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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is my friend Greg King. Greg, you probably have heard this name. He's been on the show before to talk about his bestselling book, The Ghost Forest, Racist Radicals in Real Estate in the California Redwoods. But you might not know that Greg is also the Executive Director of a local nonprofit dedicated to land conservation, the Siskiyou Land Conservancy. And we're gonna be talking about Greg's work at Siskiyou Land Conservancy, protecting some very cool parts of Northwest California. So welcome to the Econews, Greg.

GREG KING:

Thank you, Thomas. Great to be on again.

WHEELER:

Well, as I said before, you are also the author of Ghost Forest, and so if folks haven't checked that out, go pick up a copy from your local library or local bookseller. It's a great read, and for students or historians of the forest defense movement, environmental activism, this is a must-have on your bookshelf. So I've read it a number of times. It's a fantastic book, so I'm thrilled to have you on. So people might know you now as an author, but you have this other part of you, which probably takes up more of your time, which is the Siskiyou Land Conservancy. So perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the history and mission of the Siskiyou Land Conservancy, and then we can get into some of the more recent actions that your nonprofit has taken.

KING:

Yeah, thank you. So I founded the organization in 2004 to basically to focus on and protect small private land holdings in the three northwestern counties of California, you know, Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino, because they were often overlooked or there wasn't a land trust that would serve them. And an example of this was in that year, this other organization that I'd founded, the Smith River Project, we received a $100,000 donation to purchase the Stony Creek property on the North Fork of the Smith River, a rare plant habitat. And, you know, there wasn't a land trust that would, we offered to give it to the large regional land trust in our area, but they wouldn't take it.

It was pretty small and remote for them. And they were doing very big projects. And there wasn't another one land trust in that area that would take it either. We tried to give it away. So I basically founded the organization understanding that there was this vacuum of conservation need that wasn't fulfilled. And so I founded the organization in 2004, and we acquired that land on Stony Creek. We still own it. The following year, we placed a conservation easement on 148 acres on the South Fork Smith River across from Big Flat, very important, kind of a rare piece, 80 acres of flat land, large meadow habitat, ancient white oaks, and the easternmost redwoods on the Smith River. And then that same year, or perhaps the year after, I might be forgetting, we acquired 160 acres on McCoy Creek, tributary in Mendocino County to the South Fork of the Eel River. And that, while small, contains a mile of coho spawning habitat. So we protect that whole corridor there for that, and things like that. So going on and on in the midst of all this, though, our biggest project, single project since the inception of the organization has been this effort, which you're deeply involved in now, to rid the Smith River estuary of contamination by pesticides used on Easter lily bulbs. So that has taken a lot of our institutional time and funding, and it's been just a really long road. In the meantime, as you said, I wrote this book. I wrote a previous book. I wrote Bruce Coburn's memoir before that. So I was able to take some time away while still running the organization, but really focusing for a year, a solid year on Bruce's book, and then two years on my book, which was the result of 15 years of research, but a solid two years of writing. And then the land trust continued to operate, but my extensions were on these books.

But meanwhile, for the whole time otherwise, I've been concentrating on Siskiyou Land Conservancy, which kind of leads us up to the present. One of our founding directors, Ken Miller, who many people in our area know as a longtime physician and conservation activist in Humboldt County, he owned an exquisite 183-acre property on the lower middle reach of the Mad River, Baduwa't. The Wiyot name for the river is Baduwa't. And of course, they have enjoyed and used the riches of this river for time immemorial. And so Ken's objective was to permanently protect this. We did have a conservation easement on it already, but he wanted to make sure that when he passes on, which hopefully is well into the future, that it's permanently protected. So he donated that. At the same time, we were working with the Vincent J. Coates Foundation on several projects, and they contacted us in January when we asked about acquisition funding. And we told them that there was another property that we could buy that was adjacent to the Miller property and downstream, and it contained a mile of riverfront habitat on the lower Mad River. And the Miller property contains a half mile of riverfront. And so the Coates Foundation provided us with a grant of $275,000, and we closed the purchase earlier this month, July, or maybe it was late June.

So now we have this 353-acre preserve on the banks of the Mad River, which provides 70% of Humboldt County residents with domestic water as well as industries.

WHEELER:

So congratulations on the new purchase and thank you to Dr. Miller for his charitable contribution and to the Coates Foundation for their generous donation as well. So in lands conservation, right, we have a history of land use before the land gets conserved. These parcels have been logged, I imagine, in part or in whole. Why purchase these, or why these lands in particular, and what are the management challenges that might come with them, having had this history of industrial logging before?

KING:

Those are great questions. The reasons for purchasing these lands, for acquiring them and other lands around it, hopefully, because the Mad River is the least ecologically protected of all the six rivers in our area, which is really astounding when you think that municipalities really work to protect the water sources that provide the water for their customers. So there was that. There's also this middle reach, say from Maple Creek Bridge upstream, past what people know as Swinging Bridge, well past that. That whole reach is geologically and ecologically unique and fecund. There are two golden eagle nests near these properties. We see bald eagles out there now all the time. There are western pond turtles, otters, black bears, mountain lions. The gamut, really, of habitat that you would expect to find in an un-molested tract of land in northwestern California, really is there. It's really intact. Coho salmon spawn up in that region, and, of course, the Mad River has one of the only really robust summer steelhead runs in the northwest state. So this reach of the Mad River we've always known was particularly important to the ecological health of northwestern Humboldt County. And so, yeah, as you note, both of these tracts were logged off in the 1960s, although the newly acquired land has several patches of old-growth Douglas fir and hardwood forest, which is very nice, including a grove that is near the river and a big blue-line creek falls into the river there through the old growth in a waterfall, and it's really spectacular. And then there are these very steep ridges that run out, and along the ridges, quite a bit of old growth. So it's really spectacular in that way.

The other side of it is that some of these areas, now, I'll talk about the Coats Acquisition Land first. That right now is in particular need of forest health restoration, and so we're talking right now with a forester who can hopefully help us not only to perform that work, but to fund it. And in that work, what we would really also be excited about was providing some land-based employment in our area, which I think is really important. But it's dog hair thick, it's a huge fire danger, and we would like to help out the forest to recover. On the Miller property, that work has already been done, and you can see the results. And it's really a beautiful and lush piece of land with really old growth coming back now, almost 70 years old regeneration, and some giant ancient maples, and some meadows, and it's really a spectacular place. So, you know, you look at that, so we're talking a lot about forest health, habitat, but there's also the fact that people can't access almost any of the Mad River from basically Blue Lake, or say Maple Creek Bridge is a place there where people go, for dozens of miles upstream. And so we would hope to also at some point have some, say docent-led, for lack of a better term, tours through some of these lands. It won't be open to the public per se, but we will bring members of the public on small bases. We don't want to rile the neighbors out there, they wouldn't want a public park, and frankly, neither do we, you know, this is habitat first. But we also want people to be able to experience this really gorgeous place.

WHEELER:

So one thing that I thought was kind of amusing is that I was talking to a friend the other day, she's a former tree sitter, and we were discussing how much we've become advocates for chainsaws in the woods, in some respect, right? Where we have this history of industrial logging and these dog hair thickets that were the product of clear cuts, because after you clear cut, you go back in and you reseed really thickly, and how we as environmental advocates have become champions for logging of a certain sort. And I wonder if you've reflected on that as someone who is also in the heart of the earth-thirsty forest defense of the North Coast. Have you had to come to terms with reconceptualizing your relationship with active forest management, or let's give an euphemism, logging?

KING:

Right, I mean, essentially, I don't think I've had to come to terms with my own evolution as much as appreciate it. I think there's a real value in being able to, I'm 64 now, and in my 20s, I was definitely, I think we did great work, especially fighting off Maxxam and saving what we could of the last redwoods. But there was also a tunnel vision that went on. Now, we did support the timber industry, I mean, the workers. Our very first demonstration in Scotia was a Save the Loggers rally, right? Because we wanted to show, we appreciate where you're at. You guys are stuck just as much as we are. We wouldn't be up here if Maxxam hadn't tripled the cut. So there's that. But the evolution to the understanding that on some pieces of land that have been heavily timbered and they've come back extremely thick and their regeneration is crowding out all the other diversity of species and ages of species, that sometimes an industrial application is appropriate. Not always.

But for instance, today, unlike the 1980s, I own four chainsaws and I use them a lot. I actually, it turns out it's one of my favorite tools. And that's been an evolution as well. And so for instance, in Del Norte County on the 148 acre parcel where we have an easement, we also managed 15 years of restoration work there. We brought in 12 member crews with enormous steel chainsaws with the three foot bars. And they did a lot of thinning, a hundred acres of thinning over those years in the densely overstocked Douglas fir forest. And what we found with follow-up studies is that plants, the undergrowth came back in a greater diversity, including orchids that we never saw and bird life, insect life and therefore bird life. Within a few years, it's kind of like when the Klamath River was undammed and the salmon went right to the top. It's kind of like build it or unbuild it, say, and they will come. And so again, this is not appropriate everywhere. A lot of places in the Redwoods let the Redwoods regenerate on their own. They don't really want, because the soils are very delicate and they don't want a lot of heavy tractor use and stuff like that. So it really depends on the site. These sites out on the Mad River are definitely, particularly this new one, definitely in need of some TLC.

WHEELER:

So in your book, The Ghost Forest, you document the way that the North Coast was carved apart. Carved up, given to timber companies. Timber companies then took out our shared heritage, our old growth forests of the North Coast, which were once bountiful and seemingly limitless. Probably if you were a logger coming in here in the 1800s, it seemed like there was probably a resource that could never be depleted. But of course it was. So the work of Siskiyou Land Conservancy has been in part to grab up these former industrially managed lands and bring them back into conservation. You are listening to the Econews Report. Joining me is my friend Greg King, the executive director of a local nonprofit, talking about Greg's work at Siskiyou Land Conservancy, protecting some very cool parts of Northwest California. So I was wondering if you, as an author, having documented this history, how you think about the work and the future of conservation of the North Coast, how we get back to a boundless sea of old growth. So if you could reflect on Siskiyou Land Conservancy's conservation efforts with this historical sense in mind.

KING:

I appreciate that. You talk about the land graft, the illegal acquisition of all, especially in the Redwoods, but also throughout the Northwest, the Timber and Stone Act and the Homestead Act and 124,000 acres illegally stolen by a cabal out of Scotland, New York, San Francisco and Humboldt in the 1880s. That was one thing. The Redwood forest, irreplaceable, dense with some meadows and other types of forest in between, but mostly dominant. When you go eastward from the Redwoods, what you got, especially in the lands that were managed by Native peoples, were a real lovely patchwork of ancient forest, hardwood forest, and these broad prairies. So for instance, the broad prairies across the river from the land, I believe they're owned by Green Diamond right now, but also down in the Maple Creek area. Those were all created and maintained for thousands of years by Native peoples. And so it's important for us to understand that. And that also created this richness of biodiversity, the old growth forest to the mixed hardwood, Douglas fir forest, say, to the prairies. That allows for a wide range of species and large numbers of them, lots of prey and predator relationships there, as well as grasses and hunting grounds for Native peoples.

So I think this historic understanding, not only of how, say, lands were stolen and who did it and what the result is now, especially on the ground, is important, but also what about before that? So in this area where we purchased these properties, it's just upstream of the Wiyot territory and is in the Chilkat territory. It was Chilkat tribal lands. And from our research, what we've learned just starting out here is that, according to some sources, there were about 500 Chilkat in the Mad River drainage for about 30 miles of its length, about from Maple Creek, say. And I'm just guessing on that, just looking at a rudimentary map I've seen.

I don't want to get this wrong. The Chilkat people were greatly diminished through genocide starting in the 1850s. As we know, that was a terrible year in the 1860s in California for Native peoples. And apparently, according to some sources, they were down to about 20 members, the Chilkat were in about 1910. And fully ask anybody to correct and augment any of this. And I can be reached at gregkingwriter.com because I'm very interested in getting, this is just my initial try at this history. I'm not an expert.

But then, and then these 20 individuals were largely incorporated into the Hoopa tribe at the Hoopa Reservation. And so we want to pursue some sort of historical knowledge and hopefully even connection with some of the peoples that were there and maybe any descendants and what their uses were and how they lived on the land. And to have these understandings is critical to putting back together not only the mosaic of habitat that we look at when we're examining places that we want to protect, but the mosaic of the human uses and human lives there. Because we exist as a species as well. And obviously, we're quite dominant here now. And so that can inform maybe how we go forward on these lands.

WHEELER:

Well, I thank you for bringing up the Indigenous history of this area, and it is good and right that we incorporate Indigenous management practices, that we respect that history, and that we also continue to bring forward ways that we restore access to these lands for Indigenous people. So thanks to the Siskiyou Land Conservancy for that. So we have the Mad River now has a pretty significant holding in the middle of the river. Are you continuing to buy other parcels adjacent to this? Is this the kernel of something larger, or are you planning to move on to other areas of Northwest California and prioritize conservation? What's next for Siskiyou Land Conservancy?

KING:

Right. Well, you know, we don't want to be too imperialistic about this. The reason I founded this organization was after years of butting heads with people, I wanted to run something where everything we did was cooperative. So with the exception of the work on the Smith River Estuary and the pesticides, this is what we do. So we sent out letters some months ago to landowners all around the initial property that Ken Miller donated saying, hey, you want to work with us on either conservation easement, acquisition, you can put us in your trust, anything like that. And we can work out ways in which you would like to see your land protected, if at all. And we are talking with landowners out there. There's one large landowner who wants to protect their property.

And it's a really exquisite, large property out there. It's not on the river, but it's near these other properties that we now own. But she doesn't want to see it taken necessarily out of production. She wants to see it, lots of restoration work there, but she wants to be able to provide some employment in our area. She's very concerned about the economy. And I think that's wonderful. And so we would like to work with her somehow to develop either a conservation easement or an acquisition plan or something like that, whereby this land can be protected from acquisition by corporate liquidator, which happens. Of course, we've seen a lot of that. And to keep it in production, say, but also with habitat in mind. And there's some wonderful restoration forestry going on in our area. Tim Metz is doing a lot of that down in Southern Humboldt and Northern Mendocino. There's other foresters, Mark Andre, formerly with the City of Arcata. He's got a great eye for that, Greg Blomstrom. And forgetting her name now, she used to work with Epic, darn it.

Anyway, Lindsay, thank you. Lindsay Holmes, right? So another one, and so that's what's another part of the evolution has been this understanding that we live in forest ecosystems and here is where we should be using wood. I don't know that we need to supply the world with lumber, but certainly say Northern California can get lumber from out of here and we don't have to destroy the land to do it. So that's another part of the evolving personal ethos that I carry around is this fact that we use these materials too, and we can, we don't have to use everything all at once, but, and we can protect the streams and the habitat and also have set asides. You know, I talk with the City of Arcata about this sometimes, when will part of the community forest be preserved, right? Where no cutting is allowed. Right now, it's the best logging in the Redwoods and we fully support it. Like very small percentage of cut, all the roads are put to bed afterward, all the materials chipped and scattered, and it's wonderful logging, if that's such a term. So, but after a while you do want preserves. You want a place where heavy equipment doesn't enter and does not disturb wildlife ever, and that's appropriate. So we don't have to have either or.

WHEELER:

Oh, I love this evolution. Now it just has me thinking about all of our shared friends who began in the forest defense movement now have really complicated relationships with active intervention. We have Tim Metz as a restoration forester. We have Dana Stoltzman as a watershed person. We have Tracy Cattleman on fire and forest. So that evolution of that group that kind of came together in response to the threat to the Redwoods, they've really branched off and have done a lot of diverse, cool things. Maybe that's a future book.

Maybe that's a book I'll write. It's about folks who began their career in one part of the environmental movement and now find themselves in this other related part. So you have property in Mendocino County, Del Norte County, Humboldt County. How do you as the executive director of a land trust figure out where to prioritize properties? Is it people approach you, you have maybe areas of special focus because of your own interests that you keep an eye out on real estate transactions and find out when parcels are for sale? How do you prioritize and triage? Because there's so much that could be done.

KING:

Yeah, that's a really good question. It started in Del Norte County. I was deeply involved with the Smith River, which is one of my favorite places in the world. And my wife lived there for six years on a remote piece of land in the 80s before we were friends, well before we got together. And so together, especially, we've grown to love and we've explored all of that terrain. So when I founded Smith River Project, again, it was with this understanding that these small inholdings surrounded by the Smith River National Recreation Area, which is almost the entire Smith River watershed, didn't have the protections that the NRA did, the National Recreation Area. And so I decided to start mapping and prioritizing those. And that was how it started. Stony Creek went right to the top.

And it was funny because when I contacted the US Forest Service, Six Rivers National Forest in Eureka, the lands and minerals officer there, I said, but what about the Stony Creek parcel? Do you guys have any interest in ever owning this? And he said, that's one of our top three acquisition properties in the whole Six Rivers. But the owner would not sell to the Forest Service. She didn't trust them. And so we raised that money and she sold to us and we still hold it, the land there. And it's a world-renowned rare plant habitat, which is what I learned. So in looking around, in that sense, poking around on the South Fork Smith River, the land we now hold in a conservation easement, that one I found by just tramping all around the South Fork on the public lands and using maps and then information at the assessor's office and a recorder's office in Del Norte and found the ownership of these lands. And this was a very special property.

And so I contacted, it was owned by Stimson Timber, which also owned the large 25,000 acre tract at Rock Creek and Mill Creek that later sold to, for Redwood National Park. And I called them up and I said, are you guys going to sell that? No, we're not going to sell that land. And I called them up, I called them every quarter for almost three years. And finally, and we had a rapport by then, finally he said, oh, we are going to sell that. And of course I had, we had no money, my wife and I, and the land trust had no money. And this was right now. So Joanne and I owned a house in Sonoma County and we sold it and we bought that land. And we also had to float one of those loans that we should never have gotten from Countrywide. It was literally from Countrywide. It was one of the notorious loans, interest only payments, lots of money every month. And it was killing us. And, but we were able to keep it for three years, put the easement on it and sell to a conservation buyer. And it really hurt us to sell it, but now it's protected.

So, and then on the Mad River, I've been going up to Ken Miller's land a lot and getting to know the Mad and understanding on maps and talking to people that there's just no protected lands up there. And it's an exquisite, important part of Humboldt County's ecological framework, if you will, for lack of a better term, there's plenty of better terms. So that was one of those things. The McCoy Creek tract, it's infamous, you know, that was the one that Epic sued the Lancaster family. It was swapped for the Mill Creek tract out in Petrolia. Anyway, American Lands Conservancy, we negotiated with them and they ended up donating it to us because they ended up with it and things like that. So, so we, and then I knew about this 77 acres that was between Stable Slopes and Whitmore Grove and Redway. That was the only connecting piece that didn't have development on it and second growth redwoods. And so we now have an easement on that and protect that. So just looking around, understanding maps and, and terrain, hiking a lot, this type of thing is, is you just immerse in your place. And also then people do contact us as well. So there's, it's kind of all the above thing and it keeps us very busy.

WHEELER:

It sounds like you're very busy. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but Greg, I wanted to give you a chance to plug your website and anything else you'd like before the end of the show.

KING:

Oh yeah, thank you. Well, the websites is two of them, Siskiyou Land, like the county, S-I-S-K-I-Y-O-U-L-A-N-D.org. And then my personal website for the writing stuff is gregkingryder.com. And anybody can get ahold of me or us through those. And then we're moving forward. If we're always interested in talking with people who want to protect their properties. And again, it doesn't exclude human uses, especially a conservation easement. We have an easement on a ranch in Mendocino County where the guy is ranching and he has a big, beautiful house and but he can't subdivide it and he can't destroy it. And he has a half mile of Creek frontage on Greenwood Creek, which recently just came back with Coho after 50 years. Things like that. You can really do a lot with a little bit of protection. So, and we have people who contact us like they love their land. And a lot of us are aging out around here and they're like, okay, what am I gonna do? So you can always contact me. It doesn't mean that we can do anything. We're very small, but we like to work with people and see even if we can't, where we could send them.

WHEELER:

Well, very good. Thank you, Greg, for all of your work. And I'm excited. Hopefully someday the docent tours because I want to see the waterfall that you talked about. That sounds fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report.

KING:

But thank you Tom. This has been great as always.

WHEELER:

And thank you listeners. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the north coast of California.