These three Illinois Valley teenagers represented the Siskiyou Wild Rivers area in Washington DC last year, where they made a presentation for National History Day. The theme for the competition was Taking a Stand in History, and they described the work of  Lou Gold, founder of the Siskiyou Project. This won them 1st place in the Regionals and 2nd in State, and they presented at the Nationals in DC. I recently caught up with the dynamic trio – Audrey Mechling, Kieran Rose and Marissa Litak, all 14 - to hear about things from their perspectives. They laughed: “It all comes full circle – we have Siskiyou Newsletters on our project board and now we are going to be in one!” Here is some of what they had to say about the past, present and future of the area:

This part of the world is a cool place to live. We see kids all the time who haven’t had the kind of experiences we have had. It’s amazing when you meet someone from the city and they’ve only seen the stars a few times in their whole life or just saw their first sunrise! Or to meet kids on a field trip to the redwoods completely amazed at how huge the trees were.

It’s just so sad that where we live we have trees that have been alive for hundreds of years, that is such a gift, and yet we log them. Some people don’t even know that they exist yet we are cutting them down instead of sharing them with others. Tons of tourists do come to see the big trees, but if we log much more - then what? Is there going to be maybe just one little tiny place where people can see these things?!

Finding a solution really is a dilemma. There is obviously a problem that needs to be fixed, but it is much easier to say that there is a problem than to come up with an alternative.

Maybe in the future it will be obsolete, but logging is something that we still need nowadays. We are not anti-logging. We are saying there should be a lot less of it, there should definitely NOT be old growth logging. They can still log, just log with more discretion. So many of the methods of logging don’t need to be the way they are – like clear cutting. Logging should be organized in a way that it doesn’t hurt the environment so much. If we log much more, the economy here is going to croak and die anyway, because if you log all the trees, then you don’t have any more. It seems obvious that the whole logging economy just isn’t going to work long term.

The immediate future looks extremely bleak, but there has got to be some sort of breaking point where it gets so bad that you can’t possibly delude yourself into thinking that it’s good. Then the numbers will cross over, and things will start to get better. The future also looks bleak on the surface, because you can see the clearcuts. They are very visible. But what you can’t see is the people working behind the scenes trying to get it to stop.

Everyday people switch over to recycling, not polluting, being vegetarians and that sort of thing. But you never see someone who used to recycle and then says “This is a bad idea, let’s go pollute!” You never see the switch in that direction but you see it in the other direction all the time which is hopeful.

It’s a depressing thought: a lot of people like us may move away because we want to get more education and experience new things. But after college, will we still be able to come back here and see the things that we see now? Instead of coming back to the Illinois Valley and seeing mountains full of trees – are we going to come back to some giant housing developments and a WalMart surrounded by clearcuts?

At the same time, the future does look sort of hopeful. It’s like in that movie, Pay it Forward, with the idea that if each person helped just one person, things would get increasingly better. Without the Siskiyou Project and everything that Lou Gold did we would definitely have a very different place to grow up in. Marissa’s dad was affected by a lecture that Lou Gold gave, and then through our project we were able to spread it to our friends, our community and then across the state and the country. So many more people are spreading the knowledge. More and more people are going to speak out and take a stand.