Owen and his wife Marina own MycoLogical, a company that provides fresh and dried wild gourmet mushrooms, wildcrafted primarily from Oregon forests. MycoLogical pledges 50% of the company's net profits for forest conservation efforts.

When I was growing up in the Midwest, my family picked morel mushrooms. So I loved mushroom picking. Then, about seven years ago, I picked morels in eastern Oregon and sold them to mushroom buyers. It was a wonderful experience to travel around the state. It was just an adventure, a way to see the beautiful mountains of eastern Oregon - and make a little cash along the way - making my livelihood in the forests.

I totally fell in love with the industry. There was an already established industry of commercial morel harvesting, so I learned from people who were doing it. And so I did that for a few months, then I decided to go back to school and got my degree in sociology. While I was in school, I started to learn a little about non-timber forest products, implications for forest economics.

I read a lot about non-profit programs in South America that were harvesting non-timber forest products to create economic incentives for forest conservation, to give people who lived in the Amazon basin a means of livelihood that depended upon keeping the forest intact. I realized that in the Northwest, there are a lot of people who have that kind of livelihood from the forest. Yet no one was giving it serious consideration as an economic incentive of forest conservation. So when I got my degree, I decided to do this. I've been operating this company with my wife Marina for two years.

Mushrooms play an important role in the health of the forests. They live in the soil, like mold. Their tiny little filaments, thread-like, microscopic threads, go through the soil. Many species of mushrooms are symbiotic with the roots of the trees. They form sheets or underhair. They actually form a physical extension of the trees' roots and assist in uptake of nutrients and in return receive nutrients from the trees.

Every mushroom species is unique and they all have very different requirements. Some species, like turkey tail and shitake, are actually wood rotters. Rather than recycling humus and other organic matter in the soil, they break down wood, especially fallen trees in the forest, recycling those nutrients into the soil. The morels, the ones I pick, fruit in the spring. They're real peculiar in that they fruit naturally in scattered locations, but fruit primarily after some kind of devastation that disturbs their habitat - like after fire.

Morels' natural life cycle seems to be closely linked to forest fires. There's evidence that the morel may be a symbiotic species. They grow in conditions where they break down already-dead things in the soil, but there's also evidence that at some point in their life cycle they become symbiotic with the tree roots. So morels are always there in the soil in association with the trees and the fire is the trigger that tells morels that it's time to fruit.

I feel that this industry has enormous potential to turn the whole argument about jobs vs. Forest protection upside down. There's a lot of evidence that the numbers of people employed and the economic value of non-timber forest products harvested in the Northwest - from national forestland - exceeds the value of the timber that is harvested. The Forest Service could make more money selling permits to wildcrafters than by clearcutting trees!

With most species of wild mushrooms, the pickers spend a lot of time just walking through the forest looking for good patches. Once they find a good patch, it is a place they can return to year after year. But the Forest Service puts some late successional reserves off limits to harvests, or cuts them. In some areas, my pickers complain that the best patches are gone. Mycelium in the ground dies after a clearcut; the ground is baked.

We have a unique and wonderful ecosystem in the Northwest and it's on the verge of collapse as a result of overharvesting timber. We need to stop logging and preserve what remains, and protect the species that are dependent upon the forests. Government could give loans and grants to support small businesses harvesting and marketing non-timber forest products that have minimal impact on the forests. There is an amazing opportunity for Oregon to be a world-class model of sustainable forest use and provide incentives for local rural residents and industry to protect our forests.

Copyright (c) 1997-98 OLIFE -- Oregonians for Labor Intensive Forest Economics. All rights reserved.