Andy Kerr - Oregonian "War on Growth" Article

by Michelle Cole of The Oregonian staff

Andy Kerr makes an effort to maintain his tarnished reputation.

In a three-page curriculum vitae listing his life's accomplishments, Kerr reports being hanged in effigy -- "at least twice" -- and receiving more death threats than he can count. Kerr also notes that he's a college dropout, schmoozer and agitator.

He doesn't mention an arrest outside a U.S. senator's office. But he'll be happy to talk about it, if asked.

"I'm not conflict-averse," Kerr said. "Nobody got anywhere by being nice."

Kerr's career as a leading environmental activist is steeped in some of the most dramatic conflict the Northwest has known.

In the 1980s and 1990s he was a much-decorated officer in the conservation movement's war with the timber industry -- with the outcome that logging in the past decade declined by more than 80 percent on Oregon and Washington public lands. Time magazine called Kerr a "terrorist in a white collar." The Christian Science Monitor described him as "one of the toughest environmental professionals in the Pacific Northwest."

Kerr had stepped out of the spotlight in the past several years, first moving to Joseph, near the Wallowa Mountains, then resigning a top post at the Oregon Natural Resources Council because of burnout. Now 45, with a gray beard and paunchy middle, he has moved to a new home and the agreeable climate of Ashland, where he could easily kick back and enjoy life.

But that's not to be. Instead, Kerr is back, preparing to wage a bigger, potentially more divisive battle: shutting down Oregon's population growth.

The man who practices his witty and cutting sound bites in the shower is back on the Rotary club speaking circuit, asking audiences, "How many of you want Oregon to be like California?"

"I've never had a hand go up," he said. It's a vintage Kerr tactic designed to get people to think about the rest of what he's about to say, no matter how radical.

Kerr is sharpening his soldiering skills by re-reading as he does every spring "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who lived 500 years before Christ and taught that the supreme art of war is to "subdue the enemy without fighting."

Kerr keeps a list of his enemies handy on his tangerine laptop.

"Andy Kerr can be a jerk. But he's not such a bad guy," said Jon Chandler, a lobbyist for the Oregon Building Industry Association, who is more flattered than concerned that his name appears on Kerr's enemies list. As for Kerr's new organization, Alternatives to Growth Oregon, Chandler predicts it "won't get too much traction."

Jack Ward Thomas, former chief of the U.S. Forest Service, can't help but laugh when he hears of such a dismissal. "That's what the timber industry thought, too," Thomas said.

Reputation for trouble

For a while, it looked as though Kerr wouldn't be invited to the Northwest Forest Conference convened by President Clinton in Portland on April 2, 1993. The White House didn't want any trouble, and Kerr had a reputation for stirring it up.

Endangered species protection for the spotted owl probably wouldn't have made the cover of Time three years before if it had not been for Kerr. He conspired with his colleagues at the Oregon Natural Resources Council to raise the spotted owl issue for the first time in a timber sale appeal. That was in 1981. By 1988, Kerr's fingerprints were on more than 220 similar administrative appeals filed in one month.

"I told them they couldn't have a Northwest Forest Conference without Andy Kerr," said Jeff Rogers, a law school friend of the president and first lady who went on to become Portland's city attorney.

Rogers knew of Kerr's reputation, but he had not met the man. "I said: 'I'll go talk to him and make sure he won't be disruptive,'" Rogers said. "I knew he wouldn't be."

Seated next to the secretary of agriculture and across the table from the president of the United States, Kerr said he couldn't help but feel like the baseball player who finally makes the major leagues.

Yet few people in his hometown were impressed that Kerr would shake hands with a president. He was the not-so-favorite son of Creswell, a blue-collar mill town in the Willamette Valley.

Sandra Wilson, a town historian and Creswell resident for more than half a century, chooses her words carefully in talking about Kerr. "We were a timber town," she said. "Timber people and Andy's people clashed."

Creswell in 1973 was not unlike the 1950s community depicted in the movie "American Graffiti."

Most of the young people had gone to school together from kindergarten through high school. Kerr was an intelligent boy, a student government officer and a bit of a prankster. Saturday night usually found Creswell teens cruising nearby Eugene. Kerr's best friend in school, Don Ehrich, remembers they would also swing by Interstate 5 rest stops and shout at Californians to go home.

Even then, Kerr liked to shock people. As a practical joke, Ehrich nominated Kerr as a candidate for "Creswell Carnival Queen." Kerr decided he'd play the joke out.

"I wasn't going to wear the dress, but I did want to wear the tiara," he said with a grin.

He won the contest. And despite his objections, the students and administrators insisted upon calling Kerr the "Carnival King." Instead of the glass-and-glue dime store tiara, Kerr complained that they made him wear a more "manly" crown cut of cardboard and covered with aluminum foil.

His most difficult battles came with his father, a home builder who didn't appreciate Kerr's opinions on forest conservation any more than he appreciated the beard his son wore home from Oregon State University. He made him shave it off each summer. Kerr would grow it back each fall.

During the summer between his junior and senior years, Kerr worked for the family business for six days. "The first five of them my father was on vacation," he said.

On the sixth, Kerr decided he'd had enough. "I didn't want to shave my beard off that summer." He hasn't shaved since.

Juggling full schedule

On a Friday night in April, Kerr wagged his index finger in the face of an aide working for U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden. The Oregon Democrat had written legislation designed to stabilize the amount of money that timber communities receive from logging on nearby federal forest lands. Kerr was outraged that in April 2000, the government would tie dollars that communities need for schools and roads to what he considers the destruction of a natural resource.

That message delivered, Kerr moved from the ballroom to the foyer of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Portland to talk growth with a candidate for the Metro regional council. Then, his burgundy tie askew, Kerr huddled with conservationists headed to Washington, D.C., seeking protection for the sage grouse.

All of this while others attending the Oregon League of Conservation Voters annual banquet listened to the keynote speaker. Kerr isn't one to waste time on 20-minute speeches, or to wait until after dinner to eat his dessert, or to squander an opportunity to consult, advise or cajole.

"A happy workaholic," Kerr works 60 to 80 hours a week. He usually packs his schedule so tight that he's forced to change into his suit in parking lots.

He's put 125,000 miles on his Toyota pickup in five years and credits cellular phones for cutting down on speeding tickets because now he can do business on the highway. Kerr keeps a digital voice recorder tucked in the pocket of his cargo pants. He yanks it out to dictate memos to himself, such as where he'll find the Toyota in the parking garage or to send some of what he calls his "ego-clippings" to a reporter.

In addition to launching Alternatives to Growth Oregon, Kerr runs the Larch Co., an environmental consulting firm named after a tree that thrives on scorched earth. He's also writing two books. The first, titled "Beyond Wood," argues for forest preservation and against wood products. The second, commissioned by the Oregon Natural Resources Council, is titled "Oregon Wild" and features the state's roadless forest lands. This summer, Kerr's Oregon Desert Guide: 70 hikes will be published by Mountaineers Press. He describes it as a "a little natural history, political future and hiking guide -- all with an attitude."

"From the beginning I saw a lot of the same things in Andy that I see in him now," said James Monteith, the Oregon Natural Resources Council's executive director for 18 years. "Andy always knew what he wanted to do and has had a take-charge approach."

Monteith hired Kerr as a field representative in 1976. At the time, the organization was known as the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. Kerr describes the operation as "little more than four zealots who needed stationery." They also had one suit between them: a dark three-piece pinstripe that Kerr's mother bought.

"We used to have pictures of each of us testifying (before Congress) in it," Kerr said.

In those days, Monteith said, the conservation community was pretty timid. His group's goal was to create enough controversy in the press, in the courts and in the political arena to focus the public's attention on the disappearance of old-growth forests.

Monteith used to call Kerr his "main deck gun."

"You point him and you pull the trigger," he said. "The media and the political underpinnings of what we had to do were handled by Andy as part of our overall strategy."

The group appealed so many timber sales in the late 1970s, Monteith said, that Congress called a hearing. "We sent Kerr back," he said. "They grilled him, and Andy held our ground. I think we impressed upon them that we were not going away. We were committed. We were using science and we were using economics."

They were also using the press.

Brandishing sound bites

Kerr perfected the art of the snappy sound bite. He could be shocking. He could be irritating. But he could always be assured attention.

Kerr is the one who came up with the term "Rider from Hell," to describe a 1989 rider, or amendment, drafted by Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, R-Ore., to prohibit conservationists from seeking court injunctions against logging for a year. He insulted timber workers and their families when he said that another Hatfield rider would kill spotted owls "as sure as a drunken logger with a shotgun." And he angered a host of people when he said, "Asking the Oregon congressional delegation in 1990 to deal rationally with the end of ancient forest cutting is like asking the Mississippi delegation in 1960 to deal rationally with the end of segregation."

Reporters who interview Kerr all ask the same question: When? Tell us what prompted you to dedicate your life's work to the environment?

"There just isn't an epiphany story," Kerr said. "Sometimes I've tried to make one up."

Early focus on growth

As a fifth-generation Oregonian, Kerr has always been concerned about the effects of population growth. He joined Zero Population Growth when he was 17 and in high school.

He and his wife of 14 years, Nancy Peterson, have two dogs, a cat and no children, by choice. Over the years, Kerr has peppered his speeches and writing with warnings about overpopulation. Then in the fall of 1997, Kerr sponsored a conference in Portland titled "Alternatives to Growth." He hoped for 200; 600 came.

The interest expressed at the conference, coupled with a University of Oregon survey indicating that 65 percent of Oregonians think the state's population is about the right size now and 29 percent think it's already too large, convinced Kerr the timing was perfect to launch a new campaign.

He had stayed in touch with Rogers, the Portland city attorney and friend of Bill Clinton, since the 1993 Northwest Forest Conference. Kerr also recruited like-minded environmentalists and others to help him form Alternatives to Growth Oregon last year.

The group inhabits a small office in downtown Portland and has a Web site (www.agoregon.org). Yet, Kerr can't say exactly what its agenda will be. "In the next couple of years our goal is to both insist on debate and give permission to the body politic to talk about the end of growth."

Will Alternatives to Growth Oregon promote a statewide no-growth initiative? Or will it seek local no-growth ordinances community by community?

"I don't know. Give me a few years," Kerr said. "What we're trying to do is, in a sense, change the course of Western civilization as we know it."

Long list of actions

He isn't kidding. Kerr has compiled a list of 25 actions to end growth that include swapping a "consumption tax" for the income tax to encourage savings and discourage waste. Kerr also proposes ending subsidies designed to lure new businesses and making birth control available to all sexually active people, regardless of age.

Among the most radical of his ideas is a tax incentive designed to reward small families and limit foreign and domestic immigration. He concedes that immigration is a federal matter. But he suggests linking the number of people permitted to immigrate to the United States to the number of Americans who emigrate to other countries.

"About 100,000 people leave the U.S. each year," he said. "That's enough to take care of political refugees, especially if we also change U.S. government foreign and corporate policies that create refugees. It's also enough for immediate family reunifications. If we Americans want more immigrants, then we Americans should breed less so we have room for them."

Isn't that incendiary?

"Yes."

Racist?

"Unless you favor open borders, you are racist by definition. It's just a matter of degree," he said.

Kerr already appears to have gone too far for some of his colleagues in the conservation movement.

Robert Liberty, executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon, has worked with Kerr on timber and other issues. He admires him. But "it would be a mistake for people to confuse the work that we do and the work that he does," he said.

His group is battling sprawl, which could happen with or without population growth, Liberty said. "I guess I'm distancing myself and trying to emphasize these are two different subjects."

Meanwhile, Kerr hears encouragement from surprising corners.

Ray Wilkeson, legislative director for the Oregon Forest Industries Council, suffered Kerr-induced heartburn for years. He labels Kerr's views on population "radical," and he warns builders and others who have a stake in Oregon's growth to take Kerr seriously.

"He's very smart. He's tenacious. He's fearless. He's a worthy adversary," Wilkeson said.

Still, Wilkeson confesses, he's "emotionally sympathetic" with Kerr's campaign to end growth. "Whether his ideas are practical or not, I don't know," he said. "One thing he and I have in common, is we're about the same age. ... We can both remember Oregon in the '50s, when we were kids. It was a wonderful place. It really was."

Sandra Wilson, a Creswell historian, says Kerr might find his hometown more supportive, too.

Creswell has about doubled in size since Kerr graduated from high school and went off to fight the timber wars. More than 3,000 people live in the town today, and Creswell is no longer economically dependent upon logging.

"Now it's a bedroom community to Eugene," said Wilson. "I think a lot of people moving in don't have that concept of a small town. They work and shop in the greater metropolitan area. They're not involved in the community the way it used to be. ... To us who have lived here a long time, it isn't the same, and it will never be the same."

You can reach Michelle Cole at 503-294-5143 or by e-mail at michellecole@news.oregonian.com.