Oregon Humanities

Standing Up for the Land

An Oregon couple builds a community that understands and invests in healthy forests.

Kristin Kaye

Peter and Pam Hayes care for three working forests in the Oregon Coast Range that comprise Hyla Woods. They have a theory that over the last one hundred years, there have been five evolving philosophies about how to manage forestland in America—from phase one, in which the forest is a problem and land should be cleared for other uses, to phase five, in which the forest has multiple values and reserves, and should have multiple revenue streams.

Peter and Pam seek to create a phase five forest by building a community that understands and invests in healthy forestland. They mill their wood, produce flooring and trim, and sell directly to contractors and homeowners. Inspired by the community-supported agriculture model that links farmers directly to households through a farm-share subscription service, they have created a community-connected forest that allows members to help maintain the forest and buy Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood products. They helped start the Build Local Alliance and Forest Partners program to foster relationships between builders and foresters to sustain each other’s businesses. And they educate the community by opening their property for such events as Duff Dinners, a dinner series I hosted with chef Blake Van Roekel in 2010 that explores the history and future of our forests through conversations with writers, foresters, and chefs.

Here Peter describes the challenges of creating a phase five forest and the fine balance between taking a stand and working collaboratively.

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Whatever philosophy we may have for Hyla Woods is meaningless unless it connects with consumers who share that same philosophy. You can’t have a conservation-minded grower unless they can work in partnership with a conservation-minded buyer. Talk is cheap, and the best way to communicate is through actions.

We’re trying to create an approach to forestry that treats the land and people well and provides the landowner with enough of a return to rationally continue to own the forest. If we can’t create a working model, then why should we expect anyone else to try?

In our nation’s culture we have a variety of versions of “Never give a inch!” [from Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion]. It’s the balance between the “me” and “we.” The book is about the individualistic “me”: I’m going to do what I want. But the same phrase could be applied to the end of slavery or the Civil Rights Movement. People are saying, “It’s not OK with me.” Hyla Woods is another form of “Never give a inch!” To us, it is not acceptable if profitability comes at the expense of the common good. Healthy land is part of the common good. We think the place where it does make sense to put our foot down is to insist that our culture keep track of how the land is doing. There are a lot of pressures not to do that.

In the Pacific Northwest, our wood is going to market side-by-side with wood from parts of the world that have very low standards for how land and people are treated—where the forest is viewed as a resource to be mined. The question becomes how do you become create multiple values for forests in a world that values them only for their timber? If you do what you think is required to take care of the land, it’s extremely hard to not go broke. Could we ever—either through incentives or regulation—work to improve or even maintain the land health and still have a viable industry? We have labor unions to protect workers, but we don’t have unions for land. Who is going to stand up for the land?

Historically, our country hasn’t had the political will to even know how the land is doing in some pretty basic ways. If the current profitability is at the expense of the common good, that’s where we put our foot down.