Anguished Cry From A Wilderness Under Siege

‘Oh, Creator, if they destroy this place, if they build their roads, chop down these sacred trees, kill the bull trout in the water, drive the elk and bear to the high country, burn the fisher and pine marten out of their groves, crush my precious wildflowers in the ruts of their trucks and bulldozers, please, oh please do not forgive them. Damn them. Damn them all to hell.”

These words come from the “Meadow Creek” chapter of “Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater Country,” published this year by Washington State University Press and written by Charles Pezeshki.

The book signals a new era in writing on the environment, I hope. It does not try to hide the rage the writer feels. It doesn’t couch the biodiversity crisis in scientific jargon. It refuses to pander to politeness in the hope that a pleasing bureaucratese has any chance of altering public policy.

How could careful words alone succeed when some of our public lands’ fiercest foes - Chenoweth, Craig and Kempthorne - hail from Idaho and represent the Clearwater in Congress?

Pezeshki has a Ph.D. in engineering. Despite that incapacity, his book is a hotheaded activist’s firsthand account of the resource wars in central Idaho.

He founded the Clearwater Biodiversity Project to save a place he loves. Who can blame him? He wrote “Wild to the Last” to make good on a barroom bluff, but he’s thrown his big heart into the mix. He wears well and he swears well. Most compelling are the profiles of little folks in these resource wars. Folks like pigtailed Leroy Lee, former “hippie road dog,” as he calls himself, now an independent timber cruiser in Clearwater country.

Leroy found - and testified about his find before Congress - that “ghost trees” plumping the numbers on accountants’ ledgers proved invisible on the ground.

Folks like piano teacher and salmon advocate Reed Burkholder, who called for dam removal on the Snake River years before “breaching” dams made the pages of The New York Times.

Many Inland Northwest eco-heroes people these pages. All are being dispossessed, spiritually bankrupted, their hearts’ homes ripped to bits.

Everyone in America seems to recall ruined places. Those favorite wild sites where you played as a kid and learned about nature. Those getaway spots where your family used to camp or picnic and count on being alone.

Certainly, change is inevitable in the human experience. Those who fear and hate change find it hard to get along. But our populations are booming so fast, and we are planning so poorly for future growth, that our wild legacies are being sacrificed at record rates.

Moral matters call for more than cold statistics to convey the enormity of silted streams and slumping sidehills, gutshot elk and homeless goshawks, timber-dependent towns whose citizens have been duped by corporations that routinely cut and run.

Raw numbers don’t suffice. Timber subsidies may outrage fiscal conservatives. Mass extinctions may set off scientific alarms. But “Wild to the Last” factors in the human element, puts faces on the players, demonstrating that what’s at stake is more than quantifiable crimes.

Besides peopling his bioregion, Pezeshki tells memorable stories. Several have stuck with me.

One is of a mountain goat that grows belligerent - whether territorial or habituated to human presence - and attacks some campers who wound it in the face with a .22. Bloody but undaunted, the goat keeps coming.

Another is the tale of timber sale protester Erik Ryberg, handcuffed and locked in the back seat of a Forest Service truck, who found a way to urinate on the radio when his captors refused to let him out to go.

Perhaps Pezeshki comes off as too misanthropic. Witless frat boys party on the Salmon River and litter it with cans. Protesters come from far away to Cove-Mallard not because they love “The Land” but because it’s a cool thing to do.

Pezeshki’s characterization of such people often drips with scorn. A good copy editor also would improve the book. Dozens of errors - in the indexing, grammar, spelling and punctuation - slipped past.

Are we too late to save the Clearwater? On the contrary, it is one of the last best places, a unique mix of Cascades, Rocky Mountain microclimates and coniferous forests. Some of its creeks and rivers - the Snake, Salmon, Selway, Lochsa, Crooked, and forks of the Clearwater - still run clean. Gray wolves, since their reintroduction several years ago, now roam this region.

Is the Forest Service planning further timber sales? You bet. It’s all a complicated mess.

Team an undereducated populace, rocky and unstable soils, run-amok federal agencies and the most reactionary congressional delegation in the Lower 48, and you get a picture of the forces besetting Clearwater country.