ONRC began by trying to elevate the ancient forest issue, but ran into a lot of resistance from the national groups who said that what you’re proposing to do is impossible; that you’re underestimating the tremendous power of the timber industry. I think the nationals were just being pragmatic, though ONRC was critical of them. I remember James Monteith saying that these people were vote counters, not vote changers. If you walked into their offices and asked about getting this bill passed, they’d say “Look at the makeup of this committee–look at the people who are on it. You’re outvoted two to one, so don’t ask for something you can’t achieve.” And yet there are places in wilderness today, the Waldo area for example, were Doug Scott of the Sierra Club told James Monteith “Forget it, you’ll never save that, there’s too many trees.”
Was that an impetus for ONRC to approach Congress more directly than they had previously?
In general, I think a lot of grassroots movements begin when whoever was supposedly covering an issue isn’t covering it. In other words, we viewed the national conservation groups as being too willing to make deals to save the rock and ice at the expense of the lower elevation forests. Certainly the litigation surrounding the spotted owl issue led to strong criticism of what we were doing, but it also provided the information to the public about what was happening to these forests. I think one of the main problems of any public interest organization is that they don’t have the money to tell their story. In our case, the interest that Congress had in wilderness during the 1970s and early 1980s was continued because of the availability of scientific information about logging’s impact on a lot of old growth related species. What a lot of people don’t remember about the spotted owl was that it wasn’t an Endangered Species Act issue. It became listed as a threatened species .much later;
it really centered on violations of the National Environmental Policy Act which required the agencies to disclose what the impact of logging was on the species. In the case of the Forest Service, the National Forest Management Act said that they had to have viable populations of vertebrate species. Those [pieces of legislation] were the basis for [our court] challenge. I think this has been blurred in the public’s mind to being an issue related to the Endangered Species Act. When Bob Packwood was rattling his saber and saying how he was going to change the Endangered Species Act, I remember telling the media that it would be a terrible thing if that happened but there would still be timber sales that were halted because of noncompliance with NEPA and NFMA.
