‘Timber Wars’ episode 1: The last stand

When loggers headed into the Willamette National Forest on Easter Sunday in 1989, they found a line of protesters blocking the road. The ensuing battle would help catapult old-growth forests into a national issue—and become known as the “Easter Massacre.”

We tell the story through the voices of Stephan Weaver, a cutter hired to fell the trees, and Catia Juliana and Tim Ingalsbee, two young environmentalists who met at the protest and went on to marry and organize the year-long Warner Creek blockade (the focus of Episode 6: The backlash).

Hosted and produced by OPB’s Aaron Scott in collaboration with 30 Minutes West (“Bundyville,” “Outside Podcast”), and with original music by the singer-songwriter Laura Gibson, “Timber Wars” is a seven-part podcast series from Oregon Public Broadcasting that tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a small group of activists and scientists turned the fight over ancient trees and the spotted owl into one of the biggest environmental conflicts of the 20th century. Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR One app and most other podcast apps.

In addition to the podcast, OPB has an accompanying newsletter that combines the podcast with further OPB reporting to take readers through the history of this epic battle — and explores the ways it’s playing out still — in stories, images, videos and more. You can explore the series here.

Related: 'Timber Wars’ episode 2: The ancient forest

Episode 1: “The last stand” transcript

AARON SCOTT, HOST: For just a minute, I want you to consider the logger. Bearded, burly, wearing suspenders and a flannel shirt—he’s an American icon. He looks like Johnny Cash sounds.

JOHNNY CASH TALKING “LUMBERJACK” SONG: Ride this train to Roseburg, Oregon. Now there’s a town for ya. And you talk about rough.

AARON: Cash didn’t do a lot of songs about Oregon loggers, but in 1960, he released a concept album about golden Americana: stories and songs about gunslingers, coal miners, and of course, track number three, lumberjacks

CASH, SINGING:

Well you work in the woods from morning to night

You laugh and sing and you cuss and fight

On Saturday night you go to Eugene

And on Sunday morning your pockets are clean.

AARON: Loggers are the epitome of rugged masculinity. I mean, go into any hipster bar and you’ll find the flannel-and-beard lumberjack uniform. But if you sidled up to that bar and started talking about how you’d spent the day cutting down big, old trees? Those same hipsters would probably throw their beer in your face. Because these days actual logging is unacceptable. It’s gone from a Johnny Cash song to a Simpsons joke.

SIMPSONS, CONGRESSMAN: Well, Jerry, you’re a whale of a lobbyist, and I’d like to give you a logging permit, I would. But this isn’t like burying toxic waste. People are going to notice those trees are gone.

AARON: Of course, buried under the joke, is a lot of pain. And politics. And the collapse of an entire way of life. So this is the story of how people started thinking less about loggers, and more about trees— and started valuing forests as more than just timber. And how that small shift in thinking turned into an epic battle that engulfed the Northwest, then spilled out across the rest of the country.

[MUSIC]

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, I’m Aaron Scott, and this fight over natural resources and the environment laid the groundwork for future conflicts. Both the ones we’re fighting now, and those to come.

So, if you want to understand where we’re going. You have to understand the Timber Wars.

[AUDIO MONTAGE:

ARCHIVE CLIP, REPORTER: Buried to their waist, environmentalists blockaded a logging road.

ARCHIVE CLIP, LOGGER: You live in a mobile home made out of wood.

DEBBIE MILEY: So it was scary in a lot of levels.

ARCHIVE CLIP, PAUL NEWMAN: These people are in a rage over trees.

RICH FAIRBANKS: And when you say Timber Wars, it’s not a huge exaggeration.

TED STEVENS: I really hope that some day it doesn’t come into a civil war. But I see our country going that way.]

[MUSIC]

AARON: Johnny Cash’s “Lumberjack” song is about a boy learning to log with his dad in Oregon. It’s not far off from the story of Stephan Weaver.

STEPHAN WEAVER: I started in the timber industry basically out of high school. I married into a timber cutting family and worked for my father-in-law

AARON: I went to meet Stephan at his home in Stayton, Oregon. There’s an electric baby grand in the living room.

AARON: Who plays the piano?

STEPHAN: Oh, I do. Country western’s always been my kick. I play a little bit of that. Classical.

AARON: I don’t usually think of loggers as playing classical at their own baby grand. But that’s why I was here. I had a lot to learn. For example, in the world of logging, there’re actually a number of different jobs. But the guys who cut down the trees, the guys who yell timber, they’re called tree fallers, or timber cutters. And that’s what Stephan did.

STEPHAN: You had a lot of pride in what you did. Some of 99 percent of the timber cutters did. There was that one or two percent that were just there for the buck. But some of the best timber cutters came out of the Detroit Canyon.

AARON: Stephan primarily worked in the Detroit Canyon area of the Willamette National Forest. It’s huge—the home of seven snow-capped peaks. And it’s a wet, dense landscape. Sword ferns, salmonberry, and pillows of moss cover the ground, and the trees, they’re almost as big as they come. Douglas fir, western red cedar, western hemlock. They can tower 300 feet into the air and stand 8 feet wide. They feel like pillars holding up the sky, which is maybe why folks who saw them disappearing felt like the sky was falling.

STEPHAN: Where it really all started was that North Roaring Devil sale, and [laugh]

AARON: It’s impossible to pin down exactly when the Timber Wars started, because they had a different beginning for everyone involved. For Stephan, it was in 1989, in these forests, at a timber sale called the North Roaring Devil.

STEPHAN: there were a lot of things that went on up there.

AARON: The US Forest Service names timber sales. Things like North Roaring Devil, Sugarloaf, Hoxie-Griffin, Red 90. They can sound like the names of famous battles, which is what some of them were.

STEPHAN: We were snowmobiling in. We’d have to make two or three trips, you know because we didn’t have a dozen snowmobiles. But it was just a mess.

AARON: North Roaring Devil included several groves of old-growth trees in the Willamette National Forest. Stephan had been hired to fell the trees, but he says three things were off about this particular job. First, it was late March. There was still snow on the ground, so they had to ride snowmobiles to the timber stands.

STEPHAN: They didn’t want to plow the roads, so these other people could walk or drive in.

AARON: Second, they were trying to keep “these other people” away from the sale. That is, environmentalists. They had been fighting in court to stop the logging of the giant, centuries-old trees. And that led to the third thing that was off: Stephen and his crew were logging on a holiday.

STEPHAN: Then on Saturday night before Easter Sunday, Jim Morgan called me up.

AARON: Jim Morgan was Stephan’s boss at one of the biggest timber companies in the canyon. And he said, “I need ten men.”

STEPHAN: I need them tomorrow morning. I said, “it’s Easter, Jim.” He says, “I don’t care. I want 10 cutters in the morning and you’ll be compensated very well for it.”

AARON: So what was with the rush? Well, there was a court date on Tuesday, and there was fear the judge could side with environmentalists and put this logging on hold. So the fallers were racing to cut the trees first.

STEPHAN: Because once it was on the ground, it was kind of a done deal.

AARON; So on Easter morning, Stephan and his crew got up before dawn, piled into their trucks pulling snowmobiles, and headed into the woods. A low, chill cloud hung in the air, turning the surrounding trees into giant looming shadows. But this time, the trees weren’t the only ones waiting for them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, REPORTER: Logging crews arrived at 5:30 this morning to find 30 protestors who sealed off entrance to the site.]

AARON: The protestors were standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the road and holding signs stating “Save our old growth” and “Earth First.” The loggers stopped and discovered the media was there, too.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, REPORTER: This morning, a confrontation seemed possible, but both sides decided to talk about the issues rather than fight about them.]

AARON: The half-dozen loggers were outnumbered. So they stood in a circle with a handful of the protestors down the road from the bridge. You could tell them apart because, where the loggers favored baseball caps and mustaches, the activists wore beanies and beards. Well, and the other difference: there were women activists.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PROTESTER: You know, I think this argument is not very productive.]

LOGGING SUPERVISOR: “Well, I don’t think anything’s very productive. Do you think this is being productive? I’ve got a crew of men that I’m paying to be productive.]

AARON: In the news footage, you can see Stephan standing in the group of loggers. And he looks annoyed.

STEPHAN: We could talk to them and they could talk to us. But our views were dramatically different about the situation. So at that time there wasn’t any middle ground. They just didn’t want that timber cut. They didn’t want any timber cut.

AARON: Stephan and the loggers had been hired to cut the trees, but they weren’t the protesters’ real target. That was the logging company that bought the timber, and the U.S. Forest Service, which made the sale. Many people today might think of the Forest Service’s mission as taking care of the forests. I mean, it’s in the name. But actually, the Forest Service’s main job at the time, particularly in the Northwest, was selling trees to the highest bidder.

And this forest where Stephan was logging was the crown jewel. For decades, it sold more timber than any other national forest in the country—enough to build more than 50,000 homes a year. So logging companies weren’t just going to walk away.

The loggers called the Forest Service and county sheriff to deal with the protesters. As word spread through the local community, no one had any idea this was the beginning of a multi-day battle that would change lives on both sides...and become known as the Easter massacre.

[MUSIC]

CATIA JULIANA: Some people ran in the door and said, “Hey, they’re going to start logging up at Breitenbush Hot Springs, and there’s a group of us that are going to go up there tonight, and if anybody wants to come up with us, we would love to fill up our van with people.”

AARON: This is Catia Juliana. She was one of the protesters who showed up that day and had just graduated from the University of Oregon in Eugene.

CATIA: I drove here in 85, and all I knew about Oregon was that there were lumberjacks and big trees, so I stopped and fell in love with it and never left.

AARON: The city was a hotbed for liberal activism, but Catia never had time for it. Then the day before Easter, she went to a nonviolence training. Just as it was ending, someone rushed in and said they needed people to protect some ancient trees. So Catia volunteered.

[SOUNDS OF PROTESTORS]

CATIA: We arrived about midnight, and it was full-on stuff was happening, there was people with walkie-talkies greeting us.

AARON: The North Roaring Devil sale was near Breitenbush Hot Springs, an intentional community and retreat center set in some story-book old growth. The action was loosely organized by the environmental group Earth First!. I say loosely because no one seemed to know how they were going to stop the loggers. To Catia, it was overwhelming.

CATIA: One person stood up and started talking about making a strategic plan to really get some stuff accomplished, and it sounded really reasonable. So I was like, I’m just following that guy around. And it ended up being Tim.

TIM INGALSBEE: [Laugh]

AARON: Tim Ingalsbee was a graduate student who worked as a firefighter for the Forest Service in the summer. Not to give away the ending to the story, but he and Catia are now married, and he’s with us in their living room.

Tim had heard about the logging through friends. He knew that being there was risking his summer job, but he couldn’t handle what the clear cuts did to the forest.

TIM: Those are the proverbial moonscapes. It’s just nothing but, you know, scorched earth. And, you know, this is not why I wanted to work for the Forest Service. I want to do forest service. And this is quite the opposite.

AARON: So the night before Easter, while Stephan was calling his cutters, Tim was helping lead the resistance. All they had to do was hold off the loggers two or three days, until other environmentalists could file an injunction against the timber sale in court. But this wasn’t the first time the Forest Service had gone ahead with a sale like this to head off a court challenge. This was actually the second Easter Massacre. So protesters knew that loggers had the upper hand.

TIM: If they can lay the trees down before the case went to court, the judge would moot the case. Cause yeah, I mean, he might’ve deemed it an illegal timber sale, but he can’t order the trees to be stood back up. So we called it at the time “chainsaw justice.”

AARON: Chainsaw justice: meaning the logger’s chainsaws got to be judge, jury, and executioner.

The protestors stayed up all night, dragging fallen logs and rocks from the forest and piling them on the road. Anything that would slow down the logging trucks and snowmobiles come morning.

[ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP, PROTESTOR: Build a wall between these two cars.]

TIM: We built these immense barricades. And when, you know, dawn’s rising, you just see the work as, okay, the loggers will never get through that.

AARON: And the loggers didn’t. They actually went home that first day after talking with the protestors. But then the Forest Service showed up. With a front-end loader. Think: bulldozer.

TIM: And within minutes, smashed the handiwork of all of us that did hours to build.

CATIA: When they came in with the machinery, I realized I was a little out of my depth, and I got very scared. So I just ran up the road, and I had no idea what I was going to find. I ended up finding was this man Leo in the middle of the logging road trying to bury himself in this pyramid of rocks. And he started yelling at me, “help me, help me.”

TIM: Buried right up to his neck in a barricade of boulders. And that is what held off that front-end loader. I mean, the blade came right up to him, intimidated him, but he couldn’t move. So it fended them off for that the rest of that day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, DEPUTY: Anyone in the road will be arrested.]

AARON: The deputies set to work moving the rocks and pulling Leo out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, DEPUTY: You want to be carried out, or do you want to walk out?]

AARON: He chose to be carried, because in these early years, it was all about nonviolent resistance—simply putting your body in the way. Deputies arrested him and twelve others on disorderly conduct that first day. But as word spread, more people arrived to take their place.

TIM: Similar actions had been taking place all through the 80s, but in very remote places, with just a handful of people. This was at Breitenbush Hot Springs on the doorstep of Portland. So there were dozens and dozens of people coming. Hear the news, we’re going to go save the forest.

AARON: But despite the reinforcements, Tim and Catia still felt like they were up against the unstoppable juggernaut of the timber industry and the federal government.

CATIA: How are we, this little ragged band of individuals with very little resources, how are we going to stop this terrible machine that’s really, in the span of just a few years, taking the very last parts of the forest?

AARON: The irony of human psychology is that while the environmentalists felt like they were the proverbial David in the fight against Goliath, the local loggers and their families felt that way, too. Rightly or wrongly, they saw these scrappy protestors as representatives of big national environmental groups. Groups that were about to put all future timber sales in national forests on hold, all across the Northwest. So for the loggers, it was like their very existence was under attack.

[BREAK]

AARON: I moved to Oregon the same year as the Easter Massacre, but I was 8, so frankly, I don’t remember it. But I wanted to know what was at stake in the fight over the forest, besides the old-growth, so I went back to see Stephan, who was hired to cut the trees.

[SOUND OF UNLOCKING SHED]

STEPHAN: It’s kind of dirty out here.

AARON: We start out back, at the shed where he stores his chainsaws.

STEPHAN: This is a pretty much as small a saw as we used.

AARON: It’s bright orange and the size of what you’d buy at the hardware store.

STEPHAN: 32-inch bar. That’s what we use every day

AARON: But then he reaches into the back of the shed. And he pulls out a big white mechanical box with two handles. It’s so big, I would’ve guessed it was a portable generator, but it’s actually the body of his first chainsaw. A McCullough 125. It’s just missing the saw bar. That is, the long steel plate that the chain whips around to cut into the trees.

STEPHAN: You could run a 50-inch bar, four-foot bar, pretty much. I should clean the damn thing up.

AARON: And is that about as big of a bar is where ever used, or were there bigger bars?

STEPHAN: We used some bigger ones, some 60-inch bars occasionally.

AARON: Imagine that for a minute. A chainsaw that’s big enough to get on all the rides at Disneyland. How big a tree needs a five-foot-long chainsaw?

STEPHAN: But I’ve got some pictures of it. I’ll show you some big, big trees. I dug them out.

AARON: I’d like that.

AARON: Stephan takes me back inside and opens a picture album of the trees they cut at the North Roaring Devil sale. The photos show a couple of loggers in helmets and red suspenders standing on top of a fallen log.

AARON: Wow, these things are enormous. He’s standing on a tree that is as tall as, oh wait, is that you?

STEPHAN: That’s me.

AARON: You’re standing on a tree that is as wide as you are tall.

STEPHAN: Oh yeah. There was some huge timber up there. It was from five to seven, eight-foot on the stump.

AARON: That means eight feet wide at the base. These were the kind of trees Stephan cut all through the 70s and 80s. He spent every day in the woods, rain or shine, sick or injured.

AARON: What did you love about it?

STEPHAN: I liked being outdoors. I hunted, I fished, and it was the feeling of freedom out there, because, you know, you might work for somebody else, but when you’re out there working, you’re your own boss.

AARON: You also made good money, without needing a college degree.

STEPHAN: When I was 23 years old, I was making between $25,000 and $30,000 a year. Hell, I thought I was really making big money.

AARON: It was the kind of job that could support a family, buy a house, a truck, maybe a boat. Timber was the economic lifeblood of all the small towns in the Santiam Canyon—and many of the small towns throughout the Northwest. If you didn’t have a job at the mill or in the woods, you had a family member or neighbor who did. And your kids played on a baseball team sponsored by the local timber company.

STEPHAN: Then it was a good feeling. And in the ’70s and ’80s, we’d figured that we’re going to do this forever.

AARON: Stephan planned to log until he retired. He even built up a business that employed nearly 30 cutters. But environmentalists wanted to keep Stephan from ever cutting trees again, or at least these ancient ones. So back at the North Roaring Devil sale, when the loggers returned on the second morning, their wives and families came out in support.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, TOWNSPEOPLE CHANTING: Save our loggers! Save our loggers!]

AARON: Several dozen locals gathered alongside the road and under thick branches to stay out of the falling sleet. They waved hand-painted signs saying things like “Give a Hoot, Save the Oregon Woodworker.” Their main goal was countering the protestors’ message to the news cameras.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, TOWNSPERSON: This is our livelihood. This puts food on our tables.]

AARON: It felt like loggers were watching their way of life teeter on the brink, and instead of getting sympathy like farmers or auto workers, they were getting blamed. This is how one logger put it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, LOGGER: They had signs up calling us the US destruction crew. As far as I’m concerned, I care more about that forest than anybody out there.]

AARON: For both sides, the clock was ticking. The judge would decide whether to halt the logging the next day, so the question was: would there be any trees left standing for him to rule on? The loggers and law enforcement started up the final stretch of plowed road, led by the forest service’s front end loader.

STEPHAN: We kinda went in a caravan, all went together because these people were on the sides of the road and up in the hills. And this one guy, he jumped up off the side of the road, got right in my face and threw some mud and then spit in my face too. I was mad, and I stopped the pickup, and Jim Morgan said, “Just sit here. Just take it.” And I said, “You don’t know how hard that is to take.”

AARON: Meanwhile, Tim was racing the logging convoy by foot, trying to figure out how to slow it down.

TIM: They went all out. It was a huge convoy of law enforcement vehicles and front-end loaders and snowmobiles, and it was kind of horrific, because that front-end loader is smashing through all the barricades, and people start scattering. Just behind me, I saw one of our activists throw himself into the scoop of the front-end loader just to slow it down. I mean epic heroism.

AARON: Knowing they couldn’t stop the heavy machinery, Tim headed up the road into the deeper snow, where the loggers would have to continue on snowmobiles.

TIM: And then one by one, other people started joining me. So we say, let’s make our stand here. And right at that moment we hear the whine of a snowmobile. So we just held hands, like paper dolls, and spread out across the road. And sure enough it was a snowmobile carrying the county sheriff. And he was standing up on the back, and he jumps off and says, “you’re all under arrest.” And he actually handcuffed us together, holding hands. And it was the most bizarre moment, because he steps back and then realizes, “Oh, there’s one of me and five or six of you. And you’re all handcuffed together and still blocking the road.” So the sheriffs had been doing all the arrests up to that point, and the Forest Service was out of the camera view. But that required a bunch of Forest Service people to, you know, we’d laid down to snow, and they had to drag us out. That was a shocking, the lengths that the agency was going to try to preempt the court case. I mean it was just kind of a mad rush to get those trees cut down.

AARON: And they did. Over the next few days, the logging company brought in an extra team of tree fallers, and Stephan says they cut two weeks of trees in three days, just to get them on the ground. Which only incited the protestors more.

STEPHAN: Like a big bees nest. We just stirred ‘em up real good. They really went to work then.

AARON: The Forest Service fenced the area off, but activists snuck in at night.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PROTESTOR: The Forest Service is cutting too fast. They’re too greedy. We want to slow things down.]

AARON: Each day they tried new methods to stall the logging crews, inventing and refining the strategies that would become hallmarks of the Forest Defense Movement and inform future protests against everything from oil pipelines in Montana to mountain-top mining in West Virginia.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, REPORTER: Three hours later, the sheriff arrived and the real drama began.]

AARON: They circled one of the giant old trees and locked their necks together with u-locks, forcing the sheriff to bring in a locksmith.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, REPORTER: Linn County deputies arrested four protestors on disorderly conduct charges.]

AARON: Earth First! was known for sabotage, and according to loggers, activists damaged chainsaws and other machines in the night. Then a few of them climbed trees and set up slings, thinking the cutters would steer clear of the whole area. But Stephan’s boss told him to cut the nearby trees anyway.

STEPHAN: And I got a little bit close to that one tree. It didn’t hurt the person. It didn’t hurt the tree, but it scared the living bejesus out of the kid that was up in the tree. He came down pretty immediately. Decided he didn’t want any more of that. And it wasn’t a good idea to do it, but I did.

AARON: So even with their lives literally hanging in the balance, the protestors couldn’t stop the chainsaws.

On Tuesday, two days after the protest started, a federal judge heard the environmentalists’ challenge. Like many justices in Oregon, he was widely regarded as sympathetic to the industry. So his ruling came as no surprise.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, NEWS ANCHOR: A federal district judge in Portland, Oregon, today rejected a request by conservationists that he’d block logging on a stand of centuries old trees.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, ACTIVIST: There are so many people who are going to be outraged. This is all out war.]

AARON: But unlike the smaller protests that had come before, this time, the nation paid attention. The North Roaring Devil Sale got covered by the likes of “Good Morning America,” the “Today Show,” and NPR.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, REPORTER: Loggers and environmentalists in Oregon are locked into a battle over a stand of ancient trees.]

TIM: That was a first that at least public opinion radically shifted. We weren’t a bunch of ecoterrorists in the woods. We were up, you know, upholding the law, and, you know, defending what was irreplaceable.

CATIA: It is really the action that put old-growth logging in ancient forests on the map. It really helped form the movement and inform our tactics.

AARON: For Catia and Tim, that was the silver lining. Because it’s hard to say there was a winner of this battle at North Roaring Devil. In one big sense, the protestors lost. All the old growth trees were cut down, and the environmentalists took to calling it the “Easter Massacre.” But for Stephan and the loggers, it felt like a different kind of loss.

STEPHAN: It decimated a lot of communities. It was real bad. It was bad on me. I mean, I went from having a, let’s say, just having a good job, to no job for a while. But you know, I picked myself up and… well I didn’t. I was really mad at the world. In the late nineties there, I kind of hated everybody that didn’t like the trees to be cut. You know you go from being a logger that makes $40,000 a year, maybe back then $50,000, to flipping hamburgers down at McDonalds, it wasn’t a very good deal.

AARON: So these were the stakes that would define the war to come: the last of America’s great virgin forests, versus the livelihood and dignity of timber towns across the northwest.

This wasn’t a war between good and evil. it was a confrontation between two opposing worldviews. Were these forests irreplaceable ecosystems that we needed to preserve, or were they renewable resources we could cut and regrow over and over? Because it was never a given that America would preserve any of its ancient forests. After all, humans cut the old growth that grew in places like the Middle East, Europe, and most of the U.S. so long ago, we don’t even remember it was there.

So when the trees came down at North Roaring Devil, it was the first move in a high stakes chess match that’s still playing out. Because the Timber Wars didn’t end. They evolved.

And at the heart of this conflict—the deep down root cause—was another revolution going on in the forest: a series of scientific discoveries that would upend the timber industry. In fact, what we were learning was about to fundamentally alter how people interact with the natural world.

That’s next time.

[CREDITS]

Timber Wars is reported and written by me, Aaron Scott, with editing by Peter Frick-Wright, Robbie Carver, David Steves and Ed Jahn.

The series is produced by me and Peter and Robbie of 30 Minutes West.

Our music is by Laura Gibson.

Sound design by Robbie Carver and final mixing by Steven Kray.

Fact-checking by Matt Giles.

Legal oversight by Rebecca Morris.

And our executive producer is Ed Jahn.

Special thanks to the NPR Story lab team for helping us get this series and first episode off the ground, especially Michael May, Cara Tallo, Matt Ozug, Katie Daugert, Adelina Lancianese, and to Jenna Molster and Daniel Wood for the NPR archival tape.

Thanks to the University of Oregon Library for the KEZI-TV footage, and archivist Nathan Georgitis for helping us dig through it.

It’s really rare for newsrooms to have the resources to commit to big projects like “Timber Wars,” and I can’t express how grateful I am to have been given the time to talk to so many people about this huge moment in U.S. history. But that’s only possible because of all the members who support Oregon Public Broadcasting. So if you want us to do more projects like this, please become a sustaining member today. It’s super easy to do at www.opb.org/pod.

And if you like this show, please share it and give us a rating and review wherever you’re listening. It helps spread the word.