You hear this comment made that if we talk about an area too much people will come there. That has not been anything we’ve really heeded, nor have we really had any significant criticism for featuring an area [in Wild Oregon or other publications]. As forest issues in Oregon began [to heat up] , everything that was protected [stemmed from] a constituency who drew a line on a map and identified a particular area. [It was] what Brock Evans, formerly with [the] national [organization of] Audubon called “name it and save it.” When we started arguing the old growth issue, his fear was that … history had shown we named something and that created a public identity. So now we have all these ancient forests and don’t have names for them and there’s no public identity. It also became a matter of there’s more to be saved than what could be named. You couldn’t create an identity for each of these [groves]. I remember working in Eugene constantly doing media and realizing that I’d done the three worst timber sales of the week, so to speak. Not that we ever identified three, but it was sort of like the media, even if they were moderately sympathetic and interested in the issue, could only absorb so much in a certain amount of time. There was more being cut down than what we could even begin to martyr, if you will.
There were only several places that could generate that kind of name recognition, such as the Millennium Grove or Crabtree Valley?
Exactly. I think those two you mentioned, Millennium Grove and Crabtree Valley, were both cases of where there was a major effort made to create that image. Certainly with timber sales around Crater Lake National Park, we didn’t have to tell people what Crater Lake National Park was–that was easy in the sense of harm to this national park. Millennium Grove …you were asking me earlier about conscious strategies … that was probably more of a conscious strategy. I was hiking a trail near Breitenbush with Andy Kerr and Brian Heath, who organized some of the nonviolent civil disobedience efforts of several years ago, and he was
saying how they were up in a clear-cut and somebody counted the rings on this tree and there were 900 or something like that. Andy stopped and said, “We talked about Crabtree Valley as having almost 1,000 year old trees.” That’s how it got to be [called] the Millennium Grove–as part of a very conscious [publicity] effort. A portion of that was a roadless area in the South Santiam [near] Gorton Meadows. We felt the Forest Service knew those trees were that old and never said that because if they acknowledged it during the wilderness debate prior to 1984, some of that area might have been protected as wilderness if it was known that those [trees] were the oldest ones in Oregon. The agency kept silent, so the forest activists counted the rings on the trees and that’s how it was discovered. [Saving it] was elevated, not by what ONRC did, but by what other people and groups were motivated to [do] by civil disobedience. When they’re cutting down the oldest trees in Oregon, that is worthy, if anything was, of a disobedient act.
