Was there any one person who had that inspiration?
I think James Monteith felt it was important to change the name. I remember a board meeting where it was discussed. He may have thrown out the words “natural resources and someone else put “Oregon” and “Council” on the ends. I remember him saying “Yeah, that works.I1 It [the need for a name change] had been discussed several months prior to that. I don’t remember what the other suggestions were, but there was some concern that the [name] change was still too big of a mouthful. I would guess that more people would respond to “ONRC than what it actually stands for. I think Randall O’Toole once responded with “So, what’s that going to be–on rock?” but that never caught on.
It seems to be an acronym that is the name.
Right … we will say, “the Oregon Natural Resources Council but we never say “the ONRC in our own dialogue. Some people put it, “The ONRC said today …” We say “ONRC said today …” but that’s neither here nor there.
Did the board feel that the wilderness focus was running out of gas?
No, I don’t think so. I think there was an acknowledgment that after the wilderness bill passed [in 19841 there was a perception that it would be years before additional
legislation would come. I remember Dennis Heyward, who was with one of the timber associations, making a comment publicly that environmentalists were never satisfied–that once we got the wilderness passed, then we changed our name to ONRC and went after the old growth. James Monteith went up to Dennis after we’d made this comment and said “Hey, Dennis, we changed our name two years ago.” He [Heyward] just waved his hand and said “it’s just business.” He acknowledged that he was grandstanding for his employer.
I don’t really remember any discussion concerning “what happens when the wilderness bill passes.” At the time we were supporting everybody’s proposal for roadless areas. The rough inventory [in Oregon] was about four million acres and total for every group who had drawn a line around something came to roughly 3.4 million acres. But a million acres was a kind of magic number that Congress wasn’t going to go past. Indeed, Mark Hatfield saw to it that they didn’t. So there was never really an acknowledgment in, say 1982, that the thing might pass and then what were we going to do … I’m sure that the public did not perceive the ancient forest aspect of wilderness as the main issue. There was really no media or public education that could be financed to get that message out. The ancient forest issue wasn’t acknowledged in the public’s mind until some of the litigation began. We described areas around the time of the
