Author: EEC Forest Stewardship

Satellite mapping is incredible. It’s been a great way for me to visually grasp landscapes, ecosystems, and terrains on a level only recently possible to modern humans. I’ve always looked out the window on flights- when lucky enough to get the seating, and have a strong familiarity with central plains farmland, as pictured above. The 160 acre squares are common in Oklahoma, and many other states where land allotments were granted in the late 1800s–early 1900s. Why 160 acres? The National Park System can answer that-

Homestead claims were made based on the rectangular survey system, which is still used in the United States today. This system surveys and organizes land based on the 640-acre section, also known as one square mile. The 160 acre homestead comprised one quarter-section of a square mile. When Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862, the technology of the day was still primitive enough that 160 acres was thought to be the maximum amount of land a family could realistically farm. As time went by and more settlers came searching for land to claim, homesteaders had to go further west to find plots still available. This forced them to go to areas where the climate made farming much more difficult and 160 acres was not enough for a viable homestead. As a result, Congress passed several additional homestead laws allowing claimants in certain parts of the country to acquire more than 160 acres.

Even the property of EEC Forest Stewardship is marked out on the title and legal description based on the surveyed quadrant. All land in The United States is labeled this way, so we’re already grided out, even in The National Parks. I think there is a pristine fantasy in our minds about the wilds of America, most of which are pictured in The West of the country. Yes, the west is wilder than the east in The USA, but that’s more topographic than anything else. Just look at west vs. east from satellite:

It may still be hard for you to see this, but there is an extremely different terrain and ecology on each side of our continent. Yes, our county spans a continent, which is not normal for most countries, we have a heck of a land mass we’re working with, which felt to settlers like an endless plane after they came over the Appalachian Mountains by the millions post Revolutionary War. England had not allowed it’s colonies to expand further west, understanding that Tribal People owned what was on the other side, but then General Washington promised troops 100 acres of Indian land as payment for service in the war- let’s not forget all the land already claimed by colonial powers was taken in the first place, so why not expand and have the rest? Manifest destiny right? Wrong! Manifest Pest is more like it. Oklahoma was homesteaded after it served as reservation lots for tribal people pushed out of the east and starved into submission. Tribes had been pushed out so many times by then, America thought nothing of taking what was left and squaring it out for settlement, because there was so much space, why not?

Even back in New England, the land was carved time and time again to suit development. In New York State, where once Patroons ruled 16 mile stretches of river, yeoman farmers plowed up 60, 80, and 100 acre parcels for family farming. These more elongated grids are still visible from above.

Then in that post revolution era, the 160 acre homestead lot took shape, and in The Ohio River Valley, a wave of colonial gridlock appeared- nearly overnight.

Down in Southeaster America, the pine lands were a little more hilly and wet, but carving apart the landscape is still clearly evident, our scabs netted across the earth, cutting apart the natural environment to fuel expansion and abuse of our finite resources that has proven madness.

During The Dust Bowl, more waves of humanity fled their own undoing in my home state, to the sugar bowl in California, Oregon and Washington. The Sunshine State is grided out in a very familiar pattern, and we’re back to bottom land agricultural dominance. This time woven in with fracking industry, which also dots the landscape of oil rich portions of our nation.

Those undeveloped flanks of The Central Valley are craggy desert hillsides, not suitable for grazing or planting. But these grids somewhat pale in comparison to the checkerboard system embraced by northern California, Oregon, and Washington States.

By then, the railroads were connecting the coasts with transportation to ship all the wonderful, endless natural resources out of the inland and into the pockets of investors, a few already wealthy white men, who took this whole continent, including Canada and Mexico- not to mention Central and South America, into complete exploitation for personal greed. That’s so vast, I know you’re still trying to figure out this pattern, but it’s as plain at a cleared checkered board- consumption.

Washington likes to call it’s self The Evergreen State, but the pimples are showing through. We blight our forests with continual cutting, monoculture replanting, and the application of both “treated” biosolids (human shit), and chemicals like herbicides and pesticides to keep the trees growing up while the native flora and fauna are killed off in mass genocide. When a Native Person once pointed out to me that their people have been surviving an apocalypses since White Men first came to these shores starts to ring true.

I’m still trying to help us see the vastness of colonial settlement in America. Below is a satellite photo of south-central Washington State. It’s an area comparable to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined. You can still easily see all the clear cutting pockmarks across the landscape, and don’t think the green areas are pristine woodlands- they are monoculture plantations with no wilderness left for most of the mega fauna that once roamed in the millions throughout this landscape. White settlers came and cut it, burned it, lay track, bulldozed, fenced, and mined the skin of this earth in a similar way men abuse woman to this day. I’m calling it out, that’s for sure. Drill baby drill? Grab em’ by the Pussy? Anyone?

This legacy of consumption, conspicuous consumption, is written across out landscape, and EEC Forest Stewardship fold right in. The dairy farms of The Snoqualmie Valley, the logging camps, railroad, removal of First Nation People- it’s all here in much the same way it is on The East Coast, and that visual scar of gridded insanity lives on in the shape of all our square homes, square rooms, square screens, and square boxes we eagerly await at our doors. Just in time for the holidays!

P.S.

The day after completing this writing, NPR had a story about actual gridlock and how traffic is at a record high, leading to more commuting hours in our lives. I’ve experienced this personally living in King County, even at the furthest reaches of its boarders. Duvall is a bedroom community for workers in and around Seattle, including Bellevue and Redmond, the cities built by Microsoft. The tech industry put Seattle on the map, along with timber and mining. We’re about 45 min from the city by car with no traffic, but because of the congestion that continues to build, it can be a commute of 2-3 hours. Yes, there is an effort to expand more public transit, like light rail and ride share vehicles, the fact that there are too many of us continues it’s shockingly absent stint in our collective consciousness. When do we say “enough!”? When do we draw our own boundaries around consumerism? When do we stop? Then I ask, “What can I produce?”. Rather than always assuming another generation is the most important thing for each of us to produce, we’re getting the memo that many of us just should not breed, and instead, grow ourselves in other gifts to help the generations to come- and not just humans. What if the old adage, “for my family, for the future generations, and for those to come” actually embraced all the future life on earth, not just one species? Perhaps gauging to that measurement would help with solving most of our current social, economic, and psychological challenges today.

Cascade Katahdins graze on a dry day at EEC Forest Stewardship. Even in the total cloud cover, our new photovoltaic system is catching rays and banking green energy for our endeavors. It’s late November, and our flock is starting to show signs of pregnancy, just as winter sets in. There is still fodder to graze in these pastures, though fruit has fallen, and leaves too. Blackberry is still leafed out, and the sheep brows those hedges and edges for extra protein. Alfalfa will carry them to term, and nurse new lambs by next year. It’s good to see this condition in the ewes as they start to put most of their energy into growing the next generation for Leafhopper Farm.

Our LGD Kangals hold up security 24/7. I sleep soundly at night, knowing my team of alert K9s watches and listens intently, and vocalizes a stark warning to wildlife, which has learned the through routs out of the way of our well fenced livestock boundaries. The creek offers over 200′ of open throughway with restoration plantings of native species, creating habitat and a through way for wildlife moving from The Snoqualmie Valley and River, up into the Puget Lowlands and Cascade Foothills. These transitional zones allow access through human development, with intention to re-wild and retreat from over time. Eventually, our back field will be completely replanted with native understory, and the deciduous nut trees will have reached mature canopy to shelter future forests to come. Slowly, the human tending will become more and more passive, with some harvesting and replanting to fill in ecological gaps caused by human initiated extraction and removal of resident people, and biomass.

What I notice the most in this landscape is the missing top soil. There is a good compost layer around these barns from decades of domestic stock, but soil takes hundreds of thousands of years to build up and create real growing conditions for ancient vegetation. Glaciers cut through much of this area in the past tens of thousands of years, so the topsoil was relatively young, by geologic standards, but for First Nations, the land had become fertile and abundant with all the animals roaming the land, quick seeding and germination of plants as shallow glacial lakes turned into marshes and river systems carved out of melting ice and alluvial buildup. The landscape that hosts EEC Forest Stewardship, resides on a slope just below an area that started as a glacial lake and then filled in over time to become a wetland with spring fed overflow into what is now called Weiss Creek.

In the 1950s, the next generation of dairy farmers in and around The Snoqualmie Valley ventured further up hill from the already claimed bottom land to seek out new homesteads to raise their own cattle. My neighbors The Boards, and the previous, and original owners of the property I bought both came from Oklahoma in the 30s to work in the dairy barns until they had enough money to start their own herds or buy a plot to settle on. The Board’s yellow cow barn still stands, empty of cows for almost 20 years, and certainly not a milking barn past EPA regulations in the 1970s. When I first moved up to the farm, I bought two calves from Mr. Board to fill my freezers and host work parties. We had cookouts, grill fests, set some good fencing, planted trees, built new dwellings and habitat for birds and beasts, and feasted of a neighbor’s beef. What a foundation!

The flocks are fabulous, through a little monochrome. I’m not in it for a look, really, but there are some breed standards to follow, for health and harmony. I select for temperament and build, health and natural foraging behavior. You’ll see the chickens working the land, gleaning bugs, looking for opportunity across the rich earth. Sometimes this looks like a raid into my garden, which is not ideal, but it helps me design better plantings to dissuade the flock from my crops. The problem is the solution- I will continue to stand by that motto. The geese harvest is about to start, with gander on the menu for winter feasting rituals. I’ll look forward to dining on the rich drippings with dressing and fruit compote. The pears that remain chilled are softening up to make flavorful pies and fillings for seasonal baking. Oh, what a larder to celebrate! This is what such a lifestyle can offer with a little seasonal production, time in the dirt, tending, and harvest to storage for just the right time. Fruit wines are being bottled, and the hens finish molting, slow their laying cycle, and rest up through the long nights.

It was 50F in late November 2025 when I went to do night check- a ritual of final water and feeding, eyes on the animals to make sure they are OK, and good nights. I let Gill free to roam, his leg is holding with older and wiser lifestyle changes. Gill is showing his age, and we’ll monitor his comfort and health through this colder wet season to make sure his quality of life remains stellar. Koban is alert and observant, testing- as a good Kangal does while learning, but responsive to my commands, at least for now. I’m expecting the 2 y/o fall apart after I get all his manners programed. I say programed because these primitive dogs have most of their knowledge through instinct that is over 5,000 years in the making. Right now, Koban and Gill are loose with the ewes at night. There have been no problems, but I know this is a short term learning window. When the lambs drop, Koban will not be loose with the sheep, or able to reach the young ones for the next year. He will have a lot of supervised loose time with the lambs, but never alone. I see what he sneaks with Valley sometimes, nipping her and knocking her down- she is a smart bitch, and knows to stay down and still when he hassles her, but I’m there to intervene. I do not leave Val alone with Koban.

Keeping a watchful eye on things is necessary for the system to run well. I just got back from a 10 day trip back east, and need to watch what’s happening upon my return. I see a young rooster starting to via for pecking order, he should be culled. His red eye is another cull trait- as they tend to be more aggressive and become egg breakers over time (this is my observation with my own flock- experiences may differ). The beautiful plumage of this bird will be saved for craft and tool making- including flies for top water fishing. Black iridescent feathers are valued in decorative feather fashion. If you are interested, contact me. The flock continues to develop its own characteristics, and I plan to introduce some more fresh genetics in the coming years to keep health a priority. Line breeding can be done well, but not for too long before certain unwanted traits establish. The red comb and waddle is not ideal, but remains a dominate gene in chickens, and so, without more Ayam Cemani genetics, we’ll eventually have all red comb birds.

With one breeding pair of Cotton Patch Geese, there is less worry about genetics, but no plan of forming a flock out of two at this time. I continue to learn about these birds, what they need, and what it would look like to establish a breeding flock to support this well adaptive heritage animal. It’s traits are favorable, from shy temperament to relatively quiet self, unlike most geese breeds. This bird is smaller, but takes little grain to keep plump. They muck up the water, but put down great fertilizer for the grounds. They are smart, clean, and keep away from the other animals, mindfully moving about the landscape and staying out of trouble. I like them, but am not yet embracing a flock plan. The mess is a little trouble with more than two. I would put the offspring into a rotational grazing pen for the warm months, letting the mature pair roam free. That will involve some added work, but would then maintain a more hygienic habitat for all the geese, and a targeted grazing path for birds to work more diligently for the farmer. I love having a mobile bird system along hedge edges in the warm months to keep back the root sappers and weeds. It’s also an easily fenced off area for reseeding after the birds are concentrated along the strip. More to come on that project in future.

Growing a mix of plants in layers for livestock and human use, as well as restoring native plant varieties that should be present in this ecosystem, the landscape slowly returns to full abundance. The edge spaces, like this rock retaining wall around a parking area direct runoff towards the pond and off the gravel drive, and hold the slope for a setting hedge of mixed use shrubs like mock orange pollination species, hard hack material and pollinator, Saskatoon, thimble berry, cypress, willow, Nootka rose, and more. I hope to establish several more understory varieties like bear berry, trailing blackberry, and black cap raspberry. The chickens are in this shrubbery all year round. The sheep brows through from time to time, gleaning their own vetches and broad leaf forage. Layering creates wonderful abundance, and layering the animal systems adds to returning complex ecological cooperation that best supports long term survival and diversity in a thriving temperate rainforest environment.

No matter how many forbs and hay grasses established here, there will not be enough elk and deer, grouse and band tailed pidgin to produce the restoration power that can undo human logging, railroad track laying, damming, and generally depredation of the natural world to fill pockets far from ground zero in this land abuse, cloaked in limited connection to place, as in, none. Trappers had moves through these forests and lake shores for a few hundred years before the logging corporations came for the timber. Most industry had already devoured the entire East Coast reserves, Upper Midwest hardwoods, and Rocky Mountain pines. Timber barons wanted spruce and fir for construction across America. By the early 1900s, small logging towns like Duvall sprung up, and railroads took milk to pasteurization on its way into Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. Further south in Washington State, mining of coal had sped up development of the North Pacific corner of an established western most part of The United States.

So here, at the end of a long stretch from Europe to North America, through the generations of colonization and settlement, homesteading and surviving across time and space, this final generation of such a legacy is striving to return nature to place, living in some reverence of connection, sharing this experience and setting the table to share sustenance and abundant fruits from one woman’s labor, and her team work with sheep, chickens, geese, dogs, cats, bugs, mushrooms, people, and restoration farming on small scale, manageable scale for one or a few people, this place thrives and re-wilds in a mimic of what could be again in future, helping to restore and regenerate in this great space and time.

The rams are in their own enclosure and settling down for a quiet winter retreat. They enjoy hay and the blackberry stand within their enclosure. The pair is getting on without too much drama. Okie certainly makes his dominance known during their feeding, but there is plenty of space and fodder for both. I’ll look forward to seeing how our home bred ram lamb Quinn out of Lickity-Split and Okie matures. Keeping a second ram for a few seasons to line breed some genetic is not unusual, but will demand keeping two herds through the breeding season next year. We’ll see how that goes. I’m hoping to pair him with unbred ewes early next spring while Okie waits for Fall rut and his mature ewes. I can always plan like this when Winter is setting in, but next Spring, lambing will determine a lot of what the warm season produces. These are not even planted seeds yet, just plans in my herd book notes.

Livestock continue to play a major role in restoration farming here at EEC Forest Stewardship, and our eggs and lamb continue to feed local friends and neighbors, passing on the abundance here at Leafhopper Farm. Gratitude to all the patience the animals show me, and their importance work to till soil, enrich pasture, and turn vegetation into rich clean protein. May the manure and browsing act as some replacement for elk and deer that once roamed these lands by the millions. May the flocks mimic the millions of birds that once flew over these hills, thriving in The Snoqualmie Valley below during migration. These modest domesticated livestock system pales in comparison, but the fertility is returning with each year of smart rotation and responsible husbandry. Perhaps in another few hundred years, elk, geese, and even wolves might have a place back in this dynamic landscape.

This early 1700s map gives us an idea of colonial vision in North America. The 13 Colonies are almost fully formed, with New England’s Boston, Cap Cod, Rhode Island, Long Island, and New Jersey mapped, though New York City is not marked, the colony of New York was present, along with The Iroquois Nation, with Philadelphia, Cherokee, and New Orleans marking more important landscapes of ownership in the European cartographers who showed their people The New World. It was, by now, a settled coast of immense proportion. New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida, and California were all country sizes in Europe, and areas only explored by conquistadors and priests, fur traders and mountaineers for the last hundred years. Rivers guided most early commercial ventures into the content’s interior, with tribes tolerating the new comers for their steel and textiles. Trading brought biological exchanges too, and the great First Nations suddenly took sick from the interactions; millions died. This sudden human removal form the landscape gave the impression that the land was empty, ready for new people to come and steward, to grow families and multiply in the abundance of free land- available for the willing.

Crowded conditions and feudal subservience remained abundant back in Europe. Most people were landless, working as cheap labor for wealth and power. The elite entrepreneurs quickly grasped that a new land of untold riches await settlement and submission across The Atlantic, and hurried ships of treasure seekers across to claim sovereignty. Slavery in the tropical islands of The Caribbean brought sugar, rum, tobacco, and other valued crops up from a year round growing environment and free slave labor from a dark continent just below the colonial European psychopaths. I use this label to assure my readers that the powers claiming land have and will always be mentally unstable, in that they shit where they sleep and just climb up on the backs of others who wallow in their filth. Extracting the earth’s finite resources simply for planned wealth gluttony kills us all. How do we move away from this ravaging? Day to day door to door delivery would be a major first.

But back to the colonists- yes, religious freedom, yes to vast land ready for settlement, yes to needing able bodies to build infrastructure and harvest the resources. No to free land, it was still owned by companies, titled white men, and countries. That’s all kinda the same person really, with a lot of bureaucratic go betweens. I love siting patroons up The Hudson River. Investors in The Dutch West Indies Co. could have 16 miles on one side, or 8 miles on each side of the great river, who’s mouth emptied at one of the deepest harbors on The East Coast. This is why New York is such a thriving business city even today. First Nation’s people were happy to make accommodations for the white traders, at least sometimes, but there was tension as more and more pale faces poured into the landscape. Tribes made successions after several battles and prolonged harassment from white colonist. The situation was white men taking land from people they saw as less than for not already squandering the natural world for profit. Ordained by some guy in the sky BS doubled down on the ethical questions, and settlement went on without a hitch in moral quandary.

What remained unknown on the map above is where I reside today- so the colonial settlement went all the way manifest destiny and here we are- descendants of people trying to make a better life for themselves at the cost of whatever, we pray and that makes it all ok. No, we have to reach around and take the hand of those behind us. What does that mean? Look back to start, think about who is standing there and why. If you are confused by my words, I’d recommend looking deeper into your family tree, some of those branches that first made the puddle jump and why. Come on! The DNA tests are fun, and you’ll be in a database that’s accessible to the FBI, CIA, and more. I should tell you the government got into our health records with that DOGE thing. The CDC is run by KGB, I mean RFK? Ok, enough said. Unknown remains to be seen. Washington State was not even a glimmer on the horizon, well, it was mapped as a place yet to go, so we went there. My ancestors came in at Savannah in Georgia, walked west through Alabama, Missouri, then Kansas and Oklahoma. Other’s made it from Red Hook NY to Arkansas. All were tenants in one form or another, so they could not stay put very long, the landscape was changing fast.

The US purchased Louisiana from The French in 1803. At that time, the area known as Washington today was not yet explored. Oklahoma had not been carved out as a state, but it was fixing to be the dumping ground for unwanted First Nation People still residing along The Eastern Seaboard. All the promises given to tribes during the struggles for independence in the 1700s went out the door as more and more Europeans came to seek a better life and free land for the taking. By the late 1800s, abusive corporate interests used the courts to steal what was left of tribal heritage and tradition still established in Colonial America. After The Revolutionary War, veterans were promised 100 acres of Indian land, including the west side of The Appalachian Mountains, which had been the final refuge of tribes pushed out from the colonial states. The North West Territory was firming up new state boundaries like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Tribes had to be relocated out of these new lands of settlement, so good old Andrew Jackson told his federal agents to remove all Indians to Oklahoma Territory, onto reservations where they could be civilized and consumed into European white man culture as a subservient. There were no equal rights being offered at that time. White slave owners were greedy, and took what was left of tribal lands in the southeast without hesitation. The trail of tears carried many more black slaves of tribal people into the central heartland of America to continue their labors under duress until 1866, nearly 3 years after The Emancipation Proclamation.

The 1860s was a time of many changes on the colonial maps of North America. Washington separated from The Oregon Territory, which was a whites only settlement-the legacy of which still clings to the state to this day, though Portlandia skewed that understanding a bit, ushering in a lot of trendy folk thinking Portland would be so cool, only to find out drugs are real and a lot of unemployed young people becomes a real problem. But you can always get a job in the lumber mill. Logging was in full swing in these areas of The Pacific Northwest in the 1800s, and America was forming her county liberties through railroad expansion and mining industry dividends. White people from Europe were still pouring in on The East Coast, and many inland families sent their children west, to find even more opportunity in the open lands of a post civil war third wave of dominion want. Cattlemen had begun taming the wild west, with beef to feed a growing East Coast full of cities ripe with enough extraction wealth now industrializing in cities were people wanted to eat out and be entertained. Sound familiar? It’s still the way our culture works, and we the people buy in frequently- at the cost of so many unknowns.

There was a Civil War (1861-65) in this decade, so the secession map below might make more sense in this context. Good old Washington Territory, and my home state of Oklahoma was hosting all those savage Indians. Slavery was a really big thing for the south- and the north really, because all the textile mills up north were supplied by the salve labor picking and baling cotton in the south. Triangle trade benefited the abolitionist states as much as the antebellum ones- and Europe filled it’s coffers with the profits of slavery through indirect purchase of slave made goods and materials, so don’t think anyone’s ancestors weren’t heavily tangled in this grisly treatment of our fellow human beings. That stench still hangs heavily in white guilt, but we have to see what we’re made from, and accept, before we can give condolences. This is the combing of the snakes out of our hair folks. I’ll point you to The Tree of Peace story from our Haudenosaunee teachers- the ones that told Benjamin Franklin that consensus was necessary for confederacy to stand.

After The Civil War, industry consolidated, and a lot of folks kept moving westward. Those North West Territory states formed, and Chicago Illinois became the happening midpoint of American prosperity. Middle America happened to be a breadbasket and pasture for some of our best commodity crops and cattle companies- to this day. All that came from kicking First Nation People off the land, tilling up millions of rich bottom land soil, and clearing wildlife like wolves, bison, and billions of birds from the sky. That’s right folks, commercial harvesting of wild animals was on an unchecked apocalyptic massacre of many species. Note the use of punt guns for bird harvesting. The passenger pigeon went extinct in a hunting frenzy, which saw the last bird killed around 1900. Washington had been a state for 11 years, but Oklahoma still had a long way to go. There had been a land rush in 1889, opening up a lot of what was Indian Reservation to white settlers in need of some good free soil to tend. Homesteads went up all over, and the last Native Peoples were consolidated together on small allotments, quickly snatched up as tribal numbers dwindled into State Run Boarding Schools. You should research this tragedy of American History to better understand what happened to so many First Nations People, what they had and did survive. That is held in living memory today. By 1907, Oklahoma was admitted to The United States and cattleman happily drove their beef along The Chisholm Trail from Texas to Kansas and beyond on railroads to the major Cities now cropping up in well established Union States.

While Chicago dined on red meat cattle from The Great Plains, the replacement species after the bison were eradicated to take away tribal food resources and force them onto reservations for government issued food rations, trains were connecting from The West Coast to aid in the transport of much needed goods like coal for power and timber for building. Now fully colonized, America was an open door for settlement from all sides. Up in Washington State, The Treaty of Point Elliott (1855 had been signed, allowing The City of Seattle to be established, but eventually, white settlers pushed further and further into the interiors of The Pacific Coast, claiming new townships in the seasonal village spaces of tribal people. The cities and townships full of white people still exist today, with little understanding or care of what was here before, or what could be with a little more understanding of unknowns. Ignorance is bliss, I understand how so many of us continue to rest in the comfort of our unknowns. How else could we sleep at night? How many of us don’t? What can you do to get better sleep if you are starting to think more about our troubled past? What would it look like to seek the unknown?

Find out if you can drink the water out of the nearest stream to your home, or well, or even a shallow dug hole in your backyard, or a bucket collecting rain water. Find out what’s in that water, and why you would be advised not to drink it, just start there. Then find the nearest soil to your home and see what’s growing in it- or not. How many domestic dogs pee and poop on it? How many vehicles, admitting air born chemical poisons that do compound over time, drive by each day and cover that soil with pollutants? What kind of air filtration do you have in your home? Climate control? Sealed windows and doors? Is your home carpeted? Dry walled? Painted? What kind of chemicals are off-gassing in the place you spend most of your time? How about the place your children go? Spooky yet? Sure thing, because we’re living in a world of petroleum products, bid to worship screen time and buying addiction. I see the trucks driving around, coming to all the neighborhoods, and we’re still going to the store, driving every day, spending way too much time on screens, even to answer communication related to work and family, instead of being face to face.

When was your last contact with the outside world? Even in New York City, I found quiet places to sit, watch, reflect. Without your phone, you do look around, so put it away for a little bit, leave it inside and go out. Make plans with others, in person. Meet new people at a community space, hear an opinion that differs from yours. This is rewilding 101. It does not take too much effort, just a change in priorities for a few days, then weeks, then you’ll find others doing the same and connect. We’ve lost a lot of community, or only share space with an echo of ourselves in thought and belief. Stagnation causes putrification, which is unhealthy. When we open our eyes to the natural world, include ourselves in it, and encourage others to join us there, the mind, body, and spirit have a healthy reconnect to what sustains us. If you are having trouble finding this connection, change needs to happen in your life. The air, water, and soil are all necessary for human survival. Our other major need- energy, has taken over, disrupting the balance of our other resources to suit its own leviathan. People now flock to money as a savior, worshiping wealth in coin, rather than celebrating the wealth of ecological diversity around us that was The Garden of Eden, borrowing from my own cultural cannon.

Reaching back almost 400 years into the start of global colonial ambition, we can chart the deviation of humanity from our place as graspable cultures, into global maniacs of industrial consumption, and where it brings us today. Through exploitation, fortunes were amassed, money that came through the direct taking of our natural resources, at the cost of many millions of people already living in harmony with the earth, understanding her limitations for the sake of all people really need to survive and thrive in our short existence. Ask what your ambition in the world is today, and hope that it remains within the finite abundance of our world. This is the vision we could all walk towards in making a better planet for the future generations. I would like to see our humanity carry on through the evolution of this planet, but the way we are headed now, that does not seem likely. May the living earth continue to teach us with every breath that we are here in this moment. May her abundance continue to thrive, to ensure our human survival, and the survival of all living things to sustain life on this great earth, which we all share. May scarcity, the fear bringer, be overcome by our love and compassion. Sounding a little too hippy for you? Well, mind your direction of wander and ask what you believe in.

If you continue consumer addiction, take a seat on the crazy train and we’re all in together none the less. I’m typing on a high consumption ticket item, and sit in front of this screen about 3-4 hours a day. That’s about even with my continued outside time, unless I’m on an outing, in which case I’ve driven almost an hour each way. That’s some consumption for ya. Plastic truck parts, computer parts, any tech really, containers, safety equipment, paint, acrylic, most of the things you spend your time holding- steering wheels, phone, even a pen if you still write something. Plastics make it possible, and we’re all full of them anyway, so hip hip hooray on that one folks. Tin foil hats aside, we really are drowning in the petroleum we’ve been worshiping for the past 100 years. In less time then that, we’ve put poison in all the wells, our atmosphere, and the brain barrier. By now some of you are AI searching my words- or should be. I’m not linking in this writing, not today, because it’s been repeated time and time again through these pages. Now, go read the labels on all your detergents and get the heck off industrial chemicals. Biodegradable soap is the first change to make a huge difference in our world. Love!

Anywhere you go- there’s a mushroom close by! I’ve just come back from a trip to The East Coast in late November, 2025. There was amazing autumn color still on the trees, and some mycological bursts of bright pigment as well. This Chicken of The Woods was a wonderful example, hardened by time and age, an old one like this is shellaced, not a choice edible, but still some sustenance steeped for a while if you’re in need. It was loose in the ground, protruding from the rotted out oak stump where a city tree used to grow, near a school. Ideally, something would be planted here to replace this fungal habitat, but for now, the mushrooms continue working to transform detritus into valuable soil. If we sit with just this complex system of nutrient exchange, even fathoming for a moment, the layers of evolution involved, out simple understanding of it, not even yet aware of the possibility. Gosh those leaves are so pretty.

When I turn it over, this saprtrophic mushroom presents a glimpse of the happenings on a mycological level and beyond. This species needs rotting wood to thrive, though its mycelia can travel through and colonize rotting leaves from the same tree- usually an oak, and there are a lot around here- note Quercus montana leaf top left. This specimen is established in the almost gone stump of something, in a planter square between a paved parking lot, sidewalk, and a heavily used blacktop street. You can find mushrooms anywhere, and here, between a boys and girls club and a Moldavian church in West Springfield, an edible mushroom came forth, matured, released more spores, and continues to support mycelia in the soil.

So many of the species on The East Coast are a little strange to me, but I keep my eyes peeled and focus on what a dominate hardwood forest offers. Strolling through a different forest near The Catskills in New York, I could not help but notice all the blooming fruits of fall. You might think of apples and pears, but I was not in an orchard- well, not a recently cultivated one, I did notice many other saprotrophic examples slowly taking apart dead wood in a recovering forest. This particular forest was a Dutch homestead with an established cherry grove. The cultivated trees are long gone, but native black cherries are making a slow comeback. They need light, and are often found in edge spaces. Because this forest has no younger established evergreens, the cherry has continued into the canopy, with the potential to become an old growth tree. Nearby Turkey Tails passively break down a legacy of nutrients for the soil and vegetation that feeds all life on this earth.

The log hosting this larger specimen, Trametes pubescens, is a bracket fungus enjoying a downed feast that will last many years. There’s a little calling card on this log, which crosses the small stream through a purposely canal drained wetland. The Dutch knew how to make wetlands go away to reveal wonderful topsoil for tilling. Row crops fed families and made abundance for selling in the local community, or keeping livestock, which most families did in the early 1800s. By the 1900s, dairies had consolidated in the bigger river valleys, and pasteurization put commercial milk on trains to go to the big cities like New York. The territorial marking of this turd might come from a fox, most likely vulpus vulpus. The animal is leaving a flag to say “there is a good crossing here”, a direct path above the deeply cut drain ditch that is now eroding away at a rapid rate, pulling in logs that will actually help restore this wetland, in time.

The family that came and dug this drainage came on the heels of a much larger shipping canal built in the early 1800s. It’s historic banks are stones throw, or easy cart ride down the hill, where this famiyl could sell their products, like the cherries, to a canal boat pulled by mules, heading to The Hudson River, a shipping highway before rail, and later trucks haul the world to and from major ports at it’s mouth down in the bay. Coal was streaming out of Pennsylvania along this canal, and all the little town stops along the way bought coal and traded agricultural goods. The Dumond family that lived here in the 1800s worked to make the land as productive as possible in their short tenure. However, they left a depleted landscape with lost wetlands and terrible erosion that is still cutting away the soil today. As trees naturally fall into the path of these active waters, the flow will slow and spill over into the awaiting wetlands. Eventually, the water will return to its old floodplain, but human intervention could speed up this recovery, with debris dams set in strategic areas to help guide the water out of the canal and back into the low lying areas of this forest.

We have dominion over the land, yet know so little about it. The primitive concept of dig, build, control, vs. a more enlightened observe, learn, reflect, fold in brings short term gain at long term greater loss. Humans have the ability to reason out common sense tactics for survival in almost any situation, yet we keep slipping back into reactionary extraction. Untangling ourselves from that economic nightmare now holding so much of the world in the hands of a few mega conglomerates will deteriorate as this wetland did, but the compelling topography of finite holding it all up is crashing. Exponential weather extremes deal catastrophic blows sending our living world back into balance, and like 99% of all life up until now, we shall go extinct. Until that time, we can work towards restoration and rewilding, weaving the natural world back into daily routines and rituals. I’ll take a page from these mushrooms and keep on transforming personal passion into a thriving life in this abundant world.

Connectivity is the key to this thriving, and our own actions can branch out similarly, locally, with people we see doing good work that feeds everyone. None of the leaves hold back on the tree year round, refuse to compost into rich soil, that feeds the mother tree, who grows new leaves every year, knowing they will drop again in The Fall. Someone wrote a poem about this endless giving, as a metaphor for mankind to take and hold close. The mycelium is another teacher, one you have to look closely to see, but she too is ever giving, weaving death back into life, transporting inactive matter to active neighborhoods of complex mineral, vegetable, and animal relationships that make all life possible, please fold yourself right in.

Canopy is very important to the soil in this part of the landscape, abundant in hard wood trees. In big prairie country, the grasslands put down 20′ deep root systems that have similar exchanges of minerals to build better soil, hosting all manner of biological factories under the surface. Grasslands to have a more complex underground system of biodiversity and microbial action, but the forests have an above ground diversity that is just as important. Looking up in to the canopy of this hardwood landscape, I can see trees that have died, and are now hosting all kinds of life, including important nesting habitat for birds in standing snags. These dead wood towers are very important to the environment, and should be left alone if they are not a danger to personal property or a heavily used throughway. Eventually, mycilia will also inhabit these dead standing complexes, helping to deconstruct the wood and returning it to the soil.

As humans, we think we know so much about woods, soil, and water, but nature is so complex, layered, and reliant on community activity to thrive. When people take away one part of these systems, it has a cascading effect on the whole process. We took out the old growth forest, causing huge erosion of the precious topsoil in every forest we cut. Then we killed off all the predator animals, thus removing a keystone part of the life and death cycle in the animal world. Our livestock borough disease, that killed much of the deer and all the elk, as well as the over hunting we did to sell fur, meat, and antler to industrial processing. Not to mention our own sickness brought from Europe to The First Nation People, who died by the millions before the Dutch settlers and colonial expansion began. Not much of this history is taught today, but you can learn a lot by listening to the oral histories still spoken by the descendants of the tribes, that still live in these landscapes throughout America.

Nature is always trying to restore balance, and the mycological friends in these forests show the strength and determination of the natural world. The smaller relics of recovery are just as important as the big flashy conservation tree planting and wetland restoration, and it’s done passively by millions of unseen organisms still alive all around us. I say passively because we don’t have to pay to implant them, work to reestablish the mushrooms, or guide them in what they should do. Nature runs independently of us humans, and that’s incredible to sit with and watch. The more time you can spend sitting and watching, wandering and exploring, the closer to the natural world you become. In fact, we the people are part of the earth’s living system, we’ve just strayed from our original instructions to steward and tend. If you can make time each day to tend, even just observing what grows on around you, you are taking steps towards re-connection and restoration in your self. Once you rediscover the wildness within, you can embrace nature as a part of, rather than separate from your mother earth.

The wilderness of New England still carries many scars of human disruption- from canals to clearcuts, the land is deeply changed by all our extraction and greed, brought on by a complete disconnect from the living world. We spent so much time thinking about what we could change, we didn’t stop to think if we should. Now, the consequences are coming home to roost, and the human species faces monumental survival challenges related to the exponential change nature is now adapting towards, with or without us. Looking down at the rotting logs around me, I stop to thank nature for continuing it’s evolution, regardless of our monkey minds and ideas pushing in. We cannot sway nature too far off course. Learning to see her adaptability and change, embracing it and learning to be with nature, rather than against it, this is the best evolutionary understanding we have. Fresh air to breath cannot be artificially contrived- not in a sustainable way, fresh water cannot be synthesized- H2O is just that, and no lab can conjure it out of thin air. Safe soil to grow out food is not made en mass online. You cannot scroll through different soil options and pick what you like for your home. Terra firma is what it is, and though we learn to amend and cultivate, our tilling abuse and monoculture nightmares are still actively destroying the priceless landscape for the sake of industrial madness. Yet the mushrooms continue, trees grow and die, wind pushed over shallow roots in the diminished topsoil, and water carries off the nutrients needed to stabilize the banks and return the land to wetland recovery. What can we do to work with nature, to re-wild ourselves back into our roles as stewards and co-workers of mother nature?

The Oak Curtain Crust pictured above is a fascinating species of mushroom I had not noticed before. It was a beautiful sunny day to capture some pictures of this beautiful bloom. Almost always found on fallen oak logs, the strain originates in tropical regions, and has found it’s way up into New York’s hard wood forests over time. Think of all the wood we’ve shipped all over the world, and you’ll better understand how fungus has traveled to all parts of the world- for better and worse. Many fungal strains caused irrevocable damage to our native forests. In much the same way small pox wiped out native populations of people, fungal strains entered the hardwood forests of New England and wiped out keystone species like our beloved American Chestnut. On the West Coast where I live now, The Western White Pine is gone from our canopy too. Mushrooms are certainly important to forest health, but non-native varieties make short work of the trees when they are not resilient. Over time, American Chestnuts are being genetically modified to resist the blight, but very few native trees remain alive today to carry on resistance. A GMO Western White Pine strain has also been created, and I’m planting them on my land in hopes of helping a crucial tree return, but to what end? Forests adapt naturally, even with chaotic loss, new forms of forest evolve. It’s that human cause that we keep ignoring. Then we come up with our own solutions, manipulating genetics and guessing at what might work. Again, when we stop to think about what we’ve done, maybe we can start by stopping some of the destructive madness of our own actions, and being to accept the consequences. I reflect back to that wonderful speech by Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, we did not stop to think, we rarely do. Take a page from the mushrooms and sit with it for a bit longer. Imagine the outcome of careful thought and gentle reflection. We could reshape our world in the image of nature, rather than grasping at technology as a savior from what could be our own garden of eden.

Whenever I travel back to New England to visit family and friends, it’s like going to another country. The United States is a young nation on the world stage, but certainly well colonized by the Europeans that flocked here for a chance to start a new life, or in many cases, exploit the natural resources that were already devastated back in Europe. The history is deep- for colonial history, and though the first nation Abenaki had been living in the area for thousands of years, they had been hit with the early viruses that swept through The Americas when the Spanish first arrived a few hundred years before. That’s why the landscape along The Eastern Seaboard seemed empty when European colonists arrived. Millions of people had already died, leaving some of the best village sites available. The European ships found deep natural harbors, anchored, and came ashore to settle The New World without a clue as to who was already living there. Plymouth is on the south shore of Massachusetts, “At the Great Hill”, which is the meaning of the state’s namesake, also a tribe of First Nation people living in and around what is Boston today. The North Shore, where Rowley was founded in 1639, was the home of the Naumkeag people. They were marsh folks, enjoying the abundance of tidal mud flats, oak islands full of turkey, deer, geese, and ducks, as well as endless seafood from the shore and Atlantic Ocean beyond. They called the area “fishing place” or “eel-land”. Names that speak to the important food resources of the area and why they were settled by the tribes.

Today, Rowley, and the surrounding area where my family lives, is known as The Great Marsh. Most of the land around our home is protected conservation land, open to the public, allowing access to the tide flats for shellfish harvesting, kayaking, and walking trails to enjoy the splendor of this wild place. During some high tides, much of this area is flooded by brackish water, covering the causeways that we drive to get in and out from our dwelling. These access roads are ancient, with petrified wood below the rock and gravel used to maintain the county road today. In the 1600-1700s, the area was drained by tenacious farmers who wanted to cut and harvest the marsh grasses to feed livestock and thatch buildings. You can still look at aerial views of the landscape here to see the drainage canals and ditches cut through the marsh to keep the land dry enough to drive carts onto, though draft horses wore wooden mud shoes to keep them from sinking in the mud.

When the tides are up, like after the full moon on my recent visit, we try to time our entrance and exit from the marsh to avoid flooding. Still, an adventure through the tides as they change can happen, and that’s why my parent’s drive cars with high clearance. In rare cases, the tides are too deep for any vehicle, thus you have to wait out the flooding on whatever side you’re caught on. Luckily, tides are predictable, so we’re rarely stuck. Watching the water slowly cover the fields, mudflats, and causeway is a meditation of sorts. The water pours over the landscape slowly, but within half an hour, the grass is gone, and a glass mirror of liquid reflects sky. What a magical moment, ending as quickly as it started as the tide changes, and the waters head back out to sea. Our home sits at the edge of this transition zone, and, though my step-father did stay on the land during The 1991 Perfect Storm, he was not concerned, even when the waves were breaking ten feet from the door. Our little island in the marsh is over twelve feet above sea level, with another barrier island further out, sheltering us from the full force of Atlantic storms.

I’ve never been strongly connected to Ocean or shore spaces, but our family home in Rowley is a beautiful place to visit and take in. Sitting in the living-room watching the tides go in and out is a fun past time in our home. With a book in my lap, I read, pausing occasionally to take in the changing landscape around me. In an afternoon, the view will go from golden fields of slat hay to an inland sea, pushing rack up onto the edges of raised oak islands, the trees a testament to enough shore for sustained roots down into the thick marine clay. In the next 50 years, this whole area will succumb to rising sea levels, but for today, the house is safe, and our little island in the marsh remains a haven for family and friends. Below is the view from my reading perch, looking out when the tide is out, and when it’s in and flooding.

These tidal islands are full of mystery, and exploring them can be a challenge, because they are covered in poison ivy, ticks, biting flies, and sink holes out on the mud flats. You can be walking along on the grassy plane, then suddenly fall into a cut through the marsh from draining, which was covered by the long grass that tends to fold over after the floods. It’s such a mysterious place, Lovecraft wrote a short story about the area, using the marsh as a menacing presence over the small fictional town of Innsmouth. Haunting tails abound, and indeed, one of the unfortunate women who was hanged as a witch in famous Salem, came from Rowley, and the marsh. Margaret Scott had married a struggling marsh farmer, who later died, leaving her destitute with her brood of starving children. She would stand out on Rout 1, the first highway and toll road in America, begging passers by for alms and charity. If they refused her, she would curse at them, which was later used against her as testimony to her wickedness as a servant of the devil. Hang her for the inconvenience of being poor and having hungry mouths to feed.

The Great Marsh is no place to be caught on foot in bad weather, and if you don’t pay attention to the tides, you might find yourself marooned on one of the little oak islands for hours. Wading in can be very dangerous, with rip currents pulling you out to sea, thick mud to hold you fast in the flats, and sharp shellfish cutting at your shoes and legs as you trudge through the pungent sulfur smelling sludge. I’ve explored these muddy expanses with and without chest waders, and many do ford the marsh to harvest some of the best clams, oysters, and mussels available. Because the marsh is protected, it’s waters remain healthy, with little agricultural runoff, and no industrial waste to jeopardize the health of the place. There is a local oyster-man who has established rafts of cultivated shellfish for commercial sale. We are excited to support his venture, as shellfish filter and clean the marshes, making the landscape healthier for wildlife and people. The marsh is an important flyway for many birds on migration, and wildlife refuges are established throughout the marsh to protect vulnerable species. There is still some well regulated hunting, but only archery for deer and turkey. The Marsh has some of the best black duck hunting in the state, and, with permission, our family lets hunters come through on the weekends during the season. Dogs are required to fetch the birds out of the muddy flats.

Pictured above is the high tide mark from the back porch of the house. The water is quite close, but no surf crashes, just a slow seep of tidal flats soaking up to the edges of the rack, where phragmites reeds mark the edge of brackish flow. The mature hardwood trees also signal the edge of freshwater growth, and I did not notice any major losses due to rising ocean levels- yet. As I said before, inevitably, this are will one day be uninhabitable, but for now, it’s a spectacular place to visit and enjoy. I recommend The Rough Meadows if you do plan a visit, this Audubon stewarded trail system offers clearly marked routs through the marsh to keep you safe. The area is full of marsh views, oak forest expanse, and wonderful birding. Just make sure to check for ticks when you are done- and don’t stray from the paths unless you want to encounter some poison ivy- trust me, I learned the hard way more than once!

So much gratitude to The Chandler Family for making The Great Marsh accessible to the public, protecting the habitat, and seeing a clear vision of conservation and public use hand in hand. Acknowledgment of the original people who lived and tended this place- and their legacy, which continues today. Let us not forget that the First Nation People continue to live and thrive around us, and we, as guests in their homelands, can offer respect, support, and space to listen and learn about the places we now also call home. Thank you to the marsh, it’s beauty, lessons of change, and rewilding. It will always be a special place to come home to.

These are a forgotten fruit in many planned orchards, but I’m here today to encourage you to take a second look at Cydonia oblonga. I’ve planted three in Mom’s Orchard, and this year (3 since planting) they produced their first crop of fruit. My geese shook two off early, I picked one while it still had a lot of fuzz, and the majority I waited until they lifted easily off the branch. This is how I judge most of my fruit, though you can pick early to cold store into full ripeness, thus prolonging the fruit’s life and freshness. Still, I find picking when the fruit is ready to let go brings the best flavor and texture from the fruit, from apples to pears, and even these quinces. My first crop was modest in number, but generous in size of fruit. These are eating quinces, selected to grow large and sport a hefty flesh to seed ratio, great for slicing and dicing into salads, pies, and jellies. My first recipe is a classic quince “cheese”. This is the only way I had ever experienced quinces, but it was a dreamy flavor and texture adventure that I was excited to repeat.

Quinces have a generous natural pectin, which, with a little reduction and sugar, makes a wonderful jello like block of sweet fruit that you can slice and serve, usually as part of a charcuterie board with cheeses and crackers. This amazing fruit tree comes to Washington State and this little orchard spot from a local nursery, but the historical roots of the Quince begin in Iran’s Hyrcanian forests. Their homeland is temperate lowland broad-leaf forests on the south end of The Caspian Sea. The Puget Lowlands of Western Washington are similar conditions, though evergreen dominate, our orchard is broad-leaf dominate, and the soil is amended to suit the fruit bearing verities, which all require more dolomite lime, compost, and leaf mold debris. All of which are mixed and well rotted before application. The Quince had thrived in our soil, and likes a dryer summer. It took off as soon as it was transplanted with it’s root stock three years ago. The abundance of these trees speaks to the health of our soil, and the great conditions for this cultivar.

Above are two different types of Quince, with the larger one being from my eating variety. I say eating lightly, because, through I do love the raw taste, for many, it’s too astringent, but I liked the strange taste of my quince raw. The smaller one is from a different tree on another property across town. I don’t know it’s age or care, but all the fruit gifted me from this tree was this smaller size. I ended up processing them using a grater, rather than trying to cut them up. The core can be a little difficult to cut around as you are learning, and with smaller fruit, it’s just not worth the coring effort. It is recommended that quinces are cooked for best flavor, and I agree. This fruit has such a floral scent, along with a texture mixing pear and apple. The flavor is subtle, citrus with sweet rose water, or a hint of caramel. Something almost ancestral comes out of the tasting, I was enchanted at the start, and found that many quince recipes come from The Iberian Peninsula, and specifically Basque country.

Channeling some ancestral tasting, I continued dicing and slicing, then boiling and blending, ending up with a puree that went into molds to set overnight. The cheese should be firm like jello, but mine did not cook long enough, so even after a few days of sitting in the fridge, the liquid was still too viscus to set- I had not boiled down long enough. The only answer was a trip to the dehydrator. After which, I cut the flat fruit leather into pieces to go back into the fridge and freezer for future enjoyment. The sugar will keep the fruit stable, like a jelly or jam- which I could have made too, but I wanted something firm like the cheese. Net year, I’ll know to cook things a little longer. If you don’t have time for all this processing, you can grate the fruit off after peeling and freeze- that’s easiest with the smaller varieties. I did do that with the gifted fruit, and will look forward to making a small single loaf of cheese later this winter. Next fall, I’ll look forward to another wonderful harvest and some added experience in working with this unique orchard friend.

So much thanks to the abundant trees that gift us these sweet treats at harvest time. Thank you to all the people who carried these cuttings out of The Middle East, and all over the world for humanity to enjoy. Gratitude to the soil here in Washington, accepting this far flung grafted cultivar, and supporting it’s growth on this farm. May future generations have access to this food source and share in the bounty of yummy quinces!

Valley loves out woodland adventures, and shows me where all the good rolling scent spots are while we wander through stream buffer groves at The Snoqualmie Tree Farm near North Bend Washington. On a cloudy afternoon, the rains held off long enough for us to check for some local fungi in our friendly forests. Though the tree farm is an active timber plantation, there are some areas where the machines are kept back just far enough to allow some older substrate and buried old growth legacy come together to offer a little gimps of what could be if the forest was intact. Though this whole area was clear cut at least twice, more recent setback laws have begun to protect certain token areas in the plantation- specifically stream buffers, which prevent erosion in our salmon streams. Thank you fish for protecting some of the forests.

In these less trampled upon soils, mushrooms abound, and I tried to capture a few photos of the unique things growing on in these thin strips of ecological protection. A pair of M. epipterygia brave the forest floor in golden splendor. I love mycena for being small, but colorful. They span the pigment spectrum from turquoise blue to flamingo pink and are often overlooked because they are small. No, you can’t seat them, but you can take a moment to look closely at their nature and makeup to appreciate a fine specimen of mycological diversity on the forest floor. Another potential rare find is some Cortinarius rubellus or deadly webcap. I’m not 100 percent sure, but they certainly look like them. Note Cortinarius is a huge genus under the family name Cortinariaceae. I label mushrooms under this heading if they have particular gill structure and cap shape, but it’s often hard to get to a particular genus, and I’m making a best guess for this encounter.

Sorry when the pictures are so blurry, I’m using my phone camera on uneven ground in a wet environment. I’ve never claimed to be a photographer, so my apologies, but you can see the general shape, color and big gills on this cluster of fruit. Remember, a mushroom is the blooming fruit of the mycelia, the root of the fungus, which is within the sub-strait, and the body of the fruiting mushroom you see above ground. Under the soil, the real magic of a mushroom’s powers are at work, breaking down tough wood chemical structures into digestible soil for the surrounding vegetation, that’s why mushrooms are so important, they break down debris to free up nutrients in the soil, and transport it to the roots of living plants to digest. Without the mushrooms work, none of the valuable nutrients in things would get back to the soil for more growth in living material. The cycle cannot continue without fungal friends doing the breakdown work so the nutrients can be restructured for the plants to use again. Thank you mushrooms!

Valley also helped me take a peek at the work going on underground. We didn’t have to do any digging, an overturned tree had lifted it’s roots and the thin layer of topsoil to reveal what goes on underground. A compacted root ball testifies to the hard glacial compaction just under the surface of this forest. The trees have shallow roots, which topple the tall masts easily once surrounding forests are clear cut. This leaves trees that once stood together standing alone in strong seasonal winds, which blow them down and create lucrative insurance claims for the tree farm. Under these trees we took a look at the soil layers and some mycelia working to connect the forest in a highway of nutrient rich transport lines. That’s the white looking webs in the photo below.

This new soil layer, with the mycology and tree rootlets, is only a few inches thick. That’s an important truth in these legacy timber stands- the soil erodes away with every cutting, leaving rocky compaction for the future GMO plantings. That’s why the tree farms now spread treated sewage from the city in younger thinning- there’s not enough nutrients left to grow our timber trees, that’s part of why the industry is pressing in on the few uncut areas of our American forests left. We are allowing old growth to be cut in Alaska, because not enough people see what’s going on up there. But here’s a quick satellite view, so you can see the activity from the comfort of your own screen at home. Welcome to The Tongass National Forest, where active logging continues, though there are Roadless Rules to “protect” this space. It’s not a place where a lot of people have eyes on things, but Alaska want’s you to know it’s being logged. All these active logging operations are taking what’s left of the soil and clean water through catastrophic erosion, which comes after clear cutting.

Oh, and only a few people- literally 50-60 folks, are employed through this timber grab in our National Forests, even less people profit from the sale of said timber, and in many cases, our tax dollars are actually subsidizing it, meaning we don’t get any money back for cutting this old growth. Hunters and anglers join the fight against logging these national forests, so it’s not just a woke argument people. Please pay attention. The United States has some of the greatest public lands on earth, and we don’t often think about how special that access really is. If you’re wondering, it’s very hard to find statistics on public land in Europe. About 8% is public in Great Briton. Nordic countries allow a lot of public access, but not public ownership. The continent is hard to translate- public access and right to roam– as in, pass through but not linger is more the vibe. Only The United States has the kind of truly public lands of any nation in the world, and we constantly turn a blind eye to the practices of logging, mineral extraction, and oil pumping that goes on within these lands that belong to us, the people. The current administration, 2025, is also questing to sell off those public lands into private hands, and you’re not hearing about that in the news.

Back in my own woods near home, I uncover the legacy of past trees that now form the base of these younger, commercially planted GMO timber trees. The decomposing roots of an ancient forest still nurture these baby trees, helping to prop up a grove of monoculture. An old red cedar, with fire scars remains in situ beneath a toppled commercial fir who’s little rootlets dangle above a 6″ native Douglas fir root that’s still holding sediment, even as it rots away. No new huge root systems are coming in to replace what’s lost. We keep cutting the young stuff now, never allowing a forest’s ecology to recover. How can anyone possibly call this practice sustainable? But industry experts do– our forests are working forests, bringing the next generation of forest products to a box store near you. So we just keep planting, growing, and cutting- taking the majority of the biomass out of the forests, and replacing it with treated sewage- that will work right? ha ha ha

Ok, back to observations and a little less dooms day rant. As I walked through the intact canopy, I noticed something glistening and white in a shady spot of the forest grove and though it was snow. Taking a closer look, I discovered that it was not snow, but a collection of grapple which had not yet melted from a storm the day before. I captured that storm on film at the farm, and share it below to give an example of what was coming down that day, even at EEC Forest Stewardship. These frozen drops are too small to be called hail, but ice none the less, and slow melting at high elevations in the shade. This weather event has become more common in the last decade, and I think it’s a hint of things to come in our area. What if one day these events drop real hail instead of friendly grapple? Our weather is only supposed to get more extreme at Climate Change continues. What will happen to our billion dollar fruit industry when this frozen rain turns to baseball sized carnage? I’ll continue to be charmed by these small pellets, and hope we don’t see the softball sized chaos that sometimes falls in Texas and Oklahoma, where I grew up.

Back at the tree farm, I took a closer look at the soil makeup under the toppled trees on the edge of the stream buffer. The geology of The Central Cascades is a fascinating topic, and I’m always trying to untangle the layers of history locked in geologic time. Under this particular fallen giant, I found a variety of rocks, clay, sand, and ash that are typical in an active logging area. Glaciers brought in most of the gravel, so I can spot conglomerates of granite and basalt from volcanic activity on our Ring of Fire, as well as charcoal and ash from the burning that was done after clear cutting in the early 1900s. It was though then, that burning the clearings to open up the space for agriculture was the best practice for the time. It leaves a legacy of scorch marks on old growth stumps, and thin layers of burned materials on the landscape throughout Western Washington. I find this layer of incineration at EEC too. The sand and sand stone found here reminds us of the seashore, which is only about 30 miles from our forest location, and extended much further inland when the earth was enjoying a warmer period. These sandstones also predate the techtonic uplift that brought this landscape to the 3,000′ of elevation it stands at today. Thus, a shallow shoreline could have been here millions of years ago, forming the beach that later became this sandstone. The looser sand might be part of that beach, or could be volcanic in nature. These are mysteries for me, but I hope, with some time and research, I can learn more about how sand came to this forest and ended up in these layers beneath the trees.

I’m actively crumbling some of the sand and ash from the underside of the root ball of this fallen tree. This is sand and ash, not forest topsoil. There is little accumulated biomass to create soil in this timber plantation. Old growth forests take thousands of years to build up enough topsoil to support themselves and remain rooted. It is speculated that tens of feet of topsoil were lost after initial clear cutting actions in these forests over one hundred years ago. Today, we can see that legacy continue every time we cut again. The landscape cannot support trees without soil, and the treated sewage will not be enough to replace the trees take and sold by the board foot in mills to this day.

Remember, this is all in a stream buffer forest that’s been left for preservation within the timber plantation. The ecologists require these buffers, by law, but they are flimsy, and the forest along these streams is not natural or healthy. At least it’s a green patch in a brown scalping. Here’s the above view of the little grove I’m learning in.

It’s not even extended along the entire stream that comes through. To the right and left of this grove, the water is still on the surface and running, but has no protective buffer. Why? I’m not sure, but I can guess that no one cutting the trees really cared. Who is going to see or comprehend this as an issue when so much of the world is on fire else where? Who among us will challenge the abuse? Who has time? At least you’re all reading this and taking it in. At least someone is showing you, or trying to. This is the slow death of our forests in real time. It’s not just the trees disappearing, its the soil, clean water, and countless layers of habitat vanishing in an instant of commercial consumption. We can’t put it back, not for generations to come. Where are we allowing forest to grow old again? Certainly not in these industrial plantations, and don’t let them try to convince you otherwise. Oh, they do replant, and put in more trees than they took, but then thin them out, spray the forest with chemicals, and mono-crop the place, still calling it forest, but it’s a shell of its former self, just visit The Hoh Rainforest to compare.

There are legacy stumps reminding of us of what once was, scattered all over the land of The West Coast, specifically The Temperate Rainforest of The Pacific Northwest. Those stumps bare witness to the great, complex forest that once was, and could be again if we would just let Mother Nature tend her wilderness, which in turn, protects our drinking water, food crops, and habitation on this planet, within the bounds of her finite resources. Below is a pair of stumps in the buffer, a red cedar and Sitka spruce, entwined together, as most of the forest floor is, these elder trees left their bones for future young saplings to grow up from, as the young Douglas Fir is doing, along with hemlocks, alder, and other seedlings taking root in the less disturbed edges of this stream buffer. These little strips may be small, but they harbor the remnant of young seedlings from the native trees that once stood here. I hope that these token places are allowed to remain less altered, and ultimately the home of future old growth groves, even a few ancient trees are better than none.

Gratitude for the lessons in survival and abundance, even in places where wide spread deprivation practices continue in the form of depleted ecology and removed biomass from the forest. Still, native trees grow, and mushrooms return. May the waters continue to flow, and the soils grow in community with intact forests, restoration stewardship, and science that shows the long term effects of resource removal, and how leaving the resources in their place makes a better world for you and me through the generations to come.

Often, when visiting the active commercial timber industry near my home, dramatic transitions from row crop trees to desolate clear cuts across the hillside. These edges are stark and formidable. What goes on each side of these patches is predictable. Near streams, there are a few older trees, but mostly third or forth growth, planted in the 1970s or later, after stream buffers were finally introduced to save what was left of our water table after a century of apocalyptic extraction across this landscape. Truly, corperate greed stripped the whole west coast of its forests, where the largest trees in the world still grow, as token individuals, with a few park groves for toursists, and one or two National Parks, where the landscape was still stripped by early colonial extraction for economic addiction we’re still not facing as a Democratic society today, but the forest, no where was I- oh yes, extraction. Our need for paper products, cheap pulp based furniture- your IKEA is old growth from Lithuania and Romania. I’ve seen the videos of 4′ diameter hard woods being trucked into pulp mills that ship raw materials to IKEA manufacturers. They’re opening up another store just up the street- let’s go get some Swedish Meatballs!

I’ve never been in one of those stores, and hope you all stop going if you can, because the belief in bulk super stores as non-invasive to the planet’s destruction is long gone. I’m still shopping at COSTCO- it’s local. Ha! Just be aware that nothing is cheap- it’s just out of site, at the other end where I’m standing in clear cuts that stretch up and down ridge-lines just at the edge of sight. You can see the cities that are consuming, just at the horizon. Sprawl has eaten away at the forests from Puget Sound to The Issaquah Highlands. The map below is a great example of the edges of wilderness continually pushed back to make room for more human development. Washington state is the most populated state after California, with the least amount of land compared to its western counterparts. Seattle is the largest city, and it’s completely developed as a major metropolitan area, with tendrils grasping vital connection routs of trade and transport along I90- the only east west highway out of Western Washington. The city of Issaquah was bound by landscape, and even still, headed up into the hills to continue development. I’ve driven up onto the steep neighborhoods on the west side of town, and I would not want to be up there in the great earthquake that’s due any day now. The Highlands took a plateau of commercial timber land and made it into a heck of a development, doubling the city’s population in one swoop. Yay tax base! Woe traffic.

The little town of Snoqualmie had a similar problem, and didn’t want to build in the flood plane, so they went up on a ridge and plopped a whole new town which is still building sprawling apartment complexes and town houses. This is the west side of The Snoqualmie River, where more commercial timber lands lay. All of the old growth temperate rainforest is gone, and with the onset of poured concrete foundations and petroleum blacktop roads, won’t be growing back for centuries to come. In the map below I lay out my home in red, the tree farm where active timber harvesting is going on in pink, and the yellow area is fast developing what’s left of wilderness in the buffer between monumental urban concrete, and forest- not natural forest, but recognized tree production and our watershed.

That purple area holds Tolt Reservoir, Seattle’s drinking water. It’s also the water table replenishment for all the wells in the yellow area, including EEC Forest Stewardship. The tree farm uses herbicides to keep its young conifer plantations free of deciduous plants that might compete with the timber. Then, as the commercial forest matures, they thin the plantings and spread bio solids (treated sewage) to add nutrients to encourage the forest growth. Most of the biomass is taken out at each cutting- being the timber board feet sold for profit, and must be replaced to keep soil for more plantings. The historical 10,000 acre commercial tree farm has been in operation as a row cut plantation for 150 years. Only in the last 50, has chemical herbicide been used, along with GMO trees. In the last 20 years, biosolids have been added continuously- along with the heavy metals and prescription drugs that can’t be affordably removed from the city’s sewage. These treatments on the land will end up in our water, the soil, and us.

The transition zones between these areas is hard to see on the ground, but from satellite, you can see the high density development on the west, fade to agricultural centers in The Snoqualmie Valley, where Carnation and Fall City are, into commercial timber plantations, which are being harvested quite heavily in the higher elevations right now- look for the brown splotches far east along the reservoir at the top, and down through two main alpine lakes- Calligan and Hancock. The following pictures of clear cuts and groves is from the south part of that lineup- across from the ridge where the popular Mt. Si resides. The word “Junction” in the middle of both maps, is the heart of the tree farm. This is where the chemicals and sewage are being spread, and it will come down the hillsides and into our streams, rivers, and ocean shores. I don’t understand why we think there is any disconnect, but perhaps hard edges make us thing there is a separation.

The southern most part of the tree farm is a little less known to me, so I’ve taken some time to explore this tip of the forest, where the access road was recently taken out. There is still a way to drive around, but I wanted to take the walk in and enjoy a less accessible area of the plantation. It was cut up, yet there were still some groves left, mainly along wetland areas in the low spots, which should have larger setbacks, in my opinion, and I’ll explain why further on in this reflection. The logging roads are still open enough to make walking easy. So I hiked up the hillside from SLC Lake’s outflow and came over the ridge-line into what I knew would be a recently logged off section of the landscape. It’s always hard to get full pictures of the vast scale in these harvest terrains, but in the satellite image above, it’s the brown spot to the right of Ernie’s Grove. It’s almost the size of Old Town Snoqualmie. Three ridges are cleared, and I walked about two miles through it and still didn’t get to the far side. This is typical now in cutting method, and to their credit, the plantations get new trees in ASAP, then spray, then spray again before the saplings establish fully.

In this bottom panorama, everything behind me not in this photo (except the edges) is clearcut. Before us in the landscape is a recently replanted stand. The older trees below are on a small stream. They are second growth, and span about 50′, offering the bare minimum buffer of 25′ on each side of the year round water source. With only 25′ of forest on either side, the taller trees are left vulnerable to windfall, and so, the edges of all these buffers are usually lost in storms. I’ve seen it enough on this plantation to know it’s common knowledge, yet the buffers remain minimal and to not account for windfall enough. I went down into one of these buffers to mushroom hunt. Intact forest is the best place to find boletes, and I was hopeful some might be popping up in these buffer groves. I’m at about 3200′ of elevation, so the dominate tree planted in these forests is Noble Fir. Looking along streams and creeks is good, because you know there is a year round source of dampness for the mycology to thrive in. This lichen was also happening in the forest, and I was struck by the light pink something pinning off it. I believe it is in the family Icmadophilaceae.

Further on along the edge between the stream buffer and clearcut, I began to notice a familiar sight along the stark barren transition zone- a lot of trees were toppled over in the same direction on the edge of the small woods. When a whole forest of trees is cut, any left standing are suddenly vulnerable to the elements. Where a community of trees once stood together to bare the winds and rains, the cover is gone, and those left on the edge of nature’s fury cannot take the blustery winds and soft wet soil, saturated by runoff form the bare earth in the clear-cuts. This hearkens back to the earlier comment in this writing, where I think more buffer should be allocated. Wind-blow is a think in the timber industry, and can be accommodated for in cutting plans, but apparently, it does not matter in the stream buffer zones. Heck, the plantation can file for insurance claims with windfall, so why not encourage it? That’s what appears to be happening in our tree farm folks, so file that one away with the other “how to exploit local natural resources for profit”. Our wold banking group that wrote the referenced windfall article above really knows how to exploit our environment for money.

Why would the timber industry try to protect these buffer forests to keep the wild water clean and safe? Because people are not up there thinking about it, or seeing the destruction, so they get away with it. It may be just a few trees in the big picture, but it’s also our water, soil, and future survival. These “stewardship” practices are doing mother nature no favors. It’s about dollars and cents- which we can’t eat, drink, or breath. My photos don’t fully capture the destruction of windfall in this small stream buffer stand of trees. In another few decades, as we continue to lower the water table with our overuse of aquifers, the stream here will go seasonal, and the buffer zone will be eliminated, so these trees will get cut again in another generation, and no one will know or care that the stream is gone. We’ll still be buying cheap furniture and ordering more cardboard delivery packages with impunity. Hurray for same day delivery!

It difficult to write some times, with the writing already on the wall for all to see- if you look, but I’ll keep on observing, wandering, and embracing edge spaces in an attempts to be one witness in the woods. These are not pristine groves, or romantic old growth spots, but they are the edge right next to my home, where abusive industrial practices play out behind a thin green screen of forest products. You the consumer will keep on buying what you cannot trace back to the source, and the tree farm will keep offering jobs to low wage earners while plucking the last meat from the bones of our ecological home. More sewage and herbicides in everyone’s water. Just make sure you put your forests into legacy stewardship, for the future logging generations to come- machine operators, not lumberjacks- just so you know. It’s amazing to witness how much we want to romanticize some Paul Bunyan Americana. Good old boys slinging saws and axes, but it’s logging trucks and machine harvesters running rampant in our industrial forests today. The gravel roads are the legacy, and that’s where to find some good fungus, so let’s go!

While walking along the logging roads, especially on the more shaded parts, I saw some wood ear fungi, related to morel. This black specimen- a less common color in the fungal kingdom, is edible, but not choice. You’ll most likely encounter it on gravel roads around Western Washington, but I do have some fruiting up from a large leaf maple fall at EEC. Many cultures use this fungus medicinally. I just enjoy finding it on the trail and taking note of where flushes occur. Since it needs wood, I think bark and logs buried under the gravel roads host the mycelia. Substrates can be hard to sort, making some identification difficult. All mushrooms have required substrates to bloom, and knowing those habitat limitations helps with ID. Mushrooms thrive on the edges of decay, from leaves to rotting trees, these fungal fascinations break down harder chemical compounds, returning them to the soil for other vegetation to grow from. Without mushrooms, our forest floors would be deep in undigested organic matter, unable to release its minerals back into soil, thus, no new soil would be made, and plants would find it very difficult to grow.

As I continued along the edge of the road though the clear cuts, another familiar fungal friend was up and waving hello from the side lines. Clavarioid fungi look like corals, which, in these dense lichen, moss beds, and liverworts do look a lot like reefs. Their bright colors also add a splash in that sea of green. These mushrooms were blooming along the edge of the road cut, under the canopy skirt of fir trees. I believe these mushrooms also like a little light, and need edges where light can come through the trees, hitting the forest floor. Many corals are edible, but not considered a culinary must, so I usually leave them where I find them, appreciating the sculpture park vibe these unusually shaped beings offer in back country settings.

Regardless of what’s growing on in the soil, mushrooms will abound. They can break down diesel fuel, harmful bacteria, and even filter out unwanted heavy metals. Perhaps they can help in mitigating the sludge and chemicals spread through our woods, wetlands, and watersheds by industrial timber companies to scrape what’s left of our natural resources from the landscape. Mushrooms will thrive in most environments, even the polluted ones. But don’t think mushrooms are a cure all. Once they break down harmful chemicals, they store that material in their own flesh, and when that breaks down, the materials go back into the soil too. Unless to dig them out and remove them, the toxins are still where the mushroom fruited. Even if the chemicals are neutralized, they are still present, and, like many forever chemicals, they don’t go away.

If people wish to claim responsibility, which is most unusual, we could recognize these forever chemicals and try not to buy them, or produce them. But REI still sells gore-tex, so we’re still buying and releasing forever chemicals into our environment to keep dry. Oh, outdoor box store is having a sale- let’s go! I want matching rain pants, ok! These chemicals don’t just hurt nature- as though people were separate- it hurts us too. Here’s something to chew on- these forever chemicals are in the sewage, because they are in us, and the biosolids being spread in our forests, are also spread in our farmland. It’s a win win for chemical producers and food production- no wait. We the people are getting cancer! I wish RFK would focus on this for his health care reform, then we might get some where in making America healthy again. If our soils and water found in edge spaces, near our development and sprawl, are not cared for, the pollution we’re pumping out, will wash right back in to haunt us, like London’s Great Stink. With childhood vaccines on the wane, serious illness could soon be stalking our own quiet neighborhood streets, taking us back to the great times of cholera and measles. I’m not kidding- measles is in King County Washington in 2025.

We’ll let this edge crawling ladybird walk us out- there’s always a bright spot somewhere, and in this clear cut, I found a lone ladybird making its way up a second cut stump. This bright red glimmer on a grey deadpan view brought tidings of nature’s restorative way, reminding me that the natural world will recover from whatever out little monkey minds come up with, though we may not survive the evolution. Bugs, mushrooms, and the weather will persist, long after you and I return to the soil from whence we came. Gratitude to all the lessons in nature guiding us. May we have the time and patience to listen, observe, and take in the great world all around us. To the new growth, and old spoke of that wheel on fire rolling down the road.