Ground Zero In Timber Wars Shows Signs Of Peace

Kelz moved here in 1970, working on a tree-planting crew, and now makes his living making Adirondack-style backpacks of woven ash splints. He lives at The Meadows, a community of four families living off the grid and growing their own food on an old hydraulic gold-mining site. They can see some of the restoration thinning sites on old clearcuts on the hills around them; in 1987, they watched the Longwood fire burn toward their homes.

"I'm kind of hopeful and kind of skeptical too, because there've been a lot of fashions in forestry over the years," said Kelz. "For a while, they were hiring us to go clean the logs out of the streams (to improve salmon habitat). They would pay us to do it. A few years later, they were hiring us to throw the same wood back into the streams.

"Then there was the monoculture," where nothing but Douglas fir and pine would be planted in clearcuts to maximize the timber yield in coming years.

He added: "Now they are like, 'We need diversity. It's not healthy.' They've learned a lot, but they still have a lot to learn."