Coho Photography

As usual- for pictures you can click HERE

For a bright flash of light considering climate change- written on the Tejon Ranch, grass fed and all organic, continue below…

The Last Generation

Doug McDaniel’s boots rest together at the foot of a stump, his faded blue jeans and white striped shirt juxtaposed against the background of dense Ponderosa Pine corduroy. He kicks at a pinecone, a dark blue baseball cap restraining wisps of light gray hair. His kicking at the pinecone gains speed, angry bouts of energy sending needles and duff flying into the air. His face is hidden behind the baseball cap’s brim, but I can hear his voice cracking. He says that the forest service mismanages their land, forest fires get out of control, burning hundreds of thousands of acres, and bureaucracy runs rampant. He imagines a world in which public and private lands are managed responsibly, with regard for the land, not just for far-flung politics. Doug McDaniel has made the world ecologically healthier in his own way by changing management techniques on his land away from the commercial model in addition to a large river restoration project he has undertaken. In his lifetime the Wallowa River was straightened from a historically meandering channel, put in a trench, and diverted to irrigate cattle pasture; in the last 5 years he’s returned it to where it once was. The river now flows through a winding channel full of eddies, a river where Salmon can spawn. Doug has made a concrete difference through his actions, and will no doubt continue in his efforts, so does it really matter why he did it? Even if he only restored the river so he could go fishing in it like he did as a boy, I don’t really care; he made the world a better place.
The area where we sit is in the middle of a stand of third or fourth growth Ponderosa Pines, thin trunks bunched together, letting through only thin slices of the deep blue sky, splotched with late afternoon clouds tumbling over Eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Sitting here, in a forest that was sculpted by humans, cut down by humans, protected by humans from the natural process, and now endangered by humans through climate change, I realize how much we have affected every last little detail of this landscape. Doug McDaniel, the retired logger who owns this land, isn’t the first person to feel strongly about how we should manage our forestlands, but he may be the first to have the luxury of managing the forests not for economic gain, but for his own personal values.
American forestry began well before Europeans even thought about sailing to the west in search of a new land. Native Americans managed forests for thousands of years by burning vast tracts to create grasslands and create particular ecological conditions. At the same time, Europeans were cutting through their forests as fast as possible, the wood going to urban centers for construction and heat.
The moment that Europeans landed on North America and began to settle, sustainable American forestry ended. Extraction techniques developed, accelerated, and forestry moved westward as trees in the east were harvested. As the Northeast was cut over, logging shot westward, razing the great lakes region to a stubble, moving on to the west coast, where the wood was thought to be unending. But even that prophesy fell through, and now we’ve moved on to new unexplored frontiers, British Columbia, New Zealand, Papau New Guinea, Guatemala. But at some point we reached the end of the road. The damage has been done, almost all of our virgin forest has been cut down, burned, built into homes, exported to places that cut their forests long ago, places that in theory learned their lesson before it was too late.
And that’s where Doug McDaniel comes in, his dark boot now kicked into a trough in the duff, needles stuck through the red and black laces, not matching. Doug McDaniel is part of the last generation that could ignore the long-term environmental effects of their actions, and he’s broken with that pattern. His life spent in the woods, first as a faller, then as a forester, and later as an owner, hasn’t gone to waste. He has created an intimacy with the landscape with strong opinions on what is healthy, what is bad, and what needs fixing.
Later in day, riding in the passenger seat of Doug’s white Chevy pickup truck, steel flatbed on the back, I learn a surprising fact: Doug and his wife don’t believe that humans have anything to do with climate change, in fact they’re not even completely convinced that climate change is happening at all. Doug is making changes to his land simply based on his personal observations of forest health; from years spent walking, driving, and riding through his property. No matter his reasoning, he is helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Instead of cutting down trees when they are 30 to 50 years old, Doug McDaniel tries to avoid cutting down a tree until stops growing, sometimes as old as a few hundred years. Doug does it because he likes older, bigger, trees; additionally this allows the tree to sequester more carbon per year as it grows proportionally larger in volume as it gets older. He would rather have a multi-aged diverse forest, than an even aged monoculture crop, so he avoids large clear cuts. The positive global effect is that deforestation from clear cutting releases an estimated 51.8 tons of carbon per acre, whereas healthy forests are able to sequester 41 tons per acre. Doug doesn’t like wildfires; he would rather cut out the younger trees and let them decompose on the ground than risk an out of control burn that could degrade soil health. Forest fires are additionally a cause of global warming that is said to produce as much greenhouse gas per acre burned as the exhaust from 48 cars for one year. Through his changes in forest management Doug has mitigated the effects of global climate change in ways that most of us can only dream of.
By the end of the day, rumbling down a rough dirt road, I am convinced that it doesn’t matter what Doug McDaniel believes at all. What is more important is way that he speaks with his actions. Doug McDaniel has actively worked to make the world a better place. And do I care if our generation recognizes it, or if we disagree and think that he could be doing something better, something different, do it all for different reasons? Not really. He’s doing something different from the tried and true commercial model, a norm that most of the world doesn’t even recognize, and I respect him for that. The reasoning behind why he does it doesn’t matter at all. The image of global climate change is too big and too abstract to effect change in the majority of our population. Simply caring for and knowing a place is all it takes to make a person change their actions for the better.