A war in the woods
Here’s a Seattle Times article on the salal-harvesting industry: A war in the woods.
Son Chau and his wife were all alone and deep in the woods when a man shoved a pistol into their truck and said he was taking it all: 20,000 stems of a shrub called salal.
Chau had spent the day as he spends most, snipping woody stems with shiny oval leaves from the forest. Any other day, he would have driven the plants to Shelton to be shipped to vast open-air flower markets in the Netherlands.
But that afternoon four years ago, Chau watched helplessly as bandits loaded his day’s labor into a minivan and drove off, making him another casualty in what has become a war in the woods.
Specialty products harvested from Northwest forests — including moss, salal and slender stalks called beargrass — once were a low-class sideshow to logging, picked by rural folks in need of extra bucks. It since has swelled to a mammoth industry that brings in at least a quarter-billion dollars a year — nearly one-fourth the size of the apple industry.
Along the way, simple wild greens have become such hot commodities that pickers like Chau have been beaten up, robbed and shot in fights over turf. Illicit harvesters make midnight raids to steal truckloads of greens from public and private land. Cops conduct stakeouts and sting operations in a never-ending battle against illegal picking. [continue]
I hope things aren’t that bad in our area. Are they?
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