The profound action of an old growth forest cannot be easily measured. What we continue to slowly reveal, is that all our landscapes have profound function in our very survival. As humans, our curse is hubris. We think we know how to run the world, how to best manage wilderness, as though it needs our management. EEC Forest Stewardship is stewarding, but that’s cleanup after previous land owners cut the forest, put too many animals on the landscape, and degredated what had been crucial old growth temperate rainforest. There’s little of it left where the farm runs today, and not mush elsewhere, outside a few token National Parks. It’s difficult to know old growth is still being cut around the world, and that it will take thousands of years for any of those forests to come back. We humans don’t comprehend that kind of timeline, because it far exceeds our own lifetime. Another fault of our species is the lack of ability to see time outside ourselves. By this I mean, ecology has been evolving as a massive system for millions of years. The wilderness we see today, what’s left of it, has been evolving through complex cycles of climate change, global catastrophes, and many mass extinctions, which deeply impact how and what thrives on the land today. People really have no clue, but we’re great at tearing things up to get to what we value, no matter the cost.
I’m going to try to take a minute to help us look a little deeper into the ecology of old growth forests, and why they are crucial to human survival. There are reasons to stop cutting old growth which stretch far beyond any single bird species or carbon sink, it’s about how water gets to the land, how it’s filtered and cleaned for us to drink, how the air is filtered too, and soil building for generations to come. We like to count board feet of timber harvests, where easy profit is made, but if I came to my city council tomorrow, and told them we needed to pull up the drinking water pipes in town so I could get to some coal seams under the streets, that’s when people say “no” to extraction. When we see a direct affect to our lives, we ask for change. People, we have to see it now, before the only safe water to drink comes from a corporation that makes you pay too much for too little.
Forests make our climate, and without massive, old growth stands, these functions of our rains will continue to diminish. I’m not the best at explaining all this, but these two videos help, and I think taking some time to watch will help us all better understand why even younger forests need protecting, and why EEC Forest Stewardship strives to educate others about restoration farming and why planting native forest is crucial to our survival as a species. Please take a moment to take in these great pieces of information and reflect on how you can better support the protection of our native forests. Right now, our government is acting to cut unprecedented acres of our federal forests, they want to cut acreage about the size of California throughout the US. How can you help? Contact your local representatives, state, and federal too. Tell them our forests are not for sale, and why forests are important to you as a tax payer in The United States.
On another important note- all the land we live on today in The U.S. is stolen from tribal people who were deeply harmed by our government through military oppression, racial prejudice, and colonial dominion, and that’s just a jumping off point. Our continued abuse of tribal people, the lands, which are still held sacred by the tribes, which also still exist today to bare witness to Americas 250 years of direct abuse, and the hundreds of years of colonial oppression before that. I acknowledge that when I talk about federal and state forests, along with National Parks, I am participating in the dialogue of stolen land now “owned” by this country.
EEC Forest Stewardship 