Michael Kampnich

“Shortly after graduating from high school, I got a job. It didn’t take me long to see it wasn’t working out. I grew up with an interest in the outdoors all my life, so I decided to go out west.

I went out to the forested area in northern Arizona. I liked it, but it was thinning, rather than working in timber. I wrote to a guy in Idaho, and he said ‘There’s always room for people who want to work.’ In the 70s and early 80s, timber was really booming.

I had just started cutting timber in the fall of 1979 when a couple of timber fallers I worked with decided they wanted to head up to Alaska in the spring. So I went with them. It was five guys and all our gear in a station wagon. We looked like the Beverly Hillbillies. The tail of the car was nearly dragging on the ground. We got to Ketchikan, and within a week or so, we all had jobs falling timber.  It was really booming back then. In a few years I was married and had started a family and decided to move out of logging.

After I left timber I was a harbor master and a police officer. Now I commercial fish, and up until this spring, I was working for the Nature Conservancy. I’ve been here 40+ years now.

I got into working in the woods because I liked being in the woods. Working in the forest industry was a pretty easy way to do that. I always supported the industry, but I also understood that there were limits. I still support the timber industry, but I also recognize the scale of what happened during the pulp mill era was clearly too much. The early practices created a number of problems. The challenge is that the scale of the past was so significant that even the smaller scale today is contributing to the issues the earlier timber industry created.

On Prince of Wales, specifically, we’re starting to run into some really significant deer habitat issues. Wolves get all the blame, but long-term, the biggest challenge for deer on POW is lost forest habitat. 20 or 30 years ago, I didn’t wonder if I was going to get a deer in the fall. It was just which one. Now it's much more difficult to get one. We need to be honest about what’s causing this.

The loss of old growth habitat — that’s going to persist for generations. Depending on conditions, it can persist for up to 200 years. We have to start recognizing that, and making efforts to minimize that, and do everything we can to keep from losing any more of our old growth.”

- Former logger and Roadless Rule supporter Michael Kampnich

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