They weren’t sexy enough?
For the most part, BLM has the lands that nobody wanted. In the case of the forested lands, the railroad didn’t keep their part of the bargain in building the Oregon and California Railroad so Congress took those lands back. They had to create an agency to manage those lands. There are many areas that are certainly scenic and deserve a protective status, but the emphasis and concern we’ve had on BLM lands shows a broader interest in terms of protecting biodiversity and ecosystems. You often have disjunct pieces that aren’t next to some scenic peak with some exceptions. The Table Rock Wilderness near Salem is BLM and got put in the 1984 wilderness bill. It wasn’t really old growth, but here was this little island of mature forest.
I am thinking about how ONRC represents continuity in the transition from wilderness to ancient forest as the key
environmental issue in Oregon. Did the [timber] industry have a group who served as the flagship for them?
One of the things we noticed early on, while the industry had various associations of varying sizes and different interests between large and small companies, was that wilderness was a unifying issue for them. Whatever their interests were, they all hated wilderness. They all saw it as a threat … what if it caught on in the public’s imagination? That became a sort of unifying rallying cry. From the information that they put out to the press, I don’t remember being able to distinguish that some [companies] were reasonable and others weren’t. I think Andy Kerr spent more time than I did in trying to understand the industry and putting them into categories. The media really didn’t make a distinction and I don’t think the public made a distinction, so I never spent a lot of time worrying about who the individuals and companies were. That’s not to say that Andy didn’t … he had a broader grasp because he’d been raised in Oregon and knew who those companies were.
