The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (28 page)

What went wrong with the postwar vision? Ponderosa was increasingly logged out, and it did not grow back, at least not readily. It was missing fire. The great ponderosas in their open parks had emerged together with Native American fire regimes, in which frequent burning of the underbrush encouraged browse for deer and berries for fall picking. Fire burned out competing conifer species while allowing the ponderosas to thrive. But whites drove out Native Americans in a series of wars and relocations. The Forest Service stopped not only their fires but all fires. Without fire, flammable species such as white fir and lodgepole grew up under the ponderosas. When the ponderosas were removed
through logging, these other species took over. The open character of the landscape disappeared as small trees grew in. Pure stands of ponderosa became rare. The landscape looked less and less like the open ponderosa forests of the early twentieth century—and less and less like a landscape of interest to the timber industry.

In dispossessing Native peoples from the lands they had made so inviting, white loggers, soldiers, and foresters destroyed the parklike forests they had wanted so badly. To pause in recollection, it seems useful to tell of the last great Native dispossession by fiat: the 1954 “termination,” or ending of all treaty obligations to the Klamath Tribes. As a result of termination, a chunk of ponderosa land became national forest, ready to be logged by private interests. A few decades later, what was left? The quotations that follow, from the tribe’s website, help tell the story.
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The prosperous and powerful Klamath, Modoc and the Yahooskin Band of Snake Paiute people (hereinafter “the Klamaths”) once controlled 22 million acres of territory in south central Oregon and Northern California. Their lifestyles and economies provided abundantly for their needs and their cultural ways for over 14,000 years. Contact with invading Europeans, however, quickly decimated their numbers through disease and war and resulted in a treaty reserving to the tribes a diminished land base of 2.2 million acres. Once traditional rivals, the three tribes were forced to live in close proximity to one another on these drastically reduced reserved lands.

In the 1950s, scalability was a matter for citizenship as well as resource use. America was the melting pot, where immigrants could be homogenized to face the future as productive citizens. Homogenization allowed progress: the advance of scalability in business and in civic life. This was the climate in which legislation was passed to unilaterally abrogate U.S. treaty obligations to selected Indian tribes. In the language of the day, members of these tribes were said to be ready to assimilate into American society without special status; their difference would be erased by law.
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The rights of the Klamath Tribes looked ripe for termination, to lawmakers, because the tribes were well off. The railroad and the logging
of adjacent forests had changed the value of the reservation; by the 1950s, the Klamath Reservation encompassed a large swath of the ponderosa pine that loggers wanted so badly. Klamath Indians were doing well from revenues from timber. They were not a burden on the government. But loggers and officials wanted what they had.

The Klamath Tribes were by every measure not only no burden, but a significant contributor to the local economy. Their strength and wealth were, however, no match for determined efforts of the federal government to eradicate their culture and acquire their most valuable natural resources—a million acres of land and ponderosa pine. The stage was set for the dispossession of the Klamaths in the early 1950s when the Tribe was subjected to the worst of many disastrous experiments in federal-Indian policy—termination.

As termination proceeded, private companies and public agencies circled. In the end, the federal government took precedence, taking the land as national forest.
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Klamath Tribes members were paid off.

Much of the wealth derived from the sale of the Klamath’s heritage was lost to sharp dealings by merchants; unscrupulous attorneys that mishandled, embezzled or engaged in self-dealing from trust accounts of those determined to be incompetent; to poorly considered investments—sometimes by attorneys lending themselves money from the accounts; or to exorbitant fees charged by local attorneys or banks for the handling of the beneficiaries[’] affairs—which hardly ever got more sophisticated than handing out checks to the beneficiaries—a process usually handled in the most paternalistic of ways.

The dreams of progress imagined by termination advocates did not make Klamath “standard Americans” with capital and privilege. Social and personal problems followed.

Data compiled for the years from 1966 through 1980 showed the following:

•  28 percent died by age 25.

•  52 percent died by age 40.

•  40 percent of all deaths were alcohol related.

•  Infant mortality was two and one-half times the statewide average.

•  70 percent of the adults had less than a high-school education.

•  Poverty levels were three times that of non-Indians in Klamath County—the poorest county in Oregon.

Finally, in 1986, U.S. recognition was restored. Since then, the tribes have pursued water rights and the return of at least some of their reservation land. The tribes have forest management plans for this now logged-over land.
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The Klamaths seek return of these [lands and resources] primarily for the purpose of healing the land and its resources and restoring them to some semblance of the abundance they once reflected. They also seek to restore the spiritual integrity of the land…. They want their way of life back.

For the moment, some are picking matsutake mushrooms.

And what of the cutover forest? On the landscape once known for its ponderosa, fir and lodgepole emerged in crowds. Lodgepole has many fine piney characteristics, and, by the 1960s, foresters and loggers did their best to work with it. Mills began processing lodgepole along with ponderosa.
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In 1970s replanting schemes, lodgepole rather than ponderosa was often used, owing to its easy establishment on disturbed ground. If you look at the forest from above today on Google Earth, you see mainly swaths of lodgepole growing on old clear-cuts. It’s not a pretty sight. Turn-of-the-century critics—taking foresters by surprise—described eastern Cascade timber areas as “festering sores on the back of a mangy old dog” and complained that they were “visible from outer space.”
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Lodgepole had become noticeable. It is time to make it a protagonist of the story.

Lodgepole,
Pinus contorta
, is an old resident in the eastern Cascades. It may have been the first tree to arrive after the glaciers melted.
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After the eruption of Mt. Mazama, lodgepole was one of the few trees that could grow on pumice flats. It also flourished in cold pockets on the hillside, which were affected by summer frosts that killed other trees, even ponderosa. In the western Cascades, it gathers in old mudslides, where organic soil was swept away. Working with matsutake, lodgepole is hardy.

Selective logging advantaged lodgepole. In mixed conifer forests, loggers picked the best timber and left the rest. Stumps of sugar pines litter the high mountains, although living sugar pine has become rare. Lodgepole was one of the trees not taken. It didn’t mind the disturbance. Abandoned logging roads are thick with young lodgepole.

On dry ponderosa slopes, it was the exclusion of fire that most advantaged lodgepole. Lodgepole and ponderosa have opposite piney strategies for dealing with fire. Ponderosa has thick bark and tall crowns; most ground fires won’t touch it. Fire thins ponderosa stands, removing small trees and allowing survivors to dominate hillsides uncrowded by the demands of others. In contrast, lodgepole burns readily; its thick groves, live and dead trees intermingled, spread fire. But it generates more seeds than most other trees, and it is often the first to reseed burned areas. In the Rocky Mountains, lodgepoles have closed cones, releasing their seeds only in fires. In the Cascades, lodgepole release seeds every year. There are so many of them that they are quick to colonize new lands.
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In the open, bright clearings that follow clear-cut logging, Cascades’ lodgepole seedlings colonize in thick packs, which sometimes grow into stands so dense that foresters call them “dog-hair regeneration.” One old timer showed me a patch so tightly intertwined that it seemed a welded solid; he joked that we should call it “frog-hair regeneration.” Thick groves are places for diseases and pests. As the trees grow up, some start to die. Dead and live wood intermix; dead trees lean across live ones. Straining under the weight, whole groups blow down. Meanwhile, a single spark can burn the whole grove—and with it the rest of the landscape, including private houses, horse camps, timber holdings, and Forest Service offices. Although a few entertain fantasies of cleaning things up this way, most foresters think this is a bad idea.

From lodgepole’s perspective, burning is not so terrible, since a new crop of seedlings come up after the fire. Over the long history of the Cascades, fire is one way lodgepole kept its place on the landscape. But Forest Service fire exclusion has given lodgepole forests a new experience: living into old age. Instead of a rapid cycling of generations, together with fire, lodgepoles in the eastern Cascades are maturing. And as they mature, they have increasingly met with matsutake mushrooms.

Fungi are choosy about forest succession. Some are quick to establish themselves with new trees, while others let the forest mature before they take hold. Matsutake seems to be a mid-successional fungus. In Japan, research suggests that matsutake first begin to produce fruiting bodies in pine forests after forty years.
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Fruiting continues for more than forty years thereafter.
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No one has gathered clear data on this issue in Oregon, but foragers and foresters agree: matsutake does not fruit with young trees. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, pine plantations established in the 1970s and 1980s did not yet produce matsutake. In naturally regenerating forest, perhaps only forty-to-fifty-year-old trees begin to support matsutake fruiting.
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But forty-to-fifty-year-old lodgepole might not even exist except for Forest Service fire exclusion. The budding presence of matsutake mushrooms, their mycelia entwined with lodgepole roots, is an unintended consequence of the most famous Forest Service mistake in the interior forests of the American West: the exclusion of fire.

Meanwhile, the biggest challenge for foresters today is how to keep densely packed and aging lodgepoles from burning the forest down. This is complicated by changes in the Forest Service over the past few decades. First, environmental goals had begun to influence the Forest Service by the 1980s. As the Forest Service entered into dialogue with environmentalists, varied new experiments were tried, such as uneven-aged management. Second, timber companies moved on, and fewer federal funds were made available (see
chapter 15
). It became impossible for foresters to propose any initiative that was not both specifically mandated by law and incredibly cheap. All forest management would have to be subcontracted to loggers in exchange for the best remaining trees. Labor-intensive treatments were no longer an option. Without the dominance of big timber money, foresters have increasingly seen their job as one of balancing various interests—among different forest users (e.g., wildlife vs. loggers), among different forestry approaches (e.g., sustainable yield vs. sustainable ecosystem services), and among different patch ecologies (e.g., even- vs. uneven-aged management). Missing a singular path to progress, they juggle alternatives.

Foresters would like to thin the lodgepoles.
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But here they run into the sensibilities of matsutake pickers, who have seen their favorite patches
disappear as a result of Forest Service interference. Foresters appeal to pickers with Japanese research, which argues that opening up the forests is good for matsutake. But forests in Japan are different: pines suffer from shading by broadleafs; forest thinning is almost always done by hand. Pines have no broadleaf competition in the eastern Cascades, and foresters there cannot imagine thinning without heavy mechanical equipment. Pickers in the Cascades argue that the equipment breaks and compacts the soil, destroying the fungus. They showed me once-productive patches now marked only with the deep and persistent tracks of heavy equipment. Pickers say that fungi destroyed by soil compaction take many years to reestablish themselves, even when mature tree roots are available.