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# 🌳 The Tree I Didn't Cut Down - Letter From the Editor
- URL: https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/the-tree-i-didnt-cut-down-letter-from-the-editor/
- Published: 2026-10-16T07:00:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T07:00:18.000Z
- Description: A black locust tree in my yard became a Washington noxious weed this January, but the healthiest native ground on our place is underneath it. Why a series about the local policy debates over owls and salmon begins in my own backyard.
- Author: Dispatch Squatch
- Tags: Skamania County, Klickitat County, Letter From The Editor

*Enjoy the* [*audio edition on Buzzsprout*](https://www.buzzsprout.com/2605109/episodes/19932665?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io)*, or look for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.*

## Halloween Cabinet of Curiosities: A Little White Salmon Ghost Story

Before I begin, I bring you a ghost story from the Little White Salmon, told by a man who swore it was true.

J.N. Flesher taught school at Chenowith around 1913\. One fall afternoon he took a borrowed cocker spaniel bird hunting down by the old Willard bridge. In broad daylight, he heard a team of horses cross the wooden span: the creak of the bridge, the turning wheels, the hooves.

The dog went wild with fright. Flesher walked up for a look. There was nothing there.

He ran to Postmaster Gus Fisher, who wasn't surprised. "Strange things happen up here," Fisher told him. There had been dozens of reports.

On the way home, halfway across the bridge, he heard it again. "Clankety clank, squeek squeek." His blood ran cold. He asked the neighbors. Nobody had driven a team or a wagon that afternoon.

Flesher also wrote about a lineman who claimed to see a figure by the fire in an old shack near that same bridge, pointing under the foreman's bed. The foreman pried up the floorboards and found five boxes of dynamite, a few feet from the blazing fireplace.

"The stories I am going to tell you are timed for Halloween," Flesher wrote, "but they are all true."

And now, another true tale, this one starting in my backyard.

## A Personal Backyard Ecology:

Before I hand you a few long investigative stories about killing animals in our area to save other animals, I want to tell you about a tree in my yard, and about being wrong.

I should say at the start that I understand why people hate this tree; I have the cuts on my hands to show for it.

Black locust sends up root suckers (little fast-growing shoots), and if you cut it or wound it the suckers come back worse. These sprouts grow to tiny trees in the blink of an eye, and are covered in sharp thorns. Anyone who has fought one on their own place is entitled to roll their eyes at what follows. I am not telling you it is harmless. I am telling you what happened on one slope here in Underwood.

## Fire and Foliage

Our piece of Underwood has burned many times over the last 100 years. The lower town went in a fire in 1946, and I have [written about that before](https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/the-town-that-was-remembering-the-underwood-fire-80-years-later/). What grows here now grows on ground that has been scorched more than once.

By the time we bought our home, a lot of what was around it was smothered under English ivy, possibly the remains of decorative plants at the now destroyed Rockwood Hotel. But after decades of being ignored by the previous owners, it was not a patch. It was a thick knotted blanket that carpeted the forest, up to my knees in places. It was deep enough that you could not find the soil, deep enough that there were no other plants anywhere on the forest floor. 

Getting it out is the hardest physical work our family has taken on. The Nature Conservancy's own [guidance for the Pacific Northwest](http://web.archive.org/web/2018if%5F/http://www.invasive.org/gist/moredocs/hedhel02.pdf) puts manual ivy removal at three hundred to over a thousand hours an acre, and says the high end comes from sites with "abundant native vegetation mixed with heavy ivy cover, very steep slopes, dry soil or barriers such as logs." As good a description of our yard as I have seen. We have pulled thousands of pounds. An ivy mat taken off a single tree in Olympic National Park was [estimated at 2,100 pounds](https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/images/weeds/Hedera.pdf?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io).

I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's *Braiding Sweetgrass* through most of that work, and I kept coming back to the ninth chapter, "A Mother's Work," where she spends years hauling vegetation out of a pond so her daughters can swim in it. The job is never finished. And she keeps turning over the fact that in making a place for her own children she is undoing the homes of other mothers doing the same thing.

Of course, she is not endorsing anything I think about my tree, and I am not going to put words in her mouth. What that chapter gave me was company, and an honest description of the trouble I was already in. I appreciated its same consideration for the load I was trying to take on as a human being, some self-imposed responsibility for altering the march of time.

And then, slowly, things came back as the ivy was out. Ground animals first. Then foraging birds. I remember standing still the day I watched a robin digging in the dirt, because I had not seen a bird do that here since we moved in. I had not understood until that moment that there had been nowhere to dig. There were bugs in the air. I had not noticed their absence either until they returned.

Which is its own version of the problem Dr. Wall Kimmerer describes in her account. Everything that came back came back into a space I made by killing something else.

## My "Invasive" Tree

In the middle of my yard is a huge black locust tree. It made itself quickly known to me after the ivy was out, sending up fast-growing tiny clones of itself in the disturbed earth. The tiny spines that deter browsing animals certainly made themselves known to me too.

*Robinia pseudoacacia* is native to the United States. Its home range is the southern Appalachians and the Ozarks, which is a long way from the Columbia River Gorge, and it got here the way most things got here, which is to say that people moved it and then it kept going. On the first day of this year it became a noxious weed in Washington. The state board [added it to the list](https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/weeds/black-locust?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io) as a Class C weed, adopted in November and effective in January.

Read the state's own reason for listing it and you will find something I did not expect:

> "While being a desired shade tree in parts of Washington where it can be difficult to grow trees, black locust also invades other habitats, changing grassland habitats into monoculture forests."

Desired and noxious, in one sentence. And the harm it names is grassland turning into forest. I don't have grassland. I have a forest slope that was first logged bare at the turn of the century, and then planted in with oaks, each one placed by human hands as Underwood grew into a town. Despite how well the oaks are doing now, the dirt around it keeps trying to wash downhill after cycling wildfires and perhaps a few manmade conflagrations. It's this constant disturbance that likely made it an ideal home for the ivy.

The board's written justification is more candid still. A Class C listing, it says, "would not require control at the state level and could give individuals and organizations more ability to use herbicide or receive funding for removal." The listing is a tool. It is not a verdict about my yard.

Then I went and read the legal definition of a noxious weed, which I had never thought to do before. It's in [state law](https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=17.10.010&ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io), and it's three lines long:

> "Noxious weed" means a plant that when established is highly destructive, competitive, or difficult to control by cultural or chemical practices.

What that definition doesn't include is about as important as what it does. There is no ecology in it. Nothing about native plants, nothing about habitat, nothing about what the plant does to anything else that lives there. Destructive, competitive, or hard to kill. It gives me a particular appreciation for the thankless work of the Noxious Weed Board in my own county, responsible for making this evolving language at all legible for our lives here.

"Hard to kill" is a criterion. A plant can be a noxious weed in this state in part because we have trouble getting rid of it. My locust sends up suckers when you cut it, and that resistance is itself part of what makes it eligible for the list. 

The nativity comes in a paragraph further down, in how the classes are built. Class A and Class B are both defined as weeds "not native to the state." Class C, where my tree landed, is "any other nonnative to Washington state noxious weeds." 

Not native to the state. I'm not sure trees know about or understand our borders or systems of government. I can't blame them, it's a lot to keep up with.

Black locust is a native tree of the United States. It is a weed here because of a line somebody drew across a map in 1889\. The same tree, on the same continent, growing in Georgia, is just a tree. The thing that changed is not the organism and not the soil. It is which side of a survey it is standing on.

Compare that to the ivy, which went on the same list in 2002 and is also quarantined, so you cannot legally buy or sell or move it. Ivy came from Europe, in a pot, on purpose, because someone wanted the look of it. The locust is from Georgia. One of those is the thing the word "alien" was likely coined for. The other is a tree from the next part of the same country, that knows no fences or walls.

## What I kept finding under it

Here is what I cannot get past: the soil under that locust is the best soil we have around our home. Under it there are carpets of miner's lettuce, which is [native here](https://biology.burke.washington.edu/herbarium/imagecollection/taxon.php?Taxon=Claytonia%20perfoliata&ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io), and what I have best identified as lady ferns, on a slope that is otherwise dry and struggling (and a fair share of poison oak, let's be real). The ground we fought hardest for, the cleared ivy ground, is not as far along as the ground that simply had this tree standing over it.

For a long time I assumed I was seeing something idiosyncratic, or fooling myself. I was not. It looked like something out of a Studio Ghibli film.

Black locust is a legume. It fixes nitrogen out of the air through bacteria in its roots and feeds it into the soil through its leaf litter, and on ground that has been burned and scraped and stripped, nitrogen is exactly what is missing. There is a detail about how it does this that I find almost unbearably charming. The tree is a "facultative fixer." When researchers [added nitrogen to the soil](https://research.fs.usda.gov/download/treesearch/66669.pdf?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io), black locust cut its investment in root nodules by 63 percent and its allocation to fixation by 66 percent. It gives where there is a shortage and stops when there is not. It is not pumping nitrogen into my hillside out of malice. It's carefully measuring the needs of its surroundings, and answering a deficit.

And it is not only the nitrogen. Locust leafs out late, in May, and starts dropping in August. The canopy is thin and the season under it is long. In Central European forests, researchers measured the herb layer under black locust at 53 percent cover, against 5 percent in native oak forest nearby. A bright, sheltered, seasonally moist forest margin is what the tree manufactures, with a pleasant fruity white flowered scent that wafts on the Gorge winds. Now read the habitat that the University of Washington's herbarium gives for miner's lettuce: "Forest openings and margins, shaded rock crevices, and open areas where seasonally moist." Made to order, from my locust tree to the forest floor. 

## Minding my biases, learning how to learn

I want to be honest about what I don't know, because this is the part where a person in my position starts arguing for the thing they have grown fond of. The Miner's Lettuce is delicious (I like mine tossed with a homemade dijon vinaigrette) so you can imagine how the whole situation grew on me.

A thick understory is not the same as a native understory, and "visual quality" can be an especially poor indicator of ecological health. There is a study from Cape Cod that found non-native plants increased significantly under black locust while native plants did not decline, which is a result that would look, to a landowner standing on it, exactly like a thriving slope. Miner's lettuce and ferns are what I can name. They are a start on a list, not a total list. I'm certainly not a professional botanist.

The research against this tree is also real and it is extensive, but in the interest of honesty we need to also talk about how that research is not from here. [Washington's own findings document](https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/images/weeds/Black-locust-Robina-pseudoacacia.pdf?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io) for the listing cites studies from Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, China, Korea and South Africa, a laboratory experiment, and the tree's native range in Appalachia. The Washington content in it is a map of where the tree has been found. The harm is heavily measured. That exact harm has not been measured here.

What that literature does say, when you read enough of it, is that the damage tracks how poor the ground was to start. On sand prairie and dry grassland and pine barrens, where plants are adapted to thin, hungry soil, a nitrogen subsidy is unneeded, and the newcomers it invites are also labeled as weeds. On already-fertile, moist forest, the effect shrinks and sometimes disappears. The most recent tally I could find looked at 194 published cases of black locust and plant diversity. In 144 of them there was no detectable effect at all. Thirty-one found an increase. Nineteen found a decrease.

That is not a vindication. It is an invitation for me, the human with the large frontal lobe, to pay attention to my surroundings instead of reaching for a saw.

## Getting a Good Grade in Plants

What I really wanted, when I started reading and minding my yard, was to be a good student. I think we all have the same urge when we start checking plant identification books out of the library. I wanted to look up the correct answer about my tree, about the correct native plants my yard I should have, and then go to the correct suppliers to make it happen. I have a plot of forest and a limited number of hours outside of my full time job to manage it. So I would very much like someone qualified (perhaps wearing some kind of clear Certified Plant Expert badge) to hand me the assignment.

Alas, it's turned out to be a bit more complicated than that.

Start with how this tree lost its job. For most of the twentieth century black locust was something close to a federal favorite. The Forest Service's own species review says it "was once a favored tree for restoration or rehabilitation," and that its main use "has been in the rehabilitation of former surface mine sites and for erosion control," along with stabilizing railroad embankments and highway edges. It was the tree you planted on ground people had wrecked.

Then it fell out of fashion. The same review says locust borer damage was "a major reason that planting black locust has fallen out of favor in the United States."

A beetle. Not any updated scientific finding about what the tree does to a plant community. An insect that tunnels into the trunk and ruins the timber, which made locust plantations a bad investment. Its reputation was set by whether it paid out. The ecological argument arrived afterward, to a tree that had already been written off.

I find that genuinely sad, because repairing wrecked ground is a thing we still badly need, and we are especially going to need more of it in the Gorge. We have written in this newsletter about mine reclamation and who pays for it when the money runs out. One of the most documented tools for putting a scraped-over hillside back together fell out of use mostly because a borer made it unprofitable as lumber. As a millennial who graduated during the 2008 recession, with outdated skills into a volatile new ecosystem, I can't help but empathize with the struggle of an unemployed tree.

And the professionals have been arguing with themselves the whole time. The Society for Ecological Restoration's 2004 primer said plainly that "restoration attempts to return an ecosystem to its historic trajectory" and that "historic conditions are therefore the ideal starting point for restoration design." By its 2019 standards, that anchor had loosened: the reference is now what might have existed "had degradation not occurred, and adjusted to accommodate changed or predicted environmental conditions." The textbook revised itself between editions, because the ground kept moving.

Nor does the rest of the world agree. Italy counts the tree as naturalized in a few southern regions and a problem in the rest. The Czechs decided to triage, site by site, which is how the word "tolerance" ended up in a scientific paper.

Germany made black locust its Tree of the Year in 2020, and knew exactly what it was doing. The farm and forestry paper [top agrar covered it](https://www.topagrar.com/jagd-und-wald/news/robinie-als-baum-des-jahres-polarisiert-12038026.html?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io) under the headline "Invasive Art oder Überlebenskünstler?" Invasive species, or survival artist? The new German Tree Queen, Charlotte Baumann, said the foundation had picked a tree "die die Gemüter von Naturschützern, Städteplanern und Forstleuten in Wallung bringt," one that gets conservationists, city planners and foresters worked up.

Then she explained, in the same interview, exactly why her own tree is a problem:

> "Das Geheimnis ihres Erfolges steckt unter der Erde: Bakterien, die an der Wurzel leben, fixieren Luftstickstoff. Dieser reichert sich im Boden an – für stickstoffarme Naturräume wie Magerrasen oder Binnendünen bedeutet dies meist das Ende."

The secret of its success is underground. Bacteria living on the roots fix nitrogen out of the air, it builds up in the soil, and for nutrient-poor grassland or inland dunes that usually means the end. (The translations here are our own, and we have tried to keep them close.)

That is the same nitrogen I have been thanking this tree for. The ambassador for black locust in Germany names the exact mechanism, and names the habitats it negatively impacts, and they are nitrogen-poor open ground. I do not have nutrient-poor grassland. I have a burned, scraped forest slope that was starving. The same act is a gift on my hill and a catastrophe on a dune.

And then she said something that stuck in my mind:

> "Meine Aufgabe als Botschafterin der Robinie ist es, über die Kontroversen dieser Art zu informieren. Ich biete keine Lösungen an, aber eine von Menschen eingebrachte Art verdient, dass man ihrem Fall Gehör schenkt."

My best attempt at a translation: 

> "My job as ambassador for the black locust is to inform people about the controversies around this species. I offer no solutions, but a species brought here by people deserves to have its case heard."

*Eine von Menschen eingebrachte Art.* A species brought in by humans. She puts the responsibility in the grammar, where it belongs. And *ihrem Fall Gehör schenken*, to give its case a hearing, is a courtroom phrase. Somebody whose official job was to be enthusiastic about a tree decided the honest thing was to say it is complicated and that the tree is entitled to due process.

And Hungary went the other way entirely. Black locust covers about 462,700 hectares there, roughly a quarter of all Hungarian forest, and acacia honey has been a protected national product since 2014\. When the European Union moved toward listing the tree as an "invasive alien species of Union concern." Hungary fought it off, and its parliament declared this North American species a Hungarikum, a piece of national heritage. A government defended a tree from another continent by calling it part of who they are, against what it called interference from outside. 

And though this attachment may be as economically and politically vulnerable as ours was to the jaws of a boring beetle, it's worth considering. Four countries, four answers, one tree.

One more notable anecdote on this tree and the mishaps in the words we use to describe it: every account says a man named Jean Robin brought black locust to Paris in 1601, and that the genus *Robinia* is named for him. A Hungarian forestry professor went back through the plant lists and took that apart a few years ago. Robin's own garden lists do not show the tree. The plant that everyone pointed to for three centuries as proof turns out, on the description, not to be black locust at all. And the species name, *pseudoacacia*, false acacia, was borrowed from a plant that was certainly something else.

So the tree is named after a man who did not bring it, for a resemblance to a plant it isn't. Here is how that professor ends: the name "stands there on page 722 of the bible of botanical nomenclature, and is thereby sacred and inviolable."

We got the name wrong and we cannot fix it, because it was written down. A first-mover advantage, now hewed in stone. That's roughly how I have come to feel about so many other words used around these issues, and often much of how we can be quick to write self-fulfilling prophecies for the species and landscapes around us. 

Closer to home it is no tidier. California's inventory rates it of "limited invasiveness." King County says controlling it "is not required, but is recommended." And when researchers tallied 194 published studies of what black locust does to plant diversity, 144 found no detectable effect at all. Thirty-one found more diversity. Nineteen found less.

There is no answer key. And we often end up tangled in the word choices of generations long gone as we try to implement the policy language they left behind them. There are a lot of people doing careful work in different places and arriving at different places, which is what an open question looks like from the inside.

## My Locust Tree and I

And so the answer for me and my tree: it would no longer cross my mind to pay to have it removed. I am not its judge, jury, and executioner. I am its neighbor, and its steward. So I decided the appropriate relationship is to help it figure out where its shoots should come up, and where they shouldn't.

Where the hillside has been washing out, season after season, I let them grow. Those places are holding now. Where I do not want them, I pull them, and I am fully aware that I will be pulling them for the rest of my life here on this mountain. Nearby there are clusters of decorative lilacs, which are probably not supposed to be here either, and which are holding a different piece of the hill together. 

This practice of taking responsibility without imposing my vision of this environment turns out to have a name, and it was invented for this exact species. In 2017 a group of Czech ecologists published a framework for managing black locust that begins by saying "neither unrestricted cultivation nor large-scale eradication is applicable as a universal practice," and lists four options, one of which is [tolerance](https://neobiota.pensoft.net/article/11909/?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io). They worked it out because in Central Europe this tree is at once a problem their conservation agencies take seriously and a national economic asset, and a rule that said always kill it was never going to survive contact with reality.

Buried in that same paper is the sentence that rearranged how I think about my own two acres:

> "Under closed canopies of native species, Robinia does not sprout spontaneously or only slightly."

The healthy native understory is itself the control on the locust. There's an important lesson here I think, that the forest is capable of telling this tree what its boundaries are, the role it can fill. I don't need to be patronizing.

I had thought I was doing two separate jobs. Nursing a forest back, and managing a weed tree. I was doing one job. The tree sheltered the understory, and the understory is what keeps the tree in its place. They are holding each other, and I can choose instead to be supportive of that relationship.

## Slowing Down, Taking a Breath

I like nature journaling, mostly drawing, and appreciated the advice to approach the natural world with [the prompts](https://www.wildwonder.org/activity-iniwirmo?ref=skamania-dispatch.ghost.io): "I notice, I wonder, it reminds me of." Somewhere in all this, I noticed something about my own words.

I had been calling this tree "invasive." Not thinking about it, just reaching for the word the way you reach for a light switch, a word other people seem to use with confidence about the plants and animals around them. And when I started actually reading, I found that the word is not a description of a plant. It is a determination somebody made, under a rule, about a particular place. And reasonable people are still arguing about it.

So I have been trying to stop using it as shorthand. Not to be delicate, and not because I think the people who use it are always wrong. My degrees are in public policy, and so I understand the need to plant a stake in the ground somewhere with our language, so we can attempt to write laws we can act on at all. The state has a real job to do and needs real categories to do it. But when I declare a living thing "invasive," I am skipping about four steps of an argument and presenting the conclusion as though it were a feature of the organism, as natural to it as the leaf shape or branch structure I might draw out in my nature journal.

It turns out to be hard to tell what invasive actually means, and give it real scientific roots and definitions. The word is efficient and it does feel good to say. Slowing down on it costs me a sentence every time, and about half the time, I find I maybe have more questions than answers.

I would like to ask you to try it in your own yard. Not to stop pulling anything. Just to notice, the next time you call something a weed or an invader, whether you are describing the plant or repeating a decision or idea of its role someone else gave to you. And then go look at what is growing under it.

## Postcards From Europe

I love the opportunity to look across the world for examples of how they approach these same questions. It's an important reminder that we're not alone.

Hungary, Czechia, Germany, Italy. They sit geographically closer together than I am to Denver. One tree, one continent's worth of research, four answers, and the distance between the answers is less than a long drive here in America. Nobody there seems to think the others are idiots for thinking the tree has a different role in their community. They think they have different ground, different history, different things to protect, and different money to do it with, which is all true.

We cover a lot more distance than that on our side of the pond. From here to the Great Plains is a farther stretch of land than separates Budapest from Rome, and the ecology changes far more. And yet I notice that I had been looking for a single answer about one tree, as if the right one existed and I had simply not found it yet. The Correct Answer, the A+ grade still eluding me.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable part, and I am talking about myself here.

Planting native plants can be tied up in a language and presumption of virtuousness. Not just useful, virtuous. I go to the native plant sales out of university extension offices. I feel the joy and connection of learning from my neighbors, connected to the cause of supporting these institutions, of protecting these species, watching them grow and thrive. These are all indeed good and virtuous things. There is a particular warmth in knowing that what you put in the ground "belongs there," and a corresponding tightness when you learn that something in your yard "does not." I have had both feelings and I recognize them, and I take time these days to think about where they come from.

Because I am also a person who arrived here. Not long ago, in the scheme of this place, even though it is the longest I have lived in any home. I came to a valley with a long history that is not mine, and I am still learning what I owe it. It would be very convenient, in that situation, to have a clean test for belonging that I could apply to something other than myself. A plant I can be sure about. A box I can draw on the ground so I can make sure I'm standing inside it.

I am not saying native planting is a guilty conscience with a trowel. It is good work and the pollinators are real. I am going to keep trying my best to get those little sticks from the extension sale that I plant in the ground to live to the next season. I am saying that the heat I feel about it seems larger than the plants. And that when a feeling runs hotter than its subject, it is usually carrying something else.

The locust did not care about any of that. It fixed nitrogen into a burned hillside and held the soil and let miner's lettuce come back under it. It would have done exactly the same thing whether or not I had the correct ideas about it, or if it had lined up with the letter of law.

## Why I am starting here

There are a few long special investigations coming after this one, each about the place this debate in my yard extends to the ecosystem in which we all live. The due process to which maybe all living things are entitled.

One is about a federal plan to shoot up to 452,583 Barred Owls, a bird that is native to North America, to protect the Northern Spotted Owl. The other is about the hatcheries on this river, and whether what is called a "manufactured fish" counts as a salmon. Both of them turn on a word that gets printed as though it were a fact about an animal, something I could smear on a slide and identify under a microscope, when it is a policy decision somebody made.

I did not arrive at that by just reading about it. I arrived at it by pulling ivy for years and then standing under a tree I had been told to resent, even kill. And here is the pattern I did not expect to find, which I now cannot stop seeing under every "noxious weed" I try to uproot.

Look again at how this tree's reputation actually turned. It was useful. We planted it on mine spoil and raw roadcuts and railroad banks because it would grow where nothing else would. Then a beetle made it a poor investment as timber, and it stopped being planted, and only afterward did the case against it fill in. One European review puts the gap plainly: the lag between this tree being accepted for what it was worth and being rejected for what it does to biodiversity ran close to two centuries.

The tree did not change. Its relationship to us changed. I don't think that's a conspiracy. I think it is something more ordinary and harder to see, more human. We notice what a living thing does to us, and we build a category around it, and then the category starts to feel like a property of the organism.

Which is what makes me uneasy about how we talk about "The Owl." It has me looking backwards at the notorious history of the battle over the Spotted Owl as it played out here in my own county, and continues to play out.

The Barred Owl was nobody's problem for as long as it was nobody's business. It is another native North American bird that ate what was available and raised its young. It became "invasive," in the official sense, when it arrived in the one place where its competitor (the Spotted Owl) had half a century of policy and associated sunk costs stacked behind it. Critical habitat. A forest plan. Habitat conservation plans. Timber set-asides on this county's own trust lands. Court cases that outlasted the judges who heard them.

I want to be fair about this. The Spotted Owl is not protected because we spent money on it. We spent the money because it was disappearing, and it is disappearing faster where Barred Owls are present. That is measured and it is real. And the Barred Owl did move, perhaps faster than the Locust Tree arrived in my yard, perhaps another refugee in our fast-changing climate.

But I keep coming back to the same shape. The Barred Owl was never counted at all until it collided with something we were already counting, that had tremendous stakes attached to it.

We are humans. We get to make conscious choices, and because we do, I think we sometimes overestimate how much is ours to decide. It is a heavy way to live, and it is not always warranted. Sometimes we can slow down and notice that a living thing in our shared ecosystem is doing better than we expect, and spend more time watching and listening than loading the gun or filing the lawsuit.

The climate is changing the ground under all of us. Species are going to keep moving, including ours, and we are going to keep having to decide what we owe the ones that arrive. I would rather hold those as open questions, and keep testing them, and keep funding the people whose job it is to find out, than settle them with a word.

I don't know whether I am right about my tree. That uncertainty is exactly why I wanted to start here, in my yard.

I am a member of a generation that may spend all my life digging through the roots and ruins of a world come and gone. I will be trying alongside other living things, my fellow survivors, to make a life with what remains. I welcome these hard questions, the connection they give me to these lands and the many beings I share them with. And I welcome you on this journey with me.

Thanks, as always, for making this newsletter a part of your day.

*\-- Kate*