Place Attachment Primer: Process, part 2
The Forest Service’s Industrial Fire Precaution Levels (IFPLs) are stepped measures that apply to work activities on Forest Service lands. Their purpose is to reduce the risk of wildfire starting from logging operations. During our weekend at Opal Creek, we hovered between IFPL level II and III. Because of our location in a burned National Forest, chainsaw use was restricted after one o’clock for the fire danger it posed.
Auggie made a couple chainsaw cuts ahead of the early afternoon deadline. A pair of dead trees had pierced the Half Bridges, root wads up, since his last visit in. These bridges – Swiss in design and partially embedded in the rocky cliff wall, partially cantilevered from it – were badly burned on that cantilevered edge. The location of the newly fallen trees forced the drive path for the UTV to veer dangerously far out onto charred bridge timbers. When we came in with him the previous evening, he’d made us get out and walk that section.
He and Alex muscled the burnt stumps off the side of the historically sketchy and now epically so Half Bridges. Using a peavey, I sent a pair of blackened logs over the same edge. We listened to them crashing down the steep pitch to the river rushing below. The distance, measured in sound, was far greater than we’d guessed just by looking down toward the valley bottom through the new, brushy growth.
We worked in the hot sun, widening the long-contested, newly shadeless road into Jawbone so Auggie could drive in the seven foot wide excavator needed for camp clean up. When we’d covered the distance from the Half Bridges to Jawbone we switched tasks, walking up the historic flume line to take an outflow reading.
+
One behavioral outcome of place attachment – care – has always been the most interesting to me. “People with stronger place attachments tend to perform more pro-environmental behaviors, either as a direct attempt to preserve the place and protect it from damage, or as an indirect result of internalizing the community’s values of environmental protection,” Gifford and Scannell write in their environmental psychology textbook chapter on place attachment.
Jawbone Flats Environmental Education Center, the era of Opal Creek that I knew, hoped to instill a love of old growth forests in the outdoor school kids that came through our program each year. I remember quoting Baba Dioum in my fundraising appeal letter one year – “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” We didn’t know about place attachment science, but we modeled it for hundreds of outdoor school kids annually. We banked on it being a strong enough force to accomplish the work of conservation.
Of all of place attachment research’s eddies, this is my favorite. This little gently swirling idea that the ultimate promise of attaching ourselves to place, of teaching ourselves and our children to love – to invest time and emotion in – forests, and individual trees, and rivers, and the amphibians that live in their cold, oxygen rich waters has this way of eliciting caring behaviors.
This is the urgency I feel. This is what stumbling into the Opal Creek Wilderness sixteen years ago started. This is what working in environmental education and making investments of time and attention in Opal Creek over the years worked in me. The understanding that the ultimate expression of place attachment is care. That nothing feels better than putting my hands in the earth – however fire blackened – and working for its renewal.
+
The PVC pipe that had delivered Jawbone Flats’ water supply up until camp was evacuated in September 2020 looked like a thick ribbon of toasted marshmallow snaking up the steep creek bed to the intake a mile from camp. We trampled through thick ground thatch of native blackberries so ripe and plentiful that the hot air filled with the smell of freshly made jam.
As weather patterns in the Western Cascades have changed in recent years, less and less rain has fallen on Opal Creek in the summer months, and for longer stretches of time. In my six summer seasons with Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, we transitioned from dependably squeaking by on the water Flume Creek could provide us toward the end of summer to dependly running out. Toward the end of my tenure, August and September were marked by no power to camp except what a loud propane generator provided for a few hours in the morning and evening. Drinking and cooking water was provided in plastic dispensers. Flume Creek was offline until the autumn rains returned.
Scratched, sooty, and filled with blackberries, we tested the outflow of a new intake location with an iPhone timer and a twenty gallon garbage can Auggie had hauled up with us. The pool just above the intake location I’d always known was deeper and promised a more consistent water volume and pressure. Auggie had replaced the damaged intake head to test his new location. It dumped its volume into the shallower creekbed below where he stood with the twenty gallon garbage can to catch its contents. He shouted start and stop times I recorded with his phone’s timer. Alex videoed our informal test, which we repeated half a dozen times. On average, the twenty gallon bucket filled in three seconds; the outflow was strong.
It was humbling to watch Auggie care for the burned landscape. He picked up scraps of twisted metal and puddles of melted PVC and organized them into trash heaps to be hauled out who knows when. He pulled invasive weeds that are beginning to pop up inside the gate. He cleared the intake of the flume line and tested its flow. All without knowing if or when Jawbone Flats will house program participants again, if or when the flume line will be rebuilt.
What binds people with place? Love, ultimately. Love that builds with time and holds the promise of expressing itself as care.
