There were only several places that could generate that kind of name recognition, such as the Millennium Grove or Crabtree Valley?
Exactly. I think those two you mentioned, Millennium Grove and Crabtree Valley, were both cases of where there was a major effort made to create that image. Certainly with timber sales around Crater Lake National Park, we didn’t have to tell people what Crater Lake National Park was–that was easy in the sense of harm to this national park. Millennium Grove …you were asking me earlier about conscious strategies … that was probably more of a conscious strategy. I was hiking a trail near Breitenbush with Andy Kerr and Brian Heath, who organized some of the nonviolent civil disobedience efforts of several years ago, and he was saying how they were up in a clear-cut and somebody counted the rings on this tree and there were 900 or something like that. Andy stopped and said, “We talked about Crabtree Valley as having almost 1,000 year old trees.” That’s how it got to be [called] the Millennium Grove–as part of a very conscious [publicity] effort. A portion of that was a roadless area in the South Santiam [near] Gorton Meadows. We felt the Forest Service knew those trees were that old and never said that because if they acknowledged it during the wilderness debate prior to 1984, some of that area might have been protected as wilderness if it was known that those [trees] were the oldest ones in Oregon. The agency kept silent, so the forest activists counted the rings on the trees and that’s how it was discovered. [Saving it] was elevated, not by what ONRC did, but by what other people and groups were motivated to [do] by civil disobedience. When they’re cutting down the oldest trees in Oregon, that is worthy, if anything was, of a disobedient act.
I know that Opal Creek achieved a kind of national status, whereas places like, say, Sugarloaf led to confrontation but were ultimately lost.
As I explained, there were only so many issues or places that could be elevated, even if you had the resources to focus on them. Opal Creek was in the [I9841 Oregon wilderness bill and Mark Hatfield took it out only to “save it as part of his legacy [in 1996]. Mark Hatfield had a chance to save that years ago, well, he wanted to save it later. It was that calculated, I really believe. Opal Creek, interestingly, attracted people who were involved with it [the issue], and to their credit, had financial resources to lead that effort. There was more money spent and it was deserving of everything that people said about it. [interrupted by telephone call]
How were different areas identified for protection?
When groups came to us and said to us “this is an area that deserves protection,” we were pretty open to identifying everything that anybody cared about. What really worked was the formula for the wilderness effort, where we were the broader statewide group. There were local interests and we could point to the person on the ground and if the media was interested, somebody could take them out and show ’em the neat spots. There were areas which we identified through the agencies and found where old growth is and where previous roadless areas were. Examples would be the Coleman Rim and Deadhorse Rim, which are really the only remaining areas of really big, old pine on the Fremont National Forest. Sometimes we would even approach people if we knew somebody was in the area who was a wilderness advocate and say, “By the way, have you heard about this? Would you like to be the sponsor for that area?” Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t.
