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Tree
Planters
The
mighty Hoedads, back for a 30-year reunion, recall their grand experiment.
By
Lois Wadsworth
Introduction
In the late 1960s, future five-term Lane County Commissioner
Jerry Rust returned from India as a Peace Corps volunteer. He and John Sundquist,
whose River's Turn Farm has practiced organic farming since 1983, found work together
planting trees for Weyerhaeuser in the forests near Eugene. They made about $25 a
day. Rust said he realized that despite the difficulty of the job and the low pay,
it was more exciting than any work he'd done before because "you had more control
over your destiny."
With other like-minded individuals who worked in the woods, they
realized that real economic control lay in bidding and contracting with government
and private industries for tree-planting jobs themselves. These early efforts resulted
in a labor crew of workers later known as Cougar Mountain. The concept of the crew
as an independent unit would later define the de-centralized power of the Hoedads,
the organization they started in 1971.
At that time, tree planters were held in contempt by the rest of
the forest industry "the lowest of the low," as former Hoedads president
Rust said. Irresponsible contractors hired Skid Row bums to stuff, burn and bury
seedlings. "Hoedads swept all that away in one year," Rust said. "We
improved the quality of survival of the trees we planted," he said, up from
maybe 10 percent to 90 percent. And the Hoedads' "work ethic and honesty"
came together with the availability of better tree stock and the Forest Service's
higher standards to improve conditions.
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Tree planter checking
seedlings.
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Setting up a forest worker's cooperative broke new ground, demanding
skilled decisions that had to be learned on the job, just as the techniques for efficient
tree planting evolved from practices learned on the muddy, steep slopes of regional
forests. Sundquist called it "trial by error" but noted that the process
"demonstrated that people could work cooperatively." Meanwhile, Hoedads
attracted what Rust called "some of the most intelligent, idealistic and articulate
people you'd ever meet."
One was the late Edd Wemple, who celebrated the Hoedads' "opportunity
to make our own mistakes," as Rick Herson of Oregon Woods, an international
reforestation and forestry business, recalled. Wemple was the quintessential Hoedad,
serving in the organization for many years before going on to support Rust's electoral
campaigns; to work tirelessly against the proliferation of nuclear power plants in
the region; to organize and help found the Emerald People's Utility District; and
to advocate for public power statewide.
In the introduction to reunion organizer and bookseller Hal Hartzell's
book on the Hoedads, Birth of a Cooperative (Hulogos'i Communications, 1987),
Stevens Van Strum wrote that Hoedads was "a case where worker ownership and
democratic management did succeed in the free enterprise system, and in a very competitive
labor market rife with transgressions against the worker."
But as labor and anti-racism activist and teacher Roscoe Caron
noted, Hoedads hit its economic stride in the years after Hartzell's book ended.
"In 1978-'79 Hoedads had about 13 crews, so many that some broke off and became
independent of Hoedads," Caron said. "We created our own competitors and
nurtured them." Hoedads was able to expand because of what was happening in
the woods, Caron said. "The loggers were going full-tilt; it was the gung-ho
timber industry's heyday. We were planting what they hadn't planted in the 1950s
and '60s, the backlog. Hoedads were in the right place at the right time."
The cooperative survived its youth, transforming itself into a
lean network of decentralized crews working with a central Hoedads Council made up
of representatives from each group. It thrived until contract work in the forests
disappeared in the mid-1980s, an era of economic depression with massive unemployment.
"Lane County lost 10,000 people in the early '80s," Caron said.
Many people still in Eugene and others who have moved away or died
shared experiences then that shaped their lives. They also left a living legacy for
those who've come after Hoedads' history of participatory democracy, the creation
of a diverse workplace in the forest, the environmental movements Hoedads helped,
the opportunity to learn useful business skills the cooperative provided, and its
practice of giving back to the larger community.
Participatory Democracy
Many young people who came together during the Hoedads'
early days held values forged in the idealism of the 1960s, values that helped them
become good at what Rust called "participatory self-management." As a hardy
vessel, the cooperative contained fiercely independent individuals who learned to
live and work together in the field and to manage the collective's expanding business.
Some of the stormiest meetings in the history of the organization took place in Grower's
Market, site of the Hoedads office, and later at the WOW Hall.
"We started off with bad meetings," Gerry Mackie said.
Formerly a member of the Cheap Thrills Hoedad crew, he's now a research fellow in
political theory at Australian National University in Canberra. "They were free-form,
too long and based on consensus decisions. It took a while to develop structure:
an agenda, time limits, rules of order and majority decisions. We aren't taught democracy
in school; it's learned."
Mackie's interest in Hoedads' turbulent evolution toward a model
of workplace democracy was sharpened in graduate school at UO, where he wrote an
economic analysis of the rise and fall of the Hoedads published in the journal, Politics
and Society. "The Hoedads worked either because 1) it was made up of democratically
oriented people or because 2) it was a transformative experience," Mackie said
about the analysis. "If I hadn't had this experience, I wouldn't be the person
I am. Learning democracy transforms ordinary people into people who practice democracy."
Roscoe Caron also said Hoedads was "a significantly formative
experience in my life. It taught me about democracy a rugged democracy as real
as mud and sweat. This was down and dirty democracy advancing ideas, making up
and breaking up. We should have sold tickets to those meetings in the WOW Hall,"
Caron said with a laugh.
"Your opinion had worth," Rick Herson said. "We
learned how to have a group sense and feel empowered and independent within structure."
A big area of disagreement was whether people should be paid for the number of trees
they planted by the piece or if all workers be paid equally by the share.
"We struggled with the issue for seven or eight years,"
Herson said. "In the end I clearly understood that the real value was in the
asking of the question. I understood that it can't be answered, and that it doesn't
need to be."
James Shapland, of the Mudshark crew, said, "Everyone got
to have their say. You had to participate in meetings," he said. "The politics
of living in a group was the closest to a college education I ever got. Now I'm a
trade union steam-fitter. Trade unions are highly democratic. We made the decision
to negotiate our contracts just once a year, which I learned from Hoedads."
Caron recalled that one of Eugene's real characters, an old Wobbly
who called himself Stupid, taught the Hoedads how to hold meetings. "Stupid
felt at home with the Hoedads," Caron said, without irony. "Folk singer
Utah Phillips stopped by the Hoedads' office after Stupid died and took his ashes
back to the Wobbly National Museum in Chicago."
"Hoedad meetings were interminable," Sundquist noted,
"but we showed that we could design a whole program cooperatively." The
last word on meetings goes to Mackie: "I went to a Hoedad reunion meeting last
night. It just went click! click! click!," he said with pride and satisfaction.
A Diverse Workplace
The Hoedads decided early on to include women in the labor
crews and to work toward 50-50 parity. Although there were laws on the books, gender-based
integration of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
wasn't practiced in the woods. Hoedads broke down that barrier.
Caron said Hoedads taught him about "working shoulder-to-shoulder
with women. We were the shock troops of that revolution within the forest sector
of the U.S. government."
Eugene City Councilor Bonnie Bettman described an image "burned
into her brain" of "planting slopes so steep I didn't have to bend down
to plant. I could just brace myself on one knee against the slope and plant."
Calling her Hoedads experience "positive, galvanizing," what Bettman saw
when she looked at the mountains around her changed her life. "There was utter
devastation on the clearcut slopes all around us. That's when I committed to being
part of the solution."
Betsy Hartzell, then married to Edd Wemple, recalls wanting to
be as strong as everybody else on her first day as a tree planter. "I strapped
these huge mudball trees around my waist," she said. "I was appalled. I
could hardly lift my leg over a log. I waddled. It was a hard, hard first day, but
I did it."
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Back in camp after
a day of planting.
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But Hartzell, the late Sidney Rust and Julia Herson had their first
babies during this era. They lived in the woods with their husbands part of the time,
but child care kept them off the slopes. The same issues for these women came up
as in other movements of the time, Hartzell said, but because they were with men
so engrossed in the Hoedads, they took more traditional roles to keep their families
together. Betsy tree-planted with her husband, Hal, when their kids were older. "In
the middle of a clearcut, planting a tree is a spiritual act," she said. "Doing
it over and over is healing."
Jerry Rust honored the first women who worked in the woods. "I
learned the management of natural resources from Hoedads," he said. "But
I also learned about human resources: the importance of equality for women workers
and ethnic diversity." The Hoedads brought the first Hispanic crews to plant
the woods, he noted.
Jennifer Nelson saw "a lot of strong, independent women tree
planters" in the 1980s Hoedads, but she thought some USFS inspectors were "uncomfortable
with women on the crews." Nelson, a homemaker married to James Shapland, whom
she met in Hoedads, said some inspectors "treated women differently than men."
Nelson planted trees for two years and also did saw work (pre-commercial thinning)
and unit clean-up (creating slash piles).
"The spirit of cooperation is still in my personal life,"
Thumb crew member Henry Schmald said. He said he's a "house person" his
wife works, and he takes care of their home. Hoedads taught him "the lessons
of living together, working out problems, taking care of each other, staying together
and crying together," he said, an understanding that's helped him create a community
among his neighbors. "Hoedads changed my life," Schmald said. "I came
out of a seriously Republican family."
Related Environmental Movements
Based on their on-the-ground experience in the forests,
Hoedads aided the fledgling anti-herbicide and anti-pesticide movements, helped change
forestry practices and helped save the yew tree for recovery of its taxol, now used
in fighting breast cancer.
An early environmental problem Hoedads encountered was Thiram,
a white chemical in a latex base sprayed on trees to keep deer away. Thiram's a component
of antabuse, a drug given to alcoholics to make them sick if they drink. Caron said
that Thiram also sickened Hoedad crews who had to plant large numbers of the doctored
seedlings.
Hal Hartzell reports in his book that Hoedads Council "discussed
Thiram at every meeting," eventually deciding they wanted a ban on it. He also
quotes from Hoedad Joe Earp's letter to the (then) Eugene Register-Guard describing
Earp's symptoms "headache, dizziness, fatigue and loss of effectiveness"
after planting 60,000 seedlings treated with the chemical. Earp also "lodged
complaints with the USFS, BLM, EPA, State Health Department and others." Some
forests agreed not to use Thiram-treated seedlings on Hoedad bid sites, but Hoedads
noted enforcement was sketchy.
The second environmental hazard Hoedads discovered was the herbicides
sprayed on vegetation in the forest, broadcast by helicopter into "the industrial
forest war zone," as Caron called it. "Then we would go into the area and
find residue in the soil." Caron cited other people who were also aware of the
dangers of 2,4,5-T (the notorious Agent Orange used in the Vietnam War), activists
such as Norma Grier (also a Hoedad), Fred Miller of the Five Rivers area (Coast Range),
and Carol Van Strum and Paul Merrill, who documented that ducks and children got
sick after spraying. Coastal residents reported contamination of their household
water supplies by herbicide-releasing helicopters flying over their farms. "We
had to fight the whole agricultural/academic (OSU)/government complex," Caron
said.
Grier, now head of Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides
(NCAP), said Hoedads were instrumental in starting the organization. "Hoedads
exposed to pesticides in the clearcuts had pesticide residue in their blood,"
Grier said. "The evidence led to the exposure of 2,4,5-T. Hoedads devoted their
pay from a day of work to support NCAP in the early days."
Grier also noted that "Gerry Mackie wrote an affidavit used
in court against the Siuslaw National Forest in the Oregon Coast Range asking for
alternatives to herbicides. That legal victory was key to building momentum."
She said Hoedads went out and cleared brush without herbicides to show it could be
done and testified before Congress when Rep. Jim Weaver held hearings on the matter.
"NCAP's roots go back to the hard work of dozens of Hoedad workers," she
said, admiringly.
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Crummy hazards.
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John Sundquist recalls that Hoedads worked with Starflower, a women's
trucking co-op, on the forest spray plans that Hoedads helped support. "We showed
that seedlings didn't need to be sprayed," he said. "We saw people who'd
gotten sick from working with sprayed trees." Sundquist referred to what he
called OSU's "windshield science," disgust clear in his voice. "There
were dioxins in sediments in the coastal Five Rivers after units were sprayed, but
we heard from OSU scientists that they wanted to buy surplus Agent Orange,"
he said. The message isn't lost on this Hoedad turned organic farmer. "Now my
neighbors' [farms and orchards] are chemically dependent, which hurts their long-term
base of support. We don't have to re-invent agriculture," he said.
Hoedads also discovered that the yew tree, which was routinely
left as debris after a clearcut, had other uses. In his book on Hoedads, Hartzell
wrote that yew wood was prized by Native Americans for making strong bows. While
there was no commercial market for the yew, "its hard red and white wood is
good for making furniture or sculpting. ... Oregon farmers know that yew-wood fence
posts last more than a lifetime," he wrote.
But with the discovery of taxol, a naturally occurring constituent
that's used to treat breast cancer, commercial applications have endangered the yew.
Rust now serves on the Board of Directors of the Native Yew Conservation Council,
an organization he started in 1990 to protect the yew and other medicinal plants
and to utilize natural vegetation. Now working with the Chinese through an alliance
formed on the Internet, Rust said, "The Chinese are raising tens of millions
of taxol-yielding yew trees, primarily for taxol but also for ecological reforestation
projects." By the time the Olympics roll around, Rust predicts the boulevards
of China's big cities will be lined with yew trees.
Business Skills
Another lasting legacy of the Hoedads is the many people
who learned how to run a business while they were there. Grier's story may be typical:
"When I showed up at Hoedads office in Grower's Market, it
was this big, de-centralized concern. They were running a big business, with
a dozen crews and hundreds of people," she said. To work you had to form a crew
or join an existing crew. When her crew asked who would like to serve on the bidding
committee, Grier volunteered. It meant going to Eugene for once-a-week meetings where
she combed through BLM and Forest Service contracts. "I got training on how
to make good decisions," Grier said. "I'm so grateful for the opportunities
I had to learn how to run a business, to gain the basic skills. I was in my 20s.
My management skills came from those experiences."
Likewise, Councilor Bettman's first experience in policy making
came as her crew's representative to Hoedads Council, and she learned to take initiative
when she and another newcomer formed a crew called Different Strokes. "We were
a cooperative crew," Bettman said. "We worked for shares and lived in big
army tents. Hoedad crews had to be very responsible. We had to maintain our own vehicles
and camp sites, gather wood, cook for ourselves. The risk of injury required people
to be very careful, very thoughtful. The personal accountability issue was really
important to me." Bettman planted until she was six months pregnant and then
worked in the office another three months.
Herson, whose forestry work takes him to Asia and other places,
also learned business skills from the Hoedads. "I learned my forestry, which
became my life career," Herson said. "In the international forestry I practice
now I get asked all the time, 'Where did you get your Ph.D.?' I learned from keeping
my eyes open in the woods. My evolution has been based on that. And I still bark
at forestry managers as I did in the old days, only now I know more than they do
because I'm older."
Giving Back to the Community
One reason for the Hoedads' reunion this weekend, which
is filled with private parties for the possibly 500 of some 3,000 former workers
who may come to Eugene, is linked to the group's long-term philanthropy to other
community organizations. In flush times, the Hoedads helped start and keep businesses
alive, local co-ops such as Starflower (now defunct), NCAP, NEDCO and the WOW Hall.
Hoedads started a foundation some four or five years ago when SAIF
settled a class action lawsuit over money illegally taken from worker's wages. "Hoedads
got a large hunk of money and started trying to find people who were entitled to
refunds," interim Foundation Board member Jennifer Nelson said. (Other board
members are Henry Schmald, Roscoe Caron and Burt Rekher.) Many people contacted wanted
to leave their money in the account, which the board opened with McKenzie River Gathering.
The board started discussing what to do with the money, and now it hopes the larger
body assembling this weekend will contribute their ideas.
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