To understand the controversy around cutting Washington’s older trees, you have to get to know an economic supply line, from tree to timber to cash.

There are the trees and forests themselves, then the timber cruisers and surveyors, the loggers, the millworkers, the timber town residents, the local beneficiaries of timber sales, from hospitals to libraries, the county commissioners and other officials — and the logging opponents. They are all part of a complex tale of the value of the bigger trees of the Northwest, cut for money or left to grow for hundreds of years, sheltering animals and socking away carbon.

So The Seattle Times sent five journalists behind the scenes of this new timber war, to explore and explain the conflict.

Here’s how we got the story.

Inside the forests

These forests are not old growth — that’s already protected — but they are the old growth of tomorrow. The big, lush forests growing since the first cut in the 1800s and 1900s. Here are the Douglas firs and red cedars that can really pack away the carbon, through the miracle of photosynthesis, a climate moderator never duplicated in a lab. We met the employees at the Washington Department of Natural Resources who lay out a sale, as well as loggers cutting trees so big on slopes so steep that some of the logging equipment was chained to a bulldozer to keep it from toppling downhill. Then we went out with opponents ripping down timber sale boundary markers to foil the sale of a forest on the Olympic Peninsula.

The work of a mill

For more than a century, the timber industry has helped support the economies of Washington. For a look inside what it takes to make the wood products we use — provided by workers, using locally supplied logs from DNR forests — The Seattle Times got to know Murphy Company, a more-than-a-century-old, family-owned wood products company based on Oregon. We visited their veneer mill in Elma, Grays Harbor County.

The company allowed Seattle Times journalists unlimited access to the mill and their workers to learn what they do, what they make and why they rely on DNR forests to support jobs they love.

Milltown life

Timber towns have always been a lifeblood of Washington. In Elma, we explored the small-town lifestyle that residents cherish, and the many ways the timber industry supports it.

Not only in revenue distributed from timber sales and jobs, but also in big-ticket philanthropy and support for the little things, such as students raising rabbits for the county fair, the timber industry is part of the fabric of life in places like Elma.

The coming battles

In cutover lands in Washington’s Hood Canal, we walked DNR lands with an activist central to the fight for older forests who explained his objection to DNR cuts that leave clumps and buffer strips where there were true forests, with many trees more than a century old.

On an active logging job where the trees were just cut, we heard the grief cry of Skokomish tribal members for logged-off big cedars, a tree of immense importance in their culture. We heard the warnings of climate activists and county commissioners who said they could never reach community climate goals if DNR keeps cutting down the biggest trees in their region.

Voters will soon have their own say in this conflict, in the election for commissioner of public lands. One candidate, Dave Upthegrove, has promised to stop commercial logging of these so-called legacy forests.