. It’s dying, overstocked. Have you been over Sherman Pass? It’s that thirty-mile-an-hour corner on the way to Colville. The hillsides up there are turning brown. Where the fire was in ’88—that was just a big waste. They wouldn’t let the sawmill take the timber, not even three or four years later. A big log-home company from Montana came over, and they wouldn’t even let them have the logs for log homes. I talked to a lot of old-timers, and they think that if they had been allowed to go in there with saws and cut a lot of that back down, they would have driven the seeds into the ground and it would have come back a whole lot faster.

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