Did Holly Jones have much influence, or was that before your time?
Did you know him?
I’ve only heard of him through Ron Eber in Salem.
Holly was very much dedicated to protecting Oregon’s wilderness. He did not like the adversarial nature of the work. The way the Oregon Wilderness Coalition was created stemmed from the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society needing an ad hoc group in Oregon. This was before I was intimately involved with the organization, but James and Andy were working for a board dominated by people whose first allegiance was Co the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club. They sort of created a Frankenstein monster they couldn’t control and the staff, Andy and James, started arguing for positions that were stronger than what the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society were advocating.
That seemed to reach almost antipathy by the mid ’80s.
Well …yes. There were some conflicts because the major national conservation groups which had been organized around wilderness didn’t feel they could save forests in western Oregon and Washington. Not because they didn’t want to, and I don’t want to say they wrote it off. It wasn’t that cold and uncaring, but we were pushing for something that they decided wasn’t pragmatic. I always say there’s a fine line between vision and fantasy (both laugh). There’s a lot of visions which have come true, but there probably more that are in the realm of just dreams.
What happened in the Oregon Wilderness Coalition’s early history was that Andy and James ran up expenses totaling $5000 that they weren’t authorized to and the board dissolved the organization. I believe Holly was on that board. I don’t blame him for that, I think he was just caught up in “My God, this is fiscal irresponsibility.” The way the organization was structured, we had member groups which each had a governing council member who elected the board. All these different organizations were trying to protect their particular roadless areas. When the board fired the staff and dissolved the organization, the governing council simply appointed a new board and kept on going.
