How To Love A Forest
Art and activism in one of the last old-growth temperate forests on Earth
Our Issue 28 cover artist, Kyle Scheurmann is both a painter and an activist for the protection of the mighty old-growth forests of British Columbia. Introducing his most recent show, We’re All In This Together’, Liz Toohey-Wiese wrote: ’To truly know a landscape – to study its details, immerse in its rhythms, and then witness its gradual disappearance year after year – is to commit to having your heart broken over and over again …’
Here Kyle bears full-hearted witness to both the beauty and the relentless destruction of ancestral trees in a forest called Sassin. Within this paradox, his paintings summon our capacity not only to look at what is happening, but to hold out for the places we love and feel deeply connected to.
To further explore Kyle’s work, do delve into our recent tree-shaped issue and watch the short documentary about his work, A Beautiful Resistance (also at the end of this post).
IN SUMMER 2022, I spent some time living at an old-growth blockade camp in front of a forest called Sassin. It’s located on the southern end of Vancouver Island which is home to some of the last remaining strands of temperate old-growth forests on Earth. The trees here grow as big as skyscrapers, sometimes over 70 metres tall, while storing more carbon per hectare than even the Amazon Rainforest can.
But every day, we lose more of the forest to industrial logging and exploitative resource extraction. Some estimates predict that of the most productive ancient valley-bottom forests, there’s less than 3% left. Yet our government remains steadfast on supporting industry and pushing through policies that insure these forests will soon be gone forever.
The below writing and photographs detail my experiences returning to Sassin (or what’s left of it) each summer for the last three years. But the real work here are the accompanying paintings, which say more about the realities on the ground at Sassin and forests just like it than I could ever type.
Rainbowabra
August 2024
There’s an ancient forest we tried to save, but couldn’t.
It’s behind the site of a protection camp I once knew as Sassin. Until two summers ago, it was a thriving forest of cedar, fir and hemlock. Full of birds and bears and all kinds of bugs. I remember hiking through the forest with Rufous, a fellow Forest Protector living at camp. Creeks and rivers flowed through the forest, full of rocks to jump across and pools to swim in.
But RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) came quickly and within an afternoon the camp was gone.
Last summer, the forest behind old Sassin Camp was an active logging site. Rufous and I drove all the way out to see just how much they were taking. We waited at the bottom of the road till the last truck drove out at 4pm, then we hiked in. It was right in the middle of a heat-dome, it must have been 40 degrees.
Full jerrycans of fuel bulged on the side of the road. Saws were spread out across the open clearing. A giant red yarder (the crane-like machine that pulls the ancient carcasses out of the valley) was tethered to the road with all its parts splayed out in the dirt - it looked like the loggers had been fixing a mechanical issue.
Off the road, where there once was an old-growth forest, Rufous and I hiked across the thatch and discarded debris. Little birds would flutter away when we would step on some of the logs, getting jostled free by our weight shuffling the endless piles of branches and burls. Everything was still brown and still covered in sawdust. It smelled like gasoline and wood chips. The wound was fresh.
Little birds would flutter away when we would step on some of the logs, getting jostled free by our weight shuffling the endless piles of branches and burls.
I remember speculating with Rufous about a poached tree. A massive fir stump just outside of the falling line had been cut. A long skidmark scared the side of the valley from where the yarder had ripped the tree, now lumber, up to the road and onto a truck. I climbed up onto the fir stump to get a better view of what was left in the forest around me. Massive cedar trees carelessly spray-painted with their diameters; 3.7, 3.8, 4.0 metres.
Back in the studio, I knew that painting Sassin was going to be central to my upcoming exhibition, but I couldn’t figure out how. It was the first time that a forest I’d used my own body to try and save was now gone. It was too immediate, so I kept all my photos, drawings and notes from both living at camp and hiking the active clearcut tucked away.
… Until the spring, when the ‘Fairy Creek 15’ were named in a legal document and began to organise around their common case. They were being sued for $10,000,000 by international resource extraction company, Teal-Jones, for their actions at some of the same protection camps I had painted. It all began playing out on my social media feeds.
The first person to be charged was Rainbow Eyes, also known as Angela Davidson, deputy leader of the Green Party of Canada and Kwakwaka’wakw Forest Protector. I never got a chance to speak with Rainbow Eyes while at camp, there was so much going on. But as I spent more time out there, I grew a deep respect for her. By the end of the summer, when I’d see her at HQ or around a campfire, it was a bit like seeing a celebrity. I really looked up to her.
Then 11 months after I hiked the clearcut at Sassin, I was watching Rainbow Eyes on an instagram video while sitting alone in my studio. She had just become a convicted criminal for trying to save the last of the old-growth forest in Canada - one of the last jurisdictions on Earth that still harvests old growth.
Rainbow Eyes was standing on a curb outside the courthouse while passionately, articulately, enthusiastically insisting that we must come together as a community to help protect these most endangered old-growth ecosystems. She was insisting that the destruction of these forests is the destruction of ourselves.
We’re all in this together.
This was the moment that pulled together the painting of the clearcut at Sassin. The power and persistence of a person like Rainbow Eyes was quite literally holding up the forest.
While watching the video, I drew a long, arching line in my sketchbook from where I’d written ‘Sassin’ to a new note that simply said ‘Rainbow’. The painting was finished ten days later.
The following month, on the very same day my exhibition opened featuring the painting directly inspired by Rainbow Eyes, she was sentenced to 51 days in jail.
In that moment, as much as I was trying to feel optimistic while rallying behind Rainbow Eyes, I mostly felt defeated. So much of the forest was already gone and now a person I look up to so much was sitting in jail because of activism I so deeply believe in too.
I’ve felt that same defeat for much of the last year, until just a few weeks ago when Rufous and I went back to Sassin once again. Our third year in a row checking-in on an incredibly remote ecology, just to see how it’s doing.
I cried when we first got there. So much more of it was gone. In my mind, the logging had stopped the day after we left the active clearcut site. With hindsight, I feel naive for letting myself believe that we coincidentally snuck into the worksite on their last day of cutting.
All those trees marked with spray paint around the fir stump I thought had been poached were now gone too. The contiguous area of devastation was possibly two-times as large as I’d first seen it.
Everything had now turned white. All the stumps and thatch and bark and branches. All the twisted roots and tangled vines. All of it was now sun-bleached and rabidly decomposing, pushing all the carbon it once stored back into the atmosphere. I stood on the road for the first 20 minutes after we pulled up and just stared into the hole in the earth.
But I started to feel something other than fear when we began to hike across the thatch.
What I felt was maybe even akin to hope.
Little green sprouts poked through the earth and began to turn towards the sky. Purple and yellow flowers lined the largest of the stumps, growing in the cracks between cedar shards left on the once-forest floor. A fir sapling near the riverbed was already tall enough that I could see how it would one day be a big tree.
Sassin was becoming a forest again.
Although it will take a thousand years or more for it to become what it once was, all the signs of growth and life were there.
At that moment, I realised that I’ll be back next summer to see how much taller that fir sapping is.
And I’ll be back the summer after that, and the summer after that too.
In fact, I can’t imagine a summer for the rest of my life where I won’t feel a responsibility to go check-in on Sassin, just to make sure it’s doing alright.
Someday, these new trees will be taller than me.
Someday, this place will be home to birds and bears and bugs of all kinds.
Someday, creeks will flow and we will hike their rocks.
Someday, I will paint the forest at Sassin again.
Slash Pile
August 2025
Sassin held me tight on all four sides.
It’s thatch thick against my legs, twisted vines tugging at my ankles. Long branches from its ancient alder, cedar and fir reaching low to brush my hair. Ferns and fireweed flowers caressing my arms and face. Heavy dew on my lips and skin from yesterday’s rain as warblers and wrens whispered wishfully in my ear.
The pointer I was hiking with ripped free through the understory. Ahead of, then behind me, up the hill then below the grade. She called warnings into the emerald and cobalt canopy for me, maybe of a bear or maybe a cougar, but I didn’t care. This forest was showing its love for me. Sassin’s roots pressed hard into the soles of my bare feet, pushing me further into its protection.
…Which is exactly what I was there to do for Sassin - protect it. I was there to hold onto it with my whole body, just as I now found it doing for me. Standing between the saws and the sap green grove, I’d hold on for as long as I could.
However, in an ancient forest cutblock, industry and the Crown will always get their way, churning thousands of years of continuous growth into mulch in just a handful of afternoons.
Only three seasons after I fell in love with Sassin, the same trail I once hiked while being held was now ploughed as wide as a logging truck. Yarder cable and jerry cans baked in the sun across the valley now wide open to the sky. The carcasses of trees I’d befriended laid horizontal, splintered and shattered against the saw-oil soaked soil. Slash piles grew like pyres packed high with the same limbs that once wrapped around my body.
But it only made me love Sassin more.
The hardest thing I’ve had to learn in all my years working on the frontline is that sometimes the forests you love the most might not be there the next time you return. Sometimes, loving a forest requires a patience that you know will extend well beyond your lifetime.
Sometimes loving a forest means planting a seed.
So over the last three years, I’ve gone back to Sassin each summer to do exactly that - to plant a seed and be patient. To show the forest that I still love it and that I’m grateful for all that it has given me. And that just like purple and yellow flowers do, we can continue to grow together with the help of each other.
I just didn’t expect this summer’s visit to be so difficult…
*
At first, I thought it was lightning.
Where there once was a slash pile, now there was a massive, black, smouldering hole in the earth. Giant decomposing cedar torsos were half-charred and opened to the sun. The soil in the centre was charred too, right down to the rocks. I immediately took a left turn off the road and began to scale the side of the mountain to get close, jumping from log to log.
Where there once was a slash pile, now there was a massive, black, smouldering hole in the earth. Giant decomposing cedar torsos were half-charred and opened to the sun.
Later hiking a bit further up the road, I found another one. Except this time, the slash pile was only half cooked, clearly burning from the inside out.
Up the road a bit more, another. And then another. At least a dozen or more slash piles all in various states of burn. There’s no way that lightning would have struck the same clearcut so many times in one season. There’s also no way that humans made these fires, unless they first burrowed into the middle of the slash piles to ignite them from the inside out.
Fire was cutting holes deep into Sassin.
Sometimes on the prairies near where I grew up, farmers would leave big piles of grass and weeds in the middle of fields to rot. When the rot got heavy and hot enough in the summer, the piles would catch on fire. They would spontaneously self-combust.
In the clearcut at Sassin, I am sure that this is what I was witnessing - just with ancient trees instead of harvest grasses.
Hopeful, small saplings from seeds I’d previously planted were now keeled over and desaturated in the heat as Sassin literally spontaneously self-combusted in the sun.
…And the news still wonders where all these forest fires seem to come from…
The tallest slash pile in Sassin must be four or five storeys tall. It’s an impossibly grotesque pyre brimming with entire tree bodies, root systems pulled out like nerve endings, branches dislocated from languid limbs and splinters cut like jagged teeth. I’ve climbed up it in past summers to get a better look at the carnage left behind in the valley and with the new addition of the self-combustion to view across the expanse, this summer would be no different. But if I had known how much more difficult the climb would be this time around, I might have thought differently before starting the ascent.
Because just like the rest of them, this giant slash pile was spontaneously combusting too.
Just off the road and a few metres past a row of fireweed, I stepped up onto the first of the wide cedars in the pile and felt it melt below my feet. The whole mound let out a deep groan from well within its centre, but I kept going. Spanning my legs as wide as I could across to the next cedar, and then to a fir, and then back to another cedar. As my weight compacted the slash pile into its cavernous burnt out core, plumes of smoke shot up around my legs. I looked down into the blackened holes cutting pits into the fragile heart of the mound of dead tree parts all around me.
With each careful step, I worried more about falling through to the chambered centre of the burning slash pile. But I kept going, stuffing my pockets with chunks of charred debris; some burnt branches, some petrified bark, some brittle and blackened bone from a deer left dead in the pile too. And I thought about the people who were responsible for this devastation. Loggers, RCMP, bureaucrats and politicians. Would they be brave enough to climb this slash pile and face what they’ve done? I remembered them all parked on the road outside the gate at camp, harassing and threatening myself and the other campers. Barking and spitting at us. Did they know what their short-term greed had turned into? Did their pile of money self-combust too?
But by the time I made it to the top, my mind turned to the people I’d stood beside as part of this beautiful resistance. I thought about the Forest Protectors who climbed tripods or locked into sleeping dragons in order to stop things like this from happening. Just a few kilometres to the south, a new blockade was beginning to take shape in front of a forest equally as old and rare as the slash pile at Sassin I was now perched atop of.
I felt those Forest Protectors holding me just like Sassin once did.
And I thought about the first Forest Protector I ever painted. They were an unnamed person from my very first days at camp. Somebody who was meant to be a representative of all of us. Standing in a creek with their back to the clearcut, they literally held what was left of the forest in their outstretched arms.
A few more feet forward, I found as sturdy of a cedar limb as I’d stepped on yet.
I planted both of my feet, found my balance and, as one more plume of smoke shot out from the slash pile under me like a Steller’s Jay, I extended both of my arms to what was left of the forest and held on tight… quietly whispering, ‘I love you’.
Kyle Scheurmann is a painter and environmental activist, represented by Bau-Xi Gallery in Canada. His paintings depict climate crises as experienced during his ongoing research into industrial logging, wildfire, and anthropogenic climate change in the remote wooded locations in which he lives and works.
You can watch Kyle’s 15 minute film about his extraordinary work here:
Our Latest Issue
Dark Mountain: Issue 28 (£20.99)
Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 28 for only £13.99.
The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 19. 21-23, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!
Follow us online
 | A guest post by
|
Thank you Dark Mountain and Kyle! This work is special and meaningful. Keep going.