'Portraits in Sawdust'

Local zine depicts the Box of Rain Timber sale, a legacy forest parcel in Whatcom County that was sold and cut in 2022.

“Portraits in Sawdust” is a digital and physical zine I made in 2023 with my friend Wil Henkel, in collaboration with the Center for Responsible Forestry. It centers around the Box of Rain Timber sale, a legacy forest parcel in Whatcom County that was sold and cut in 2022, despite significant community opposition. The zine aimed to story the loss of this specific forest and contextualize it in a local narrative of natural extraction.

I moved to Bellingham in 2019 and met Wil, who is one of my dearest friends. The thing that brought me and Wil together most initially was the time we shared exploring and thinking about the local watershed. For me, it was a way to begin to really know the place I now call home. In 2022, Wil and I had both been involved with a community-led campaign to protect the Box of Rain, along with several other legacy forest parcels in Whatcom County that were slated for logging.

Legacy forests are structurally complex, mature forests that were logged often prior to 1945, after which began the widespread use of clearcutting with chainsaws, herbicides and replanting as monocrops. They are critical for biodiversity, water quality and salmon habitat as well as being able to store and sequester vast amounts of carbon at rates unequaled by forests replanted by human activity. They are natural forests, not tree plantations, and as such they are more resistant to wildfire — these are forests that are on their way to becoming old growth. The state manages 1.7 million acres of forest land in Western Washington. Of this acreage, there are only 77,000 acres of unprotected legacy forests, many have been clear cut already. These last legacy forests represent only 3% of state managed land. This is why this forest in particular, as a legacy forest, felt so important.

After the forest was logged and the community effort failed, I became interested in creating an archive of this forest as well as of the efforts to protect the parcel from sale, even though it was unsuccessful. I wanted to create a portrait book, a collection of the individual trees that made up the place. I was thinking about yearbooks — catalogs of who people were at one point in time, the community they made, and felt curious about applying the concept to this project.

Many forms of political engagement and demonstration have a significant element of performance art. While they are deeply meaningful and genuine expressions of the values held by a community, they are theatrical by nature — communicating their message through performance. These movements are of the body, in the present, and the records can often be focused more specifically on the statistical and informative side of the campaign. I thought it would be interesting to create a document that, while also informative, engages with the artistic aspects of activism. I am interested in the ways media can be used to weave together art and social activism, curious about the power of documentation.

To create the document I made photographic portraits of some of the stumps in the grove that stood out to me and other photographs and then used a program to cut out parts of the image, creating a constructed image with clear and intention absences. By weaving these more abstract images in with interviews from members of the Center for Responsible Forestry and more clear information and imagery of the site, I wanted this project to thread together the creative, artistic and emotional ways of relating to the landscape around us with the scientific, statistical and political ramifications of regional resource extraction and management and the implications it has beyond local communities.

I have lots of physical copies of this zine leftover from the project. Feel free to email me if anyone reading this is interested in a copy.