Timber Wars

Timber Wars

It’s the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. A march of chainsaws clear-cuts the country’s last available old growth forests. Protesters spend months sitting in the tallest trees in the world. And at the center, the northern spotted owl becomes the most controversial bird in the country. The "Timber Wars" podcast tells the story of how this conflict reshaped the Northwest and the nation as a whole, and transformed the way we see—and fight over—the natural world. "Listeners are left with both an appreciation of the magnificence of old growth forests and the toll paid by logging communities when those forests were protected. Environmentalists and loggers don't agree on much, but I think they will concur that 'Timber Wars' is fair and brilliant journalism." —"New York Times" columnist and Oregon-native Nicholas Kristof With original music by singer-songwriter Laura Gibson. Winner of the National Headliner Award for Narrative Podcast, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program’s Victor K. McElheny Award, Society of Professional Journalism awards for Audio Series and Audio Feature-Hard News, and more.

Episodes

Timber Wars Trailer

August 28, 2020 • 1 min
It’s the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. A march of chainsaws clear-cuts the country’s last available ancient forests. Protesters bury themselves in front of bulldozers and spend months sitting in the tallest trees in the world. And at the center, the northern spotted owl becomes the most controversial bird in the country.

The "Timber Wars" podcast tells the story of how this conflict redefined how we see the forest and reshaped the...
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Ep 1: The Last Stand

September 21, 2020 • 30 mins
When loggers headed into the forest on Easter Sunday in 1989, they found a line of protesters blocking the road. The ensuing battle would help catapult old-growth forests into a national issue, and become known as the “Easter Massacre.”
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Ep 2: The Ancient Forest

September 21, 2020 • 32 mins
For most of America’s history, trees were seen as crops, and the plan was to log the country’s last virgin forests and make them de facto tree farms. We see forests very differently today. How did things change so quickly?
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Ep 3: The Owl

September 21, 2020 • 33 mins
Throughout the 80s, environmentalists lost in the woods and in the courtrooms. There just weren’t many laws that protected trees. But there were laws that protected animals. And the idea started to percolate: what if they could protect the old growth by protecting an animal that depended on it.

Depending on who you are, the northern spotted owl is either the hero of this story, or the villain. And the Endangered Species Act is eithe...
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Ep 4: Mill City

September 21, 2020 • 33 mins
Mill City was one of dozens of flourishing timber towns, where a job in the woods or at the local sawmill could support a good life. But protests and court cases upended that, leaving locals to ask: are owls more endangered than loggers?
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Ep 5: The Plan

September 21, 2020 • 38 mins
The Timber Wars grew so hot that one of President Clinton’s first acts in office was to fly half his cabinet to Portland to resolve the conflict. The result was the Northwest Forest Plan, the most sweeping conservation plan in U.S. history. But it might never have happened if not for some behind-the-scenes dramas that played out in a Capitol Hill bathroom-turned-office and a presidential lunch buffet.
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Ep 6: The Backlash

September 22, 2020 • 33 mins
Before the Northwest Forest Plan had a chance to succeed, Congress seized upon the threat of wildfires to create a loophole and throw the plan out the window. With old growth once again being logged, the fight to defend it grew both more mainstream and more violent, seeding the tactics for many conflicts to come, from environmental to anti-capitalist movements.
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Ep 7: A Way Forward

October 2, 2020 • 38 mins
Is the Northwest fatally divided, or can we overcome our differences and work together? We tell the story of one group of loggers and environmentalists who have found some semblance of common ground. But it didn’t come easy. And no one knows how long it’ll last.

If you want to learn more about the Timber Wars, you can find the additional reading list we mention, plus a transcript for this episode, at: https://www.opb.org/article/202...
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Bonus Ep: Big Money Bought the Forest

November 14, 2020 • 35 mins
In 'Timber Wars,' we've talked about how the northern spotted owl took the blame for a lot of other things that cost jobs and hurt timber-dependent towns, like automation and international competition. Well, there was another huge thing the owl took the fall for—something that cost timber towns even more money than locking up the national forests, at least in Oregon.

In a year-long investigation, OPB, the Oregonian, and ProPublica...
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Guest Ep: Grouse

November 21, 2020 • 19 mins
If you’ve been enjoying Timber Wars, there’s a new show you should check out. It’s about a weird and wonderful bird: the greater sage-grouse. You’ll find these creatures in wide open sagebrush country, trying to hang on alongside oil and gas drilling, recreational activity, development and ranching, which puts them right in the center of a controversy that has a lot in common with the fight over the spotted owl.

The host, Ashley Ahe...
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Guest Ep: How to Save a Planet

January 22, 2021 • 60 mins
In the final months of the Trump administration, there were a flurry of environmental rollbacks that hearkened back to the Timber Wars, including changes that would make it easier to log old trees and a huge reduction in the area protected for the northern spotted owl. So we wanted to bring you an episode from another podcast, "How to Save a Planet," that helps explain environmental rollbacks like these in light of one of the big i...
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Bonus Ep: Wildfire

January 28, 2021 • 43 mins
In 2020, wildfires swept across the West, consuming millions of acres of forest and destroying thousands of homes and even whole communities. And sadly, this is just the beginning. Fire is the future here in the West. But what we often forget is that fire is also the past. It’s what our landscape has evolved with. The tricky question is figuring out how we fit into that.

So we wanted to bring you a bonus episode that dives into som...
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Bonus Ep: Suzanne Simard and the Social World of Trees

May 7, 2021 • 59 mins
What if, instead of competing with each other, trees work together? What if they even communicate? Renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has spent her life digging into the "wood wide web"—the mycorrhizal network of fungi and roots through which trees share resources and information. Her work has transformed the way we understand forests and inspired everything from the Tree of Souls in "Avatar" to the scientist character in "Th...
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