title: Ep 7: A Way Forward
author: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
contenttype: podcast
publication: Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars
published: 2020-10-02T20:29:32-04:00
sourceurl: https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/ep-7-a-way-forward/audio.mp3
word_count: 6237
Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community-funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join us over them, section member, with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news cycle with us. And listen to long-form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the Fresh Air Podcast from NPR and WHOY. Last time, on Timber Wars. This is a big forest reserve protected for the owl. Now an arson fire triggers a timber sale, becoin the phrase, light it and log it. You all don't want the media to know about this, is that what's going on? We are not going to be able to win a war of force against the state when they really decide they want to come in here. But what we can do is we can win a hearts and minds campaign. We can win the public relations campaign. They could have made this really painless, but they didn't want to. They wanted it to hurt. In September 2020, catastrophic wildfires erupted across the West Coast. It's at least 33 dead and dozens more missing. There are 62 large fires burning in California, Oregon and Washington state. Sadly, this is nothing new. It seems every year it sets a new record for the biggest fire yet. But this blew that record away. About every year for the last 10 years, we burn about 500,000 acres. This is Oregon Governor Cape Brown on CBS's Face the Nation. This year, this week alone, we burned over a million acres of beautiful Oregon. It was devastating to watch while we finished this series because the fires swept through so many of the places we visited. From the forest around Brighton Bush, where we began, to Mill City. I want to say about 9.30, 10 o'clock at night, I started hearing our fire whistle blow off from Intel. This is Tim Kirsch, the mayor of Mill City. And now telling people they're in their driveways, need to pack up and go or at least be ready to go and just, you know. In some ways, Mill City was lucky. The fire didn't push far into the city limits. But other towns didn't share that luck. This was the night of September 8th in Talent, Oregon. This town, Phoenix, Oregon, about 4,600 people also seemed to get out. And Fernow of flames as the beachy creek fire tore through the small town of gates. Even before the flames went out, the fighter ruptured about what or who was to blame. A fight that went up to the highest levels. President Trump renewed his stance Monday the California's wildfire crisis as due to the mismanagement of California's forests and not connected to climate change. Well, I think this is more of a management situation. On the other side, Trump's challenger, former vice president Joe Biden, focused on that thing Trump refuses to acknowledge. If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more America blaze? So if you're wondering whatever happened to the Timber Wars, how did they end? Well, the answer is they didn't. Over the past 25 years, the Timber Wars have evolved from a fight about what to do with all growth into a fight about what to do with the entire forest. And the stakes have only gotten greater because now we understand that these forests are central to the fate of our planet's climate. So with two sides dug in and time running out to make changes that will have any effect, what do you do? How do you build a bridge if it keeps burning down? From Oregon public broadcasting, I'm Aaron Scott, and this is Timber Wars. Hello, Aaron. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you, Boyd? I'm well. I hope I don't come off too much like a hillbilly. You know, we want to reflect people in whatever state they're in. So are you telling me I sound like a hillbilly now? This is Boyd Britain. He used to own a welding shop that did work for a lot of the logging companies in Mills in Eastern Oregon's Grant County. I'd do reach him by phone though, because he recently retired to Arizona. I got my great big belt buckle on right now. So you know, you can just picture that in your mind. Grant County is covered in dry forests of Pandorosa Pine, running along the slopes of the gently rolling blue mountains. Historically, logging was so big that Les Schwab started his tire empire here, outfitting all the loggers and sawmills. But then all that changed. The timber industry was just struggling horribly. We were losing mills. We were losing our greatest natural resource in which it was our people. They were leaving because there was no work. Remember how President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan was supposed to provide enough timber to keep the loggers logging in the mills milling? Yeah, well, it didn't work out that way. Environmental protests and court challenges continued to lock up the forests. There's all kinds of environmental stuff going on and everybody was hating each other and it got really, really nasty. Things got so contentious in Grant County. Boyd ran for County Commissioner in 2002 just to try and calm everyone down. Boyd won on a platform of civility. And the next year, he headed to a meeting to discuss the region's forest plan. So I go there with some of the timber guys, and probably 15, 20 people in this meeting, plus the forest service people, and they're talking about what's going on. And there's this lady in the back, and she's had some things to say. I asked Dad Bishop, I go, who the hell is that? And he goes, well, that's Susan Jane Brown. She's one of the kicks or button court all the time. So me being the shy person that I am, I went up and said, Susan Jane, my name's Boyd Britain, we need to talk. And he was flanked by a bunch of big, burly loggers. You know, hey, I hear you're the attorney that's kicking our button court, and that's not working for my community. It's not working for me. Susan Jane Brown is an attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center. She lives in Portland, but she'd head to Grant County to appeal timber sales in the Malier National Forest, which wasn't a comfortable place to be an environmentalist. I certainly was concerned about my safety at times. I had been run out of town before. I'd been tailgated by pickup trucks. I've had air let out of my tires, you know, that sort of thing. So that's what's going through her mind when this guy with his big belt buckle and even bigger mustache walks up to her. So his proposal took her by surprise. And we really want to bring you out there. We want to bring you out to the forest and I'll make sure to bring you back, which was very kind of him. Bring you back. It was a joke because both sides knew just how uncomfortable it might be for a young woman environmentalist to go out into the woods with a bunch of loggers whose timber she shut down. But I was willing to give it a shot. I mean, I'm pretty much willing to talk to anybody who wants to have a conversation as respectful about it. Susan Jane might have been just one woman in the woods, but she was anything but powerless. After President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, Republicans had countered with a salvage logging rider that opened up large swaths of old growth to a year of heavy logging. But then the tide reversed again. And this was a bit of an accident caused by something Clinton's team added to the plan, called Survey and Manage. It requires that whenever you go out and do timber harvest, particularly in old growth stands, you have to look, you have to survey for rare and sensitive species. And some of those species, when you find them, you got to buffer them. Remember how much loggers hated the spotted owl? Well, Survey and Manage gave environmentalist all kinds of critters to use in court, just like this spotted owl. We're talking red trebles, five kinds of salamanders, and 46 species of snails and slugs. It became the basis for litigating every single proposed timber sale. Which is why Jerry Franklin also hated Survey and Manage. Remember, he's the scientist who helped create the Northwest Forest Plan. The plan was groundbreaking because it created reserves where viable populations of all these species could live. That way we didn't have to worry about what creatures lived in the areas opened to logging. But with Survey and Manage, here we were back to counting individual species everywhere. You put up that timber sale, you're going to face lawsuits. It just became a constant nightmare. The overall effect was that environmentalists managed to take pretty much all the old growth off the table in Western Oregon and Washington. The Forest Service basically stopped even trying to sell it, and logging in Federal Forest dropped 80-90%. But environmentalists didn't stop there. With ancient forests and spotted owl territory protected, folks like Susan Jane set their eyes on the forests to the east of the Cascade Mountains. They weren't part of the Northwest Forest Plan, but they had a similar plan to protect big trees. The environmentalists said about fighting salvage logging, which still got an easy passback then, because it meant cutting trees that were damaged from things like insects or fire. We filed a number of lawsuits that challenged all of that salvage logging, and we won our cases, and so as a result, the forest was really shut down. So that's where things stood, when Susan Jane headed out to Grant County and loaded into a small bus with boydons and local loggers. After the course of three days, they visited the National Forest that Susan Jane had locked up, and then private forests to show her how things looked when folks could log selectively. Boyd's central argument was that forests need to be managed, and management means chain saws. Timber is a crop, and it grows back. That's one of the wonderful things about it. That's one of the things that the local people were just so up in arms about. You've got to be able to start taking care of it by cutting it. Susan Jane, however, was not convinced. And so it was highly emotional. Not that anybody screamed and yelled and stomped off or said mean names or anything like that, but it was clearly a lot of emotion on all sides. Nonetheless, by the end of the three days, Boyd asked to keep the conversation going. And Susan Jane agreed. They started holding meetings in the back room of a local restaurant. Boyd would invite folks from the community, and Susan Jane would bring some of the environmentalist she worked with. And in 2006, they made things official by starting a forest collaborative group named The Blue Mountains Forest Partners. But a name was about all they could agree on. Whatever we were together, it was a pretty clear line of deep-markation. And the environmentalist were on one side of the room, and the timber industry was on the other side of the room, and the forest service was just going to stand in the middle like what do you want us to do? Let's talk about the forest service for a second. Because by the time Susan Jane and Boyd started meeting, the agency wasn't quite the same thing it used to be. Up until the mid-90s, the forest service was mostly seen as a friend of the logging industry. Working hand in hand to get the cut out. But during the Clinton administration, it started to change. For the first time, a biologist, Jack Ward Thomas, was running the forest service. And he began to fill the ranks with other scientists to shift the agency from timber management to ecosystem management. But a lot of the timber ol' guard was still there, so pretty soon the forest service itself was an agency divided. And now neither side trusted it. We couldn't talk to one another. It was that bad, almost that poisonous. This is Mark Webb. He's a bit of a philosopher Woodsmann. He's got a PhD in philosophy from Notre Dame, and he works on the side as a contract tree cutter. He joined the collaborative a couple years into the process when he was the Grand County Judge. It's an elected position that essentially heads the County Commission. I characterize it as multi-cultural conversation. We say the same word, but we have different connotations, so we're speaking past one another. And it takes a lot of work to pin that down. It wasn't just that they had two different meanings, for words like, healthy forest. They actually saw two very different things, even when they looked at the same patch of trees. You know, I did at the time approach things with what we call Westside Eyes. You know, if you live on the Westside and you're used to the Douglas fir hemlock forest, and they're dense and they're big and they're wet, you come out here and it's not that. It's very dry. It's supposed to be open. You're supposed to have ponderosa pine in large and maybe a little dug fir. So looking at some of these stands, and I was like, I don't know, it looks kind of okay to me, where the local folks were like, this is so unacceptable. To localize, the forests were overgrown, which means full of fuel, waiting to go up and flames. So before they could find common ground, they needed to figure out how to see and talk about the forest in a shared way. And that involved two things. Let's find Conti. See something else. In August of 2019, I went along on one of the Blue Mountains forest partners monthly field trips because their first big breakthrough was the realization that they needed to get out of meeting rooms and into the woods. It's really beautiful, isn't it? The Indian out in the woods is not abstract. If you're in a room talking about, oh, well, we should cut these trees versus those trees. It's pretty abstract. If you're out in the woods, you're all looking at the same thing. You can actually touch the tree that you would want to log or you wanted to protect. The second thing they did was both sides committed to following the science. So they invited experts to tour the forest with them and talk about what exactly makes a forest healthy. What kind of why we're in this area is because it allows you to take in a lot of different stuff. Today's tour in the Malia National Forest is being led by the ecologist James Johnston. And here I'm channeling our good friends, Norm Johnston and Jerry Franklin. First focus on protecting and nurturing the big old trees, which usually involves, you know, aggressively thinning younger trees around them. Following the science gave them a shared language to talk about the forest. But it was also dangerous because it meant both sides had to be willing to change their beliefs. That may mean that I'm going to have to get OK with logging more trees. It may mean that the community has to get OK with more fire on the landscape. The scientists agreed with the locals. These forests were overgrown, although it was more from suppressing fire than not logging. To the collaborative worked with the forest service to design projects that focused on using both logging and prescribed fire to remove a lot of the small trees and clear out the duff and underbrush. The idea is that it makes the forest more resilient to wildfire, drought and climate change. They started out small but slowly worked their way up to bigger projects. Do you want to do it much more to see? Still one more stop. Do you want to keep moving? Yeah. OK. Follow me. Today, we're touring a couple of those sites. And the surprising thing is, now you hear the environmentalists saying, yeah, chainsaws. I like the fact that in the thinning units that are done by chainsaw, that we can actually go through and actually have an influence on how the species composition comes out. Pam Hardy is one of Susan Jane's colleagues. Because I think there's good evidence that the species composition has gotten way out of whack compared to where we were historically. And also compared to what this land is going to be able to support into the future. If you don't speak a collegeist, what that says is, they were starting to agree. These dry, east side forests need to be managed. But there was still an issue that was too hot to touch, salvage logging after fire. It came to a head six years into the collaboration. The parish cabin fire burned more than 7,000 acres in the Malier National Forest. To the collaborative tour the area, they walked through the burnt trees, the smell of charred wood still hanging in the air. Then they circled up at the side of the road to see if they could find some agreement on what to do. And so the conversation started along, kind of calm, and then it got a little bit more heated. And folks were not careful with their language. For environmentalists, ever since actions like the Warner Creek blockade, burned forests had become essential ecosystems. In particular, there was fear that too much salvage logging could endanger several types of woodpackers that live in these dead trees. And it finally got to the point where there were colleagues of mine in the conservation community who were really pretty straightened in their view that salvage logging really was the devil. But to timber communities, salvage logging was a saving grace. Those trees are dead, so you either log them quickly where they rot and the local economy rots with them. And both sides actually were pretty entrenched. This is County Judge Mark Webb again. And he had an idea. He had been reading about a biologist who was looking into the impacts of salvage logging on woodpackers. And he thought this is somewhere they could follow the science. We could develop a research salvage around a woodpecker study. And it would allow us to actually see if there wasn't some way that active management, if it didn't facilitate ecologically important habitats, maybe didn't destroy him as bad or impact him as bad. And so that was the point that I tried to get into that conversation. And it was just shut down in a heartbeat. And he was going there either the environmentalist or industry. Here they were, six years into the collaboration and no one was willing to budge. To Mark, that felt like failure. Mark walked away and got in his rig and left. That was that. Yeah, and I walked away because I just thought after six, seven freaking years, we can't talk about this and I'm done with it. Mark was ready to go back to the status quo and fight it out. He wasn't the only one who walked away over the years. A lot of people on both sides did. But boy, in particular, was effective in getting locals to return. One of the arguments that some of the guys were telling me, well, you know what we've given us? We gave up this and gave up this. Okay, you have. But listen, if we don't engage them, we're done. I think desperation, more so than my rhetoric or anything like that is what convinced these folks to come along. After almost two years, Mark came back. But by then, the group's internal dynamics were only part of the problem. There was also pushback from the community. You have to understand the people of Grant County do not trust big government. They voted to ban the United Nations in 2002 and they've tried to gain control of federal land. So it's no surprise locals hated even the hint that environmentalists from the West side of Oregon could dictate their fate. As County Judge Mark took most of the heat. I was in office just one term. A big reason is because of my involvement with the collaborative that was clearly communicated to me. And so there's been a lot of pushback. I'm considered an enviroment. So it is fun to see some of the emails where I'm grouped with the radical enviroment. And if I could, I would be out cutting the big trees that were not allowed to cut because that's what I like to do. But what Mark and the rest of the group didn't know is that the county was on the verge of a massive crisis. And it was going to make or break their collaborative. That's coming up. Federal funding for public media has been eliminated. That means KMHD is entirely community funded and your support is more important than ever. Go to KMHD.org and join as a rhythm section member with your ongoing monthly contribution now. Thank you. This is the sound of the Malier lumber sawman John Day, the biggest town in Grant County. It's the timber equivalent of a Roob Goldberg machine. Logs go in, perfectly milled two by fours, come out. Bruce Doc Savage is the president of the company that owns the mill and he wasn't an early fan of the collaborative. And so the first reaction was we're going to fight you until we're the last saw mill standing. Unfortunately, we pretty much are the last saw mill standing. Before the timber wars, there were around 40 mills across eastern Oregon. By Bruce's count, now there are a dozen. And by 2012, Malier lumber was the last one left in Grant County and it was running on sawdust. We had run out of supply. I actually announced in the newspaper a 90 day notice that we can't continue on. They were the biggest private employer in the county and they'd have to lay off nearly a hundred workers. I remember I was actually on a backpacking trip in the Sierra's and I came out of the wilderness and I was all blissed out coming out of the Sierra's and feeling like John Mirr and I checked my voicemail. Susan Jane had a message from one of the mill employees she knew through the collaborative. She said the mill was closing so she called them back. I was like, that's not okay. You know, I spent pretty much the whole trip home thinking about what are we going to do? Because if the mill closes, that this community just dries up and blows away. It's really the mainstay of what's keeping this community alive. But it wasn't just the community. Susan Jane realized the mill was also keeping the collaborative alive. Because even if the community could persist, there's no mill to process. The byproduct of our restoration work. That is, the timber they thinned paid for the rest of their work. And at that point, you know, there is no other place to take it. And so we were going to be done if that mill closes. So she started making phone calls. She got Oregon Senator Ron Wyden's office involved. She roped in other conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy and Sustainable Northwest. And she got Bruce and the county's biggest loggers on board. We met in Portland and unbeknownst to me, I thought it was going to be just a couple of us. I believe there were 40 people in the room. There were people on the phone talking about how we can keep the mill open and still meet these goals. And it's like, all right, well, here's a blueprint. Here's an idea of what we can do. And it was multifaceted. And really, yeah, everybody needed to bring their A game. For a service like, yep, kind of sin. We're going to give you more money. We're going to up our accelerated restoration footprint on this forest to keep the mill open. The result was what's called a 10-year stewardship contract. It guaranteed that the Forest Service would pay for a certain amount of restoration work for 10 years, ensuring a sustained level of logging. But I think that's when I really looked at Susan Jane. She was putting her neck out on the line from her side because she was actually being presented as more of a moderate. And I'm sure she had plenty of feedback from people that were winning the battle. Susan Jane did get pushback. She still gets it, but she wasn't the only one. A lot of my friends in the industry said, you've gone to the dark side. This will never work. And my response was, I don't think it's a dark side. It's a little gray. But what are my alternatives? And I got to tell you, I'm learning something more about the forest than just harvesting trees. But whatever shade of gray the agreement lives in, the economic results were black and white. The logging company Iron Triangle won the contract and doubled its staff from around 50 to more than 100. The Forest Service Office also staffed up by dozens of positions. All told, the contract supported more than 250 jobs a year. Susan Jane, I sheed my hero. She's my hero in the environmental unit. She's saved, helped save a lot of jobs. So a sawmill saved and one of the biggest forest restoration projects yet in one fell swoop. That's a huge marker of success for collaboration. But there's another major marker. There hasn't been a single timber sale lawsuit since the group started. That's not heard of. So you know, it's like we all have to suffer in order to become better. We know that anger doesn't get you what you want. Compromise does. And it isn't everything. Of course, I don't want to imply everything's perfect. The 10-year stewardship contract has fallen short on some of its goals, both environmentally and economically. But the process, the collaboration, is the kind of success that social scientists and policy makers fly out to study. So let's look at what went into their success. First, the industry had to hit rock bottom before being willing to come to the table and to settle for less timber. Second, they went outside so they could literally touch the trees they were talking about and find a shared language. Third, there was the commitment to following the science. If there was something they disagreed on, they created a research project so they could figure it out together. Two things I would add would be a level of humility. Former county judge Mark Webb, who's now the executive director of the collaborative. By which I mean an ability of the participants to recognize they probably got things wrong in the past and be able to admit that. And also a willingness to take risk based on a shared understanding driven by that shared decision-space in science. It's that willingness to adapt and take risks that Susan Jane sees as essential to confronting the challenges ahead. We're not fighting the old wars anymore. There are new battles. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with, put more fire on the ground. And we can't do that in the way that we used to. But none of those things happen without trust. And that comes from the final ingredient, just being able to hang out together. And then yeah, the collaborative that drinks together stays together. Which makes it sound like a bunch of alcoholics. But it really is that offline conversation. It's the opportunity to take off your hard hat and be a human. And it allows us to have some fun together. It started by heading to the bar after their meetings. But eventually Susan Jane was spending so much time in Grant County that she and her husband built a house here. And now they often host dinners after monthly meetings. We need the bar in the air. I think it's more appropriate to do a spot at alcohol. The night I was there, there was a woodpecker pinata made by researchers who were just finishing up that science that Mark wanted to do around salvage logging and woodpeckers. It's made out of ditches. This is the takeaway that feels so important. Because now, even in the face of things like catastrophic wildfire, this group of loggers and environmentalists have become friends. And yes, it's tenuous. It could fall apart at any time. But after you've worked together to save a mill and you've watched each other's kids grow up. It's that much harder to just give up and fall into the old battle lines. You know, in 2003, had you asked me if I ever would have felt this way about any of these people or owned a house in Grant County for having sakes, no way, man. There's just no way. These people are crazy. But now they're my crazy. And they're my friends. I care about them. You know, when the mill was going to close, I was just like, I can't, I mean, my friends are going to lose their jobs. And just like any friendship, you want your friends to be happy and healthy and successful. And now that these folks are my friends, that's what I want for them. And that's what they want for me. I have no doubt about that. Of course, one successful collaboration doesn't end the timber wars. And in some ways, this story is a tragedy. Logging isn't the way of life it used to be. And many of the forests that environmentalists fought to save are burning up in wildfires. Things aren't looking good for the northern spotted owl, either. It's getting pushed out of what's left of its territory by an invading owl. And many scientists don't think it's going to make it. But remember, the owl was a stand-in for the old growth. And there's still old growth left. That likely wouldn't have been the case if no one had done the science, filed the lawsuits and blockaded the logging roads. Economically, while a third of former timber towns are worse off, a third have stayed the same. And another third of those towns are better off than before. On large part, that's because they managed to play off the beauty of the forests around them to attract tourism, recreation, and new businesses. In other words, the forests in small towns that make the northwest the exquisite place it is, they are proof that not everything was lost. And that's important to remember. The story of the timber wars is the story of a paradigm shift. And this year more than any other were seeing crisis after crisis, put enormous stress on the fundamental systems we take for granted. Healthcare, the justice system, the political process, even capitalism itself. It's like they're hitting their own last of the old growth moments. Where the longer we wait to redesign the way we do things, the more painful it's going to be. So in trying to figure out how to move forward, what can we learn from the past? The actual falling of a tree begins with the making of a scaffold. Then they begin their cutting. The forests of the Pacific Northwest are the most productive in the world. They're one of the greatest natural resources on the planet. So down they come. Trees that are so big that more than 20 houses can be made from just one tree. But now with climate change, trees serve an even bigger purpose. Making young trees grow into old trees is one of the best ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Clear cutting those trees, or losing them to catastrophic fires, is one of the fastest ways to release it. Thousands of years ago they were to be found throughout Europe and Asia. They grew in countries that are now cold but were at one time warm. Running out of old growth shouldn't have taken anyone by surprise. When climate science is just as clear, the lesson of the Timberwars I think is that you have to adapt without leaving people behind. Or they'll fight so hard you get change, but no progress. For most people a job like this would seem too dangerous. But then logging is a hard and dangerous work. And these men take pride in their strength and courage. If the Timberwars cut a trail through the forest, it was a dead end. So now it's time to chart a new path. Or we risk never finding our way out. But the journey is not quick, simple or easy. Before we go. In this series we chose to focus mostly on the conflict over national forests. But while the folks on the ground were fighting over trees versus jobs, the big timber corporations continued to make huge profits logging private lands, despite employing fewer people and paying much less back to the local communities. My OPP colleague Tony Schick teamed up with ProPublica and the Oregonian for an incredible series of investigative stories. That if you're interested in this issue, you have to read. You can find them at opb.org slash special reports slash Timberwars. And we'll be bringing you one or two bonus episodes with his reporting on this. As well as a look into another one of the issues we didn't get to explore. What role does forest management play in wildfire? This is where the next big fight is going to be. And while the findings are surprising, to say the least. If you really want a deep dive into all of OPP's reporting on this issue, please sign up for our Timberwars newsletter. At opb.org slash Timberwars, there's a little box on the top right of the page where you can enter your email address. And while you're there on the listen Timberwars page, you can find a reading list of many of the books and research papers we drew on for this series. Timberwars is written and reported by me, Aaron Scott, with editing from Peter Frickwright, Robbie Carver, David Steve's, and Eddie On. Huge thanks to Peter and Robbie, who produced this series with me. Without them, I would probably still be on episode three. Our original music is by singer, songwriter Laura Gibson. To me, her music has always captured the landscape of the Northwest, so it was an honor to have her score this series. Sound Design by Robbie Carver, mastering by Stephen Cray, fact checking by Matt Giles, legal oversight by Rebecca Morris, marketing and publicity by Jennifer McCormick and Lauren Alconich, research help from Aaron Ross, our editor is David Steve's, and our executive producer is Ed Yon. The series would not have happened without their own wavering support. A good chunk of our archival footage came from MPR, and from the KEEZ ITV Chambers Communication Corporation collection, at the University of Oregon Libraries. Thanks to Jenna Moulster, Nathan George I just and Lauren Goss, for helping us access it all. Other footage came from CBS, C-SPAN, K-A-T-U, K-D-R-V-T-V, K-P-T-V, NBC, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Pickax the Cascadia Free State Story, and the Prailinger Archive. There are a lot of people to thank, but I want to begin with everybody who spoke with me, who invited me into their homes and shared their stories. Seriously, thank you. Thanks also to the MPR Story Lab program, which was instrumental in helping us develop this series. Huge gratitude to Michael May, Adelina Lansianis, and Sam Leeds for running the program. And to our mentors, Caratallo, Matt Ozig, and Katie Dogger, for taking time from the insane cycle of breaking news to sit with us in the woods, virtually speaking, of course. Thanks to all my colleagues at OPB, who supported this series in all sorts of ways. Frankly, there are too many of you to list, but I hope you know who you are. And finally, thanks to you. This series was only possible because of all the members at OPB. Your support means that we can take these deep dives into our region's history. So if you liked this series and you're not a member yet, please head to opb.org slash pod right now, as soon as the music ends and join. That's opb.org slash pod. And thank you for listening.