Guardians of our food

Assume for a moment that our Earth is a bubble, containing finite physical material, moisture and the solar energy that’s delivered to us each day. Anything organic is ultimately food for something else.

Our own species’ relatively narrow food requirements are what we’re usually most concerned about, and the solution to meeting our needs is not complicated. To provide food for all, rather than having billions among us go hungry, we need more efficient food production and better foods and/or fewer people: Impossible Burgers rather than Wagyu beef. Backyard tomatoes rather than mass agriculture that’s produced far away and flown, then driven, vast distances to our dinner tables, etc.  

At scale, this requires policy change, but also cultural change. Hence swapping out light bulbs does play a part in these matters. As we run out of food and water there is the excellent and well-timed opportunity to recalibrate our relationship with nature. But what stories — what seeds — can help encourage that change?

I work to get the bulk of my protein from wild game — a deer, an elk, a couple of ducks and pheasants, some grouse — but that’s because I’m incredibly fortunate to live in the heart of the 2.2 million-acre Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana, in an unincorporated community composed of a few homesteads and “town”— two bars and a mercantile. The northernmost half of the Kootenai is called “the Yaak,” with Canada’s wilderness at our back. I’m incredibly fortunate to live in the only ecosystem in Montana I’m aware of where stream temperatures have not yet begun to rise, sheltered as the Yaak is by a diverse mosaic of microsites — twists and turns of geomorphology that create a bewildering landscape of rumpled north slopes and frost pockets. 

I live off the grid and heat partly with firewood, but my chainsaw runs on the magic elixir of the Paleozoic, summoned from 3,000 feet beneath the Earth, thousands of miles away. Even when I walk a hundred yards from my cabin in the autumn and sit quietly waiting for a deer to walk past, I will have had a cup of 4 a.m. coffee prepared on a stovetop and poured into a metal cup. 

Hemlock shadows play across a barkless silver snag in the proposed Black Ram logging area of the Yaak.

I do not hunt with a cedar bow and deer ligament bowstring and flint or obsidian arrowheads. I use copper bullets instead of lead to avoid contaminating the meat, but the copper, rest assured, does not come easily from the Earth’s embrace. My meat is stored in a propane freezer.

The word “sustainable” is a good word to bear in mind in all matters, but I think it is important to remember with humility that humanity’s current position on the tree of life precludes sustainability. For us to be here in any significant number, much has already had to step off — or been pushed off — into oblivion, and the accounting is not yet finished. Our needs and our population numbers long ago evolved beyond sustainability. 

Everything exists because of everything else, and sometimes in direct opposition to it, despite our best intentions. It is our lonely birthright to forever take more calorically and thermodynamically than we give. We cannot ever be sustainable — not in life. But we can pump the brakes on the mad adventure of our brief existence — our voracious passion and profligate appetite for the world’s finely wrought treasures.

Wild nature is not a crop but a cathedral, and a single old-growth forest is a databank containing more info than any legions of supercomputers could hold. Forests belong in a Department of Climate Defense, a Department of Homeland or of Global Security, a physical and spiritual Department of the Interior. So why is the U.S. Forest Service housed within the Department of Agriculture? It’s a relic of an earlier era of convenient ignorance, when we were told that animals do not feel pain, and that forests were just crops of fiber that could be farmed like corn. How did DOGE’s whiz kids overlook this fiscal and silvicultural mismanagement? 

Forests absorb about a third of the world’s annual carbon emissions globally — but older trees absorb far and away the most. Our old and mature forests are an enormous asset in this planet’s climate portfolio. And yet the Forest Service is still working to clear-cut old growth. In the West, 75% of the agency’s current proposed timber sales are at least a mile or farther from the “wildland-urban interface” — the small towns and villages in harm’s way from the dragon breath of global warming. 

Protecting the cool shade and wet groves of old and mature forests worldwide is the single best thing we can do to slow the meteoric rate of climate change, but the agency is racing to clear-cut these old forests before their true ecologic and economic worth can be accounted, claiming that it needs to log these giants so far in the backcountry in order to protect communities against wildfire.

In the Kootenai National Forest, there’s a region called Black Ram that is an inland rainforest, and a primary forest: one that’s never been logged. Much of it shows no evidence of fire scarring. Fire has passed over and will continue to pass over the West like the meteorological phenomenon it is, but the Yaak ecosystem is projected to be the least vulnerable to wildfire in the Northern Rockies all the way through the rest of this burning century.

And, ironically, the greatest lesson the old forest has for us at this particular point in the burning is not how to achieve more fiber product per acre, but, instead, how to keep from further aridifying our food system, and everything else.

This issue of High Country News explores the theme of food and power, and at the risk of hitting the nail on the head too squarely, the old forest does not offer us food directly. Instead, it stands guard over our food, for a while longer. The old forest stands guard over our water, cools and stabilizes the one thing — weather — that determines the food supply, not just for Montana and the West, but for the world.

The old forest at the center of the Black Ram country, which has almost never been in a hurry, buys all of us — farmers and ranchers, musicians and hunters, teachers and students, saints and sinners — the rarest and most precious of commodities: time; time, here among the living to figure out how to take less and share more. That is why my neighbors and I are hell-bent on saving it, through an organization we founded a few decades ago called the Yaak Valley Forest Council. We have proposed that the Black Ram country be designated the nation’s first Climate Refuge — a 265,000-acre mass of public land dedicated to storing the maximum amount of carbon possible.

I know of no scientist willing to say our current agricultural system can survive peak global warming. Old forests like the one at Black Ram are a lifeboat, and we are its passengers.  

In addition to our climate justice campaign to save all old and mature forests in the Yaak — the seed of that action then gaining momentum and support to transform into a campaign to create a global Curtain of Green — our group advocates for the recovery of grizzly bears: Ours is the most threatened population in the United States. But it is, of course, not just the grizzlies in our community whose existence is stressed as never before. Our county, Lincoln County, has one of the highest poverty rates in Montana, and each village’s food bank — Troy, population 900; Libby, population 3,200; Eureka, 1,600 — exists chronically at the edge of collapse, but none more so than the utterly unincorporated remote Yaak (population unknown), where a volunteer food pantry that’s only open two hours a month serves half the valley. Even while we’re advocating for grizzlies and old forests and restoring riverbanks degraded by clear-cuts and literally taking the temperature of our ecosystem daily with stream and lake thermographs, we spend more and more of our time rallying donations for the Yaak pantry. 

This wasn’t something we ever thought we’d be doing when we formed nearly 30 years ago. But in this ecosystem — one of the very few in the U.S., and perhaps the only one, where nothing has gone extinct since the last Ice Age — it is not a cliché to say that all things are connected. It is instead a hyper-specific reality. 

In these burning days, we all find ourselves making adjustments, inhabiting a world few imagined or foretold, and, increasingly, we look to the mysteries of the ancient forest for instruction, leadership and the best kind of hope: hope that leads to action.  

One does not commonly think of a female grizzly up above treeline in the wildflowers of summer, breeze ruffling her fur, as having much sway one way or the other over the cost of a loaf of bread, or even the existence of a loaf of bread. But the grizzly bear is far and away the major cornerstone of the ecosystem — tenuous though her hold is now — and the Endangered Species Act, which requires protection of her habitat, is all that stands between the liquidation of these shady, unroaded forests, where she spends an increasing amount of time. Where would you go on a broiling summer day if you were wearing a 70-pound fur coat?

With the complex and crafted integrity of her species, she protects the old forest, which cools our planet. In that forest is a dream of a Climate Refuge, first here and then in green belts encircling the world at northern latitudes — a fringed, breathing, semi-permeable Curtain of Green that allows us to continue dreaming our dreams — not sustainable, mind you, but beautiful — of feeding and caring for ourselves, and our kind and kin. The old and mature forests do not grow our food. But their cooling breath makes possible the food for all.