The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

"How can they do this?" I said. "The BLM is destroying the very land it's required by law to protect! It's like . . . Smokey the Bear, he's murdering trees!"

"One thing I bet you're going to learn, wookie," she said. "Governments have almost zero foresight and an almost infinite capacity for stupidity, violence and destruction. Not quite, but almost infinite capacity. The not-quite is when people get mad enough to stand in the way."

"I don't want to learn that," I said. "Please, I want to learn that government is wise and wonderful and that citizens do not have to take their own private time to protect themselves from elected leaders."

"Don't we wish . . . ," she said, her mind far down the road ahead of me. Then she turned to confront me. "This is not going to be easy. That's not a forest out there, it's big money, big power."

She laid a Federal document on my desk. "BLM gets a lot

of its money from the timber companies. The bureau gets paid to sell trees, not to save them. So don't think we're going to walk up to the district director, point to broken laws, and he's going to say, 'Gee, we're sorry and we sure won't do that anymore!' This is going to be a long, tough fight. Sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, that's what it's going to take to win. But let's not start any action that we don't intend to win. If you want to quit, let's quit now."

"We can't lose, anyway," I said, loading a new data-disk into my machine. "As long as the IRS can swoop down and seize a first-draft manuscript out of my computer, there's nb point in writing manuscripts. But I can write one hell of a timber-sale protest! The government won't have to seize what I write . . . we'll mail it to 'em direct. The Clash of the Bureaus, I can see it now: before IRS can decide whether to take my money, I'll spend it fighting BLM!"

She laughed. "Sometimes I believe you. Maybe there is no such thing as injustice."

Our priorities changed. Other work stopped while we studied. On our desks, on the kitchen counter, piled on the bed were thousands of pages about forest management, sustained-yield practices, erodible soils, fragile-lands regeneration, watershed protection, climatic evolution, endangered species, the socioeconomics of timber management versus the benefits of anadromous fisheries on marginal sites, riparian-zone protection, heat-transfer coefficients hi granitic soils, and laws, laws, laws. Books of laws. The National Environmental Protection Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Endangered Species Act, NHPA, FWPCA, AA, CWA, DOI 516M. Laws leaped from

pages, through our ringers, into our computers; written in electrons, coded and cross-referenced, filed in disk after disk, duplicated in bank-vaults, lest something happen to us or the house where we worked.

When there was enough information to change minds, we began meeting with neighbors. Joining with Denise Findlay-son and Chant Thomas, who had fought mostly alone before we came, we pressed for help from others.

Most of the people of the valley were reluctant to get involved . . . how I understood their thinking!

"Nobody's ever stopped a government timber sale," they said. "There's no way to keep the BLM from logging whatever it wants to log."

Yet when they learned what we had learned, that turning forests into deserts was breaking the law, we found ourselves with a Save-the-Forest membership of more than seven hundred people. Our private hideaway in the wilderness became a headquarters, our little mountain an anthill as fellow workers came and went all hours to pour findings into the computers.

I met a Leslie I had never seen: total focused business-at-hand; no smiles, no personal asides, one-track one-rail single-minded concentration

.

Time and again, she told us. "Emotional appeals won't work: 'Please don't cut the pretty trees, don't ruin the landscape, don't let the animals die.' That means nothing to the Bureau of Land Management. And not violence either: 'We'll spike the trees, we'll shoot you if you try to kill the forest.' That means they'll do their logging with the Army to protect them. The only thing that will stop the government is legal action. When we know the law better than they do, when they know we can take them to court and win,

when we can prove that they're violating Federal regulations, the logging will stop."

We tried negotiating with the BLM. "Do not expect cooperation," she said. "Expect double-talk, defensiveness, we-don't-do-it-that-way-anymore. But talking with them is a step we have to take." She was right, every word.

"Leslie, I can't believe this transcript! Have you read? The Director of the Medford BLM sat there and told us, on tape! Listen:"

RICHARD: Is what you're telling us that you need to have a lot of people make an outcry about this, against the logging, or that it would make no difference what people say?

DIRECTOR-. If you are asking me a personal question, very likely it would not.

RICHARD: Whether you get four hundred signatures or four thousand . . .

DIRECTOR: We get petitions like that. No, it wouldn't make a difference.

RICHARD: If there were forty thousand signatures, if the entire population of Medford, Oregon, protested the sale, would that make a difference?

DIRECTOR: Not to me.

RICHARD: If there were professional foresters who were objecting, would you listen to that?

DIRECTOR: No. I am not concerned about public outcry.

RICHARD: We would like to see what has made you so certain that this is worth going ahead in spite of so much public outcry.

DIRECTOR: Well, we are doing it.