I honor the forest by living where Oswald West State Forest abuts our backyard. Living on the wildland-urban interface is beautiful and inspiring, but there’s also danger from mother nature’s pruning during storms and wildfires. For me, it’s worth the risk to to live close by the forest, seeing and breathing it every day.
Another way to honor the forest is by spending $250,000 from Clatsop County’s coffers to provide some local match for the purchase of fifteen hundred acres of forest that will be the Arch Cape Forest. That’s a community project to own and manages the watershed for the Arch Cape Water District. I championed that expenditure for years, and on November 4, 2020, the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners voted to put a quarter of a million dollars in escrow for the Arch Cape Forest.
Hooray! Thanks to Dan Seifer, the (late and lamented) Ron Schiffman, Phil Chick, Mike Manzulli, and many others who continue to develop and promote this concept until it achieves reality. It’s an admirable effort, one I hope is imitated in other places around the county and beyond. The Arch Cape Forest will protect water in Arch Cape forever, we hope.
Yet another way to honor the forest is to consider the timber it produces. My grandad treasured and honored wood. He was an amateur cabinetmaker who used to say admiringly, “look at the grain on that piece of wood!” He did, and I did, modeling after him.
One of the most precious objects in our house is the walnut library table he constructed from 2” X 6” walnut planks. A tree or trees had to die, to be harvested, for him to build that table.
I thought about that as I painted with Jan Tarr’s “Meditation and Painting” group at the Center for Contemplative Arts in Manzanita. We painted thanks to Lola and Joel Sack’s generous devotion to raising consciousness in the North Tillamook and South Clatsop County areas.
If you come to our house, you’ll see paintings of the spirits of trees, because yet another way to honor the forest is to consider their spiritual value. I wanted to express the beauty, power, and grace of trees in the paintings from Jan Tarr’s classes, the ones hanging today on the walls of our house.
There are other ways to look at forests and honoring the trees that constitute them. A couple of weeks ago, in Lyons, Oregon, Rob and Tyler Freres showed me their mass plywood panel factory, their family’s pride and joy, the way they honor the forest.
Mass plywood panels were developed by the Tallwood Institute, and Professor Judith Sheine, Tallwood’s director of design, has often talked with me about modular housing that’s constructed of 2” mass plywood panels.
If we can reinvent the economy of rural Oregon by using forest products wisely and efficiently as modular housing, using mass plywood panels? That could be a game-changer. If we honor the forest, love the trees, and at the same time use automation and technology to provide housing, an adequate and stable tax base for communities, and adequate and stable income for rural Oregonians, we will have honored the forest in new and fine ways. Or, so I hope.
Contributed by: Lianne Thompson | Clatsop County Commissioner