Oregon Story; Harvesting the Wild

Funding for production of the Oregon story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development [Intro music] [Intro music] [inaudible] There's a secret world in the woods a subterranean society foraging in the forest for wild things. Huckleberries, boughs bear grass, sword fern, fiddleheads, salal, mushrooms, moss, echinacea, lomatium pacific yew. They're called non-timber forest products, or special forest products and they're worth a lot of money. It's a lot smaller than timber, probably a lot smaller than Microsoft,

but it's big. Christmas greens, probably $300 to $500 million dollars in the northwest and most people don't realize that it's even being done. Most people don't have a clue that there's even anybody up here working. They drive by, you know, looking at the trees they don't even see the people standing in between the trees. Some harvesters used to be loggers, some read Euell Gibbons in college a lot of them are new to this country. [inaudible] And some of them are descended from the people who were here first. They all like the independence. For them, the forest is the very last frontier and the passing seasons dictate the profit margin. This story is about a year of seasons in Oregon's forests. [Music] Summer wildfires are part of the natural cycle in the West.

The Forest Service fights fires mostly to protect people and their property and historic treasures like this trapper's cabin in the Umpqua National Forest threatened by the Apple Fire. But fire also promotes new growth. It thins the understory and disturbs the ground beneath the trees. There may be morel mushrooms here come spring. I mean it's fun to go and pick mushrooms and be able to cook something that you've pick that's grown wild and see what it tastes like and, you know, kind of get an idea of how people used to do it in the old days, as the kids would say. After mushrooms, come Summer's huckleberries. You take a huckleberry pie to work and everybody goes "Woohoo!" [music playing] It's good, isn't it? [music continues]

[music continues] [music continues] [music continues] [music playing] Been doing it off and on for 17 years now. Lots of people are out there right now about probably three times four times what used to be out there. It's just getting way too crowded. It's becoming more popular because it's organic and it's wild. Some of commercial things, like jam companies. It's been a very good year. It's funny it makes me feel really primitive and it makes me feel like I'm really coming back to the earth ecause, just gathering like we've done for all of history. Back in time, the Indians had Huckleberry areas that they gathered. [Taaw-lee-winch] How these baskets are just keep sakes with my mother. And I ask her to use them for

this demonstration for the Huckleberry first year. If I was going to pick today, I'd go down by Parkdale. That's where I'd go because the berries are big. [Bruce Jim] Our people's always been self reliant on our foods, all our roots, fruits, and berries and fish and deer meat, elk meat. As long as we're here and the berries are there we go and collect them. [George] Bruce Jim says outsiders are trespassing on to the Warm Springs reservation. [Jim] Really insulting to us that they don't do that without any regards to how we feel and we never traded it off in a treaty. That was ours, that was ours to maintain and keep. Not for them to be coming in here and picking and selling. Or even trying to sell to an Indian along the road you know, buy a Gallon of huckleberries for $30. No, I'll go pick my own.

You know. [George] The Warm Springs tribes also have treaty rights to gather their traditional foods on land they ceded long ago, but there's competition. [Bernice Young] In the last couple of years on the Barlow Pass Road has been a good area. Over by Timothy Lake has always been a good area, over by Bonnie Meadows in that area that it's open. That's always been a good area. [George] Things are different on the other side of the Columbia. [Linda Jones] We have a long house we go and this is one of the foods we honor. The gathering and everything that's all part of, you know, our belief. [George] Huckleberries have been protected near Mount Adams ever since the Depression. [Cheryl Mack] In 1930, huckleberries were selling for 50 cents a gallon, which at that point in time is a remarkable sum of money. Things like 7000 people are setting up communities up here and picking huckleberries and then driving them to various markets as far away as Texas so that they could get a higher price for the huckleberries. [George] The Yakima tribe complained, reminding Washington DC of their off-reservation

treaty rights and in 1932 the Forest Service listened, protecting one side of the road for the tribes. It's called the 1932 Handshake Agreement and it stuck. [Mack] If it's a good year. There is plenty of huckleberries on both sides the roads for everybody. [George] The Warm Springs tribes haven't been able to get a similar set-aside. [Jim] We roamed this land and this land, to us and to my people and the old people has always been ours and has never been and we have never given it up or given anything away, you know, that is precious to us. [George] Bruce Jim and his people are up against the market. In some places the forest is more valuable than the trees. The rarest plants and fungi can be worth more than timber measured in board feet because it takes 40, 60, 100 years to grow those trees, but you can harvest the wild things every year. "Richard ?Haynes?" is

paid to see the value of the forest and the trees. [Haynes] Special forest products, at the state level, is about a tenth of timber products but locally it can be very important. [George] No one claims the special forest products industry will ever equal timber. [Haynes] It's too small. It won't be a replacement industry but for those who wish to live in the small towns maintain say a lifestyle. It offers an opportunity. [inaudible] [music plays] [inaudible] [music continues] [music continues] [music continues] [Shelley Stout] I made a torte with different kinds of the maitake and the shiitake mushrooms. It was really delicious. [Bill Gibson] I just love to saute the chanterelle mushrooms with the salmon. Well, I had had blueberries or wildcrafted blackberries.

[Norma Craven] We love egg dishes with the chanterelles, cream of mushroom soup for the shiitake. Just very simple. [Cory Schreiber] If someone says "Hey what's popular in the northwest?" Chanterelle mushrooms, huckleberries wild salmon, porcini mushrooms, white truffles, black truffles. You know what grows together, goes together. So the chanterelles go great with the corn, huckleberries go great with the pork. Things that we're trying to, you know, connect and leave simple at the same time. We call these a sexy mushroom. Chanterelles are the sexy mushroom. Chef "Corey ?Schreiber?" likes supporting foragers but he keeps an eye on what is a largely unregulated business. [Schreiber] Nobody is paying for the crop. Nobody's paying for the land. Nobody's paid for the water it takes to irrigate the land. So, basically what they're doing is purchasing a license. We know that the public owns the forest land, but certain mushroom growers have, you know, rights to their areas and they're very protective about those, so I think there are some small battlefields or wars that go on and protecting things that aren't theirs.

But obviously, if you can get prime dollar for the ingredients they want to claim that if they can. [Arley Smith] I think that the harvesters are probably over policed. [George] Arley Smith is a mushroom harvester turned middle-man. He says harvesters don't have the same access to public forests as timber companies do. [Smith] The money that is spent in enforcement could be spent in other areas as well, keeping this an industry that's above board. I think that there's probably enough regulations in place at this point. We would just like equal opportunity to get to the areas where products are at, rather than drive up a road and run into a locked gate. [George] It's a year round business. From Chanterelles in summer and autumn to winter's hedgehogs, truffles, and black trumpets, to spring's wild salad greens, fiddlehead ferns, and morels: a parade of highly perishable edibles. [Smith] These particular ones are destined for the Los Angeles marketplace. We may not know it but we may be feeding the Lakers.

[George] One mushroom that's gone from rags to riches to reasonably priced in just a decade, is the matsutake. Wholesale prices have plunged from a mid-90s peak of $600 a pound, but matsutakes still have more mystique than any other mushroom. [Terry Culp] Some people say it's an aphrodisiac. I can't tell you that, I don't live in Japan, you know. But some people say that. [Jackson Harlow] My circuit is central California to Northern California, Northern California to Idaho, Montana, Washington. [Belinda] We work every single day when the season's here. You can work five months straight every single day. [Harlow] It's just like the fungus trail. [Culp] What happened back in '87 all the way to about '93 to the peak in Japan when they were buying everything. All of a sudden, we're paying three, four, five, six hundred dollars a pound. Looked like gold growing out of the ground. Bigger than the timber industry, bigger than the fishing industry. Then, after the economy crashed in Japan and people start jumping out of buildings and the yen wasn't

strong we had a lot of the other third world countries come in. We had Morocco and Spain and China and you have Mexico, where they get like a dollar a day for working. [Harlow] If this company over here across the street, has an order for 500 pounds tonight. Then their company's willing to pay an extra couple dollars to get that 500 pounds. They don't want garbage they want- this is an edible product. [Belinda] There are conflicts of course, you know. But, somebody always has to not like somebody else and that happens a lot. But, oh well. [Harlow] Some of the buyers, you know, will give their part of their commission away to help compensate the price because yeah, we don't want to be, look at me, sitting over here and all the action is across the street you know. [music plays] Every year it's less and less. [inaudible] [Culp] Mushrooms are 90 percent water. What happens is you have 10 percent shrink on your mushrooms. So, if you have a thousand pounds of number ones, which is 17 dollars a pound, at $17,000. All right. Then you lose

1,700 right after the first 24 hours. Okay, then we have to clean the mushrooms. We have to pay a driver to come through from Vancouver to pick up this product and go clear back to Vancouver. We have to clear customs, there's a customs fee on your mushrooms. And before we're into these mushrooms we're probably into them 100 dollars a pound before they even leave Vancouver because it's like, you know, $250 a kilo to get them to Japan. By the time it's done you hear the price like $300 bucks a pound in Japan. Well, that's probably just about what they got into them because even a cup of coffee in Japan's $7 the steak's $80, you know. [Harlow] The big prices are gone you know. And it's going to be harder and harder for a lot of these folks to make a living. [Belinda] They're bringing them in There's not many. [Harlow] The real hard core pickers, they're Mother Nature's chosen children. We take care of the woods, we don't just go out there and harvest mushrooms. [Culp] Woo! Look at this beauty. [George] The Winema National Forest has become a key stop on the matsutake trail. The trick

is communicating with harvesters who are mostly Southeast Asian. [Man] What's he cooking? What's for dinner? [speaking another language] [Woman] He boiling the water for a shower. [laughs] [George] What was once a backwoods frontier has become a brisk business with permits and rules. [Rick Bond] Your permit is only good for the matsutake mushroom. If you want other species of mushrooms you need to buy a different permit. [speaking another language] Translator "?Koi? ?Chunlabut?" speaks five languages and hiring her has paid off in cross-cultural relations. [speaking another language]. [Bond] Yeah, me and you. What makes you think I can find them any better than you? Yeah. You go out with me you'll starve. [George] People like Rick Bond used to worry about pickers getting shot in the woods. Now he's worrying about protecting the mushrooms from overzealous pickers. Matsutake habitat is fragile, so

rangers patrol the forests like cops on the beat, sort of. [Bond] There's two main escape routes or entry points that they go up and down that ridge. Be courteous, as always. We don't chase anybody, these are just mushrooms. [Jim Wolfe] That's right, it's a fungus. [Byron Carlisle] They don't pay us to chase anyone. [Wolfe] Have any products being removed from the forest, they need to have a permit. So, that's why we're here. [Carlisle] These people are educated now and if they're within the wilderness and we see them with a product, we're going to write him a ticket. [Wolfe] It's a money making proposition. We're not here to be sneaky, we're just out here to do compliance so. If we fine them today fine, if not, more likely than not they had a permit so. [Carlisle] Well, that one's big enough. I can tell that from here. [Wolfe] Oh yeah, alright. [Chounlabout] This size, small. It's nice number one of the mushroom. This is what they looking for. [Wolfe] So what do you what would you pay for that mushroom.

$3 something. Close to $4. [Carlisle] She just found $3 worth of mushrooms. [George] What do you think it smells like? [Wolfe] Red Hots and dirty socks. [laughs] [George] Finding a matsutake is like finding a needle in a haystack, but it's not much easier finding pickers wearing camouflage. [Wolfe] I'm not hearing a soul. We usually hear these guys. Yeah it is a big area and we have to look hard. [Carlisle] Jim, I'm going to cruise off to the right. [Wolfe] Keep on going, see if we can't locate them. Yeah, I know, I've been looking I've haven't seen any mushroom. Here. You find you one? [Carlisle] Oh, there was three, it was a cluster. [Wolfe] Those aren't matsus though. [Carlisle] Really? [Wolfe] Nope. [Carlisle] I was wondering about that. [Wolfe] No. See how red it is underneath? Matsi's are whiter. Cool. A lot of people go out and take time off to do this,

we get paid to do it. A lot of fun. Guys, can we see your permits real quick. [Man] Sure. [Wolfe] This is hers? [pickers chattering] It doesn't matter how long it is. [Carlisle] Diameter. [Wolfe] It has to be- It has to be that big. [incoherent chatter] Over the top. This is questionable- keep it. I mean that's real questionable so we don't have to take it from you. But make sure, use that ring and put it over the top. [George] All this has kept the mushroom crop healthy. [Wolfe] Yeah, there you go! I got plenty. [George] And the pickers welcome guests. [Carlisle] I feel very strongly about this. I feel the deer and elk and bear do more damage to the resource than the harvesters. [Vern Oden] When they told me that there was a mushroom out here you could pick and you could make over $400, I thought they were baloney-ing me and I couldn't believe it. Back in them days they call them white gold. [George] Nowadays, Rangers aren't the only ones patrolling the woods.

Take Vern Oden. [Oden] I have been doing it for 14 years. It was a Native American Indians actually that taught me how to do this. [George] He's not just a picker, he's a mushroom monitor. So is ?Kao? ?Saychow? [Kao] This very good, good sign. This is a perfect number one. [George] The mushroom monitors are part environmentalists and part labor organizers. [talking in foreign language] They tell pickers to dig carefully and they stick up for the pickers rights. [Beverly Brown] Within each ethnic group, The same argument is taking place as within the timber wars in the Anglo community. [George] Beverley Brown helped create the Mushroom Monitoring Project. [Brown] We tend to think of environmental justice dealing with toxins and urban issues. We're talking about a lot of folks way out in the woods. Unless you have their participation, you're unlikely to end up with a really good solution or a workable solution for very long. It's environmental justice in the woods.

[Oden] I feel that the harvesters have just as much right to the woods as anybody else really. I'm a former logger myself. I'm not against logging, there's a lot of us mushroom harvesters that are not against logging. We know that is has to be done. All we're asking is to please leave us a little bit of what we have left because there's not much left here. [music plays] [music continues] [Carlisle] The regional economy has changed greatly with the reduction in timber being offered by the Forest Service and even by private land. These people that used to work in the logging industry are now working in the Special Forest products industry. [George] Hard times came in when timber slumped and budgets got cut at

federal land agencies. [Carlisle] Yes, we would like more money. No, we're probably not going to get it. [George] No extra money to stop timber thieves or to pick up trash. [Wolfe] Garbage day. We usually find a few of these laying around when they have a lot of picking going on in the same area. [George] And no money to figure out what wild products are worth to the taxpayers who own them. [Haynes] The value of a pound of mushrooms in your hand is a is a known thing, but whether you'll find a pound of mushrooms in a day's effort. We don't know. [George] Not knowing what price tag to put on wild products makes it tough to manage timber and special forest products simultaneously. For instance, morels thrive after logging. But not matsutakes. They do best near undisturbed old growth trees. [Phil Cruz] It's a symbiotic relationship with the matsutake mushroom. And if you lose the old-growth trees, it takes them three hundred years to replace

those, or more, plus you lose the mushrooms also. [George] Ranger Phil Cruz wants to thin some of those old growth trees to keep them healthy for centuries to come. But matsutakes will disappear for decades. [Cruz] So, I know that doing some thinning will set the mushroom back for a few years. But our hope is that within 10 to 15 years it will be unnoticeable, probably, possibly even better is what some of the scientists have told us. [Man] Well but, what are they going to do for the next 20 years? [George] So worried mushroom monitors started meeting. [Man 2] Test, test. That's pretty good. [George] They monitored what happened to mushrooms after logging and met some more. [Oden] And now, that 30-year-old logging I swear to god, if you walk out there and try to find mushroom right now, you would not find a mushroom. [Cruz] That's true, but but in 30 years you will. [incoherent chatter] [Oden] Now we're talking 60 years. [Cruz] What I'm hearing from almost everyone is that up on the 60

road, the Windigo Pass area, that nobody would like to see us cutting for a long time, if ever. Well I'm willing to put, I guess you could say, a moratorium on the 60 road. [incoherent chatter] [incoherent chatter] [Oden] Let's say you're not going to be the Ranger next year or you're not going to be Ranger two years down the road, five years down the road. Is that still going to stand? [Cruz] We can put it in writing. [Oden] Okay, will that hold then? [Cruz] It should. [Oden] Okay. [Brown] This is probably the first time in the United States that a group of low-income people across cultures have allied with the local community the local white, low-income community have come together to take an environmental stand on a set of timber sales, about which they were not consulted. It's quite extraordinary. [George] So pickers have stopped a timber sale. And the Forest Service has acknowledged that transient Southeast Asians have a long term stake here. [speaking another language] [Translator] He like to come over here, it's

good exercises. All fresh air and stuff two months of the year. He say if they were shut down this program, no picking mushroom he might die, he said. [music playing] [Chounlabout] People here it's just like home. Like me, in 97 I come over here I didn't know anybody except my family here and, finally, I met my husband here and I get married. You know. Can't forget it. I mean, every year have to come back. Miss it. Every September. It's different, I just, you know, like it here. To somebody else, I don't know, but to me it just feel like home. [music plays] [Gloria Johnson] Did you know that Oregon is the 33rd

state in the union? [chorus sings] [George] This Christmas, Oregon is donating a 70-foot-tall Douglas fir from the Umpqua National Forest to be the Capitol Holiday Tree. [Johnson] The Douglas fir stands alone. It's definitely the kingpin of North West forestry. [music plays] [music continues] [music continues] [music continues] [music continues] [music continues] [Man] One, two, three. Merry Christmas. [music continues] [applause]

[Pat Mooney] This is Port Orford Cedar. [George] For people like Pat Mooney, who pick pine cones and boughs and brush, Christmas actually starts in the summer and lasts until it snows. [Mooney] When I started the trees it was just something I loved. When I retailed my first tree I think was five years old and that 50 cent piece hung out both sides of my hand, it was so big. This is a full noble fir limb. The blue tint on that gives you tremendous color contrast. We take only about 15 percent of the total greenery off the tree at any one time and that doesn't shock a tree or hurt it at all. Gives the government or the timber companies a lot of revenue while they're paying the taxes underground for 60 years until these trees mature. [George] He practices what federal land agencies have always preached: multiple uses of the forest. [Mooney] When I'm stumbling over this stuff out in the woods, working around my Christmas trees and different things I go, well, you know do I cut that down and throw it away or is there market for that? Do we research

this? What do we do with it? You know I see this product being wasted every day rather than harvest it for boughs or Christmas trees, they do a pre-commercial fitting in the middle of summer. You go up the road and here's this huge amount of greenery laying all over the ground. The difference between product and trash is where you end up delivering it, whether it's the dump or to the reshift same product ends up in different places. Okay this is my last little order. Green's going out. Timber sale is a one-time thing. Six or eight people can put out a $100,000 worth of timber now with their high-tech equipment in a matter of weeks. Put out $100,000 worth of greenery, you're going to have to have a small army for a month. Charles you want some of this Hemlock. Yeah, I'll take some. All right. I brought down some Juniper too. [George] Pat Mooney's boughs help support a whole crew of flower cutters and wreath makers. [Charles Little] I always loved flowers. So I turned a hobby into a

profession. [music plays] [Rosemary Gutierrez] I like the flower. [music plays] [Amy Erickson] It's very creative and it's very forgiving. It's flowers, so it's going to be beautiful no matter what. [Mooney] Yesterday a tree limb, tomorrow a wreath. The big companies that do all the wreaths for Wal-Mart. They can go to Weyerhaeuser, get a contract with them, but the mom-and-pop little people, the single mother I supply greenery to-- she needs fifteen hundred pounds of greenery to do a wreath contract. But if I can't get a contract then I can't supply her. That's her Christmas money. [George] He says big money timber contracts still dwarf wild products. Even though both industries could coexist. [Mooney] A lot of these guys are are on the edge. They're, they're desperate

and are looking for something to do. If the product is made available they will do this. If not they're going to turn other things: drug manufacturing, growing pot, illegal activities and for the small community it's very damaging. The government owns the ground, they should make it available to those people. [George] And there are plenty of wild greens to choose from. [music playing] [Lloyd Palmer] Oh here's some huckleberries. [Jeffrey Peck] Beargrass-- you could tie it in knots, you could put it around the vase and make a bow out of it. [Saul Guijosa] Two kids. I gotta take care of them. [Palmer] We have a pretty good crop of fern, pretty good undergrowth of fern here. [Peck] Flat fern. Not the longest lasting.

But. Funeral work it's usually one or two-day things. [Man] When there's a lull in building we just keep plugging away. [laughs] You know? [Palmer] I'd love for somebody to find a use for salmon berry and get some use out of that. We have gobs of it. [Mooney] It's like making vegetable soup. You know, you take a little of this, a carrot, a potato, a handful of peas and pretty soon you get a full pot. [Man] It all looks like weeds to me. [George] And then there's salal. It's all over Oregon from the Cascades to the coast. When Ranger Lloyd Palmer started out, logging dominated. But now... [Palmer] Our crews and the individuals that pick brush any more far and away pick salal. Probably 95 to 98 percent of the brush harvest under our leases is the salal. [Peck] This is it, this is the key. [George] Salal has a shelf life of four months, long enough to ship to Europe.

[Peck] They just throw the flowers in and it lasts forever. [George] And you can harvest salal 10 months a year, all winter long. [Guijosa] The bouquet, they put two leaves of brush.Two leaves and one leaf huckleberry. This, huckleberry, and two or three flowers, is 19 bucks. [George] Saul Guijosa picks salal up in Shelton, Washington the epicenter of the salal industry. These days most pickers are Latino and the lucrative brush business has moved to a leasing system. About 15 years ago the large buyers out of the Washington area started moving south and entered our area and our bidding and actually bought up most of the lease areas.

One of those big Washington sheds moved to the Oregon coast and hired Mitch Nicholson. [Nicolson] It's quiet and you get to see things most people never get to see. Wild animals, little hideaway spots and it's nice. Lot of places you go to work now they don't want to pay nothing and you know it's pretty hard to make a living. If you get good at this you can make pretty good money, you know for picking brush. You know I got some of the guys who work for me and make $50, $60 thousand dollars a year you know. You're out here using your hands, it can be pretty miserable. It takes kind of a special person to come out day in and day out. [George] In one district of the Siuslaw National Forest the company owns forty six out of forty nine salal leases. The government is taking a bigger cut so the sheds need lots of pickers. The company has got close to a hundred thousand dollars in the areas that we bought. Used to be able to

buy a lease for $50 and that same lease I paid $12,000 for. So I, I have to have a crew work at to get the money back off of the land. [New Speaker] and the big company has the land and they (give?) the permit and you go and pick, and you have to sell back to them, and they take ten percent. (name?) hosts of picked Sala for a shed until he and his friends pooled their money for a lease of their own. But most harvesters have to pick on company controlled land and then sell their brush for whatever price the company sets. From an ecological standpoint it kind of shifts pickers into the position of picking as much as they possibly can in order to make a wage that's decent rather than letting some lie fallow. Rebecca McLean is cataloguing all special forest products in the US. The work is hard and can be quite dangerous and if they were employees they

would have benefits. On the other hand, maybe that would price particularly the small businesses, the small companies, out of the ability to compete. They don't really want to make everybody their employee, too. You'd have to have some sort of supervision on everybody that was up here, probably have to drive them to the mountain, and drive them back all the insurance, all the extra money. And with Salal already it's not really very much profit on it at all. What it looks a whole lot like is Central California farm work. The state of Washington agreed, ruling in 2001 that pickers should be treated as employees, not independent contractors. Six big brush sheds went to court and won. This has ramifications for all of us in how forests are managed. We have the right to walk across a piece of land. If someone has the exclusive right for harvesting on it will I be challenged simply walking across a piece of public forest? If I have brown skin I almost certainly will be challenged. So this doesn't have to do with

non-timber forest projects. It has to do with the public nature of public land. So the leasing system continues. [New speaker] I would take some of the dog wood It's springy [inaudible]. [George] But the floral greens business can change as fast as consumer tastes change. Just ask Rachel Galloway. [New speaker] It doesn't have to look like something that your grandma would have put together to have, you know, branches and flowers on your coffee table as opposed to just when you go out for a walk in the woods. I love my job. [George] And why wouldn't she love her job. After all what florists are selling is love. That's all flowers are is, you know, they're reproductive. That's why they're so attractive that's why they're shaped the way they are, that's why they smell good. I mean, they're everything that we kind of tie into being sensual flowers do and that's what--that's all they're about. [New speaker] When you got somebody a friend of the hospital what do you do, what do you bring to the hospital? Flowers

That cheers them up, it smells good. You know, it brings a bit of nature here, and that is healing in its own right. [music] [New Speaker] Today in your massage we'll be using a combination of lavender, rosemary, and blackthorn oils. You'll get a renewed, balanced Feeling [George] You know how you feel when you stick your nose into a rose and in that you feel different we can have deep mental emotional effects fairly quickly. With aroma therapy because we're going via that olfactory nerve in affecting that deep emotional part of the brain. Plants are like our mothers or something we take for granted but they mean everything to us and I think it's no accident that flowers are given to our mothers on Mother's Day.

That's right up there that's flowering Oregon grape. Here's the sidalcea surrounded by weedy grasses. Here's the other one. It's cinquefoil or potentilla. Nan Vance looks at things from a plant's point of view. I'm sort of plant centric and from a plant's point of view the world is a dangerous place with nowhere to run. [NAN VANCE]: Animals eating it, people picking it, overstory growing, so it's not able to flower and reproduce itself. And plants have evolved with all these wonderful compounds, these secondary compounds and these alkaloids because they really didn't want to be completely eaten, and they had to have some defenses. [CHRISTY GEORGE]: Those defensive compounds can poison or heal. This is stinging nettle here. Which is why plants are the root source of all medicine -- herbal, and pharmaceutical. It's quite tiny. It's very edible. Actually it's quite good.

The time to gather medicinal plants is spring. And the place is Grants Pass in the surrounding Applegate Valley -- it's a biological hotspot. [MUSIC] Deborah Francis is a registered nurse turned naturopath. So how is he? Did he respond to that medicine for his ears? Yes. OK yes.

The difference between herbs and drug medicine is the difference between how you feel when you walk in a forest and you walk in the drug store. There's a vitality there. There's something alive there. There is a deep philosophical difference, and I think we're looking at what's going on with them mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and we're looking at what's going on with the whole body. Some people are, you know, I just--if I can get them to, like, to just start eating some vegetables, I've gone a long ways, you know. And other people, I'm doing some fine tuning. It looks like he recovered really fast he doesn't even have any sign of it. The biggest obstacle to cure is that people don't believe in healing anymore. It's very sad. You have a great smile don't you? The doctors don't spend time with people. It's actually made my business. If the forest is our drug store it makes sense not to take anything for granted. Dandelion. One person's weed is another person's medicine. The Greens can be taken in steamed or put in a salad and they're really good for the liver. And you never know when you'll need that weed. When I think of a dandelion, think of it as the ultimately

optimistic plant, because people spray it, they dig it up, they do everything they can to get rid of it, and every spring it pops back up and says you know you really need me. You know that liver's getting a little toxic. You really need me. Deborah Francis is Lakota but she's still learning her ancestors medicine. Originally, herbal medicine was all about moms mixing a tea for a sick baby and it's the people's medicine. We all have a right to this medicine. [CHRISTY GEORGE]: Some herbs that go into her tincture she picks herself, some she buys from foragers like Allen Adesi. And harvesting can be a hard job even in May. [ALAN ADESSE]: This is a late spring this year. He left forestry 20 years ago to become a wild crafter. [Adesi] Wild. Crafter. collecting herbs and you know making herbal medicines and learning, that is a craft. Feeling the spiritual connection to the wild lands. And we collect these things from wild places

so therefore that's how I interpret wild crafter. I hope what we're doing now is Wyethia. Get a lot of these roots that just get rooted into these rocks. And don't like to come out of the ground that easy. We'll just have to dig a cavern around it get my Sunday work out. A lot of rocks down here. Big old boulders. This root doesn't want to come home with me today wants to stay here. That's cold. One of the plants he's hunting for is Lomatium. Look at that. The Native American people call it biscuit root.

You want to take your time harvesting the root Otherwise you end up breaking the root and the plant won't come back from the tap root. [George] Like medicine. part of the wild crafting ethic is to do no harm. [Adesi] I'll show you. A way to do it ethically. If you go into an area I only take no more than a third of the plants in an area and I will replant my buds from the top of the root. Eventually, it will grow in the root back. It looks a lot different after you get all that mud off of there [chuckling]. Those who swear by herbs claim they cure almost all ills. For instance this Herb? is an immune system booster keeping you healthy rather than treating you after your sick. [Adesi] But we still have the problem of the short fix. Take a pill and it's all done. You have to think differently, you have to change your, your patterns of behavior that got you that place of imbalance.

This is red clover blossoms. It's good blood purifier. It's actually good for cancer and systemic problems. This is another kind of unusual botanical it's it's a lichen. They call it lungwort. It's used for healing the lungs. Cascara bark -- it's used as a laxative, and Oregon grape is good for the liver. I've got some golden seal root here. Some Echinacea Angustifolia root. Devil's club, Ginko leaf. Ginko is for the brain. Allen Adesi sells some herbs directly to customers and others to larger botanical companies. [ALAN ADESSE]: My customers ask me, well how do I know if it's a good product? Talk to somebody in the lab And ask them how they make their herbal medicines and if they're not going to talk to you or they can't tell you, put that product away and go to the next one until you get somebody who wants to answer your question -- is going to tell you and feel some passion about what they're doing because I can guarantee you that herbal product is probably going to work.

[CHRISTY GEORGE]: One company he works with is just down the road. [Ed Smith] We are the largest liquid herbal extract company in United States. The World Health Organization states that 80 percent of the world's population uses herbal medicine as a primary form of health care. And we're not just talking about chamomile tea here [music] But we can't live without it that's for darn sure. We all evolved from the same primordial ooze. And so even though plants and human beings are obviously very different living entities. They also share a common chemistry in many, many ways. [George] Ed Smith and his partner started Herb Farm out of a fascination with how herbs heal. [ED SMITH]: I know it's very hard to believe, but I *was* a 60s hippy. Herbs, I think, were the inevitable. thing that came out of that. [CHRISTY GEORGE]: What started small in the 60s has become a multi-billion dollar

business that transcends traditional politics. [Ed Smith] That's where the right and the Left meet in terms of a medical liberty. We've been using these herbs for centuries, for millennia, and now it's maybe it's time for us to help the plants heal for a while I want this company to survive into the future, I want herbal medicine to survive in the future. Herbal medicine doesn't work without the herbs. If we wipe out Goldenseal What are they going to use in its place? [George] Concerns about overharvesting and why all the people we met in the herb business are also farmers trying to tame wild plants. [Various Speakers] So this is Rosemary. This is Valerian. Blue Cohosh. This is Thyme. Blessed Thistle. Bloodroot. Lemonbalm. Goldenseal. Ladies' Mantle. Motherwort. This is Wormwood. Hyssop. Eastern Colt's Foot. This plant is called Feverfew. Feverfew. Here we've got Feverfew. I use it for migraines. Somebody that needs to be healed or touched they need to get down in the dirt and touch the plants and listen to the Mother Earth.

Two thirds of every drug is either extracted from a plant or was originally discovered in a plant is now synthesized. You can't patent an herb per se. We're stepping on some multi-billion dollar toes out there with the pharmaceutical industry. [Etherington] Here we have a cancer cure. Francis Etherington keeps an eye on forests from Crater Lake to the coast. Here's a live yew tree [George] not too long ago she stumbled on a new chapter in the saga of the Pacific Yew. The tree that reminded us nothing is worthless. [FRANCIS EATHERINGTON]: It used to be considered a trash tree -- it was burnt up in the clear cuts...nobody wanted it. And suddenly this will save our lives. The discovery of Taxol triggered a rush to harvest the trees in the early 1990s until Bristol-Myers Squibb found another way to manufacture the drug and harvesting stopped as suddenly as it started. Here it is.

But someone cut down these Pacific Yew Trees in an old growth forest outside Roseburg right in the middle of Spotted Owl country. [Etherington] I counted about two hundred and seventy or so rings here and so it's probably over three hundred years old. The company's patent is expiring and Francis Etherington fears a new rush is on. This time by generic drug makers. BLM was very secretive about who the contractor was and who the buyer was. [Fielder] I can tell you that it was not a drug company that purchased these, they were private individuals. And I am precluded under the Privacy Act for giving out the names and addresses and so forth of private individuals. This is just a backroom deal. I mean nobody knows what's going on. And we found out about this after the bark was stripped. These are our public forests. [Fielder] It's a, you know, a legitimate forest products that we sell permits for, so we went ahead and issued the permits. [George] Dwight Fielder says he had no choice because the Pacific Yew isn't endangered but he made changes after he saw how the trees were

harvested. [Etherington] This is another yew that was cut down, probably between two and three hundred years old here. It's right by a little -- the headwaters of a creek, as you can see right there. This water right here flows right into a fish barren stream 200 feet down that way. And it's a Coho, it's an endangered species. [Fielder] Well it's on the bank of a stream and they didn't drop it right in the stream, but it was, it would have been within 50 feet of a stream. Assuming that it was running water at the time Since that's taken place, we've changed our specifications, tightened them up a little bit. [FRANCIS EATHERINGTON]: We never know why we want all pieces of the puzzle, why we don't want any species to go extinct and the yew taught us one of those lessons. [George] Spring brings new life to places scorched by last summer's wildfires.

Mushrooms are popping up, a hillside of them near that old trapper's cabin. And something new is stirring on the Warm Springs Reservation. The tribes have already done well with hydroelectric dams. The Kahneeta Casino and Resort and timber. Now tribal elders want to expand their small commercial harvesting program. [New Speaker] Like your boughs, your tree thinning, your pinecones. Your mushrooms Posting polls. That's all right here they don't have to go off. [George] But they won't sell their special things like huckleberries. [New Speaker] We still live our way of life when we're modern Indians. Once an outsider will come in, if you're not, they'll ask you what's your uniqueness, you know, so if they can't explain it and define it then why should you have a reservation anymore.

[New Speaker] You might go over there and explain to them about that job [George] Bruce Jim (?) has come to trust wholesaler Arlie Smith. [Smith] I'm not a really much of a public speaker as you [George] who is here to share his mushroom lore. [Smith] Mushrooms, in my opinion, have one purpose and that's to eat. You started to have a question. [New Speaker] Well it does it have to have direct sunlight. [New Speaker] Bill shares on the dangerous mushrooms? [New Speaker] Are there mushrooms out there you absolutely do not want to touch? [New Speaker] Does wildlife effect these crops when they come into prime like that? [New Speaker] Have you got them mixed up before? [New Speaker] Can you just give us any kind of ballpark of what the economic potential will be for the individual and for the tribes. [Smith] Let me pass out of a summary sheet of what we did last year. He estimates that last year the tribes lost a million dollars worth of mushrooms. We know that Matsutakes is a been taken from the reservation by people that shouldn't have been here. But I would encourage people to have a pad and pen with them, And when you see vehicles that you don't think belong out here, take down the license plate number.

[CHRISTY GEORGE]: But conflicts loom. The tribes don't want to pay for permits to pick on land they seeded a hundred fifty years ago, land where they still retain rights to gather and barter. [New Speaker] I can't understand in any other plain English what trade and barter is, you know. If I want to go out to trade and barter, you know, I'm going to barter, well, what's to barter, deal. It's money. Today. It's not furs, you know, it's not beads. [George] And the tribes who want to log and burn to encourage wild products. [New Speaker] As soon as you guys start making money, then we'll start charging you. [George] It's a balancing act. What happens here could serve as a small scale experiment for the outside world where special forest products are still in timber's shadow. [New Speaker] This is where things should be. It can't get any better than this. And good luck because we know they're there, go find them [Laughter].

[New Speaker] Every year we pray for these berries, it's another life circle, we've made another beginning. [traditional drumming & singing, clapping] [New Speaker] Fresh huckleberry milkshakes, want one? [New Speaker] Right now it's the height of the season. [New Speaker] I can see Oregon changing and the need to do something with these special force products and with the people that have lost their jobs. [George] There is no study that puts a definitive dollar value on the whole industry in Oregon. The Pacific Northwest or the United States. [New Speaker] There's almost an unlimited opportunity for the use of special forest products.

[New Speaker] It's been an overlooked value for a long time. If you don't recognize the value of something it's difficult to justify managing it. It's a free good. [George] Good numbers would give land managers more muscle to nurture special forest products, but that could also mean more regulations, less chaos, less freedom. [New Speaker] It's kind of a still a wide open industry. Some of the chaos is good because it retains some of those internal monitoring systems. [New Speaker] It's not beneficial to over harvest because you're not going to have anything two years from now. [New Speaker] In order to serve the public, I believe you need to listen to what they're trying to tell you. [New Speaker] The special Forest Products arena has provided a place where people on the timber side of the war and people on the more environmentalist side of the war kind of have common ground. [George] For now the industry is still small enough that the forest will survive it and endure. [New Speaker] You'd be surprised how many people will tell you "oh yeah, oh yeah when we were kids we did

mushrooms." It's part of who we are as humans. You think about it for millions of years that's how we made our living, you know. We gathered. [George] You want to tell us where you found these things. [New Speaker] Actually. no. [New Speaker] I had a secret spot but I didn't tell anybody. [New Speaker] Where am I going? [Laughter] [New Speaker] [Foreign Language] [New Speaker] Someplace. He has someplace. [New Speaker] It's a little bit of a drive to get there but

I'd have to kill you if I told you where it was. [Laughter] [New Speaker] A successful journey. [Laughter] [Outro music] Funding for production of The Oregon Story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development.