This week’s episode: Timber Wars 

Thirty years ago, a fight over old-growth forests and the spotted owl forever transformed the way we see – and fight over – the natural world.

Fighting for the land

On this week’s podcast, we bring you the first episode of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s series Timber Wars. Led by reporter Aaron Scott, the series looks back at the fights during the 1990s over logging in the Pacific Northwest and tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a small group of activists and scientists turned the fight over ancient trees and an endangered species of owl into one of the biggest environmental conflicts of the 20th century.

The first episode brings listeners back to Easter Sunday 1989. On that day, loggers headed into the Willamette National Forest and found a line of protesters blocking the road. The ensuing battle would become known as the Easter Massacre.

Protests, seen above, spread from the West Coast to the Rocky Mountains after a 1995 law nicknamed the “salvage logging rider” suspended environmental regulations and reopened protected forests to logging. One of the environmentalists’ biggest successes during the Timber Wars was to turn the fight to save ancient forests into a national issue, with hundreds of people who hadn’t previously thought of themselves as activists turning out to get arrested and putting their safety on the line to slow down logging.

Listen to the episode here.

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Special event 

Free Speech: Weaponized in the Digital Age

Reveal and Mother Jones are teaming up to host a discussion on the role journalism can play in both combating disinformation and holding tech companies accountable. 

As Reveal has reported, weaponizing speech on social media platforms has taken a toll on democracy while hate groups have thrived. Mother Jones has made disinformation a major priority in its reporting, focusing on the role of tech platforms, among other issues. In October, Mother Jones learned it was a victim of Facebook’s intentional algorithm manipulation. Join us as we hear from experts on technology platform regulations to learn what’s possible and what the boundaries are of First Amendment restrictions. 

Christa Scharfenberg, Reveal’s CEO, and Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones’ CEO, will be in conversation with Nicole Wong, an attorney specializing in internet, media and intellectual property law, and Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

Join us for the conversation today, Wednesday, Feb. 17, at noon PT/3 p.m. ET

Brought to you via Zoom. Click here to register.
 

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Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior reporter and producer at Reveal. She produces radio episodes on everything from Amazon to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

Listening: I’m listening to the audiobook of “The Undocumented Americans” by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, which is all the more powerful because it is read by the author. She’s one the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard, but resists being the poster child for the American dream, which she has called “a pyramid scheme” with immigrants “at the bottom.”

Reading: After almost a year of pandemic lockdown, I really enjoyed the short story “The Hug” by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is set in our masked and socially distanced COVID-19 world. 

Watching: The 2020 film “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” based on the August Wilson play, is a tour de force with standout performances by Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. 

You can follow along with Katharine’s work on Twitter at @kmieszkowski.

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