A Nice Trip To The Forest

In October of 1988, Idaho Republican Jim McClure, former chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a sagebrush rebel, stood on the floor of the Senate and brandished a handful of metal implements from the podium.¹

“Let me show you a few tools of the eco-terrorist, and explain how they’re used,” he said. First, a row of nails welded to a steel bar, then a few bent metal rods—tree spikes—twisted after harsh contact with a saw. These “despicable tactics,” in the senator’s view, constituted “a cowardly act…in the name of ecological protection.”²

Three years later, a spotted owl was found nailed dead to a sign in Olympic National Park, with a note reading: “the match has yet to be struck.”³ Intended to spite environmentalists, the killing was apparent revenge for a federal injunction that blocked timber harvest in owl habitat—part of a whipsawing battle between logging and ecosystem protection in America’s Western forestlands. At every turn, the government was a sprawling and contradictory intermediary, spanning the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, federal courts, and when “ecoterrorism” was involved, the FBI. A vast bureaucracy, working often at cross-purposes, and laden with baggage from the past.

Burned clear-cut area of Olympic National Timberland, Washington. Near Olympic National Park, April 1973, Environmental Protection Agency, via National Archives. NAID 555088.

Strolling right into this conflagration, into the same foggy old-growth woods on the Olympic Peninsula, are Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, in the 1994 episode “Darkness Falls.”⁴ They are on the case of a missing logging crew, vanished from exactly the same spot as a Works Progress Administration crew from the 1930s. The immediate suspects: a pair of “militant environmentalists” who have been pestering the encampment. Helping our protagonists navigate these woods is a Forest Service ranger who refers to himself wryly as a “Freddie.”⁵

It’s a monster-of-the-week episode, ripped from the headlines of the “timber wars,” and just as the FBI began to sharpen its focus on the scattered groups of activists and monkey wrenchers that constituted the direct action wing of the environmental movement.⁶ The monster, in this episode, is a literal green scare, in the form of a bioluminescent forest insect that swarms and cocoons its human victims at nightfall.⁷

Just a month after this episode aired, the Northwest Forest Plan went into effect. Conceived at a nationally-televised summit led by President Bill Clinton in 1993, the Plan was billed as a grand compromise between industry and environment.⁸ In the show, the Forest Service ranger reflects the broad-minded optimism of this political moment and his implied role as a mediator distinct from timber interests, telling Mulder, Scully, and the audience: “Let me get this out of the way. I have no quarrel with these eco-terrorists in principle. I’m as concerned for this forest and the environment as anybody. It’s their methods I can’t condone.”

In typical X-Files fashion, and despite running into tire spikes and rice-filled radiators, Mulder’s sympathies jump right away toward the fringe, allied with the environmentalists. Scully, though skeptical, is drawn in by the entomological aspects of the case, and when she breaks out her microscope to look at wood mites, we’re off and running.

In contrast to the malign alien presence that hovers over the main X-Files episodes, this one advances a different perennial theme: ecological comeuppance, and what people have collectively done to deserve the wrath of nature (see also “Detour” from Season 5). The wounded landscape seeks revenge, as the felling of a 500-year old tree triggers a vengeful swarm of tiny green bugs.

1919. Entomological Ranger W.E. Glendinning checking felled spruce infested with spruce beetle. Oregon Coast Range. USDA Forest Service.

I recently had the pleasure of spending a day in the field with a forest entomologist, so timber insects were top of mind when I watched this episode again. Complementing the fictional infestation on the show is a long pattern of catastrophic real-life outbreaks: of introduced insects like woolly adelgids and ash-borers as well as coevolved ones like spruce budworm.⁹ The cocoon that Mulder and Scully discover in the woods, although large enough to envelop a human, is pretty much the mega-sized larval webbing of any one of these.

“Our entomologists are still trying to determine the specific epithet of the insects you encountered,” a PPE-clad doctor tells Mulder in quarantine.

The whole history of forest entomology is rife with X-Files imagery and language—its mysterious emergent organisms, its vast bureaucracy of government control and eradication. All of this can be seen in a remarkable collection of historic photographs from the Forest Service’s Western spruce budworm control project in Oregon and Washington, photographs that may as well be production stills from this episode.¹⁰

1955. Ford tri-motor spraying DDT. Western spruce budworm control project. Powder River control unit, Oregon. USDA Forest Service.

There are laboratories and chrome instruments, experiments with various “biological control agents,” and all kinds of “suppression projects” organized by “incident commanders” using aerial spraying of toxic insecticides and defoliants. With so many crop dusters, somebody’s bound to see a UFO.

Three decades later, in the real world, we’re still not out of the woods—and parts of the episode seem awfully familiar. There’s climate change, with the deep historical perspective unveiled by dendrochronology, and the idea that things might be emerging that were meant to stay dormant for much longer. Counting tree rings on a behemoth stump in the midst of a clearcut, the Forest Service agent marvels: “A recorded history of rainfall and climate…I should take a core sample.”

And then there is the “exposure to unknown biological vectors.” Mulder and Scully have the task of diagnosing an invisible pathogen and improvising prophylaxis to buy themselves time, and when they fall victim to it after all, they are left to rely on an opaque government response to nurse them back to health and provide some kind of explanation for what they experienced.

At the end of the episode, Mulder, looking ruefully at Scully laid out on a gurney, says: “I told her it was going to be a nice trip to the forest.”

1968. Donald Tandy points to Douglas-fir beetle galleries in bark of beetle-killed salvage logs. Wind River Ranger District, Gifford. USDA Forest Service.

1. R. McGreggor Cawly, Federal Land, Western Anger: The Sagebrush Rebellion and Environmental Politics (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Douglas Martin, “James McClure, Powerful Western Senator, Dies at 86,” The New York Times, March 2, 2011; Jim McClure in C-SPAN Clip from October 14, 1988. For more on the sagebrush rebellion, see this description from the Library of Congress.
2. McClure’s “wicked looking” objects arrived on the Senate floor from the pages of Ecodefense, a monkeywrenching handbook affiliated with Edward Abbey and the environmental group Earth First!—in McClure’s view, “an organization inspired and led by a few social misfits who get their kicks by hurting people and destroying property. Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (New York: Avon Books, 1976); Dave Foreman, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (Earth First! Books, 1985). Monkeywrench Gang.
3. Note Hinting At Fire Threat Found With Dead Spotted Owl,” The Seattle Times, January 16, 1991. (Incidentally, the note reads like something the Cigarette Smoking Man might say in any given X-Files episode).
4. Actually filmed at the Seymour Conservation Forest in British Columbia, along with almost every other forest scene in the X-Files. Louisa Gradnitzer and Todd Pittson, X Marks the Spot: On Location with the X-files (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999); Eric Grundhauser and Ella Morton, “The Vancouver Forest That Has Been Every Wooded Location on ‘X-Files’,” Atlas Obscura, June 15, 2015.
5. Another term straight out of Ecodefense.
6. Rebecca K. Smith, “‘Ecoterrorism’?: A Critical Analysis Of The Vilification Of Radical Environmental Activists As Terrorists,” Environmental Law 38, no. 2 (2008: 537-576); ACLU, “How the USA PATRIOT Act redefines ‘Domestic Terrorism,’” December 6, 2002.
7. Will Potter, Green is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2011).
8. Michael Blumm, Susan Jane Brown, and Chelsea Stewart-Fusek, “The World’s Largest Ecosystem Management Plan: The Northwest Forest Plan After a Quarter Century,” Environmental Law 1 (2022).
9. Juliann E. Aukema et al., “Historical Accumulation of Nonindigenous Forest Pests in the Continental United States,” BioScience 60, no. 11 (2010): 886–897; also see Matthew P. Ayres and María J. Lombardero, “Forest pests and their management in the Anthropocene,” Canadian Journal of Forest Research 48, no. 3 (2018):292-301.
10. See the USDA Forest Service’s online collection on Flickr: “R6, State & Private Forestry, Forest Health Protection.”