PLANTS | ALEX HARRIS | OLD GROWTH SOLUTIONS
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Young and Indigenous podcast is an outlet for people to know about Indigenous knowledge, storytelling, and history. Through our youthful journeys as Indigenous people, young people, and elders share their experiences with us. Without them, we wouldn't be able to do this. Come listen to Plants, a podcast series featuring many different plant knowledge keepers with diverse perspectives and plant philosophies.

A series brought to you by Children of the Setting Sun Productions and Cultural Survival Youth Fellow Opportunities. Hello, welcome to Plants, a podcast series brought to you by Young and Indigenous Podcast. This series is brought to you by Children of the Setting Sun Productions and Cultural Survival Youth Fellowship Opportunities. Today we're sitting with Knowledge Keeper Alex Harris. Alex, can you introduce yourself?

Sure. My name is Alex Harris. I live here in Whatcom County and I work as the Land and Water Policy Manager at the local nonprofit Resources for Sustainable Communities, which is based here in Bellingham, Washington.

Wonderful. And can you share a little bit more about resources and your position at the organization? Sure. So, Resources was founded 40 years ago here in Bellingham, and we're an advocacy and education nonprofit. We work on a variety of environmental issues. My particular focus is on land policy and water policy, and particularly how the two interact. So I track forestry, ag, and development.

and make sure that land uses are improving over time and advocate for land uses that are restorative and less degrading to our watersheds. - Yeah, thank you. That sounds really important. Can you share what kind of relationship you've developed with the plant relatives and give some examples in your line of work? - Sure.

I see plants as teachers and kin, and it's hard to sometimes describe in modern English what those relationships look like. We're so disconnected these days from the natural world that I think there's a lot of misunderstandings of what it means to be kin with the natural world. But plants, luckily, are teachers, and we can learn from them and recultivate that understanding of kinship.

My wife and I run a flower and vegetable farm business out near Acme, so in the East Whatcom County area.

So we are struggling with plants every day. We work with them, we work against them, we kill a lot of weeds, we cultivate a lot of botanical magic. And it's sometimes beautiful, it's sometimes really difficult. And that's how it is when you work with the natural world. You're not in control. It's a partnership and you have to learn

how to be a part of that partnership instead of pretending like you are the sole decision maker and the master over the farm or over a landscape. So I try to take those lessons from the farm and from my experience in nature and weave those into my day job, into my policy work.

and just remind myself that the natural world for a very long time worked in harmony with human communities for millennia. And we just need to remember what that partnership looks like. It's going to be difficult to recultivate that understanding, but it's very, very doable. Wow, thank you. That's what an eloquent way to say living in relationship. And you do just that. So...

Thank you for reminding our audience as well that our people have lived in relationship with the land for thousands and thousands of years and it's just very recently that we've kind of stepped away from that relative to human history. So thank you for bringing that to light. So you mentioned, Alex, that you work with forests and in forestry. Can you tell us a little bit about that work? Sure.

Here locally, we have a lot of opportunities to move the needle on how we manage our forests. Almost all of our forests have been logged and converted into homogeneous, simple tree plantations. And there's a certain dogma in the forestry world that

The best management is the one that converts the complexity and the wildness of native forests into tree plantations, into these tree farms that are solely meant to generate wood and to optimize profit and revenue returns on a short-term basis.

So the goal really of our work locally is to transition towards what's known as ecological forest management, which is an appreciation of a forest as an ecosystem, recognizing this ecosystem as complex, recognizing the numerous benefits that come from a functioning ecosystem, and trying to make management decisions that

may result in wood products, may result in some logging happening, but instead of these clear cuts and these plantations and these sprays that you see now, you transition closer to mimicking natural disturbances, learning from fire, learning from wind events, learning from fungus and insect events, learning how nature thins itself out and how nature manages a forest.

So that's really the idea of ecological forestry. And here in Whatcom County, there's a long history of people advocating for better forest practices. So the work we're doing now is on the shoulders of thousands of people coming before us who have for a long time advocated for this kind of management. And we're starting to see some really positive results.

especially in the last two years, we're seeing the state, the county, the city of Bellingham start to do some really cool things with forests and start to recognize what the science has told us, but also recognize what traditional ecological knowledge has been telling us for millennia.

Wow, thank you. I had no idea that forests could be so complex. But when you really sit back and think about it, and think about all of the abundance that forests bring, and even if you just were to stare at a forest floor and look at the many layers, they really are quite complex. And we're really blessed to have them. And what a step away from

traditional conservation or what is known as utilitarian conservation, you know, early conservation to be in a point now where we're seeing a lot more holisticness in the approach of forest conservation. And yeah, you speak to that so beautifully. So thank you. Of course.

In light of the recent victory that we had to celebrate, our audience might not have an understanding of what an old growth tree is or what an old growth forest is.

what a mature forest is. Can you maybe elaborate on what these are and what the benefits of having and protecting mature forests are? Right. Well, usually where I start with folks is before European settlement, the vast majority of our landscape was...

old growth, mature forest, this structurally complex native forest that supported a wide variety of species, supported all sorts of human communities, supported these watersheds and these salmon populations. Everything kind of was built on the foundation of these forest ecosystems.

And upon the arrival of Europeans in the 1800s and especially by the late 1800s, when clear-cut logging really began in earnest, these complex ecosystems began to be translated and converted into simplicity. And ever since, that's what we've been seeing is complexity,

being degraded and turned into simplicity. And of course you see that not just in forests, but all over. If you look at any ecological system, what Western society likes to do is compartmentalize, commodify, simplify, and utilize for economic gain. So here in the Northwest, forestry is kind of the first way that Europeans did that to the landscape.

And it's arguably the most impactful land use in this part of the world. So old growth is kind of the baseline of what a fully functioning ecosystem is in this part of the world.

These are some of the most dense ecosystems in the entire planet. When I mean dense, I'm talking about carbon, but also just sheer biomass, just the amount of material that life has been able to produce. They are carbon powerhouses. These old growth ecosystems continue to take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into the wood that

over time is storing carbon and then eventually these trees die and other trees take their place and that wood contributes a lot to the ecosystem even when it's dead. So that's notably what 50 years ago, 75 years ago,

That was the first thing that scientists really took note of. Old growth ecosystems are not just the forests with big trees. They're the forests with the most amount of dead wood on the ground and standing dead wood, what we call snags. Dead wood is crucially important for a wide variety of species. And it's notably what's lacking on the landscape. And there's a reason.

human beings, especially modern human beings, love dead wood as well. We use wood for our buildings, we use wood for all sorts of other things. And so wood is an incredible resource and that's worth recognizing. I think we should celebrate wood and really respect how precious of a resource it really is.

I think we need a timber industry in the Northwest that continues to develop wood products, but how we do that is crucially important. Should we convert old growth ecosystems into wood products? Absolutely not. Almost all those ecosystems are gone and the old growth that's left should be maintained.

You mentioned mature forests. Maturity is the stage directly before old growth. So when you talk about forest succession, it's kind of the lifetime of a forest. It starts out young and over time goes through all these different stages.

A mature forest is a forest that's maybe 80 to 150 years, and it's the stage immediately before old growth. So when we conserve mature forests today, if we choose not to log a 150-year-old forest, that forest is likely going to become an old growth forest in the next few decades. So the prospect of restoring old growth

is to me really exciting. We actually can contribute something positive to the next generation. We can leave a positive environmental legacy to our descendants instead of just leaving these industrial wastelands, these toxic cleanup sites, these polluted rivers, these degraded forests. To me, that's really exciting, the opportunity to leave something positive.

Now that we understand the importance of old growth and mature forests, can you share a little bit about how the broader community can support the movement of preserving and protecting these forests? Right. So in the state of Washington, there's a lot of land that is publicly owned. Some of that land is in federal ownership. Those are our national forests.

Some of that land is in the state's ownership, and that's the Department of Natural Resources mostly that manages those state lands. The DNR, Department of Natural Resources, they have this charge to generate revenue from their forest lands, mostly through timber sales, through logging projects.

And over the years, they've benefited schools and libraries and other beneficiaries by logging these forests. And then a portion of that revenue goes to support the beneficiaries. In 2019, there was a policy shift. I won't get into the policy weeds, which are sometimes pretty boring for people. But in 2019, there was a shift that allowed the DNR policy.

to start logging mature forests that had previously been on pause. These stands were not allowed for logging for a time. And in 2019, the state was suddenly allowed to log tens of thousands of acres of mature forest on the west side of the Cascades. And so they did. And we started seeing timber sales come up of these stands that were

80, 100, some of them 150 years old. And I mean, any layperson, any person on the street walking through these forests would call them old growth. Technically, they don't meet DNR's definition of old growth. They're mature. They're not yet old growth, but they are the old growth forests of the future. So citizens and community members started learning more about the problem and

learning more about where this was happening. And then we started essentially mapping out

which timber sales are coming up that have mature forest in them. And then we would go out to these sales and on the ground with our measuring tape, we would start to take diameter measurements. We'd start to take photos. We start to record data in the field of the structural complexity and the biodiversity that we observed. And then we would take that and start commenting on these timber sales.

we would comment, DNR would say, we already followed all the laws, which is true. They were following all the laws on the books and then they would move forward with the sale and then they would log the sale. And this started happening again and again before we realized this regulatory process was never going to get us where we needed to go. We needed to move this into the political sphere where we could actually, through grassroots organizing,

apply pressure to the state DNR and move them away from this logging of mature forest and try to get some type of policy that prevented that from happening anymore. Back in the 90s, there was a lot of activism around protecting old growth forests, and it did yield a policy shift

that ended old growth logging on DNR land. So now we're hoping to do the same for mature forests. Everyday people, oftentimes they're really busy. They don't know a lot about the issue. They can be overwhelmed with all the facts and all the complexity.

And that's why groups like the one I work for, that's why we do what we do. We go to all the meetings, we read all the documents, we sit down with DNR foresters, we talk with other governmental entities, we meet with the tribes, get perspectives from both Lummi Nation and the Nooksack Tribe.

and try to come up with policies that are both ambitious but doable. We try to thread a needle. We don't want to be too ambitious because then you're just a dreamer. But we also don't want to compromise too much because then the status quo wins. So you need to thread a needle. And with the work we've done here in Whatcom County, I think we've been pretty successful at we haven't protected every mature forest. Some of them have already been logged.

But over the last few years, we've protected hundreds of acres and now maybe over a thousand acres of mature forest land in the county that was going to be logged, but now is in conservation status. And that would not have happened if everyday people did not get involved and participate in this grassroots movement.

Awesome. And some examples of getting involved could be sending emails to local representatives, could be attending local meetings and learning about the forest, sharing a little bit about the forest with friends and family and friends.

attending rallies like the one that y'all hosted in September. Just some examples of how you can get involved. You're really passionate about the work that you do. Can you tell us how you got to where you are? What pivotal moment in your life put you in this direction? Yeah, that's a great question. And I really appreciate that question because

A lot of the time in this space, in natural resource policy, you talk about the legalities and the science. You know, you stay in those spheres. You talk about the rules and the laws and all the policy reforms. And then you talk about all the science that's been done. And you never really get to explore the spiritual and the personal. It's almost looked down upon to bring that up. So thank you for bringing it up.

What motivates me is it is my spiritual connection to these ecosystems. When I walk into a healthy forest ecosystem, I'm overwhelmed with the beauty, but also with the cooperation that these different organisms all seem to be accomplishing. I mean, it's just to me like it's magic that

There's competition amongst all these different species and organisms, but they find a way to achieve some type of homeostasis, some type of balance that persists over time. And yet there's constant change. It's change and balance. And to me, that is what human beings have been striving for maybe forever. We all compete against each other. We all...

have our own individual needs, but we need to find a way to live in harmony with one another and with the land. And we've looked to religion, we've looked to political ideologies and all sorts of other things to find the answer. And I think there have been some good insights in those traditions, but you only can go so far before it all comes back to Mother Earth and the age-old wisdom of

that is embedded in these ecosystems. It's taken modern society centuries to realize through the scientific process and through these other processes that traditional ecological knowledge has always known this. And we're circling back to what our ancestors already knew and what a lot of indigenous folks still today practice. What we need to do is

stand behind indigenous people, bolster the decolonization efforts that are happening in our own communities, and those are everywhere, those are happening everywhere, and find our own way to disrupt the kinds of capitalistic mindsets that treat us as cogs in a machine, that treat us as individuals all in competition with one another,

that treat us as opposite from the natural world. That mentality is toxic and we need to disrupt it and we need to promote the kinds of ideas and the kinds of practices that heal our relationship with the natural world, that heal our relationship with each other. - Would you say your connection to the forest falls in line with more of a spiritual responsibility as much as it is a physical responsibility? - Yeah, that's a great question.

I honestly think they are the same responsibility. And through the scientific lens, we see separation all over the place. And it's very useful to boil things down to their fundamentals and to separate them and categorize them. It's very useful. In fact, I would say it's very important to have that kind of vocabulary and that kind of understanding of these ecosystems

but it can also be misleading. It can very quickly separate the physical from the spiritual. And I think that's actually where a lot of our problems begin is where we start to treat spirituality as something that takes place in the afterlife or takes place only in special buildings or takes place only among certain people. All that kind of separation

is not mirrored in the natural world

And it's pretty easy to see the connection of the physical and spiritual when you're in, say, an old growth forest or for some people, it's the desert or it's a river ecosystem or it's 100 miles out on the ocean. You know, sometimes you need to be in that kind of place to understand that connection. And maybe it's hard to put the connection into words,

but you know it when you see it. When you're in it, you know it. And I bet every single person who listens to this can think back on a moment where they've felt that connection. And yeah, I think it's, in my mind, like...

this conversation about forests is a really great physical example for us to have a conversation about something more than just these physical places. It's about our relationship to the land. And it's about our relationship to the next generation. And to me, that's a spiritual conversation. And that's why it's been great to have a lot of

indigenous people, a lot of different religious congregations and other folks bring in the spiritual to this conversation so that it's not just boiled down to dollars and cents. It's not just boiled down to board feet. We're also talking about a cultural change. So yeah, I think it's a really cool question and very thought-provoking.

Yeah, I love the answer for that. And, you know, it makes me want to, you know, pose a little activity to our audience. If you're not driving and listening to this, I...

I invite you to just, you know, step in, step into that world for a second. Think back to a time you're sitting in a forest, on a beach, maybe out, you're on the water, or you're in a desert, and you've had a moment of just surrealness. And think about, you know, the sounds that you're hearing, and think about what you're seeing, all the colors, and how you feel.

Doing these exercises and going out into nature and learning how to really fully appreciate what we have right before us, that almost is like peak happiness. That is almost like peak existence. Recognizing

how, how, um, how precious, you know, all of, all of this is, and how, um, blessed we are to have, to have it as at our, you know, at our disposal, not at our disposal, but like in, in our, you know, in our hands, you know, um, because we are at a time and place where

If we if the pendulum swings one way we could lose it all you know and so you know don't don't take what we have for granted and go out and sit and sit with the natural world and learn you know learn learn from the plants learn from The natural world just how to be thank you. Yeah for sure and if I could add something to that Which relates to your next question here about?

Folks getting to understand the ecosystems in their own backyard, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to go out with a field guide and a botanist to understand what's going on. Everyone has a different way to relate to a landscape and get to know it. For some people, that's going on a 10 mile run. For others, it's sitting quietly and meditating by a stream.

My favorite thing to do is to explore some new place and to move slowly but still cover geography. And the stuff I find just never ceases to amaze me. And so find your own type of approach that gets you outside, that gets you covered in dirt, learning new things, engaging your curiosity, and

engaging that gratitude muscle that I think for a lot of us modern folks like is under used and maybe has atrophied. I think a lot of us maybe I will speak for myself at least I grew up religious and gratitude was very much a part of the religious practice. I think a lot of folks who have left religion maybe haven't found a way to incorporate gratitude into their own lifestyle and to their own practice.

So maybe for each person, you know, something I'll challenge each person who's listening to this is to find some way to express gratitude for the natural world, for the clean air that you breathe, for the clean water that you drink, for the land you live on, for the people who have stewarded this land since time immemorial, for the people who are...

speaking up and doing what they can to protect this amazing planet. Just that micro expression of gratitude every day in your own small way makes a world of difference. And if you could find a way to get outside, to be outside, to enjoy being outside and express gratitude, you're already over half of the way there.

The rest of it is getting involved, finding your own way to get involved in the movement to protect these places. But honestly, when people ask me, like, what can I do? What can I do? Half of it is what you do on your own time and having your own physical and spiritual practice in the outdoors. That reminds me of that saying, just show up. Right, right.

Just show up. It can be so intimidating to like, you know, think about joining a coalition of, you know, forest defenders or land defenders in general. But it's not that it's not intimidating at all. And it's not challenging. It's really a team effort in general.

in going about whatever you're hoping to achieve. And it's definitely not as hard as like writing a group project by yourself. Right. It's, it's everybody who Pat, who is passionate about this cause coming together to make this job easier and more achievable. So, so thank you for, thank you for sharing that and allowing our audience to,

One, learn healthy habits and learning the values of gratitude and responsibility. But two, also for inviting our audience to understand that half of it is really just showing up. Right. And taking care of yourself and living in relationship with the land, which is really what you should be doing all along. Right.

Speaking of people who are passionate about the environment and care, that's a great segue into the Whatcom Forest Watch. And from my understanding, that's a group that you've helped found and coordinate. Can you tell us about what the Whatcom Forest Watch is and what your role for the group is? Right.

So, like you were saying, these types of grassroots efforts cannot be done alone. By their very definition, they are mobilizations of many people with different backgrounds, with different skill sets, with different perspectives. Oftentimes there's a lot of disagreement.

in grassroots movements, but that's baked into the recipe. You need different perspectives because if we all think the same way, it's really dangerous. It can be really unhealthy. So just like an ecosystem benefits from its heterogeneity, from its diversity,

Similarly, our grassroots movements are healthiest when there's a wide variety of perspectives at the table who are all contributing in their own way. Welcome Forest Watch is a small but mighty group of grassroots advocates from our community who get together once a month. We talk about issues relating to forests and forest management, and then we talk about next steps and opportunities to get involved, and that means

There's homework assigned. There's roles delegated. A lot of people spend pretty considerable time on this work, but that time contributes to the success of this movement. And truly, I am just amazed by how supportive this community has been. I'm from Oregon where

logging is far more aggressive, where there's way less protections for the environment, for watersheds, for salmon. And it was really encouraging to move to Whatcom County five years ago and see all the progress that's already been made, but then also see some of those similarities. And so a lot of the grassroots work that I am a part of here is building on

the work I've done elsewhere in the Northwest. I'm from Southern Oregon and I've done grassroots organizing in Southern Oregon. I went to school in Eugene and did my first grassroots organizing there and then lived in Portland for four years and then moved up here. So I've gotten to see different parts of the Northwest and it's been really cool to see the different parts of this movement. Most folks are

you know, focused on climate change in one way or another. Some of them are more focused on the fossil fuel energy side of things. Other people are more focused on the adaptation and resilience side of things. But there is an overarching movement. And sometimes I think we can forget when we're in our own little corner

what kind of movement we're a part of. And it's even, it's broader than a regional movement. This is a worldwide movement. And it's really inspiring to feel like we're a part of it. And by acting locally, we're making our own contribution to this global effort.

That reminded me of a point you brought up earlier, that indigenous isn't just here and indigenous movements aren't just local movements. And I kind of...

This year at the IPD event, I had the opportunity to reach out to indigenous people from other countries and people sent indigenous stories from other countries. And it just reminded me that indigeneity is everywhere. There's indigenous movements in China. There's indigenous movements happening in Europe, Africa, New Zealand, and here in America.

that you saying that forestry movement is a worldwide movement as well. It just, that sparked that. And I did want to acknowledge that you said that and that is the truth. Indigenous people aren't just Native American First Nations. Indigenous people are

struggling all over the world in these movements. So taking part in your local movements and learning how you can impact policy change for the greater good of the planet, literally, is really one of the most beneficial things you can do. So thank you for bringing that up. And also on the note, you're from Oregon.

And I remember Carly Lloyd sharing, Carly Lloyd, Center for Responsible Forestry, shout out Carly, she's dope. But she was sharing, she shared her testimony a couple of years ago at the Mother Earth Day event, talking about invasive species, beetles wreaking havoc on local forests in her territory and how disheartening that was. Have you had similar experiences? Yeah.

For sure. So yeah, I grew up in Southern Oregon near the Oregon-California border and it's still west of the Cascades, but it's much drier. It's a very different place than Northwest Washington. And fire is an integral part of the ecosystem there. And of course, since Europeans settled 150 years ago,

fire has been suppressed and the ecosystems are choked full of vegetation, way more dense than they used to be. And of course, a lot of these forests have been logged and turned into dense tree plantations, which has only worsened the problem. And what we've seen is fires that when they sweep through are contributing to a lot of loss. And in my hometown in particular,

There was a fire in 2020. It was part of the Labor Day fire event, which is the biggest fire event ever to occur in recent history in the Northwest. And the most destructive of all the fires during that week of September 2020

was in Ashland, Oregon, which was the town I grew up in. A fire started in the city limits and then ripped through the center of the Rogue Valley and destroyed thousands of homes, displacing many thousands of people and traumatizing my community that I grew up in forevermore. And I go back there every once in a while to see my wife's family, which is still living in that area,

And people talk about it with a look in their eye. They've experienced trauma. And of course, these kinds of events, sometimes we have things we can do to mitigate fire impacts. We can thin certain dense plantations. We can leave mature forests as they are. We can encourage the right kind of fire use and learn from indigenous fire use.

But other times, there's very little we can do other than stop climate change. Because climate change is contributing to hotter and drier conditions on the landscape, which really sets the stage for a fire. All you need is a windy day and a spark, and the forest will take off. So what you really need to do is stop climate change from getting worse so that these forests are not so dry and so dry

A lot of these trees are really stressed. So, I mean, that was and still is a really sensitive topic to see how climate change is already contributing to real human suffering, including in the hometown that I grew up in.

Thank you for being willing to share that story, your story with our audience. I know it was a little bit of a blind side, but it sparked my interest because I've driven through northern and southern and eastern and western Oregon. I guess I've driven all over the state. And I've seen how beautiful the forests are in northern Oregon. And historically, I mean, southern Oregon,

and Northern California probably had a good amount of healthy, mature forest pre-contact. And I'm very ignorant on those territories, so I won't speak much to what they probably looked like. But in terms of climate change,

how multifaceted the destruction really can be between the dieback of forest because it is simply not cold enough, the dieback or the burning of forest because it is too hot and dry, where climate change sets the stage for invasive species and habitat loss. I mean, there's so much that happens...

in terms of destruction when talking about climate change and, you know, that, that story and Carly's story, you know, gives us, gives us just two perspectives that are deep, deep. And, um,

So I just I commend you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And for our audience to be able to hear firsthand on how you were, you know, you were affected by climate change and climate impacts. So thank you. Back to Welcome Forest Watch. Mm hmm.

There was a rally back at Maritime Heritage Park we talked about a little bit earlier in September and I attended that rally and it was incredible by the way. Props to everybody involved for that. If I remember correctly, you were an organizer.

as well as the MC of the event. Can you give us your take, your perspective on the rally and like kind of like what you've seen just being in front of everybody? Yeah, it was honestly, I've done a lot of events like that, but that was perhaps one of the more challenging ones. It was an emotional roller coaster because

We hosted the rally at the same time that the Board of Natural Resources was visiting Bellingham. So the Board of Natural Resources, or BNR, they're the ones that oversee DNR, the Department of Natural Resources. So the BNR was coming to Bellingham for their annual retreat. They're all the decision makers. They are the targets of our campaign. We are trying to influence them.

So we thought of different ways to engage them. And one way to engage them was to join them on their tour around forest lands in Whatcom County, which we all thought was pretty important. And members of the public were invited to participate and ride around in the vans with them. So we figured, okay, we have to do that.

But then we also figured, wouldn't it be cool if we kind of flexed our community's muscles and were like, we are watching and we care about this issue and you should do more for forests. And so I kind of said like, yeah, we have to do both of those things. And suddenly I realized I have to do both of those things, even though they're happening on the same day. So yeah.

I was in a situation of frantically planning this rally, pretty last minute, as always happens, with the help of dozens of other people, organizations from around the state. We had a ton of help from volunteers right here in Bellingham.

A lot of artists came out and made some beautiful signs and beautiful banners. And we had circus and puppet folks come out. We had poets and musicians. Everyone kind of just came out of the woodwork. It was incredible.

I worked with others to orchestrate that, but also had to attend this tour with the Board of Natural Resources. So, you know, got up at some who knows what hour and spent the day driving around in these white government vans with the Board of Natural Resources and with staff of the Department of Natural Resources

as well as some elected officials who came along and had some really great conversations, really good dialogue, some vigorous debate about how our forests should be managed, and some awkward moments for sure. And then I got picked up during the tour early with a few elected officials who were going to speak at our rally, and we went to the

to the rally site and started organizing the event. And it was a blank concrete area and we just kind of turned it into a beautiful, vibrant event. And then you never really know who's going to show up, but the community showed up. Hundreds of folks who live in Bellingham and the surrounding area came to this event, showed their support. They sang with us. They listened to the speakers and it was overall a really successful event.

No, for sure. See, this is what I mean. The train can stimulate some really interesting reflections on like industrialism and our current place in history. Yeah, maybe I'll listen to it and have the train be left in. Dude. It's valuable. You're right. Oh, yeah. As annoying as it is. It sparks good emotions.

Thinking back to this many staff meetings that we've gone off onto like a 10 minute banter, 20 minute banter. I'm just like, why, why is this thing? It's a good little reminder. We'll miss it if we move. Right. Something you mentioned is, can you imagine what it would be like if the coal terminal had been built? And sometimes our environmental winds are so quiet. We're like, we're keeping things as they are.

And so we kind of take that for granted, but we should really appreciate like how different our community and our place on the Salish Sea would be if we had North America's largest coal export terminal. You know, like it would have transformed this place and the victory that Lummi Nation and others were able to make happen to stop that coal terminal

preserved the integrity of this place. I think a lot of people have already forgotten about that, you know? It's huge. And I think that to me is like the work we're doing on forests is building on the work that was done with the coal terminal, right? If we can learn from those successes, I would hope we can bring some of that same approach of allyship between indigenous and non-indigenous people

to protect what matters most to us and keep this place special. Yeah, reflecting on the coal terminal, and I was a teenager when it was first proposed, and I remember, man, the first conservation group or I don't know if it was an institution, it was so long ago, but they sent a representative to our school and kind of told us what it was, and it was just like,

we had no fight until the Lummi Nation said no. Like we were going to lose this fight. And even like in my, even in my younger years of activism on the Cherry Point site,

reef netting out there showing that we're still here kind of it still did feel kind of heartless and hopeless like we were going to just get steamrolled I mean they they started developing out in Cherry Point and that's something that's kind of looked over you know by the state and it really gets me frustrated because it's like they started developing before they had the rights to do so

being wealthy enough to be able to pay the fines, being so confident that they were going to win. And I don't know how the tribes stopped it, but I imagine in other places where the tribes don't have as much power, there is no stopping something like that. And we do have to recognize that the opposite people, entities of the opposite philosophy

will and have gone about unethical ways of, you know, going about their business, you know, going development or whatever that be. So that kind of opens up that door. But thankfully we won. Thankfully, you know, hopefully we keep winning and we just...

keep that victory permanent and we keep establishing ourselves as, you know, the first people of this territory and our allies keep coming to our aid and, you know, not even to our aid, but, you know, we're our allies, indigenous people and non-indigenous people. We're one. We're one. And we've stood, we've stood that way, you know, in recent history and without our allies and

Without that unison, these victories don't happen. And so, yeah, to acknowledge a couple of those things, you know, one, they don't play fair. Right. And we are kind of forced to play by the book a little bit more. Right. But...

Two, once again, another example of how our allyship just moves this work forward in such a more profound way. Speaking of victories, recently over 2,000 acres of mature forests were protected in the state of Washington. Nearly 600 of those acres are right here in the Whatcom watershed.

Could you share more about what this means for our community and what it means to you? Sure. Yeah. So the Department of Natural Resources in December of 2023 announced that they would be using money from the legislature to protect 2000 acres of mature, structurally complex forest. And that's forest that would have been logged without this program.

The money actually comes from Washington's new cap and trade, what's known as a cap and invest program. The program is called the Climate Commitment Act, and folks will likely be hearing about the Climate Commitment Act throughout this year because, I mean, I'm just going to say it, Republicans are trying to kill this legislation.

It's easily the most ambitious climate policy ever to be implemented in the state. It's one of the most innovative and ambitious climate policies in the whole United States and really is an international. It's got it's got an international attention.

as being a far reaching, bold approach to tackle climate change. The whole idea is to tax the hundred largest polluters, the big corporations that are dumping large amounts of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. So figure out who those hundred are and then they get taxed and that money

that is generated then gets invested in tackling climate change, both from a mitigation, also known as carbon reduction standpoint, so like reducing greenhouse gases, but also from a standpoint of resiliency and adaptation.

acknowledging that climate change is not going to just go away. We need to invest in strategies that improve the resilience of our communities and our ecosystems to the impacts of climate change. So this policy was passed in 2021. It's a huge win for the environment. And there are right now a lot of attacks on it. I just wanted to make that plug because people are going to be hearing about this. One of the pockets of money that came from the Climate Commitment Act

funded the protection of these mature forests. And the idea is that we buy replacement land that will be managed for these beneficiaries. So the state DNR is going to buy private timberland and that timberland will no longer be managed according to the low standards of private timberland. It will have to be managed according to DNR's rules, which are better.

And then in exchange, 2,000 acres of mature forest are protected and they're not logged. We got a third of the acreage here in Whatcom County. Statewide, there was 2,000. We got 650 of those acres. So we're one of the major players in the state of Washington that's working on this. And most of those acres were focused in the Lake Whatcom watershed, which is the drinking watershed for the city of Bellingham.

It has a long history of aggressive logging and rampant development that has led to the pollution of that water body and all sorts of problems in the lake. So there's a good argument to be made that preserving mature forest in the Lake Whatcom watershed is going to improve the resilience of the watershed in the long run.

Notably, we were also able to protect the Brokdown Palace Timbersail, which was this mature forest about 100 years old along the banks of the Middle Fork Nooksack River. Of course, the Nooksack River has three forks, and this is the Middle Fork, and it's up by Mount Baker. We fought long and hard to protect this.

broke down palace and at the very last minute we were told by some allies at dnr that it was literally the last forest to be included it was included because public lands commissioner hillary franz decided to include it so it was a political decision and she only did that because of the grassroots support that we've been able to generate so it's a direct reflection of like

The work that people have done in the last few years around this issue has directly resulted in forest protections. I mean, grassroots organizing works, and it's working right now. That being said, 2,000 acres statewide, it's great, but it's only a drop in the bucket. We still have about 50,000, maybe over 50,000 acres left.

of this mature forest that remains unprotected on state DNR land. So we're taking steps in the right direction, but there's more work to be done. With, with that kind of, I guess, success, you know, shout out Whatcom County too, you know, wow. And shout out, yeah, shout out everybody that cares for where they live and as it,

as an indigenous member of this territory, my hands go up to each and everybody who's doing this amazing work. to all of you. And, you know, we've said it a couple of times, no victory is permanent. You know, we've said it a couple of times and it holds true, especially in this work, but with like Whatcom County success,

Do you see a potential of like working outward with other counties potentially to help get the rest of those 50,000 or as much of it as we can protected? And how do we ensure that our victories remain permanent? Yeah, that's a great question.

My own philosophy is that we have very little control of what happens on the federal scene, what happens in Washington, D.C. It's thousands of miles away. Decisions that are made there, they're very hard to influence. I'm not saying it's worth giving up on, but it's not my fight personally. I think some of the most meaningful change we can make to tackle things like climate change is

Those happen at the local scale. And so I believe in using success on the local scale as a model, as a template that can be adapted in other communities. And it maybe can be modified to meet the needs of those communities because no two communities are the same and no two ecosystems are the same.

but at least the shape, the constellation, the template can be developed here in Whatcom County and refined. And then if it works, that can be exported to other communities. And the whole idea is to find a better balance between our economic goals and our environmental goals, because we need both. We need to think about both. But oftentimes we think of

economic activity, doing as much as we possibly can while complying with the bare minimum regulations, the environmental laws. And that's just not enough. We need a more holistic approach. And that's what we're starting to do here in Whatcom County. Something I wanted to mention, Whatcom County Council, they're the legislative body of the county. They just passed a new ordinance and I think it was November of 2023.

to create what's known as the Forest Resilience Task Force. And the idea of this task force is to talk about forests as more than just opportunities to produce wood products, but instead to think about forests as ecosystems that can help us be more resilient to climate change. This task force has about 20 members, including

different governmental entities, both tribes in the area have been invited. A lot of different stakeholder interests will be at the table. I was very fortunate to be appointed to the task force. A handful of other really awesome community leaders were also appointed. And we're going to be meeting over the course of about a year and a half, and we're going to produce a handful of recommendations to the county of how to refine the work we're doing here. And if we're successful,

I think it will be a really great model that can be adapted in other communities. And we're actually already seeing other communities take up some of the work we've done to make progress in their neck of the woods. And likewise, we are learning from them. So there's this really cool exchange. This is how grassroots organizing works. We learn from each other. It's iterative and it's cooperative. And the more...

innovative we can be the better because all these problems we're trying to solve they're really complicated and we need smart solutions and we shouldn't expect to have to reinvent the wheel every time learning from each other's is the best way to go looking ahead what are your hopes and goals for the future of local forests and global forests and how can we contribute to that vision or dream as a community well I've mentioned

ecological forest management in this conversation. And perhaps the most exciting ecological forestry pilot project in our neck of the woods is known as the Stuart Mountain Community Forest. And it's a project that the Nooksack Tribe and Whatcom County and Whatcom Land Trust and the Evergreen Land Trust, these four partners, they've been working on this for many years.

And just a year ago, they were actually able to make their first acquisition. In fact, it was less than a year ago. They bought their first part of the community forest and they're taking private industrial timber land out of these timber corporations hands, putting that land into the local community's hands. And the whole idea is that you manage those lands for the benefit of the local community, the tribe and the land trust in particular,

have been very adamant that we need to see better forest practices if we're actually going to recover our salmon populations. There's really a lot of science that shows that industrial logging contributes to more sediment, hotter temperatures, higher flood events in the winter, lower stream flows in the summer. All of those things adversely affect fish.

and fish are already having a hard time in a lot of other ways. So the idea is to manage forests to function more like they used to and to provide a more natural hydrology, more natural watershed patterns that fish rely on in order to survive and in order to thrive.

So that project, they acquired the first 550 acres and they're about to acquire another few thousand acres. They just got funding to buy another few thousand acres. This is all in the South Fork Nooksack River watershed, kind of near the Nooksack tribes reservation in Deming. And I'm just so amazed at this project. I was really fortunate to be a part of it for a few years, a part of the project team.

And now the folks who are leading it are just doing great work. And I think that's going to be a really exciting opportunity in the future. I would love to see more things like that pop up around the landscape here in Whatcom County and beyond. Well, that sounds like an incredible project. Really, it fills my heart with a lot of hope to hear that

No, but it's a great way to decolonize the landscape, right? Yeah. Especially if you're returning that land to indigenous stewardship. To me, that's the most radical, awesome thing we can do is bring this land back into indigenous ownership and stewardship. Amen. Well, Alex, thank you for joining us today and giving us such incredible insight on what it is to be a forest defender and to...

be in good community and relationship and answer a call from the forest itself, you know. I'm sure you know better than I do that the forest needs help and you've seen that and you're doing it and we appreciate all the great work that you do. One last question. Do you have anything to share with our young and indigenous audience? Any words of advice?

Yeah, I guess sometimes it can feel really challenging to be alive at this particular moment when there's already been so much damage done to our communities and to our planet. I think it's important for each of us to find something, some guiding star that motivates us. And for some people, that's music. For some people, that's dancing. For some people, it's meditation or getting outside or raising kids or, you know, whatever.

But something that gives you hope, something that grounds you in yourself and gives you hope, that's essential. And if you are expecting to change the world without taking care of yourself, you're just not going to get very far. You need hope. You need resilience. And then once you've done that, you can go outward and contribute.

And I think a lot of especially young folks, they sometimes forget that they get so weighed down by the weight of social media and the news that they read and student loans and all these economic challenges. Find something that makes you hopeful and make sure you carve out whatever time you need in your in your life to to engage in that practice of showing gratitude and practicing hope.

Thank you again for joining us, Alex. It was so incredible to hear your story, your testimony, and to just see how passionate you are about the work that you do, incredible work that you do at that. And it's been such an honor and a blessing to be able to host you on this interview. I know we've been talking about it for quite some time and, you know, this

this is just another way to help keep that victory permanent, to keep all these victories permanent, to ensure that like, to ensure that we do have something here to give to not only the next generation, but the next seven generations. So Haiska, this is Young and Indigenous podcast plant series brought to you by Children of the Setting Sun and Cultural Survival. Peace.

Hey, what up, y'all? Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Plant Series. This episode has been produced by Roy Alexander, Free Borsi, Cyrus James, and Ellie Smith. Original soundtrack by Roy Alexander, Mark Nichols, and Free Borsi. Huge thank you to our funders, the In It's High Foundation, the Cultural Survival Fellowship, the Paul Allen Foundation, and the Whatcom Community Foundation.

Young and Indigenous is a part of Children of the Setting Sun Productions. We are an Indigenous nonprofit set in the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack people. Hachika for listening. Later, y'all.