Since some of that wilderness is BLM land, I wonder if that presented any problems?
BLM has always been very difficult. We’ve looked upon BLM as being the anonymous agency which liked it that way. They didn’t want to have public recognition that you were on BLM lands. It has only been fairly recently that they have even made recreation maps for their lands or had entrance signing. That is unlike the Forest Service, which promotes that sort of recognition. BLM looked at the 0 & C Act as giving them license to be a timber management outfit and you weren’t supposed to mess with their lands for any kind of protective status. The problem we have with national conservation groups is the fact that most BLM land is not forested. There are about two million acres of [BLM land in] Oregon that are. Another problem is that you have to be an expert on that two million acres–which is a lot when you’re sitting in Oregon, but it’s a small part of the entire public lands when you’re in Washington, DC. From the national perspective you want to base your lobbying efforts where you get the greatest bang for the buck, and specializing in BLM was harder. What helped us with BLM was the interest that Mike Axline, who was first with the U of 0
Law Clinic, had in BLM. To this day the Western Environmental Law Clinic–which had to change its name and move off campus in response to pressure on the university by the timber industry–has taken cases for us involving BLM, while other attorneys doing environmental litigation did not. I really give them a lot of credit for having championed BLM [cases] .
