Was wilderness that hot an issue?
It was a very hot issue and I worked with the other social studies teachers to invite Roy Keene, who was a very controversial spokesman. He came and spoke to my classes. To sort of balance it, we invited the Douglas Timber Operators to speak and they pissed off the kids. They [the Douglas Timber Operators] saw that the teachers were not responsive to their message, so they wrote a letter to the principal trying to blast us by saying the kids were not respectful, that they were wearing hats and holding hands (laughs). We read this letter to the kids, which really
pissed them off at the timber guys. You can kind of read your audience, whether you’re teaching school or not. When I talked about forest issues or whatever, and saw the kids squirming, I’d say, “You know, you can’t eat a pileated woodpecker.” One day a kid raised his hand and announced that herd shot and ate a pileated woodpecker. After that, I thought, well, maybe you can.
“Natural Timber Country was the title of a film that some of the mills showed to their employees. I remember my principal hated to have kids wear hats in the classroom but he was pretty open to what I wanted to teach. I was showing this film one day and the vice principal came up to me afterwards because there was one part in this thing where one of the loggers would grease the skids for the mules to pull the logs across. There was a quote where one of the loggers who greased the skid behind the mules said you had to be careful or the mules would kick the shit out of you. The vice principal heard this and he wasn’t upset, but it was the first time I ever thought that someone would be standing outside of my door and listening to what I was saying. This was because he came up to me and asked “What are these films you’re showing? One talked about kicking the shit out of a person.I1 And so one day I was getting into my environmental thing with one of my classes. I remember sitting in the faculty room right after the last
period and the principal walked in and said, “WENDELL WOOD, I walked by your class today,I1 and I thought, “Oh my God, what did I say?” He said, “There was a kid with a hat on.” I was so relieved, realizing it was just the hat.
I decided when I was teaching high school, that I could teach evolution or wilderness appreciation, but I couldn’t do both. So I taught evolution, but I never called it that (laughs). It definitely provided some lively debates and discussions. It’s the goal of education … trying to get them [the students] to think rather than just memorizing stuff .
There’s so much more information now about the ecological value of forests. The research first started coming out in the late ’70s and early ’80s about the function of snags in the forest and cavity nesters. I was hungry to find information, because when I was in school old growth forests were thought of as biological deserts. When I began working with ONRC later on with this kind of information, I remember thinking, “Gosh, I wish I had this when I was teaching high school.
