conservationist
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REX ZIAK GREW UP WITH a conservationist’s ethic. His father, a life-long logger, understood the necessity of preserving resources for future generations and the importance of caring for the environment so that it has the opportunity to repair itself.
Around Rex’s family home, all creatures — birds, deer, squirrels, mink, otter, toads — were protected. He learned to keep feeders filled with seed for wild birds in the winter and to build houses for them in the spring. Stewardship of the land and appreciation of the earth’s natural wonders became core values for Rex. By the time Rex graduated from high school, clearcutting had become the tree-harvesting method of choice, and he watched with increasing concern as the ancient forests around his home gradually disappeared. In 1990, he learned that the last two small parcels of virgin forest, with trees dating back 800 to 1000 years, were scheduled to be clearcut. Realizing that no one else was going to step forward to save these ancient trees, Rex taught himself how to be an effective conservation activist. |
He brought as many people as possible to see the trees, wrote letters and made phone calls, created a network, and succeeded in finding out how to contact the vice-president in charge of timber investments at the national corporation that owned the land. At this point, Rex’s unique ingenuity came into play: realizing how difficult it would be to explain the value and beauty of this forest to a bureaucrat in Boston, he took a photograph of the oldest tree, then wrapped a length of rope around it to measure its impressive diameter. He then packed up the photograph and the rope and mailed them to the vice-president, with instructions that he should lay the rope out in a circle on his office floor.
The result [vividly recounted in a story filmed for NBC’s "Today Show" — See NBC Today Show video on Contact page ] was that the corporation decided to sell the two parcels to the Nature Conservancy. One is now part of a Federal Wildlife Refuge, providing valuable habitat for endangered wildlife. The other parcel is the core of a watershed project that protects one of the last streams where wild salmon thrive in SW Washington. |
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The Daily News
Longview, Washington Conservancy group buys timberland in Naselle, Wash. May 6, 1999 (AP)
The Nature Conservancy will use money from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to preserve a 100-acre old-growth forest on the Washington coast. ...
... the lower 100 acres contain an old-growth stand of Western red cedar and Sitka spruce. The cedars, their gnarled, burled trunks rising into bleached "candelabra" tops, are as thick as 12 feet and about 1,000 years old. The old stand is a remnant of the once-vast coastal forest cut down many years ago. It harbors threatened marbled murrelet seabirds, which nest on the giant boughs of old-growth trees, and two rare species – the Van Dyke and Dunn’s salamanders. |
From the Nature Conservancy website:
http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/
Ellsworth Creekstates/washington/preserves/art12965.html
This 5,000-acre basin is nestled in the Willapa Hills in Southwest Washington, where rain and a gentle topography combine to make it one of the most biologically rich ecosystems in the state. Found here are stands of old-growth Sitka spruce, Douglas-fir and other conifers thought to be more than 800 years old. Marbled murrelets nest high in their canopy, and bear, cougar, and elk make their home on the forest floor. Flanked by many of these ancient trees, Ellsworth Creek is one of the healthiest in the region, and each fall it is choked with chum salmon returning to their natal beds.
[See NBC Today Show video on Contact page] |
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For more information about Teal Slough see
Orion Afield
Winter 1997/98 "A Stranger in My Own Home Town: The Fight to Save Teal Slough" Read Essay Here
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d e s i g n by
cheth