In 1995 Bob Heilman published Overstory: Zero. It's a book about his life as a day laborer over a period of more than 20 years in the forest products industry. He lives in Douglas County, Oregon, a vast and still wild area of forest wilderness, rivers and lakes. He writes about the hardness and physical dangers connected with the work, of the suicides among his friends after long layoffs, of a 75 percent divorce rate, and of the ongoing confusion and ugly politics surrounding the forest management dispute (which is still very much the same dispute in 2007).

The term "overstory" is used by the logging industry to describe clear-cutting, literally taking down every tree in a given surrounding area and leaving the ground bare. The "overstory" is the canape formed by the tops of trees, their limbs and foliage. So, if you cut them all down, you have Overstory: Zero (there is also an understory, which is the second layer beneath the overstory. An old-growth tree, for example, may have an overstory that averages 180 feet and an understory that averages 75 feet). Clear-cutting is never called deforestation by the forest industry. If you look at a typical daily work sheet you'll see a pair of numbers that track the layers of canopy, the covering of branches and leaves that the living trees have spread out above the soil.

Bob, like the great Russian writer Chekhov, has closely watched the social and cultural drama of his own community as it has evolved over several years. Most of the negative human effects are brought about by the actions of the logging industry and forest management politics. Always one of the toughest and most dangerous jobs on the planet, as the times worsened, Bob noticed that the bosses worsened as well. Some bosses driving the men harder and harder, forcing more output, knowing that they couldn't quit and find another job. Knowing that they were increasing the likelihood of more accidents. Some "riding herd" on what they termed as a gang of "brush apes." All of this to look good to their own bosses, often the head forester himself, who often had no difficulty lopping off a few heads to save his own skin.

That the logging industry is drying and is poorly managed by the various government agencies assigned, is now a widely known fact. Politicians hiking a wooded trail during a brief stop over, then promising everyone that things are going to get better, has not stopped the human carnage from escalating. The so-called "traditional political debate" is almost always limited in what it can actually address. Seems that only works if an issue can be decided by a single vote. But the deeper psychological and philosophical social issues - such as how to retain thousands of men who can no longer work in a dying industry - remains a mystery. When those who could make a difference, could come up with a vision, cannot see the problems, nothing happens. And so the "debate" about how to better manage the country's forests continues unresolved in 2007.

Unlike Chekhov's doctor character (in his play Uncle Vanya) who talks of "a thousand years from now," politicians and forest service careerists seek band aid approaches that rarely have much effect on the greater scene. They have no ideas for genuine solutions to the long-term fundamental problems.

There is simply zero vision to go along with the overstory zero problems. No ideas to turn things around. So the social, economic, and cultural crisis brought about by poor forest management practices over decades really can't be solved by politicians. Perhaps it should be turned over to the private sector; perhaps to entrepreneurial types who can figure out how to make money by retraining the thousands now unemployed and reemploying them? It seems that only when man is about to extinguish himself from the planet (recall how only recently have the politicians begun to address global warming) does he take action. We can go to the moon but we can't come up with an idea to help out the tens of thousands of people displaced by poor forest management. What a strange species we really are. **