Note: This is the first part of a two-part tribute to Dave Foreman, who recently shuffled off this mortal coil. Part 1 recounts Dave’s contribution to stopping the infamous Bald Mountain Road, a dagger into the heart of the Kalmiopsis wildlands in southwestern Oregon. Part 2 is my take on Dave’s unique contributions to the conservation and restoration of nature.
Top line: A giant in nature conservation and restoration died just a few days short of the autumnal equinox. Like few others, he inspired generations of advocates of wildlands, wild waters, and wildlife to reach for the greater good and to demand more.
Figure 1. Dave Foreman liked his cigars. After I quit smoking in the sixth grade, my cigar consumption was one cigar when I was thirty-nine and then again when I was fifty-nine, both times with Dave. I was hoping for one more when I’m seventy-nine. Source: Wildlands Network.
“Kerr. Dave Foreman. I’m coming to Oregon. Do you want me to damn you or praise you? Whatever you think best.”
So began a telephone call I received from Dave Foreman in 1983. Dave was coming to attempt to stop the infamous Bald Mountain Road, a Forest Service project to sever the North Kalmiopsis wildlands in southwestern Oregon so the area could never be added to the existing Kalmiopsis Wilderness.
The Congressional Battle That Set the Stage
In early 1978, after a political pissing match of epic proportions, Senator Mark Hatfield (D-OR) and Representative Jim Weaver (D-OR-4th) agreed to expand the then-78,850-acre Kalmiopsis Wilderness—first designated a “wild area” by the Forest Service in 1946 and made a wilderness by Congress in 1964—by ~92,000 acres. When there is a difference between the House of Representatives and the Senate, often they split the difference. Not in this case. Hatfield was far more powerful.
Hatfield’s first legislation called for expanding the Kalmiopsis by 134,000 acres, as did Weaver’s first bill. Weaver also initially called for the designation of another 136,000 acres as a wilderness study area, which would set the area on a path toward eventual inclusion in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. However, by the time the House voted on Weaver’s proposal, he was proposing that the entire 280,000 acres be slated for wilderness designation.
Piqued that Weaver would expand his Kalmiopsis Wilderness expansion proposal, Hatfield dialed back his own original 134,000-acre Kalmiopsis addition by 51,600 acres to 82,400 acres. If not bought and sold by Big Timber, Hatfield was surely leased and rented. While both ends of the Kalmiopsis are wild and wonderful, the South Kalmiopsis didn’t have much commercial timber, being mainly a serpentine landscape. However, the North Kalmiopsis had lots of virgin old-growth forests, and Hatfield didn’t want these lands protected.
A conference committee of representatives and senators convened to resolve the differences between the two bills. Going in, most thought that Weaver and Hatfield would resolve their 187,600-acre difference by reverting to the common 134,000 acres of Kalmiopsis additions they both had originally supported. No such luck. After a lot of pissing, moaning, bitching, and whining all around, Weaver and Hatfield grudgingly agreed on a 92,000-acre addition (in the end, a classic splitting the difference almost evenly, though Hatfield came out 1,800 acres better than Weaver).
Watching Hatfield act out in the conference committee that day was a lobbyist from The Wilderness Society by the name of Dave Foreman.
The northern boundary of this new wilderness addition was drawn along the east-west ridge of Bald Mountain, which separated the mainstem Illinois River to the south and the Silver Creek watershed to the north. The House committee staff knew the area better than their Senate counterparts, so the new boundary was actually drawn not quite on the hydrological divide but rather just northward and downslope. Because of the hellishly steep terrain, this was enough to preclude the planned Bald Mountain Road, which the Forest Service had devised to open the area to clear-cut liquidation.
Shortly after the bill was signed into law, Hatfield found out he’d been quietly had. He even more quietly passed a “rider” to move the boundary and shrink the wilderness so as to allow the logging road to be built. Additionally, as chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, he made sure the Forest Service had all the money it needed to build the Bald Mountain Road, $1,485,000 ($7.1 million in today’s money).
This loss of those 102 acres (but who’s counting?) of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness resulted in arguably the first skirmish in what would later be known as the Pacific Northwest forest wars.
Litigation, Round 1
In 1979, just a year after the congressional Kalmiopsis calamity, the Forest Service approved the Bald Mountain Road and multiple timber sales it would allow.
In 1982, the Sierra Club and the organization now known as Oregon Wild (then the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, OWC) brought suit in federal court to stop the Bald Mountain Road. Because the club was paying the lawyer, it was calling the shots. For political reasons in Congress, the Sierra Club lawsuit intentionally chose not to cite as precedent a very successful lawsuit brought in another US district court by the State of California against the Forest Service that overturned the agency’s second Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE II) in that state. Rather, the legal complaint was a standard challenge under the National Environmental Policy Act. While OWC disagreed, we had no money for our own lawyer to bring the very likely winning claim. As an OWC staffer, I begged and cajoled the Sierra Club, to no avail. US District Court Judge Helen Frye found for the Forest Service.
Construction began on the Bald Mountain Road but was soon shut down by winter weather.
The Last Option: Protests and Blockades
Things were looking bad for the North Kalmiopsis. There was no legislative option and litigation had failed.
The Carter administration had offered the RARE II process during hearings on what would become the Endangered American Wilderness Act, which had expanded (somewhat) the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. That administration was rolled by its own Forest Service. When the RARE II dust had settled, the agency was recommending only 15 million acres for wilderness (mainly rock and ice) and another 11 million acres for additional review later, out of 66 million roadless acres reviewed. (The agency refused to inventory a lot of qualifying land.) To be sacrificed to development and exploitation were 36 million acres of roadless areas, including the North Kalmiopsis.
The disaster that was RARE II was a radicalizing event for the four guys—including one Dave Foreman—who founded Earth First! Playing nice with a supposedly sympathetic administration was not cutting it.
As there were no options in the arenas of legislation or litigation, it was time for the arena of protest. The new Earth First! was looking for trouble and found plenty in Josephine County, Oregon.
In the spring of 1983, local citizens—aided by the outside agitators from Earth First!—commenced a string of blockades and protests designed to delay the bulldozers and chainsaws from defiling Bald Mountain.
First, and longest, on the scene was another Earth First! founder, one Mike Roselle. Roselle, partly by using some walking around money spent mostly on beer, but mostly by using inspiration, perspiration, and organization, convened a ragtag coalition of locals and outsiders who flocked to the cause (some of whom went on to have distinguished careers in mainstream conservation) to do what they could to stop the Forest Service. Roselle was the glue that held the effort together.
By July 1983 there had been seven blockades and forty-seven people arrested. The story of the protests, including Earth First!’s role, is beautifully and movingly told in Susan Zakin’s book Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement, which has been recently updated and reissued with a new afterword by the author.
Figure 2. Dave Foreman sometime in the 1970s, before the founding of Earth First! Source: Rewilding Institute.
Here I reprint the incident in which Dave Foreman was dragged under the Bald Mountain Road contractor’s pickup for 103 yards (but who’s counting?). This account is from The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism.
Then on May 12, Dave Willis [later the catalyst for the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument] and Dave Foreman set up a roadblock on the access road 10 miles from the construction area to stop the Plumley [road contractor] workers on their way to work. With their support team, they pulled a downed tree into the road in front of themselves, because, as Foreman said, “I don’t want to be a hood ornament on a Plumley truck.”
At 6 AM, a sheriff’s deputy arrived and asked them to move. They refused. The deputy then winched the log out of the way and parked 50 feet in front of them. Willis, missing both hands and feet from frostbite, was in his wheelchair. At 6:15, the Plumley Six-Pac pickup carrying five workers arrived and drove around the deputy’s vehicle. The workers tried to pass Willis on the inside of the road cut, but Foreman stepped over and blocked their path. They then drove to the outside of the road bend. Foreman stepped back in place.
For a moment, the blockaders faced off the truck. Then it shot forward, hitting Foreman in the chest and knocking him back five feet. Again truck and man faced off. The truck pushed against Foreman. He pushed back. Les Moore, the driver, accelerated. Foreman had to backpedal to keep from being run over. He finally lost his balance and went down. He held on to the bumper for a few seconds and the truck finally stopped . . . after having pushed him a distance later measured as 103 yards.
The five construction workers leapt out of the truck and surrounded Foreman, who was lying half under it. “You dirty communist bastard,” yelled Les Moore. “Why don’t you go back to Russia where you came from?”
“But, Les,” Foreman replied, “I’m a registered Republican.”
The deputy then arrested Foreman for disorderly conduct and took him to the Josephine County Jail in Grants Pass. Foreman made bail that afternoon. The sheriff’s office and the Forest Service maintained that no assault had occurred, merely that Foreman had stepped in front of a moving truck, which had immediately stopped. That’s not what a UPI reporter wrote from the scene or what two local television crews filmed.
Litigation, Round 2
In late 1982, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the district court ruling in California against the Forest Service. By this time, the Oregon Wilderness Coalition had renamed itself the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) on its way to becoming Oregon Wild. Protests are newsworthy. People were calling ONRC and asking what they could do. I suggested they send us some money so we could sue the Forest Service again the right way. People did send money—not enough for us to pay for an attorney but enough to cover ONRC’s actual costs. Most fortunately, a recent University of Oregon School of Law graduate had hung his shingle in Roseburg, Oregon, which billed itself “the timber capital of the world.” Doing divorce cases wasn’t why Neil Kagan went to law school; saving nature was. Kagan jumped at the chance to litigate again—this time citing slam-dunk precedent—the matter of the Bald Mountain Road.
ONRC, unlike the Sierra Club, feared nature’s backlash more than any congressional backlash. In honor of Earth First!’s unconventional contribution to saving the North Kalmiopsis from the dagger that was the Bald Mountain Road, Kagan listed Earth First! as the lead plaintiff in the case, along with ONRC and seven individuals.
Kagan won the case. Big time. Judge James Redden enjoined further construction of the road and any associated timber sales. For the down and dirty on the legal machinations, I highly recommend Kagan’s law review article, “Wilderness, Luck & Love: A Memoir and a Tribute.” It reads like no other law review article you’ve ever seen. It is the story of Kagan’s role in litigating to protect Forest Service roadless areas and his love of both nature and the law, intertwined with love for his wife, Betty Reed, who left us far too soon!
Though it was the second round of litigation that eventually saved the day, it was the direct, sometime illegal—but always moral—acts of citizens who ran to the noise of the bulldozers and chainsaws that effectively drew attention to the injustice being done. The story of Earth First!’s role in total—not just Foreman’s ride under a logging crummy—in stopping, along with locals, a great environmental travesty is one for the history books.
In Part 2, I will offer my take on why Foreman changed the course of nature conservation in the United States, if not the world.
Figure 3. Kalmiopsis leachiana is found only in the Kalmiopsis wildlands of southwestern Oregon. Source: George Wuerthner (first appeared in Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness).
For More Information
Davis, John (ed.). 1995. The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism. Peregrine Smith Books (available online where used books are sold).
Kagan, Neil. 2018. Wilderness, Luck & Love: A Memoir and a Tribute. Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law 7 (issue 2).
Zakin, Susan. 1993. Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement. Markham Books, Cowgirls and Pirates Media.