When I was small, my parents bought 126 acres of timberland, much of it old- and first-growth, in southern Oregon. They also bought a log truck, a small sawmill, enough seeds to begin a well-stocked garden, eight chickens and a rooster.

The first year, the focus was on clearing enough land for a home, a home that my dad built by hand from trees cut and milled on our property. In our old family albums, there are pictures of Dad standing in the snow with a hammer putting together the frame of our house. I’m beside him holding the nails.
For the majority of that year, we didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. Our water came straight from the creek, and Mom hung an old railroad lantern from an exposed beam in the half-completed kitchen for light.
The next year, with the house nearly finished, my parents began selectively logging the land they had bought. We would all venture out together to find the perfect tree to cut into specialty pieces of lumber for sale. Once that tree was found, Mom and Dad would go back alone to figure out how to bring it down and back to the mill. It was hard, dangerous work, and it was beautiful.
A few years later, facing mounting debt and a poor school system, my parents sold the land to a family who pledged never to log it. Then, they put my brother and me in the back of the Isuzu Trooper they had recently traded in the old Vanagon for, and headed for five-day-a-week workweeks and an education system they felt confident in. It was a trade-off that to this day they say was for the best, but I’m not sure either of them really believes that. They loved that land like it was a child. It was part of their psyche and an integral part of how they defined themselves as humans.
Every day, as new anti-environmental legislation is passed through Congress, the battle between loggers and environmentalists continues. But in this war, both sides are losing, and perhaps only the government is winning.
When a timber sale is made on federal or state land, the money from the sale goes not to families, individual logging outfits or even private companies. It goes to the government, often to finance further stages of “healthy forest management.”
Last spring, I had the chance to spend some time at a tree-sit and also to spend a day with a local logging outfit as they cleared a hillside owned by a private corporation. Both groups were adamant that what they were doing was right, and both groups seemed to truly love the forest they were standing in.
As I spoke with the logging foreman about his crew, his family and his upbringing, I was struck with his compassion and knowledge not only of the land he stood on, but also of the forest policy being dictated in Washington, D.C. It’s very easy to say that loggers are anti-environmental, and probably some are, but many have spent their lives in the forest and they love it just as deeply as any activist. Just like me, they grew up there.