Whitman Alum Family Nurtures a Sustainable Forest in Oregon’s Willamette Valley

Golden light streams through Oregon white oaks robed in moss and lichen, illuminating patches of sword fern and hazel in the rich soil below. The knobbly trees mingle with Douglas-fir, Bigleaf maple and a host of other species, spreading into the Zena Forest, a diverse habitat that climbs hills, snakes along creeks and dips into canyons, covering 1,300 acres in northwestern Oregon.

Ben Deumling ’05 has called the Zena Forest home since he was 5 years old. Now, as President of Zena Forest Products, he and his mother, Sarah (Snyder) Deumling ’68, have made it their mission to steward the forest in a way that emphasizes restoration and regeneration. 

“I’ve been here almost all my life, and I continue to learn new things about this forest and this ecosystem every day,” says Ben (pictured right).

The story of the Zena Forest is a complex ecosystem in itself, weaving together deep family roots, shared care for the land and the environment, and a commitment to thinking creatively about managing a forest and a business for the future—grounded in two generations of Whitman College experiences.

The Path to the Forest

Sarah is described on the Zena Forest Products website as Visionary Matriarch and Protector of the Forest, a title she laughs about but doesn’t argue with.

“She spends her days in the forest on her four-wheeler with her machete, chopping blackberries, protecting the little trees,” Ben says.

Sarah says she was born with a love for the woods in her bones. Her mother’s family has lived in the Willamette Valley for generations. Her great-grandfather ran a mill in Portland in the 1870s, and Sarah grew up on a farm in nearby Molalla. 

But her connection to Zena Forest started thousands of miles away.

When Sarah was in high school, her family hosted an exchange student from Munich, Germany, named Apollonia (Eulenburg) Heisenberg ’70. The girls grew close, and Sarah spent a year after graduation living in Germany before returning to the U.S. to attend Whitman. She loved the Washington countryside and the chance to “make a little ruckus” with the close friends she made on campus.

On a visit to Sarah in Walla Walla, Apollonia fell in love with Whitman too. She moved into Sarah’s sorority and convinced the Office of Admission to give her a good deal on tuition.

Soon, another friend from Germany wrote Sarah asking if he could come out to Washington too. His name was Dieter Deumling ’71. He only spent a year attending Whitman, but it was enough to change both of their lives. He married Sarah in 1970.

Several years later, a family of forest managers back in Germany—cousins of Apollonia and friends of Dieter—decided to buy a forest in Oregon to hedge against the threat of acid rain in their home country.

But they needed someone to manage it. In 1987, they offered the job to Dieter, and the Deumling family moved to the Zena Forest.

Growing Out of Loss & Love

In the summer of 1996, Dieter passed away, leaving the Deumling family at a crossroads.

“It was fairly sudden, and here we were, and nobody wanted to leave,” Sarah says. “We’d become very attached to this place. Even though it wasn’t ours, it felt like ours.”

The landowners asked Sarah if she’d like to take over.

“It took me about 15 minutes to decide,” she says. “And I’ve never regretted it for a moment.”

Sarah had a Politics degree from Whitman and later earned a master’s in Teaching, so forestry was a new adventure.

The landowners sent their head forester and an assistant out to Oregon for three months to give her a crash course in caring for the woods. 

The first time she met with log buyers on her own, she was afraid to ask about all the things she didn’t know, especially because there were few women working in forest management at the time. But once she started asking questions, she discovered the buyers were happy to share their knowledge—as were many other people in the forestry community.

A Grounded Education

Ben was 14 when his father passed—and deeply attached to the forest. He’d already started working in the woods during the summer and on the weekends with Dieter.

“As a kid, I would follow him everywhere in the woods,” he says.

Zena Forest was Ben’s home and a place he wanted to come back to, but he knew that college was an opportunity to gain new skills and experiences.

After a gap year working in a car repair shop in Germany, he headed to college. He’d heard his parents’ joyful stories and visited his older sister, Katherine Deumling ’96, and her then-boyfriend, Brian Detman ’93, on campus and was determined to follow in his family’s Whitman footsteps.

Despite his interest in forestry, he started out studying physics. But after taking an environmental politics class, he changed his major to Politics and Environmental Studies. His love for Zena Forest provided a strong foundation for his education.

“The responsibility to be a good steward and citizen of this earth was instilled in me forever by my parents—and by growing up in this patch of forestland and falling in love with this place,” Ben says.

In the spring of his first year at Whitman, he spotted an ad for Semester in the West—a new interdisciplinary program in which students would spend 90 days traveling; meeting scientists, artists, officials and land experts; doing fieldwork; and learning about the challenges facing public lands. Ben became part of the program’s inaugural class and worked as a Semester in the West staff member for a year after graduation. 

Semester in the West deepened his connection to the land and his interest in environmental and natural resource policy. 

Ben says his Whitman education underlies his whole career: He gained strong writing skills and learned the value of communication, collaboration and “finding ways to thread the needle on thorny environmental challenges.”

“That’s something I’ve continued to this day, trying to help work on challenging environmental issues and find the middle path,” he says.

New Opportunities Emerge

After his graduation, Ben returned to the Zena Forest, and he and Sarah set out to build a business that would care for the forest and the family while setting an example of innovative forestry management.

“My passion, my reason for continuing to do this work, is to support the good restoration and good stewardship of forests, at least in the Willamette Valley, and more and more around the state,” Ben says.

Today, besides his work leading and preserving Zena Forest, Ben’s advocacy includes being a governor-appointed member of the Oregon Board of Forestry.

Oregon is the timber capital of the world, anchored by Douglas-fir—but the economically valuable evergreen isn’t the only tree in the woods. A healthy forest is complex, Ben says, with multiple species and ages of trees and a wealth of other plants, creating an ecosystem that is resilient to disturbances such as fire, ice or insect infestation.

A key native species in the Zena Forest is Oregon white oak. By finding a use for oak logs, the Deumlings believed they could create a new revenue source for their forest and encourage other managers to support a diverse and healthy ecosystem in theirs.

In 2007, the family opened a sawmill and founded Zena Forest Products, seeking uses for the wood they processed from their land and from the surrounding area.

“If you're going to be taking care of a forest, you have to be thinning and cutting trees and creating markets for all the other species that grow in a complex forest,” Ben says. “For the last 17 years, I've been working at trying to get better and better at making high-quality wood products out of all these other species.”

The next phase of Zena Forest’s life began in 2008, when the owners put the land up for sale with the hope of finding a conservation buyer. The Trust for Public Land brokered a deal that allowed the Deumlings to buy the forest, with the Bonneville Power Administration purchasing a conservation easement, “which ensures that this forest is protected as a working forest ecosystem in perpetuity,” Ben explains.

The family is now raising a new generation of Deumlings in the forest: Ben and his wife, Emily, and their children, Asa and Ezra, live in the house Ben grew up in, with Sarah beside them in an attached apartment.

A Sustainable Vision

Today, Zena Forest Products primarily sells hardwood flooring.

“I didn’t graduate college and say, ‘I want to make hardwood flooring,’” Ben says. “I wanted to find a way to support these forests. And it turns out that making hardwood flooring is a really good way to do that.”

After Ben’s sister, Katherine, passed away in 2022, her husband, Brian Detman ’93, who directs Oregon’s Youth Development Division and serves on Whitman’s President’s Advisory Board, stepped into her role as a shareholder on the Zena Forest Products board. Brian says it’s been an important way for him and the couple’s son, Ellis, to stay connected to the family—and to a cause he cares about.

“The environmental and climate change reality is an essential piece of this work,” says Brian, who lives in nearby Portland. 

Running a sustainable business based on a sustainable forest requires making difficult decisions while balancing environmental, social and economic impacts.

“The Whitman education, the Whitman experience, has helped the business make sense of all that,” Brian says.

For the family, it comes down to values, Sarah says. Zena Forest Products makes thoughtful decisions—from how they harvest trees and process wood to how they care for their employees and more. It may mean their products cost more, but customers can also know they’re making values-based decisions when purchasing them.

Choosing a sustainable forest product gives customers a tangible reminder of the importance of the environment, Ben says.

“It’s not going to necessarily change the trajectory of climate change globally,” he says. “But it’s a thing that you can connect with and be at least more involved in the conversation about what’s important in our lives.”

To Sarah, caring for the planet feels more urgent than ever before. She wants her grandchildren to be able to have the kind of connection to wild places that she’s had throughout her life. Despite the legacy of human destruction of the environment, she finds hope in Zena Forest.

“Being able to go out and take care of a forest gives me something to do every day that feels useful,” she says. “It’s a good place to be.” 

Floored at PDX

In Portland International Airport, when travelers walk across the remodeled main terminal, which opened in August 2024, they traverse a beautiful and unusual floor made by Zena Forest Products.

Ben Deumling ’05 says the contract with the Port of Portland for 75,000 square feet of Oregon white oak flooring allowed Zena Forest to invest in their sawmill facility, adding the technology to make a type of flooring that’s common in Europe but is currently made nowhere else in the United States.

Zena EdgeGrain flooring uses strips of wood three-quarters of an inch wide. Unlike traditional wide-plank flooring, it can be made from scrap wood and small-diameter, lower-quality logs.

“It allows us to use a lot more of the tree and to add more value to these trees that are coming out of the forest,” Ben says. 

The benefits of the airport project go beyond the terminal floor alone.

“The Port of Portland chose to go above and beyond and source local, sustainable materials across the spectrum of all the things that went into that building, with the interest of trying to make a difference here in the state,” Ben says. “We are now able to expand our footprint, our presence, our ability to do good work across the state because of this new facility we built.”