He spoke for the trees

KELLOGG — Arbor Day has been celebrated for more than 150 years and began as a way for people to take positive action for their communities by promoting education about trees and the surrounding environment.

With today being Arbor Day, it only seems fitting to celebrate one of the day’s greatest local champions, Ed Pommerening.

Pommerening was deeply committed to preserving the environment and improving his community, until his untimely and unexpected passing on Christmas Eve last year at the age of 75.

That won’t stop the legend of Ed Pommerening from living on in the spirit of the lushly forested mountainsides that surround the area.

The hills surrounding the historic mining town of Kellogg were once barren and naked in the early 1970s due to decades of pollution from the Bunker Hill Lead Smelter and the Zinc Plant.

In 1917, Bunker Hill established a smelter to extract minerals from the ore, but unfortunately, this process led to the release of hazardous gases into the air, including sulfuric acid, zinc oxide, phosphate fertilizers, lead, arsenic, cadmium and zinc. These pollutants were detrimental to the environment, which caused over 80% of the trees to be contaminated and unable to grow back due to the pollution and smelter smoke.

The trade off was that while Silver Valley remained prosperous, the once beautiful forested lands were bare.

Bunker Hill Mining Company hired Pommerening in 1972 to serve as a forester with a seemingly impossible task — the reforestation of the Silver Valley.

The hills reminded Pommerening, who served with the 101st Airborne Rangers, of the singed foliage of Vietnam.

“When we turned the Pinehurst corner, I always said I thanked the Good Lord that I wasn’t driving,” explained Pommerening in a video created by the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation in 2022. “Because it’s what we use to call a Vietnam flashback.”

While working on this task, manly local residents were said to mock the reforestation effort and in 2010 it was reported that, “many local residents were openly skeptical of the reforestation effort. Pommerening couldn’t walk into a bar without hearing mocking asides.”

However Pommerening was unshaken by his detractors explaining in that same 2010 report that, “there was a whole pile of people who laughed at me. I was the dumb S.O.B who thought he could grow trees on the hillside. If anything, it made me work a little harder. To me, all we needed to do was to solve a problem, and I knew it had to be done.”

To accomplish this, Pommerening devised an unconventional plan and developed an underground greenhouse in one of the tunnels of the Bunker Hill Mine.

Below the surface of the Earth he began growing seedlings planted by high school and college students each spring.

As a result, between 1975-1982 and 1991-1993, youth throughout the Silver Valley could be found planting trees on the steep and barren terrain of Shoshone County. During the summer, those hired would be responsible for planting 200 trees daily.

After the Bunker Hill closed in 1981, putting more than 2,100 people out of work, Pommerening was recruited by contractors working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to continue the reforestation endeavor.

Due in part to the efforts of Pommerening, the Silver Valley is also home to a diverse array of outdoor recreational opportunities, including hiking, skiing, snowmobiling and fishing, all among the now lush forests.

By the end of 1993, Pommerening and his team had planted 2.8 million trees on 5,000 acres of land, significantly transforming Kellogg’s once-barren hillsides. The reforested area is home to various species, including Ponderosa Pine, White Pine, Quaking Aspen, Ocean Spray, Ceanothus and Snow Berry.

Pommerening had hoped for a 50% survival rate, but the actual rate was astonishingly high, with 80% to 90% of the trees thriving today.

While Pommerening may have passed on, you cannot step outside in Shoshone County and not bear witness to his handiwork — the thing that he poured every ounce of his life into.

Something the residents of the Silver Valley — even those detractors — will be forever grateful for.

To help the memory of Pommerening live on, his family requests that memorials be made in his name to the Arbor Day Foundation or a children’s hospital of their choice.