by Bailey Hilgren
Cycles of living have long shaped the McKenzie River Valley. A constant stream of cold water spills down the valley from the high Cascades, feeding the vibrant riparian communities and fish life for which the region is famous. Seasonal cycles structured the lives of the First Peoples living in and around the area for thousands of years. Most recently, the Molalla and the Kalapuya annually travelled through the valley depending on seasonal food availability. The typically decades-long cycles of fire and recovery in the McKenzie River Valley have shaped the area’s forests; however, since Euro-American settlers seized the land of and displaced the Molalla and Kalapuya peoples in the nineteenth century, land management practices involving fire suppression disrupted these cycles. As climate change effects have intensified in the past decades, the fire season has become longer, further exacerbating increased fuel loads built up from suppression in a pattern that is becoming increasingly common across the western United States.
This map shows the distribution of a selection of our field recordings throughout the McKenzie River Valley. Locations are remembered approximations.
For more on the history and present-day culture of the Molalla and Kalapuya peoples, see the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde website, and for more on the history of the McKenzie River Valley, see the McKenzie History Highway project.
One of our team members, Jon Bellona, has previously created work that encourages listeners to embody the devastating experience of fire. More information on the installation can be found here.
In September of 2020, a perfect storm of intense winds and extremely dry conditions ignited the McKenzie River Valley, consuming 173,000 acres in less than 5 days, destroying 430 homes, and killing one person. The Holiday Farm Fire, as the blaze was named, severely damaged the area, with considerable loss in human infrastructure and non-human animal habitat.
More information about the Holiday Farm Fire can be found on the official government incident webpage and the Register Guard‘s extensive coverage of the fire and its aftermath (including this photo gallery).
The communities affected by the fire have been slowly rebuilding in the year since, but the process has not been straightforward. Not everyone has been able to afford to rebuild, particularly with lumber and construction costs soaring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Clean-up efforts have involved removing downed trees and debris in order for residents to rebuild. Damaged trees that pose a safety risk to people around them, called “hazard trees,” are also removed, but the process of identifying which trees should be felled certainly is not immune to possible exploitation by those prioritizing financial interests.
Where individual and group memory helps to establish how human communities in the valley are rebuilding, the area’s non-human life has been regenerating according to its own set of rules. Many mobile creatures like animals were capable of escaping the fire (though certainly and tragically, not all), but many of the vegetative life forms were severely damaged or perished. Fire is necessary for the cyclical regeneration that many landscapes in the western United States rely on: the orderly and predictable changes in species composition in an ecosystem is called ecological succession. In the aftermath of megafires like the Holiday Farm Fire, damage to an area can be more severe, threatening to cause even larger changes to an area.
Photo by Jon Bellona
Non-human life is returning and, in some cases, thriving in the McKenzie River Valley, and though some human residents moved away, many have banded together in place to build financial, emotional, and logistical support networks that have allowed them to stay and maintain their already fairly tight-knit communities. (See, for example, the stories collected on social media under #McKenzieStrong or on the McKenzie Recovery website.) The resilience of the McKenzie River Valley residents in many ways demonstrates how in the face of catastrophe, both support and grieving are collective. In spite of the many challenges they have faced, the communities of the valley – both human and non-human – are recovering, rebuilding, and regenerating. They have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of tragedy.
Resilience, however, is a complicated idea when used to name responses after so-called “natural” disasters like megafires. The Holiday Farm Fire was likely so destructive because human fire suppression and human-caused climate change exacerbated ecological cycles. And yet this doesn’t tell the whole story. Considering power dynamics between people, or within social systems, is also crucial for understanding a world that has been and continues to change due to climate processes driven in part by the greed of a powerful few. Likewise, fire suppression is a management strategy used by the more sedentary settlers who violently displaced Indigenous peoples, many of whose cultural practices involved and continue to incorporate relationships to fire that result in much healthier long-term human-forest relationships.
Calling the survivors of the Holiday Farm Fire resilient rightfully emphasizes their strength, but it also has the potential to distract from the reality that they shouldn’t have needed to be. The resilience of those most affected by climate change and environmental catastrophe, often poor and/or BIPOC frontline communities, is inspiring, certainly, but it can also be a placating cover for anger, meaningful change, and planning that seeks to pin responsibility for problems where it rightfully belongs.
Catastrophes like the Holiday Farm Fire remind us of the intertwined nature of social and ecological systems, particularly in the context of climate change where human intervention quite literally surrounds us. The fire reveals the need for human planning that takes seriously the challenges presented by living in a fire-prone place in an era of global climate change, and ecological planning that humbly but honestly acknowledges the roles of humans as part of communities with our non-human environments – in other words, the need for awareness of socioecological systems and attention to processes of socioecological succession.
Long-term scientific research projects that provide baselines for comparison after catastrophic disturbances like the Holiday Farm Fire are crucial for this type of work. The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, which forms part of the McKenzie River Valley, is an excellent example of this type of project. Decades of scientific data collection in the forest provide an immensely helpful record of what the area was like prior to the fire. The areas within the Andrews Forest also affected by the blaze likewise provide useful information on ecological and socioecological resilience.
While the quantitative record is an important part of investigating and documenting processes of succession and ecosystem resilience in the aftermath of the fire, qualitative, “meaning”-focused work is also necessary to explore socioecological succession. This was the focus of our multidisciplinary team’s project: we constructed a qualitative record, primarily in sound, of both the devastating impacts of the Holiday Farm Fire and processes of regenerative succession as collective response afterward. Our group sought to document change in both social and ecological systems, but crucially also the relationships between the two.
We spent two days in the field collecting recordings and material objects, and spoke with several scientists familiar with the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest (which is in the McKenzie River Valley and was partly affected by the fire) and sound-focused data collection and analysis techniques. This website documents some of our process and contains a selection of our recordings, some of which have also been peppered throughout this introductory essay. The website also serves as a record of the creation of a small grouping of sound sculptures that ground field recordings in the materiality of pieces of singed wood from the valley. The snapshot-like soundscapes of socioecological succession that we captured demonstrate the regeneration of human and ecological systems in the aftermath of the fire, including the often intermingled sounds of communities rebuilding, non-human life thriving, scientific observation, and the complex interactions between these.
