Ep. 11 - From Extraction to Stewardship: What Forests Taught Me About the Legal System

The Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island are just packed with life.

In these coastal rainforests, it just feels like everything's alive.

The trees, you know, the forest floor and the trees are just dripping with moss.

Ferns are growing seemingly everywhere.

Dead trees and logs seem to be just immediately consumed by new life.

At times, it almost feels like you can see the forest growing in real time.

It's incredible.

And yet, each community we stopped in seemed to have some story of ecological disaster.

I won't name them all, that's not the purpose of this podcast, but I wanted to name a few examples throughout this episode just to help connect these reflections I was having as we were on the road.

In one instance, we stopped at a place, I believe it was called Otter Rock on the Oregon coastline, and we stopped thinking we could see some sea otters.

And one of the first signs or placards we read when we got out of the van explained that the fur trade had wiped out the local sea otter population 100 or so years ago and that it's never recovered and there's no sea otters at Otter Rock.

And that was a pattern the whole way.

Sea otters, orcas, whales, eagles, osprey, California condor, salmon, rivers and waterways, old growth forests.

Everywhere we went, there was some version of the same story of loss.

a species pushed all the way to extinction or near extinction, ecosystems completely destroyed, forests clear-cut, rivers and waterways poisoned, communities displaced.

And it was just really amazing to me that a place so full of life and beauty could carry so much death and loss and destruction at the same time.

On our last day in Sequoia National Park, we hiked through a grove of sequoias that had been clear cut.

I believe it was in the late 1800s.

One of the trees had a placard, one of the stumps had a placard by it that explained that it was the tree that had been cut down just for the World Fair and had been shipped to the East Coast and I think to London and to be put on display as an exhibit in the World's Fair.

And it was so tragic to stand next to these just massive trunks of trees that were thousands of years old that were cut down in a matter of weeks by a few humans trying to make a buck.

And I don't say that lightly.

There was something deeply sad about standing there.

I could just feel the loss.

It's really hard to explain the size of these trees and how old they are and the recklessness and carelessness of people coming through and cutting them all down.

couldn't understand how you wouldn't at least save one or that someone didn't just say hey maybe we just leave one of these alone every single one was cut down and it it's hard to comprehend how much lumber one of those trees produces so that it just feels so excessive and greedy to take it all And as we moved north, as we passed through areas of active logging and actually saw forests being clear-cut or that had just been clear-cut, I couldn't help but think about systems on a broader scale.