What years were these?
This was 1969 to 1973. I remember being told by professors who were otherwise sympathetic to the natural environment that old growth forests were pretty places but otherwise biological deserts. That was the philosophy at the time. I think Jerry Franklin’s work that was published in the early 1980s was one of the first things that came out which said that old growth forests were really an ecosystem. They started showing after the early successional stages that
these forests had biological diversity. Our argument was, of course, that we have plenty of the young managed stuff and there is no shortage of early successional forest.
What role did you play in the Redwood [National] Park issue?
I was there between the two expansions of the park. While logging of redwoods was an issue that the Northcoast Environmental Center was concerned about, I was not actually at Humboldt when that was in the fever pitch phase of the legislation. There was legislation that had come just before and just after my time there. I remember the dedication of the park, just after Nixon had been elected. The motorcade was coming through the little town of Orick, but I was looking for worms under a bridge and didn’t see it.
So you didn’t go to the Lady Bird Johnson Grove for the dedication?
No, but I remember being struck by the amount of time and work that people like Dave Vandermark and Lucille Vinyard, who were Sierra Club members, put into that. Lucille Vinyard’s husband, William Vinyard, was one of my professors. He taught about aquatic plants and I was acquainted with him, but not that socially. Their house was
a beautiful place overlooking the ocean at Trinidad. I remember walking in to see Lucille about something and she had books and papers just scattered all over. Every chair had an EIS and other documents. I thought how would anyone get into this? I later realized while I was doing it that you never read these things for their own sake. That’s why I could never have gotten into law school. It was more like you are trying to save this little piece of land, so you had to look in this book to find that fact and so forth. People seemed struck by me in the same way. They asked, “How do you get into this technical literature? It is the driest stuff in the world.” Again, you’re motivated by what you are trying to accomplish.
Was reviewing documents an aspect of setting up the NEC?
I was publicity chairman, so I was doing press releases. I did not spark, by any means, the formation of the Northcoast Environmental Center but I was one of the people who made it work. When they opened the office, there had to be somebody there.
Did you touch base with John Hart when he wrote Hiking the Bigfoot Country?
I did not.
