Bridging the Divide

...Miles Horton, founder of the Highlander Center for Research and Education, where Brown served as an intern, used to say that success depends not on a person's degrees, expertise, or authority, but on that person's capacity for learning, and ability to listen and to grow...

...Can the land tolerate and support a species that lives outside its own relation to the rest of life...

...The community now has a twenty-year permit to operate a campground and owns all the buildings and equipment on the site, and it's moving on to other, more critical issues...

...I learned otherwise when I took a job as a community organizer in a rural county, and got involved in a conflict between a community that wanted to keep its local campground, and the U.S...

...In addition to the loss of jobs and family farms, residents have watched schools, churches, granges, and community organizations shut down...

...By transcribing stories onto paper, Brown invites readers to undertake a greater task than merely understanding a scholar's refined arguments...

...In Timber Country asks if we can survive the destruction of the cultural fabric that binds us, as individuals and as a species, to that same web...

...Six rural counties in Oregon have recently declared the right to control what has always been federal land and have empowered sheriffs to arrest federal employees on public land...

...Beverly Brown's In Timber Country is a sophisticated attempt to get a handle on the crisis in rural America...

...Low-income and blue- and pink-collar men and women who are grounded in the rural culture of this area must create independent pressure organizations and enter the public debate with the power of numbers behind their words...

...A successful democratic society depends on the constant interplay of interests among equals," she writes...

...When the government sets new and stringent limits on its support of both culture and economy—either by threatening to close a campground, or by redefining forest or agriculture policy—it should come as no surprise that people see government as wanting to shut down public lands, and, with them, industries and communities...

...Forest Service that wanted to shut it down...

...Government has a hard time escaping the role of a faceless, inimical "them...

...When I moved to Oregon from Boston in 1991, I thought the save a logger, eat an owl stickers on the pick-up trucks were a simple expression of uneducated, redneck, gun-loving dupes of the multinational timber industry who wanted to cut every last tree...

...All the people she interviewed live in two counties in southern Oregon, a rural area about as big as Connecticut...

...Hunting, fishing, gathering, and small-scale commercial mining and logging filled in lean times, and gave rural life a breadth and flavor that urban readers can only read about or imagine...

...they know that money not only talks but wins...

...Each story and analytical perspective is shaped and colored by the particular facts of each life...

...Brown's book makes clear that people understand how American politics is driven by interests and influence...

...Most media coverage of this so-called sage-brush rebellion hypes the conflict as jobs versus environment...

...The oral histories she has gathered are a primer for anyone interested in learning a more complicated and interesting truth about the Northwest timber wars...

...Coldbrook knows that cutting down the rest of the trees won't solve the economic problems of the area, and she looks to local women to provide new leadership and find new answers...

...Women in this area, I think, are seeing that they need to do it together...

...Listening is learning...

...It is a truism of community organizing that you cannot do this kind of work for people if you do not work with them...

...The biggest racial problem I see now is between Californians and Oregonians," says Kathy Dodge, a twenty-seven-year-old white woman working on her education after pregnancy and marriage at sixteen...

...Kiko Denzer (Kiko Denzer is a writer, artist, and former community organizer in rural Oregon...

...Their voices come from the other side of the cultural divide, which typically keeps working and poor people from fully participating in democracy...

...As she explains, timber has always been a boom-and-bust industry, but people compensated by making the most of open lands and resources...

...Brown asked twelve men and thirteen women—married, single, straight, gay, all working, and mostly white—to talk about "growing up, the changes they have seen in the area, and what they think of the changes...

...Do city dwellers have a relationship to the land, though they never hunt or harvest their own food or do so only as sport, or only visit rural and wilderness areas on a short-term, seasonal, recreational basis...

...The people she interviews all speak to core democratic values that oppose this political reality...

...He provided some editorial suggestions on an earlier draft of this book and has worked with the author on setting up a center for popular education...

...It took me months of often-embarrassed listening before I heard what people were, repeatedly and not always patiently, telling me...

...The economic and social change rural people describe has taken money, services, and security out of their communities...

...In Timber Country asks you to listen and to grow...

...Nobody's asked us what we think economic development should be...

...Retirees and other wealthy people have moved in, bought land, raised property values and taxes, and put up No Trespassing signs on land where people used to hunt, fish, or gather...

...What the Forest Service tended to treat as childish resistance to change actually was multilayered concern for local social, economic, and political life...

...Brown points out that Oregon's innovative rural land-use planning laws, while designed to preserve rural land, have actually set up guidelines for lot size and usage that effectively favor rich new arrivals and squeeze out poor and working rural people...

...After about a year of community meetings, local loggers, ranchers, rednecks, and former hippies, with some outside research help from me, made demands that undeniably met Forest Service policy goals...

...It is this kind of local organizing that Brown says is needed...

...Rural people feel these changes are the result of population growth, despite what might look like wilderness areas to an urban visitor...

...Brown suggests going beyond merely listening to poor and working people, beyond just documenting their political ideas, beyond building working-class constituencies...

...Some of the rest of us need to start making decisions about what the economy needs to be based on and how we're going to manage it," says Caroline Coldbrook, a forty-one-year-old, fifth-generation Ore-gonian...

...This is a small story of hope in a much larger conflict that threatens to become a shooting war between communities and the government...

...If they come up here with the attitude that they want to make Oregon into California, because California is already too populated and this is a nice place, but they want all the benefits of California lifestyle in the Oregon area—then that bothers me...

...The invitation here is to observe and listen, and to reach an understanding of different lives...

...And you cannot work with people if you will not listen to them...

...Environmentalists ask if we can survive the destruction of trees, animals, and the habitats that bind them together in a single, complex web of fife...

...Each side spoke a different language, and I was in the middle—fluent in policy but dumb to the ways and meanings of rural life...

...How does one build bridges across that divide...

...Rural residents say that decisions about their lives and work are made by bureaucrats "in town...

...We continue to look at economics as if women don't exist," she says...