ISawArkansas

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Loggers cut down old-growth trees insisting, “We hugged it first,” and tell us if they didn’t cut the trees, we’d be using plastic toilet paper.

Environmentalists insist that deer don’t cross the roads, roads cross the forest.

The two sides have been fighting for years. Loggers provided economic security for numerous communities for generations, while those opposed to logging insisted that trees are the lungs of the earth – trees take our breath away and convert it to oxygen so we can take another breath.

On Feb. 1, 1931, the New York Times ran a story that Oregon would start logging, regarded as a sign of returning prosperity during a depression.

In 1944, forest fires halted logging for a while, and fires continued on a regular, weather-driven schedule.

By 2006 there were logging-rights auctions, where the Forest Service sold cutting rights on national land.

But by then, forests had been reduced to insect food and rot because they couldn’t do their job amid all those screeching chainsaws.

Anyone who looks out over the Mark Twain National Forest, with a boundary sits less than 10 miles from Eureka Springs, can see nothing but trees, trees, trees. Trees uplift our insides, heart to brain and back to our toes. Trees are friends of people.

When you drive from Gateway to Seligman, you see trainloads of black walnut trees that have been harvested in their prime to be turned into gun stocks, furniture, bookcases and flooring.

Black walnuts grow in rich, deep, moist soil, and the Mark Twain has that in aces.

Black walnuts are similar to humans – they’re not good for everything. They both poison the things they are close to.

A lawyer called Susan Jane Brown has achieved what no one before her could – she managed to get loggers and environmentalists together for coffee. Both sides showed up under duress, but they did it. They stopped the name calling, the shouted threats, and letting air out of each other’s tires.

Then they had dinner together. Then they went into the forest as a group and saw that forest fires, which have been called medicine for the earth, were burning larger, destroying everything because the old trees had been harvested, leaving saplings that burned hotter, faster, and angrier.

Susan Jane Brown talked loggers into cutting the saplings, using the younger wood, keeping the forests viable in a time of environmental disquiet. Loggers kept their jobs and adjusted their sawmills to cut up smaller trees so they could assist forest health while making a living.

Naturally, there were radical loggers and radical tree lovers who insisted that compromise wasn’t enough, that their side should have won, and the other side should move.

There’s always a gap between us, but compromise is also medicine for the earth.

Last weekend on a starry night at about 10 after 9, you could look up and see the international space station float 248 miles above Eureka Springs, brilliant as a planet.

Three Americans and three Russians. We waved.

If it had been Noam Chomsky, Alexei Navalny, Valentina Tereshkova, Kamala Harris, Tom Hanks, and Canadian chef Amanda Cohen looking back at us maybe we could all relax and continue to do good work.

And maybe the six who are up there are simply perfect as they really are in a compromising position.