A Speech by James D. Petersen
Writer and Managing Director of the Evergreen Foundation
Publishers of Evergreen Magazine

On the Occasion of the Dedication of the Pulaski Project
Wallace, Inn, Wallace, Idaho, Saturday, August 20, 2005

When Robin Stanley asked me if I would be willing to visit with you this afternoon he said he hoped I might be able to inspire you. That's a tall order, especially given the fact that I've never considered myself to be a very inspiring person.

Robin heard me speak two years ago at the National Forest Counties & Schools Coalition annual meeting in Reno. I was there because there are a lot of folks around the West who think I am one of the architects of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act that Congress ratified in the fall of 2003. It makes for nice poetry, but it isn't true. What is true is that I am the founder and managing director of the non-profit Evergreen Foundation. We exist for only one reason: to help advance public understanding and support for science-based forestry. We fulfill our mission on the pages of Evergreen Magazine, a quarterly journal we've been publishing since 1986.

It is also true that Evergreen was the first magazine to tackle the complexities of forest health. We did it in 1990 - and over the next decade we published seven special editions designed to call attention to the underlying causes of the West's forest health crisis - a crisis that has now reached pandemic proportions in Idaho north of the Salmon River. I'll have more to say about forest health in a few minutes.

Because a good deal of my writing - and most of my speaking - revolve around forestry and logging many also think I am a graduate forester or perhaps a logging engineer, but I am not. I am a writer by profession. I have a Liberal Arts degree from the University of Idaho, with majors in journalism and broadcasting. Before I hung out shingle in 1971, I worked for newspapers in Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Illinois.

The story of Evergreen's founding is much too long to tell in the time we have together this afternoon, but I do want to say that I consider myself blessed to have had an opportunity to use whatever talent I possess in defense my culture and my heritage, for I am the son, grandson and grand nephew of loggers, miners, cattle ranchers, sawmill workers, sawmill owners, dam builders, commercial fishermen and ditch diggers.

If you take nothing else away from my remarks this afternoon, remember this: there is not a job or a product on the face of the earth that is not the result of the harvest or extraction of a natural resource, and its conversion to a finished product. Not one.

David Roderick, one of the steel industry's legendary tough guys, put this truth in even more succinct term in a Wall Street Journal interview conducted on the occasion of his retirement from United States Steel. Roderick had brought U.S. Steel back from the brink of collapse and the Journal's reporter wanted to know how he had done it at a time when resource-based industries were falling out of favor, overshadowed, at least in media pop culture, by the nation's seemingly inexhaustible service economy.

"Service economy," he shouted. "No wealth is created flipping hamburgers, taking in laundry, clipping fingernails or shuffling securities on Wall Street. The only way to create new wealth is to convert natural resources to finished goods."

So it is that the computer, which was supposed to usher in the paperless society, has in fact caused a doubling of paper usage over the last 15 years. Paper from trees, and computers from gold and silver, mined deep in the earth, computers housed in shock proof plastic cases, made from petroleum pumped from even deeper in the earth. You get the idea.

At the height of the spotted owl war, I wrote an opinion piece titled, "Building Bridges of Understanding," in which I made the case for cultural exchange programs that link this nation's rural resource based communities with urban and metropolitan centers where most of what we produce is consumed. Here is one paragraph from the piece:

"We are the best fed, best dressed, best housed nation in the history of civilization. We fly at the speed of sound, compute at the speed of light and live in the lap of luxury, enjoying comforts and freedoms unimaginable to most of the earth's population. But with rare exception, we never give a moment's thought to the countless thousands of farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers, sawmill, factory and oilfield workers who bring us these riches in such abundance - every day of our lives."

I am getting ahead of myself, so let me stop for a moment to say what a thrill it is to be here, to be home again. I am a son of the Silver Valley, born and raised in Kellogg. Like you, I am very, very proud of my heritage. So I want to add my congratulations on the completion of your Pulaski Project, commemorating both Edward Pulaski's heroism and the Great 1910 Fire.

Ninety-five years ago tonight many living in Wallace, Burke and Mullan feared the world was coming to an end. And for 80 some firefighters, recruited mainly from the streets of Spokane, the world did end. But most of Edward Pulaski's crew survived because he skillfully and courageously guided them to shelter in the portal of the Nicholson Mine.

I wonder where the Edward Pulaski's are in the Forest Service today. Pulaski's generation, and the one that followed are the ones who transformed the Forest Service from a largely custodial group into a world class forestry organization.

In 1951, the U.S. Forest Service was voted one of the two most admired organizations in America. The other most admired organization was the United States Marine Corps. Imagine it: the country held the Forest Service in the same high esteem in which it held the Marine Corps.

It's no secret the Forest Service no longer occupies such a high station in the nation's public discourse, but in fairness, I need to tell you their problems are not entirely of their own making. I'll also have more to say about this in a few minutes. But first I want to say a few things about my mother and father, in the hope that you will find inspiration in their remarkable lives. I know I certainly do.

My dad, who some of you knew, worked for the Bunker Hill Company for 34 years. He was a ditch digger, a plumber, a pipe shop foreman and finally water superintendent for the entire company. Over the years he also served on numerous city-related boards, and he was a member of many Masonic bodies, including the Grand Commandery of Knights Templar of Idaho, Red Cross of Constantine, Eastern Star, the Royal Order of Gesters and the Shrine. He was also Most Eminent Commander of the Royal and Select Masters of Idaho. Dad would want me to get all those titles correct. I hope I did.

My Montana-born mother taught English and literature at Kellogg Junior High School for 32 years. Before she and dad were married in 1942, she taught in one room school houses in Montana, beginning in Virginia City when she was only 18 years old. She must have been a gifted teacher, a fact I gauge by the seemingly endless stream of former students who visited our Mission Avenue home over the years: to introduce spouses and children, and to thank my mother for her toughness, her dedication and her inspiration.

I'll have more to say about my parents in a few minutes, but first I have to get something off my chest that has been festering in my soul for several years now.

I cannot begin to tell you how angry I am over EPA efforts to erase all memory of the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mining and Concentrating Company from the face of the earth. Let it never be forgotten that a good deal of the lead we threw at the Japanese and the Germans during World War II came from this mining district. And let it also never be forgotten that those who worked in this valley's mines and smelters - though far from the front lines - are also part of the Greatest Generation that Tom Brokaw described in his two fine books.

My wife and I were in Coeur d'Alene the day the smelter stacks were toppled. I was completely unprepared for it - in fact did not know it was happening until I turned on the television set in our hotel room. I am not ashamed to admit to you that I wept. Like many other Silver Valley fathers, my dad worked on those stacks. Though crude by today's standards, they embodied what was then the latest in air pollution technology. And they brought some relief, if only temporary, to those who lived in Kellogg, Smelterville and Pinehurst.

Now, whenever I drive past the old smelter site, I slow down, stare in disbelief at the emptiness - and get angry all over again. Wouldn't it have been nice if some vestige of this once fine company could have been preserved for posterity?

Apart from the EPA's senseless destruction of two towering pieces of Idaho history, I'm am angry at the way some journalists have mischaracterized our mining industry and the generations of men and women who worked in mines and smelters.

Our parents and grandparents were not pariahs, and neither are you. They did nothing wrong and neither did you. The country desperately needed this valley's mineral riches, needed your skills and your labor. And I submit it still does.

I confess I do not know what the mining industry's economic contribution is to the Silver Valley today, but I know what the Bunker Hill Company's contribution was in 1980, its last full year of operation: The company employed 2,100 men and women in the Kellogg area. The annual payroll was $50 million. Property taxes paid to local taxing districts totaled $1.5 million. At $13 million a year, the company was the Union Pacific Railroad's largest customer. And at $2 million a year, it was also Washington Water Power's largest customer.

If the economic multipliers for the mining industry are the same as they are for the timber industry - and suspect they are - total direct, indirect and induced employment generated by the Bunker Hill Company approached 14,000. And then silence: no more whistles announcing shift changes, no more hustle and bustle on McKinley Avenue, no more distant rumble of ore cars unloading at the rock house.

My sadness repeats itself at more than 500 now long gone sawmills in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, southern Utah, northern Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, South Dakota and northern and central California. Estimates of the number of jobs lost in the wake of the threatened species listing of the northern spotted owl vary widely. Some say 40,000, but others peg the number at closer to 80,000. My safe guess is somewhere in between, but the raw numbers tend only to hide painful reality: bankruptcy, suicide, alcoholism, child abuse and loss of hope. Billie Lawson, a trauma nurse at Harbor View Hospital in Seattle told me in a 1989 interview that she saw the same anguish in unemployed loggers she treated that she had seen in Vietnam combat veterans.

I no longer remember what year the EPA arrived in the Silver Valley, preferring, as I do, to honor the memory of the contributions our families made to this valley. So if you are looking for a way to rise above the anger I know some of you feel, I suggest that you use our time together this afternoon to reflect on the contributions of loved ones gone on: men and women who came to this valley early in the last century in search of new beginnings.

Immigrants like my Norwegian grandfather Paul Petersen, who spoke no English when he passed through Ellis Island, but boldly told his two younger brothers and a sister that they would learn to speak English. "We are in America now," he said. "We will make a new start. Norwegian will never be spoken again in our family."

I think this story repeats itself in many Silver Valley families. And we are all the richer for their perseverance and their vision of a better life in a new country called America. By keeping their memory alive, making certain our children and grandchildren know who they are, where they came from and what we stand for, we insure that the truth about this valley's contributions to our nation will never be lost.

My dad had an eighth grade education, but he one of the smartest men I've ever known. God only knows what he might have accomplished had his father's sudden death in 1928 not forced him into the labor pool. He needed to find a job to support his widowed mother and a little sister. But with the Great Depression looming, jobs were virtually non-existent, so he went into the firewood business, harvesting standing dead trees in Jacob's Gulch, behind where Kellogg High School now stands. He dragged them to his mother's house on Mullan Avenue, cut and split them in stove wood lengths and sold them - for 25 cents a cord.

When FDR formed the Civilian Conservation Corps, dad went to work planting trees on Crooked Ridge, at the headwaters of the Little North Fork River. I have an 8X10 black and white of his crew taken in camp in May 1934. There he is, a boy standing among men, no doubt wondering what our troubled world held for him.

He hired on at Bunker Hill and Sullivan in 1938, as a 75-cent an hour ditch digger. By the time he retired he alone directed the company's vast water system. Not bad for a quiet young man with an eighth-grade education. But, again, I wonder how many times his remarkable story repeats itself up and down our valley. You see, down deep, where the real us that we are lives, these stories are the real reason we are here today, the real reason why the Pulaski Project got done. It is in memory of who we were, and in hope of who we might yet be.

After dad retired, many of his Kellogg friends urged him to run for county commissioner. The idea plainly horrified him. Although he had a long history of civic involvement in Kellogg, the prospect of being a county commissioner was a leap too far. And then came the day when he called me at my public relations office in Kalispell to say that he had changed his mind, and that I would be running his campaign.

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It wasn't that I was stunned by his change of mind. I was stunned by his apparent faith in my ability to get him elected. To be sure, I had lots of election experience, and had never lost a campaign. But let me tell you, running your father's campaign is an entirely different matter.

Looking back, I will readily concede I learned more from him about campaigning than he learned from me. Chief among my lessons was the fact that my father's demeanor never changed, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He was rock solid, honest to a fault, generous with his time and money, and unfailing in his quiet dedication to the citizens of this valley.

And he loved being a county commissioner. You may recall that Vernon Lannen and John McGee were also county commissioners. Dad had known Vernon since Vernon was a boy, and he and John took an instant liking to one another, as did dad and Fred Cantemessa, who, if memory serves me correctly, was elected or appointed after John's death. The Petersen's and the Cantemessa's became summertime next door neighbors at Babin's Resort up the North Fork.

Although Fred never knew it, his friendship and easy humor helped ease the pain that befell my father after the Bunker Hill Company was acquired by Gulf Resources in what was one of Wall Street's first hostile takeovers. Gulf's utter disregard for the Silver Valley nearly broke dad's heart. No town ever had a better friend than Kellogg had in the old Bunker Hill Company, and no company ever treated its employees or its communities more shabbily than Gulf Resources.

Dad tried to run for a second term as county commissioner, but he just didn't have it in him. Something had gone wrong. Within a year, he would sit me down one summer evening and explain to me, as best he could, that he had Alzheimer's disease - a cruel and debilitating affliction that none of us had ever heard of, but one that I would come to know all too well in the last four years of my father's life.

On your Pulaski Project website, which, by the way, is one of the most impressive forestry websites I've seen, Ron Roizen reports that I am going to tell some forestry stories this afternoon. Let's get started.

Although it commemorates great tragedy, the rise of the Pulaski Project is itself a great forestry story, because it tells the country that, despite your economic setbacks, you remain vitally interested in the health, productivity and history of your forests. And that's a good thing, because there is much work to be done.

In September of 1994 I attended a forest health conference in Spokane. Fire ecologists from all over the country gathered to consider what might be done about the increasing wildfire threat associated with outsized insect and disease infestations that were - and still are - devouring the West's great forests.

Never far from the discussion was this question: could the West experience another fire on the scale of the Great 1910 Fire, the largest forest fire for which we can find ecological evidence on American soil? The consensus was that wildfire on such a scale is highly unlikely, mainly because we have so many more fire fighting tools than we had in 1910, including an excellent road system.

But this does not speak to the changing nature of forest fires. No less an expert than Dr. Wally Covington, perhaps our finest fire ecologist, told me after the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire that he had not expected to see a wildfire of such unpredictable ferocity in northern Arizona for another 25 years. Yet in the same wildfire season, the West experienced two such monstrosities: Rodeo-Chediski and southern Oregon's Biscuit Fire. Together, they burned one million acres.

Is a million acre fire in the cards here in northern Idaho? No one can say for certain, but this much is true: annual mortality in Idaho forests north of the Salmon River is at its highest level in a half century.

In scientific circles, the crisis we face is often described in terms of net annual growth, which is defined as gross growth minus mortality and harvesting. Think of it as a convenient measure of the amount of stove wood you've stacked on your back porch in preparation for the coming winter.

If net annual growth in Arizona and New Mexico could be consolidated into a single block of wood, that block would be the dimensions of a football field -and would stretch one mile into the sky. Annually, only 13 percent of this block is removed.

Again, my back porch analogy is useful. If you only burned 13 percent of your firewood over the course of a winter, and were adding the same amount of new wood annually, your porch would soon collapse under the weight of all that firewood. And if your house caught fire, you'd have a real conflagration on your hands.

The same thing is happening in Southwest forests. They are collapsing under their own weight - and the wreckage is burning in wildfires of unprecedented ferocity.

The situation is even worse in northern Idaho and western Montana, because our forests are more productive than forests in the Southwest. Here, net annual growth is the equivalent of 4 and one-half football fields stretching a mile into the sky. About one-third is removed annually, meaning two-thirds remains this year, two thirds more are added next year, and two thirds more the year after, and on and on.

If you want to know why the West's great forests are dying and burning in increasingly frequent and ferocious wildfires look no further than these football fields that have become the focal point of strident debate over what should be done. Many environmentalists say we should let nature take its course. But others disagree, correctly noting that these are not natural fires; that they are burning far beyond what fire ecologists call "the range of natural variability."

In some forests in the Interior West, per acre stand density is 500 times what it was before white settlement began. I have wedged myself through thickets in northern Arizona that were impassible to wildlife - stands of 100 year old ponderosa pine with stems no bigger around than my forearm. Robbed of nutrients, sunlight and rainfall, is it any wonder these forests are so desperately ill, or that they are so susceptible to insect and disease infestations, or that they are dying in firestorms?

You can find the same ecological conditions in northern Idaho, western Montana, eastern Oregon and Washington, Wyoming, South Dakota's Black Hills and much of California. And almost always, the underlying cause is the same: the public's long-standing and still widely supported policy of putting out forest fires wherever they occur.

We could argue the ecological merits of this policy for hours, born as it was in the politically charged aftermath of the Great 1910 Fire, but by in large I think this has been a good policy - and I think it still is.

Yes, the gentle under-burns so common in some parts of the Interior West a hundred years ago had great therapeutic value for forests. But elsewhere in the Interior periodic stand replacing wildfires, like the Great1910 Fire were the norm. Today such catastrophic fires are no longer acceptable. Our society has changed in ways that make them unsafe, undesirable - and ecologically impractical.

Over the last few years The Evergreen Foundation has been involved in several national polls designed to identify the public's primary forest related concerns. In poll after poll, support for large-scale thinning and restoration projects designed to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in the West runs well above 80 percent. When we ask people which forest qualities they enjoy most, their answer is always the same: clean air, abundant fish and wildlife habitat and a wealth of year-round recreation opportunity.

These are not qualities you will find in dying forests - or in forests that have already been consumed by wildfire. It logically follows that leaving these forests to nature - and inevitable wildfire - is not a viable or socially acceptable option.

My friend Alan Houston, a fine PhD wildlife biologist at the Ames Plantation in Tennessee described our choices about as well as anyone has. We were out hiking on the Cumberland Plateau one crisp fall morning when he turned to me out of the blue and said this, which I can quote from memory:

"When we leave forests to nature, as so many people seem to want to do, we get whatever nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times, but with forestry we have options and a degree of predictability not found in nature."

Philosopher and environmentalist Alston Chase, who wrote "Playing God in Yellowstone," a quite revealing examination of the philosophical underpinnings of modern-day environmentalism, got to the nub of the problem with me in a 1990 interview. Here is what he said:

"Environmentalism increasingly reflects urban perspectives. As people move to cities, they become infatuated with fantasies of land untouched by humans. This demographic shift is revealed through ongoing debates over endangered species, grazing, water rights, private property, mining and logging. And it is partly a healthy trend. But this urbanization of environmental values also signals the loss of a rural way of life and the disappearance of hands-on experience with nature. So the irony: as popular concern for preservation increases, public understanding about how to achieve it declines."

With so much wisdom around us - and with such strong public support - you would think thinning and restoration work in at risk forests would be a no-brainer. But you would be wrong, because in its well-intended efforts to protect the public's forests, Congress has created what my friend Jack Ward Thomas, a former chief of the Forest Service, calls "a crazy-quilt" of environmental laws and regulations that seem to be as impenetrable to science-based forestry as the very forests we are trying to save.

This is not good news for the New West with its trophy log homes, ski resorts, wine shops, golf courses, art galleries, telecommuters and gated communities. Because minus the wood processing infrastructure and unsubsidized markets for solid wood and biomass that private capital and private entrepreneurship provided for the federal government for more than 60 years, restoration forestry will remain a distant dream - and at risk forests will continue to die and burn.

My friend Jim Hurst auctioned his sawmill last Tuesday and Wednesday. I suppose some of you remember Jim as the inspiration for the Shovels for Solidarity Convoy that journeyed to Nevada a few years ago to call attention to the plight of a tiny mining community that was battling the federal government over its use of an access road.

Now, 150 Eureka families have lost their jobs - some after 25 years. But Jim took good care of them. They each received a severance package of around $30,000, a tip of the hat from Jim to his extended family. Out of respect for this man who I admire greatly I drove up for the auction because I knew he could not stay away. And sure enough he was there, and so I clumsily offered what I hope were some comforting words.

But no one should take comfort in this now silent mill's demise because it was a technological marvel capable of processing trees with tops only three inches in diameter.
God only knows how many such trees die annually on the Kootenai National Forest, a forest you can see from the window in Jim's office. The Kootenai is arguably the sickest national forest in the entire country. In less litigious times, it could have easily provided the mill with a perpetual supply of thinnings.

Despite the demise of Owens & Hurst Lumber Company - and hundreds more just like it - there are finally some reasons for hope: bi-partisan passage of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, bi-partisan support for modernizing the federal Endangered Species Act and stewardship contracting, a tool that provides ample opportunity for communities to be meaningfully engaged in defining their own forest futures, in rescuing at-risk forests.

There is definitely a place for the Silver Valley in this dialogue - and now you have the perfect tool: the Pulaski Project - not just a trail or an interpretative center, but a living, breathing entity able to take its place at political and intellectual tables where some very heavy thinking is currently underway.

Although it is still an under-reported story, radical environmentalism has lost its seat at this table, just as surely as a dismayed public has grown tired of their shrill voices, their arrogant intolerance for the views of others and their dishonesty. Look for their ever opportunistic lawyers to start heading for the exits soon.

I do not know where we are all headed in forestry's brave new world, but my sense is that we are moving in the right direction. So you would do well to remember Bruce Vincent's admonition: the world is run by those who show up.

Equally true over the course of history has been the fact that whoever controls access to natural resources controls the destiny of civilizations.

If you are looking for a strategy that might put the Pulaski Project on a lot of political radar screens, may I suggest you form a task forest to assess the feasibility of building a major wood processing cluster here in the Silver Valley, something capable of initially handling large quantities of mostly marginal quality wood. Minus profitable markets for this kind of fiber, I'm afraid the forests you love and want to protect face a fiery end.

Be sure to ask the U.S. Forest Service's Forest Products Lab at Madison, Wisconsin for help. I have many friends there, and I am confident they can help you sort through the possibilities and the limitations.

You also have a tremendous resource in the Policy Analysis Group, which is housed in the College of Natural Resources at the University of Idaho. My friend Jay O'Laughlin, who runs the Center, is one of the most thoughtful and creative scientists I know. He can be a great help to you - as can the University's fine cadre of foresters, ecologists, biologists and economists.

I also think the Forest Service can help you. Despite its legal morass, despite profound cultural change inside the agency, I take Chief Dale Bosworth at his word when he says, at every possible opportunity, that something must done - an soon. Here is what he wrote in the agency's 2003 sustainability assessment:

"We have some 73 million acres of national forest land at risk from wildland fires that could compromise human safety and ecosystem integrity...the situation is not sustainable - not socially, not economically, not ecologically."

This is a good time for you to get started. $7-an-ounce silver is one reason. So too is the resurgence of real estate investment here in the Silver Valley. You are witnessing the early signs of a land rush that has been sweeping across western Montana for several years. It will bring new money, new employment and new ideas: joy and heartburn in the same package. But where natural resource management is concerned, this could be your shining hour. Remember Alston Chase's lament: "As popular concern for preservation increases, public understanding about how to achieve it declines."

You know how to achieve it. Your new neighbors will not.

I want to close out this afternoon with observations from an old friend and an American icon. The old friend is the late Leonard Netzorg, one of the finest lawyers forestry ever had. The other is Teddy Roosevelt, our conservation president. These quotations underscore what Leonard called "the changing nature of society's felt necessities," those gentle and often unseen urgings that over time become societal tidal waves. I think the public's near-unanimous support for thinning and forest restoration is such a tidal wave.

First Teddy Roosevelt, from a speech he gave at a Society of American Foresters meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1903:

"And now, first and foremost, you can never afford to forget for a moment what is the object of our forest policy, for that object is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in itself; nor is it because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policy of home making in our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary. You yourselves have got to keep this practical object before your minds; to remember that a forest which contributes nothing to the wealth, progress or safety of the country is of no interest to the Government, and should be of little interest to the forester. Your attention must be directed to the preservation of forests, not as an end in itself, but as a means of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation."

Can anyone doubt that we have strayed light years from our conservation president's original instruction since the federal timber sale program collapsed under the weight of litigation in the early 1990s?

Now Leonard Netzorg, who was a union organizer in Detroit in his youth, who later worked for Franklin Roosevelt; and whose sweeping observations on society and science have never failed to sweep me off my feet:

"Society has demonstrated an unwillingness to vest in scientists the final authority to make the decisions that affect the rest of us. We insist that our non-scientific views be heard, that we whose lives are affected have the right to participate in decision making and policy processes that flow from today's scientific facts. The timber industry is going to have to share these forests with others that have different values and want different things from the forest. Frankly, I welcome it, and I rue the day when polarized factions no longer tear away at the fabric of our society. The American Revolution is still going on. We are still changing, still learning. If some of us were not constantly tearing away at what others of us think we know, we would all still think the earth is flat. What is science today is witchcraft tomorrow."

What Leonard is saying is that forums like the Pulaski Project are not simply vital to our forest future. They are our only hope. The task now falls to all of you to define hope's vision.

Thanks again for inviting me. First, last and always, I remain a son of the Silver Valley.