Interviewed by Crawdad Nelson – New Settler, Issue #26 November 1987.
Crawdad Nelson: The redwood region is described as a thirty-mile wide belt running along the Pacific coast from central California to just north of the Oregon border. Approximately four percent of this land, which was for thousands of years dominated by the growth cycle of sequoia sempervirens, an apparently immortal tree which lives for centuries and attains remarkable size, has been preserved in redwood parks.
The rest, with the exception of relatively small plots on Pacific Lumber company land and scattered groves elsewhere, was clearcut between the late 1800’s and the present. My own family was involved with this activity almost from the start, and I now live on a flat ridge, sharing space with second-growth redwoods growing in circles around tall stumps. It is a feat of imagination to contrast the reality of what I’ve seen daily all my life, against the ancient reality of tall trees. To think of this time as a fluke, and that other time as the norm, is regarded, at best, as hopeless sentimentality.
At my father’s house (which was his father’s house) there is a black-and-white photograph of a redwood grove. The timber is large, and well-spaced. There is power and peace in that section of woods. The photograph is framed in “curly” redwood, wood which took on abnormal character because it was allowed to stand for hundreds of years, in the days before redwoods’ lifetimes were reckoned by dollar value.
It is a safe bet that the grove pictured is long since cut down and milled up, and if you went to that site today you would find a stump-dotted grove of lush, hundred foot-tall trees, or a fresh clearcut.
Today in Scotia and Rio Dell, loggers benefit from the voluntary restraint practiced historically by the Pacific Lumber Company. Standing old-growth forests, unheard of in other areas, have provided Pacific Lumber employees with a standard of living unmatched in contemporary timber country.
First Avenue in Rio Dell is a gravel track between rows of small houses. People notice any traffic. I parked out of the way in an empty lot near a gas station at the border of the residential section. Even so, I half-expected someone to run out of a pink-trimmed white house, under a perishing rose trellis, to shout that I had taken his brother’s parking spot.
It is late in the dinner hour; the moon is full, bright and sharp. Timbered ridges are the skylines; on this early evening they are distinct black lines running from the black north to the moonlit south. Toward Scotia, the sky is brightened by Pacific Lumber’s sawmill complex.
Dan Collings is a professional tree climber. His job involves scaling old-growth timber and cutting the tops off trees, a hundred feet or higher in the air.
When Earth First! tree perchers Greg King and Jane Cope occupied platforms in old-growth trees this fall as a way of protesting the Maxxam Group’s accelerated harvest, Dan Collings was one of the Pacific Lumber employees sent to the grove near Kneeland.
CN: What orders were you under when you were sent to the protest site?
Dan Collings: Just to watch and make sure they didn’t walk off. And to try and chop the banners down. They had hung banners between their platforms. I was going to get the banner if I could, but I couldn’t because of the way they had it set up. I would’ve had to chop them out of the tree to get the banner.
If I could have got to one of their platforms while they were tyrolling away from it, out there on the ropes, I would have cut the platform down and got a hundred bucks. Not from PL, but from a private party.
Dan has a book of photographs—his “brag book”—picturing him on the way up a giant fir. First there is him and the tree, then him, higher and higher until he is ready to cut. Then, shots of the top of the tree leaning away from him, finally failing out of the sky. He explains how the cut is made, how it is necessary to wrap a cable or chain around the tree below the cut, and then make sure the cut itself is clean and complete, so that the wood does not split.
Dan Collings: That’s the biggest rush of all, when you cut through and the top of a tree jumps away. There’s nothing else at all to compare with how that feels.
I’m a tree climber for Pacific Lumber. I get an hourly rate, plus a certain amount by piece-rate for any trees I climb. Twenty dollars a tree for every tree over sixty inches on the first cut, ten dollars a tree for everything under that size. I go up in trees that are close to a protection zone, or those we just can’t save out. I climb up ‘em and put a cable around ‘em so they can tow ‘em over. The tree Greg was in was probably about 115 inches on the first cut. One of the biggest around there. I didn’t get paid to go up it. I just did that on my own.
CN: Do you feel any threat to your own job security because of the accelerated harvest under Maxxam?
Dan Collings: [quietly] Somewhat.
CN: The environmentalists estimate a five-to-eight year period before the old-growth is liquidated.
DanC: I think they’re real off-base there. I drive around that country hunting and there’s a lot more old-growth and residual out there than they realize. There’s no way we could finish it in that time, unless Maxxam triples production.
The way things are going now, I’d say it will last fifteen, maybe twenty years. There will still be old-growth even then. I’m not saying it’s impossible to cut it all in seven or eight years. With enough equipment and men, they could. But there aren’t enough now.
CN: That’s as optimistic an assessment as I’ve heard. Still, there won’t be enough old-growth for you to practice your trade until retirement age. How do you feel about that?
DanC: I think that whether Maxxam took over or not, there was going to be increased production. That was in the wind before. Whether it would be to this extent, I don’t know. This timberland was going to be logged anyway eventually.
I think it’s Hurwitz’s right as a property owner to do whatever he thinks is right, as long as he stays within the law. How I think he should do it hasn’t got much to do with what he does.
CN: Some people think that you, as an employee, do have a right to be involved in what the corporation does, as it affects your livelihood.
DanC: Nobody’s a big Hurwitz fan out there. We just do our jobs and go from day to day. Right now I’m doing better than I ever have. Since Maxxam came in I’ve had a nice raise in pay, and we have excellent benefits: insurance, investment plans, a nice bonus of three or four thousand dollars a year (seven percent of gross income). But who’s to say, no matter who owned the land, how fast it would be cut. Maxxam always did say they can only guarantee those benefits for three years. This coming spring, we will definitely lose the bonus.
None of us really sing the praises of Charles Hurwitz, but what are you going to do? If the market is there, and they want to cut it fast, that’s free enterprise, and that’s how America works. It’s his land; he’s not breaking any laws.[1]
If they are going to log this timber, I’m going to have a job. Unless Greg and those guys get their way, and this all becomes a park or something—that’s my main concern. As far as Maxxam failing, or selling out, I don’t know. I think it’s kind of strange, what he did, going $8 billion in debt that way, and he knew he was going to get a lot of pressure from the environmentalists. It seems to me, if you have something that’s so valuable, you take it a little slower and make it last a little longer. What I wish might be different from the way it is, but…
CN: Earth First! disputes the notion that anyone can buy the right to cut down and sell forests which have been developing for several hundred thousand years.
Dan C: I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, the ground and everything heals itself. If you waited four or five hundred years the old stumps would rot away and you would not be able to tell the difference. I am definitely for cutting all the timberland. We already have more parks than anyone can walk through. Any species that needs old-growth to survive is going to survive in the parks that are set aside already.
Dan’s wife, Kathy, shares his opinions of timber harvesting, and is not afraid to let me know. Although she was setting the table for dinner when I called, barely a half hour before I arrived, the kitchen is spotless when I get there. Two civilized children move quietly through the house, asking permission for things, and watching me with open curiosity.
How do you tell someone you’ve come to find out what allowances their father intends to make for their future?
CN: Do you intend to stick around here and keep logging?
Dan C: I’ll log somewhere, if not here then Alaska or wherever I can find work I like it, that’s what I do. I’m damn good at it. It’s all I know how to do, and I’ll do it somewhere. I read very little, I would be no good in an office situation. I’d just rather be up in a tree.
CN: Greg King suggested that all Pacific Lumber employees should go out on strike, right now, and demand sustained yield, selective cut situation.
Dan C: Clearcuts are ugly, real ugly, but when you really think about it, a clearcut is actually better for your timber production. When you clearcut, you always burn to get rid of slash and everything. This discourages stump suckers and encourages root suckers. If the stump suckers get very big, they stand a greater risk of blowing down in windstorms because the stump will eventually rot out underneath them. Root suckers make a nice strong root system, so you end up with better timber in the long run. If you don’t ever burn it, you don’t ever get that. This is timberland, so you best play, in most situations—I’m not going to say all—is just to clearcut and burn it.[2]
CN: I can see that clear cut might be less destructive in that way, but would you agree that it might be less harmful to the forest if carried out on a smaller scale?
Dan C: I’d like to see that. I’d like to retire logging.
CN: Is it important enough that PL employees should take a stand and demand it?
Dan C: (pauses) Not for me.
CN: It’s your future. You could work thirty more years.
Dan C: Like I said, I believe I’ll be able to retire logging. I’d like to see things go slower. But I don’t have the conviction to get up and buck the system. I’m not going to in any way endanger my job for that. It’s not worth my job. I don’t think things are going as fast as a lot of people think they are. Sure, they’ve upped production a lot, but there’s still a lot of timber out there. Me wanting to see things go slower would be for my own reasons, you know, me. Sooner or later it’s all going to get logged. Sooner or later, it’s just a matter of time, all the old-growth of timber company land is going to get logged, and that’s just a fact.
CN: The residual old-growth left in the old-style PL strategy left a lot of old-growth—not virgin—trees. It seems like the intent was to keep standing old-growth on private land.
Dan C: Yeah, but sometimes, because of the steepness of the ground and so on, there are some places where it looks like they should have gone ahead and clearcut it the first time. They end up destroying a lot of the small trees during selective cuts.
CN: When this old-growth is gone, as we both agree is inevitable under the present arrangement, the primary thrust of the timber industry in redwood country would seem to be toward fairly short rotation clearcut strategy, with lower-grade softwoods and perhaps particle-board manufacture as the standard. Are you comfortable with that scenario?
Dan C: I personally wouldn’t want to see that. For that to happen, they’re going to have to cut out all the old-growth virgin, all the residual, and from then of never let a tree get beyond a certain size.
CN: The Noyo watershed, where I live, is now being clearcut extensively, and much faster than the first time. The industry seems to interpret sustained yield to mean perpetual re-growth of timber to a maximum of 70-80 years.
Dan C: I can’t see any difference in anything that grows in a second-growth forest. If you give it time, it’ll all come back the same.
CN: No one intends to give it time.
Dan C: There is so much land up here with forest on it; it would take a long time for them to get to that point. But, I suppose some day, you know, four or five hundred years from now, or whenever, you’re not going to have the luxury of being able to but lumber like we have now. You’ll still be able to get wood, but it’s going to have to be wood harvested just like corn. It’ll come to that, with the population of the world expanding.
CN: Agricultural innovations such as wholesale irrigation and fertilizers carry hidden problems which show up over the years. We are seeing salinization of farmland and such debacles as the Kesterton marsh because of technoagriculture. In my mind, it sets off an alarm when I hear foresters say, “This is not a garden but a farm.”
Dan C: I can’t see any difference in that whole second-growth forest, as far as leaf mold, down under the trees. If fact, some of the second-growth trees are as big as some of the rattier old-growth. If you give it time, it’ll all come back.
CN: There’s only really been one generation of second-growth. We don’t know what happens to subsequent generations because we just haven’t had the time. Company foresters like to claim the forest is healthier than ever, but no one really knows because we simply have not seen the long-term effect of this major change in the ecological structure. Clear cut may resemble natural reforestation, at a certain scale, but deforestation of watersheds is an experiment, not a science.
Dan C: I’ve seen some pretty good-sized third-growth. It seems like the same tree. It seems as healthy as anything else. I imagine, if you burn it, you would just get more root-suckers, and eventually the same tree.
CN: Repeated burning removes the leaf mold, an essential component of the soil. Also, lichens which live on old growth draw in atmospheric nitrogen and eventually add it to the soil. We don’t know what happens if you remove that step.
Dan C: There’s a million things in this world that you can worry about all the time. The possibility of nuclear war, this big arms race, you’ve got bums hanging out in downtown Rio Dell who could break into your house and steal everything you own. I like to discuss it and be aware of it as much as possible, but as far as a strike, or a big voicing of opinion as you were talking about, my opinion—while I don’t agree completely with everything that’s going—is not that strong against it, so that I would even think about doing anything like that.
CN: What would it take? What if Maxxam doubles production again and you can see the end of this outfit in five or ten years?
Dan C: I think it would be stupid, flooding the market with old growth like that. I think it would be a shame for everybody involved. I still don’t think I could make any difference, though, and I would just go ahead and do my job. If you come into my house and mess with my family, I’ll take a stand on that. I try to vote for the politicians that I feel are going to represent me the best, and if I have a strong feeling about something…what are you going to do, really? The whole world is a bunch of problems. You just have to do your best and keep on truckin’, you know.
CN: The Earth First!ers say you can take matters into your own hands and do what is in front of you to prevent what is obviously wrong. Whatever you can reasonably do without hurting anyone.
Dan C: I don’t see it being as screwed up as they think it is. This land was always going to be harvested.
CN: Take a ride out Sherwood Road and look at the Noyo canyon.
Dan C: I haven’t really thought much about third-growth and all that. We’re still logging virgin timber up here.
CN: It won’t last forever.
Dan C: No way. You cut an old-growth tree and it’s gone. That’s a fact. There’s nobody alive who’s got the time to see another one. But, you cut the old-growth; there’ll be second-growth.
The Collings house is neat and comfortable. One wall is devoted to a picture collage. Friends and relatives grin with fish. In the middle of our conversation, Kathy leaves to go bowling. “I bowl for Pacific Lumber,” she says. There is gentle humor in her voice, and more than a note of irony.
Dan’s grandfather settled in Humboldt in the 1930’s and went to work for Pacific Lumber. Dan’s father quit the woods at age 30 and went to work for the City of Fortuna. Dan was athletic in his high-school days, and claims to have been able to run a 4.5 second 40 yard dash. I believe it. He is small, but solid-looking and vigorous in his hobbles. For fun, he snow-skis and dives for abalone.
The only work-related injury he cares to talk about happened when he was new in the woods, and didn’t know what to look out for. A small fir log, being cinched around by a yarder cable, bent under pressure and then sprung free. As Dan dove to escape, the log caught his heel and drove the ankle into the space between tibia and fibula, as a steel wedge might split wood. He says it hardly bothers him now.
CN: Are you reasonably happy with your life here? Your job, this town?
Dan C: I like my job, but I don’t really like Rio Dell itself. It’s a beautiful little town and everything, but so many people in this town don’t work. These low-income houses where the welfare mothers live are just a bunch of dumps. I coach baseball in Rio Dell and most of these kids don’t even know who their dad is. And your kids have to go to school with them. Mine don’t, they go across the bridge to Scotia.
CN: Is Scotia much different?
Dan C: Oh yeah. Everyone works over there. It’s a pretty good deal for a lot of people. Pacific Lumber has always taken really good care of their employees, and up until Maxxam took over, they had a sustained yield program and you could always figure you’d be logging. Now, it’s kind of a drag, because Hurwitz is cutting the timber a lot faster than it’s growing. Second growth as well as Old-growth.
I like to think that I consider the consequences of anything I do. Ever since the first man killed an animal to make a pair of shoes, the earth has been making sacrifices. If you really want to get down to it, if you don’t want the earth to make any sacrifices, you’re going to have to take off all your clothes, leave your house and go live in a hollow log somewhere. None of us are ready to do that.
I figure the old-growth that they have in the parks is enough for people to look at and to have. The rest should be well managed, but harvested.
CN: The protesters believe humanity doesn’t actually have the right to influence things which were getting along well enough without us.
Dan C: Well, where do you draw the line, and whose property do you draw it on? Who says what you can take, what you can leave, if anything?
I like to see the tree saved out. Without butchering what remains, get the best use out of what we do take. A lot of people will just gouge anything within a six-foot saw length of a tree, they will just cut down, a lot of old-timers are like that, just because that’s the way they have always done it. I try not to do that. I don’t knock over any young growth that I don’t have to. I like to see a good job done, and get the most out of a tree. Hey, now you’re logging [chuckles]; sometimes it’s a question of safety, but I try to be as sensitive as I can about what I cut.
Cutting of old-growth timber is really good for the deer population. That’s one of the big things I was really arguing with Greg King about. There’s just not the browse in old-growth for ‘em, a deer would have to pack his lunch.
Now, you’ve got to cut up the ground really bad, to get old growth timber, and there’s a lot of erosion. Now that’s a fact, and I’ll tell you right straight off, when you cut old-growth you put soil in the rivers. You can tell by looking in the rivers. But as far as habitat for animals, when you log, they all scatter a little bit, but any browsers, your small animals that browse, they come in thicker and better than they ever were before. That helps predators: Bobcats, hawks and all that. There might be some small species that I don’t even know about that won’t make it. You’re going to mess up some happy homes. Greg was talking about some moles and squirrels and things that live in the ground—sure, you’re going to mess them up.
As far as animals go, the ones that can move around, as this piece grows up, they can go here to feed, and you know, hide in the thicker timber. They come back in as soon as you’re done logging. A lot of the times, they don’t actually even leave. You’d be surprised how close they’ll stay, especially deer, top your equipment. It’s amazing. They just stand there and watch. It’s not in their time, they just kind of look at it.
Footnotes
[1] Actually, EPIC argued, successfully in some cases, that Maxxam was violating several existing environmental quality laws, as noted in the previous chapter.
[2] Dan Collings’ beliefs are not universally accepted. Furthermore, there are many different types of “selective cut” methods. Collings no doubt had more invasive variations in mind when he compared clearcutting to selective cutting methods. Howie Wolkie’s very extensive “Citizen’s Primer to Stop U.S. Forest Service Destruction” circular whish was included in the Eostar (March 21) 1988 edition of the Earth First! Journal described various types of selective cutting and argues that in general, when logging is “appropriate”, selective cutting is usually always better than clearcutting.