Forest, Forest, Burning Bright

The few yards between my car and the trailhead measured the distance between dread and resolve for the start of my hike. Last August, I parked in a sunny glade that was both the end of a road and the beginning of the shaded tunnel of my path, a circling back and a beginning.

I've never begun a solo backpacking trip without a sense of what I was leaving behind, that I was knowingly walking farther away from my family and safety and people I loved and who loved me. The craving for my home and family was physical, high in my chest. For me, the beginning of a long backpacking trip is a conscious transition away from comfort into strenuous reflection.

A faint warning in the clear morning came through the smell of burning paper. A blaze covering thousands of acres a few dozen miles away called the Lookout Fire had been active for a month already, mostly on public land. In Oregon, fires are named liked hurricanes, and the Lookout Fire was one of the worst this year, most notable for being on the "wet" side of the Cascades and spilling into some truly ancient old-growth forests. I had driven to the trailhead carefully to avoid highway shutdowns and dense smoke, but the scent lingered in the woods like a warning that the fire would come, eventually.

I stopped calling myself a conservation biologist a few years after finishing my doctorate. Conservation is about preservation and baselines - -keeping ecosystems and livelihoods the same or restoring them to some previous postcard-like vision. Bouncing back from modernity into the past. Conservation had become for me a fundamentalism of science: a faith-based approach to healing wounded ecosystems by always guiding them into a better history.

I also understand that many parts of conservation ring true and just. Correcting pollution and overfishing are necessary and clear under any circumstance. Many species need careful management because of past wrongs and disruptions.

But about the time that I walked into the forest that day, the Lookout Fire was creeping through a landscape I had visited just a few weeks before with two renowned conservation biologists. We had descended from the road into a narrow, densely forested valley with massive fir trees, many well over a thousand years old and meters in diameter, the dense bark folded over itself like the land we were walking across. We found rare amphibians and flowers, the sun hidden by a canopy more than 200 feet above us.

That forest was burning to the south as I began hiking. A forest that had not seen fire for a very long time. The paper I smelled was older than the ancient library of Alexandria, volumes and words becoming ash and embers.

Conservation would have us replanting that forest, cultivating with admirable love and patience the landscape that was. But what if that landscape cannot be again? That recreating the lush ecosystem of July will simply accelerate the return of the fires of August? Conservation as ideology, as simplified science and a set of targets invariably pointing backwards, does not guide us into the future. Or help us see alternative futures.

The challenge is that a landscape experiencing persistent pressures from shifts in temperature, precipitation patterns, and the intensity and frequency of extreme events like drought and extreme wind and rain events will transform into a new state. The outlines of these new forms are beginning to appear now, and like a pilgrim I would traverse through a patchwork of past and emerging future landscapes over the following four days. The Cascades are on their own journey now.

The safe assumptions of conservation are common to the practice of many disciplines. Engineering, hydrology, economics, and the law function in simplified forms of their principles, reluctant to see the shift in a grand narrative.

My path that day last summer was straight, true, and up, with no alternative choices for some nine miles, when I turned north on my main path. The first part of that day took me through the land that was and is, and through the land that is and will be, with transitions marked by fire. And the day's hike took me through a double grief — for the shifting landscape, and for the safe orientation of my lost discipline. Four days later, I returned to where I began, changed and ready for change.

John H. Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA