Faith, Love, and Family

On Saturday morning, February 8, we awoke to find three feet of snow outside. Our delight ended the next day, when newspapers reported that 61-year-old Tim Lillebo had collapsed and died shoveling his driveway Saturday evening.

Tim helped lead an incredible group of people dedicated to saving Oregon wilderness in the late 1970s and 1980s and centered on an organization then known as the Oregon Wilderness Coalition (OWC). We were more like family than co-workers, putting in long hours for nearly no pay, sharing rooms, cars, meals, and just about everything else. In mourning Tim, I find myself mourning someone who was nearly a brother but also the loss of the family itself.

OWC had hired Jim Monteith as its director in 1975, paying him the munificent sum of $200 a month ($875 in today’s dollars). He decided he needed help, so he took one of his two hundred dollars and hired Andy Kerr and Tim Lillebo, at $50 a month each, to be OWC’s Western and Eastern Oregon field coordinators.

It’s tempting to say something like Jim was the brains, Andy the soul, and Tim the heart of the organization. But the truth is that none of them really knew what they were doing, and they experienced many “if only I had known this last year” moments. Yet over the next two decades, they reformed the the environmental movement, permanently altered Oregon politics, and ultimately changed the Forest Service itself.

Their first big change was bringing science to the wilderness movement. In the early 1970s, the timber industry seemed to have all the science on its side: old-growth forests were biological deserts incapable of supporting wildlife, which actually thrived in clearcut forests; the trees themselves (at least the ones that were commercially valuable) could only reforest after a clearcut; the timber industry provided 40 percent of the jobs in Oregon; and national forest timber sales were so lucrative that they made the Forest Service the only federal agency that earned a profit. Arguments for wilderness focused almost exclusively on aesthetics: clearcuts were ugly; uncut forests were pretty.

Monteith, a Stanford biology graduate, didn’t accept this state of affairs. He brought forest ecologists like Glenn Juday and Paul Alabach, as well as other scientists such as Fred J. Swanson, to speak at OWC’s annual conferences. Soon, wilderness advocates throughout the state stopped arguing about ugly clearcuts and focused instead on silviculture, biology, hydrology, and other scientific arguments.

For example, Kurt Kutay–who Monteith hired after Lillebo and Kerr–wrote a paper showing how something called the allowable cut effect could allow the Forest Service to save more wilderness without reducing timber sales. Forest Service chief John McGuire was so impressed he flew to Oregon to visit Kutay and ordered the agency’s researchers to see whether Kutay’s method would work. They found that it would on some forests but not on others; the last finding proved to be the more shocking because it meant the Forest Service could no longer use the allowable cut effect to justify other policies.

OWC soon spread its scientific tactics to other states. OWC activist Todd True successfully challenged a plan to road and log hundreds of thousands of acres in Washington’s Okanogan National Forest. None of us had ever been to that forest, but the plan was so bad we couldn’t let it go. Embarrassed, Washington environmentalists soon stepped in to make sure the Forest Service did right in the Okanogan. Environmental groups in Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and Utah also emulated the OWC model.

The focus on science spread well beyond the wilderness issue. Ned (which stood for Nancy Elizabeth) Duhnkrack–whose father was a high-level Forest Service official–took it upon herself to stop the Corps of Engineers from building dams in every Oregon watershed.

They not only used science to make the case for their positions, they often let science change what those positions would be. In 1979, a Reed College student named Cameron La Follette wrote a massive 144-page report titled Saving All the Pieces about the many benefits of old-growth forests, alerting environmentalists that there were important values in uncut forests outside of potential wilderness areas. Biologist Wendell Wood, who began working for OWC in 1981, started inventorying stands of large old-growth trees that needed to be saved.

Then there was a long-haired hippie who called himself a forestry consultant and who, like Ned, introduced himself by his initials: “I’m ROT and I work on wood.” He counted seedlings in clearcuts to challenge Forest Service and BLM reforestation records, and measured growth rates in uncut stands to challenge their yield projections. In the 1980s, another forester, Andy Stahl, joined the extended family, as did a wildlife biologist from Germany named Dieter Mahlein, and many others.

It only took six years for OWC to win the ecological debate. In 1981, prodded by Juday, Swanson, and other people familiar to OWC, the Forest Service’s research branch published Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests, which confirmed everything La Follette had said two years before: Far from biological deserts, hundreds of species of plants and animals depended on old-growth forests. Old-growth tree also played important roles in keeping streams clean and maintaining forest productivity. The paper’s lead author (out of eight), Jerry Franklin, also published a paper showing that no forest types depended on clearcutting, and that other cutting methods such as shelterwood cutting actually better replicated natural conditions for optimal reforestation.

The timber industry was losing other debates as well. Tom Barlow, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, showed that, far from being a profitable agency, most national forests actually lost money on timber sales. The agency as a whole had only made a profit one or two years in the 1960s and three or four years in the 1950s. While Oregon forests were the most profitable, Oregon activists scrutinized them on a sale-by-sale basis and found that Oregon national forests sold more money-losing timber than anywhere else; they just covered it up with the sales that did earn a profit.

It also happened that in 1981 the Federal Reserve decided to fight inflation by doubling interest rates. This devastated the home construction industry which in turn devastated the timber industry. While Oregon was hit hard, reporters, editorial writers, and politicians soon realized that timber accounted for a lot less than 40 percent of the state’s economy; in fact, it was more like 6 percent and declining.

Fildena is a generic generic levitra medicine used for the treatment of male impotence (or erectile dysfunction as it is colloquially known). Guy’s hair fall is a situation which is typically seen right now where in the man is unable to sustain or discount viagra sales maintain his erection for longer time or period. Lack of sleep, stress, and excessive usage of drugs and alcohol consumption can cause many sexual problems in your life, as well as make levitra uk new, lifelong friends. Through Arginine’s help, Human Growth Hormone levels are less or more respitecaresa.org cialis tab than normal, then erectile dysfunction (ED) is one of the significant issues. This led to a sea change in Oregon politics. No longer did politicians and opinion leaders kow-tow to the timber industry. The editorials of major newspapers that once opposed wilderness now enthusiastically endorsed it based on the idea that wilderness would attract high-tech employers to Oregon. Newspaper reporters revealed the once-secret inside dealings between politicians and industry lobbyists. Members of Congress such as Jim Weaver, whose district saw more federal timber cut each year than any other, could get away with a hard-line stand for wilderness.

Though not immediately apparent to us on the outside, the Forest Service was changing too. In 1983, Winema National Forest supervisor Bob Chadwick and a few other daring Forest Service officials joined Oregon environmentalists in organizing a national “Mission Symposium” where Chief Max Peterson allowed environmentalists from across the country to grill him for hours. In 1989, two years after he retired, Peterson announced that, “Anybody on the back of an envelope could have figured out that the rate of harvest cannot be sustained.”

It turned out that Peterson’s public opinion was privately mirrored by agency officials still on the job: between 1988 and 2001, they reduced national forest timber sales by more than 85 percent. What’s more, people inside the Forest Service were happy, even enthusiastic, about the reduction. I tell the story in more detail elsewhere, but it was clear that constant pressure from OWC and its allies had persuaded the agency that it had been overcutting.

For two decades, Jim, Tim, Andy, and their followers fought against a seemingly immovable object–and not just moved it, they shoved it off a cliff. In retrospect, those years were in many ways the best in my life, and the feeling of comaraderie from working with all of those people is something I don’t expect to ever have again.

Our family even had a mother and father, Betty and Loren Hughes, who owned a small business in La Grande, Oregon, but lived for the wilderness. Loren introduced us to local wildlife experts such as Jack Ward Thomas, who later became chief of the Forest Service, and took us on hiking and horseback riding trips through northeastern Oregon roadless and wilderness areas. I especially remember a trip exploring the Hells Canyon Wilderness, Tim and Loren leading the way with shovels to move the rattlesnakes off the trail. Somewhere in Hells Canyon is a roll of film that fell out of my pocket that had a beautiful profile of Tim on horseback riding into the sunset.

Like most families, we had arguments and stressful times. But like most families, we supported one another. A pep talk from Monteith could keep one of us going for weeks. When someone felt really burned out, several of us would take an afternoon or weekend off to look at the big picture. Lillebo and Kerr were always ready for a potluck dinner, especially if all they had to bring was the beer.

Sadly, the family broke up in the mid-1990s. Most of us had lived in Eugene (Tim, who roamed eastern Oregon, being the notable exception). But in the late 1980s, nearly all of us independently decided to move, mostly to Portland. Some went to law school; others thought Portland was closer to the reigns of power; still others followed a significant other. I myself was attracted to a lady known as the SP&S 700.

The Portland move may have been the family’s downfall. Where Eugene was small enough that we would see each other almost every day, Portland was so big that weeks or months could go by between visits. Or maybe it was just that we had won the war, and the remaining work we were doing together seemed to lose its significance.

In any case, one by one, we dropped out, left the family. Many took other jobs, “real” jobs that paid more than a few hundred dollars a month. Some might say we grew up, but I think we lost the faith: faith in the cause; faith in the process; faith in our family.

Unfortunately, a new kind of environmentalist stepped into the vacuum, one less interested in science and more interested in using environmental issues to gain power. Those who supported science-based plans written by conservationists on the ground like the Quincy Library Group were demonized by new environmentalists who wanted all decisions and direction to come from the top down.

This doesn’t mean OWC people stopped working for environmental causes. Monteith co-founded the Wallowa Land Trust. Todd True heads the Seattle office of Earth Justice (where he still protects the Okanogan Forest). Andy Kerr consults to environmental groups on their political campaigns. Cameron La Follette is protecting the Oregon Coast. ROT (along with former Oregon Environmental Council director John Charles) works on environmental issues from a libertarian view. But, as effective as they/we all might be, most of us are isolated from one another.

And then there was Lillebo. Of those of us who started working for or with OWC in the 1970s, Timbo is the only one who stuck it out. For nearly 40 years, he kept the faith, continuing to work on eastern Oregon forests for OWC (now called Oregon Wild—Wendell Wood, who joined OWC’s staff in ’81, is also still with Oregon Wild). Moreover, going against the tide, Tim kept the focus on science, leading a collaborative group of industry, environmentalists, and agency officials in developing better methods of forest management.

“The scientific facts called for a different response and Tim was able to adapt to the new necessities,” Andy Kerr told the Oregonian. “It’s counterintuitive that you address the abuses of logging by doing more logging. Tim was able to work through it.” This kind of work was demonized by the new, power-hungry environmentalists in the 1990s, but I find it refreshing, as the issues are nowhere near as black and white as some portray them.

Tim was the perfect person to lead a collaborative forestry group. His grandfather and father were Oregon loggers, and he himself did some logging before working for OWC, so he could relate with people on all sides. His curly hair and mustache broke a few hearts in his day, but his infectious smile and down-home manner helped him make friends with almost everyone.

I’m ashamed to say that, even though we lived just 30 miles apart, I haven’t seen Tim in years. But I always wanted to believe I could go back to my family when I needed to. Now, I’ve lost one of my brothers, which makes it all the harder to think I can ever go home again.

For those who remember Tim, a memorial gathering and celebration will take place at Aspen Hall in Bend’s Shevlin Park on Sunday, February 23 from noon to 4:00.