Coyotes and Town Dogs
Earth First! and the Environmental

 

Coyotes and Town Dogs is the story of Earth First! as well as a vivid account of the fascinating personalities, flamboyant tactics, epic confrontations, and philosophical, legal, and ethical dilemmas of the entire American environmental movement, from grass-roots activists to those in the corridors of power in Washington.

In 1979, Dave Foreman had a successful career as the Wilderness Society’s top Washington lobbyist. A decade later, as leader of the environmental group Earth First!, he was dragged from bed at gunpoint and put on trial for conspiring to destroy government property. Foremans extraordinary journey from disillusioned insider to militant activist—and the journeys of the half-dozen other experienced and determined activists who helped him create Earth First!—provide the focus for this compelling and comprehensive history of both the environmental movement and its most controversial group. Here, too, are the ideas and passions of such central figures in American environmental history as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and David Brower, and the first comprehensive biographical treatment of southwestern iconoclast and Monkey Wrench Gang author Edward Abbey. A timely and wide-ranging book, it provides an important foundation for understanding and debate of the crucial environmental choices we face in the years to come.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

To Jack Burns …

… and all the other ghosts

 

Here the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land.

—Charles Bowden
Blue Desert

Coyotes and Town Dogs

Prologue

All romantics meet the same fate….

—Joni Mitchell
“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” 1971

1989 — Tucson, Arizona

ON THE LAST DAY OF MAY, the desert sky was a shade of gunmetal gray not often seen in late spring. Nancy Morton and Dave Foreman slept under a flowered sheet in their brick suburban tract house. Nancy had risen early and mixed a new batch of sugar water for the hummingbird feeders. But then she dozed off again, wearing her shorts and a T-shirt. It was that kind of morning, the air motionless, the neighborhood quiet.

At 7 A.M. someone knocked loudly at the front door. Nancy was the one who woke up. She walked barefoot through the dark hallway. When she opened the door, four men burst into the house, stiff-arming their guns in front of them.

“FBI!” one shouted. The agents rushed past her, heading straight for the master bedroom. They jerked the sheet off her husband, a bearded, balding environmental lobbyist, and aimed their cocked .357 Magnums at his naked body.

It was the couple’s third wedding anniversary.

Eleven hours earlier and 200 miles to the northwest, Peg Millett crouched in a sandy wash. She kept her head down so the Blackhawk helicopter’s sixty-million-candlepower spotlight couldn’t home in on the reflection from her glasses. It was the first time she had stopped running since the FBI flare lit the night sky.

Millett could no longer see the place where the bust had gone down. But its afterimage was burned onto her eyelids. The eightyfoot power-line tower rose out of the desert like a giant insect in a Japanese horror film. FBI agents fanned out around it, an army of men wearing dark clothes to help them disappear at night. They wore plastic leggings, like medieval armor, to protect them from rattlesnakes. Most of all, she remembered their SWAT-team firepower: M-16 automatic rifles, 9-millimeter handguns, 12-gauge shotguns loaded with double-ought buck. She could not see the men or their guns anymore. But she could hear their voices. “Peg! Peggy Millett. Turn yourself in.”

Peg was pretty sure she had broken through their circle. When the voices stopped, she listened for the sounds of men moving in the desert: a clatter of rocks being dislodged, the soft cry issued when cactus enters flesh. But there was nothing human. She heard only the occasional fluttering of a bat, the dive of a nighthawk, a subtle wind brushing catclaw acacia and desert broom. She waited for the helicopter to angle off into the night. She was perfectly still. Oddly, she was not frightened.

The wash was a good hiding place. It had been created by hundreds of purple and black monsoons ramming hard rain onto the desert floor. Repelled by the dry caliche, the waters had spun out and collided to carve the channel where Peg was holed up. The helicopter’s explosive chuk-chuk-chuk made it easy to imagine another monsoon. It would dwarf all the previous storms that had etched these washes onto the desert like hieroglyphics of an unknown language. The summer rains started before the Spanish Jesuits, before the Sand Papago, even before the mysterious people, the Hohokam. Each civilization had left its mark, making it tougher to wring life out of the ground, causing the floods to become more violent. It was easy to imagine a flood to end all floods barreling through the wash, destroying its shallow borders. The brown water would sweep Millett and everyone she knew off the edge of the land like a broom disposing of human debris.

The helicopter’s lights veered off, then disappeared. When Millett dared to look up, all she saw was the teeming Sonoran dark. She would spend the night alone, moving through the mountains toward home. The moon would not rise until about five, just in time to be blasted out by the desert sun.

Standing, she willed herself to regain her bearings.

Scorpio in the southern sky.

A barrel cactus near her right leg.

Coyotes yipping, answering the frantic, deep-throated cries of the German shepherds tracking her.

It was time to start walking.

By late morning news of the arrests was coursing over telephone wires, being spit out by fax machines, flashing on computer screens—sometimes even being transmitted face-to-face. Dave Foreman had been busted for conspiracy. The renegade environmentalist who founded Earth First! with his drinking buddies in the Mexican desert had been rousted buck naked from his bed by an FBI posse. He was still in the can, nobody knew where. Nobody knew why he had been arrested. All they knew was that on the previous night two other guys had been busted while cutting down a power line near the aptly named town of Salome, Arizona. Their names were Mark Davis and Marc Baker. Wags quickly dubbed them the Marx Brothers in honor of their misbegotten evening expedition. The power line they had been whaling away on was a microscopic part of the $3.5 billion Central Arizona Project, which diverts water from the already drained Colorado River to the air conditioners and swimming pools of Phoenix and Tucson. The CAP, as desert rats call it, would have been an ambitious enough target for any self-respecting environmental saboteur. But the FBI contended that the power-line fiasco was merely a warm-up for a bigger enchilada, a conspiracy to take out power to three nuclear facilities: the Palo Verde power plant in Arizona, the Diablo Canyon plant in California, and a weapons-grade plutonium-processing facility at Rocky Flats, Colorado.

As it turned out, the Marx Brothers were not staking out their moves alone. A horse trainer and singer named Peggy Millett had gone to Salome with them. Millett was a high-profile Earth First!er, a member in good standing of its Redneck Women’s Caucus, and a friend of Dave Foreman’s. The fourth member of the group was the driver. He was a shadowy man with deep-set brown eyes called Mike Tait. Mike Tait’s real name was Fain, which should have been spelled “feign.” Fain was an FBI agent who had spent the last year of his life infiltrating Earth First! Peg Millett’s trust was his opening wedge. But when the FBI flare whited out the desert like a giant X ray, Fain’s federal bones popped out like a jitterbugging skeleton left over from El Dia de los Muertos. Peg Millett took one hard, fast look and ran like hell. Eluding fifty FBI agents who were tracking her on foot, in trucks, on horseback, and by helicopter, she disappeared into the cactus-studded hills.

Long before agents got a fix on Millett, Dave Foreman’s friends were tracking down help. Some of the first calls went out to the Wyoming law offices of Gerry Spence. The flamboyant “cowboy from Jackson” had never lost a case. Spence earned his reputation as a defender of the little guy by winning $1.8 million in damages for the family of Karen Silkwood, a whistle-blower at a Kerr-McGee plutonium-processing plant who had died under suspicious circumstances on her way to meet a New York Times reporter. Not all of Spence’s clients were so sympathetic. He had won more than $1 million in damages for a former Miss Wyoming who claimed to be personally maligned by a Penthouse satire of the Miss America pageant, although the judgment was later reversed. A few years later, Spence punched a few more holes in his white-hat persona when he represented Philippine dictatoress Imelda Marcos. But Spence proved that he hadn’t lost his principles—or his ability to recognize a good platform—when he took on Foreman’s case pro bono. Dave Foreman was the environmental movement’s most charismatic figure. More than any other individual, he was responsible for linking the words radical and environmentalist in the public mind. Not to mention the minds of the people who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI had been interested in Earth First! since 1981. The Weather Underground had long since been rained out and the G-men in J. C. Penney suits were stashing most of the gun-toting neo-Nazis of the radical right behind bars. By 1987, when the FBI admits it began a serious investigation of Earth First!, terrorists had become an endangered species on the American continent. Revolutionaries were even scarcer. Antiabortion fanatics who tried to blow up women’s clinics were not considered fair game under official government policy. So apart from a few bomb-throwing Puerto Rican separatists, tough-talking nature lovers like Dave Foreman were the obvious choice when the agency had to justify its whopping $35 million a year counterterrorism budget. This fact was not lost on Gerry Spence. He would later thunder out in court that Foreman’s bust was part of a blanket attempt to squelch the radical environmental movement. Since the domestic intelligence scandals of the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI had been officially prohibited from making direct political hits. Spence would do his best to put the FBI, not Dave Foreman, on trial.

In the meantime, the goal was to get Dave the hell out of jail. That was Jim Eaton’s job. Eaton was a jovial, stocky blue-collar Californian who had left the Wilderness Society in the same 1970s purge as Foreman. When he heard about Foreman’s arrest, Eaton activated an informal network called the wilderness grapevine. The grapevine was made up of about a hundred career environmentalists. They were westerners, by adoption if not by birth. Most had come of age in the 1970s, an era rich in both romantic turmoil and substance-abuse casualties. Usually the grapevine was little more than a long-distance substitute for the backyard laundry line. But in a genuine crisis, it was a crack organizing tool. The seventy-three character references that greeted U.S. Magistrate Morton Sitver at Dave Foreman’s arraignment two days later were the grapevine’s handiwork. They came from people like David Brower, aka the Archdruid, a white-haired visionary who had transformed the Sierra Club from a hokey hiking club into a political behemoth, creating in the process the template for a modern environmental group. There was even an affidavit from Foreman’s ex-wife Debbie Sease, attesting to her belief that her former husband was not a flight risk. Since leaving the intense New Mexico cowboy who turned her on to politics, Sease had become a high-level Washington, D.C., lobbyist.

After a lengthy hearing, Dave Foreman was released on $50,000 bail. The other three defendants did not have similar clout. Characterized by the government as “terrorists,” they would spend the next two months in jail. Six months later, a fifth indictment was handed down. Ilse Asplund, Mark Davis’s lover and Peggy Millett’s best friend, was also charged with felony crimes, although she had been home in Prescott on the night of the power-line expedition. These ecosaboteurs were not typical felony suspects. All but Davis were college graduates. They were intelligent, articulate, well mannered, and extraordinarily well read. They had been brought up on Dr. Spock and rock and roll. Until they were arrested, they thought that doing the right thing made them invulnerable.

Dave Foreman was the only exception. Since starting Earth First! in 1980, Dave Foreman had known this day might come. Later he admitted that his sense of danger had been rather abstract. But when he finally had a chance to reflect on the events surrounding his arrest, the only real surprise was the outpouring of support from the mainstream movement. He had traveled quite a ways up a dangerous, unmarked side canyon. But he was still a member of the tribe.

He hadn’t always wanted to be. After leaving his high-powered Washington, D.C., lobbyist’s job in the cold winter of 1979, Foreman did his best to make sure he could never go back. Inspired by Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the founders of Earth First! made ecotage—burning bulldozers, spiking trees, yanking up survey stakes—an attention-grabbing tactic in their no-compromise approach to saving wilderness. But to a knowledgeable minority, monkeywrenching was almost beside the point. It was Earth First!’s willingness to cut through the sagebrush-scented bullshit of the western power elite that made the group truly radical. Foreman and his friends were among the first people to realize the true depth of the environmental crisis. All of them had read enough to understand that the land’s ability to replenish itself was being choked off by industrial development. If only half of what they said was true, environmental issues were no longer a question of jobs vs. nature, snail darters vs. dams. Life itself was threatened.

For ten years, Earth First!’s proposals for biological preserves were pretty much ignored. But by the 1990s they had filtered out to mainstream environmental groups. In somewhat altered form, they were being debated in publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic. Slowly, suit-and-tie conservationists were rediscovering the maxim of Sierra Club founder John Muir: “To pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” It was high time. Since the movement had become professionalized, most environmentalists lived in two worlds. In the real world of nature, salmon spawned in rivers beneath the soft russet bark of redwood trees and mountain lions took down the weakest of each year’s deer herd. But in the “real” world, trees were being cut at a pace rapid enough to turn transparent mountain streams into channels of silt and mud. Because of government-sponsored extermination of predators, deer were overpopulating and becoming a “pest.” Environmentalists found themselves agreeing to absurdities: everything from the ugly slaughter of buffalo migrating outside man-made park boundaries to wholesale destruction of the remaining 10 percent of the country’s ancient forests. Ecologist Raymond Dasmann called it World War Three, industrial man’s war on nature. As in any war, civilians were caught in the crossfire. Environmentalists found themselves seriously discussing the costs and benefits of environmental poisons. Was air conditioning worth .0125 human deaths per million?

It was insanity. Or at least schizophrenia. The founders of Earth First! took on the confusing task of integrating these contradictory worlds. Cowboys without illusions, they were determined to roll back the industrialized frontier. Beneath it were remnants of the American Eden, still plentiful, still possible. It was this wild, romantic idea that truly threatened the timber, mining, and ranching barons who had kept the politics of the American West on a tight rein since the closing of the frontier.

To men of their immense power, monkeywrenching was mostly an annoyance. But it was also an indication that the stakes in the environmental wars had risen. Skirmishes between nature lovers and the western business elite had gone on for at least a century. Now the conflict was escalating. The environmental movement had become increasingly powerful. At the same time, industrial development was cutting deeper into the heart of the West. Something had to give.

Another generation of environmentalists might have been content to redouble their lobbying efforts, push for better press coverage, or print yet another calendar with glossy color photographs. But the 1960s had shown even die-hard rednecks like Dave Foreman that you could influence the debate from the outside. And you could have a damn good time doing it.

For ten years, Earth First! did just that. By the late 1980s, the selfproclaimed anarchist “non-organization” boasted more than five thousand subscribers to its newspaper, the closest thing the group had to a membership roster. Earth First! activists dressed as bears kept popping up on the television news like Wild Kingdom reruns on LSD. Taking the term photo opportunity to lengths previously unknown in the environmental movement, they were doing everything from bicycle-locking their necks to bulldozers (the famed “Buggis Maneuver” named after the crazed Texan, now deceased, who invented it) to parading down Wall Street dressed as spotted owls.

And all around the country, there were quiet acts of sabotage. Nachtwerke, Ed Abbey called it. Throwing a monkeywrench into the works of Demonic Progress. Dave Foreman’s rabble-rousing, footstomping fundamentalist-preacher speechifying was more than an institution. It had become a virus.

The arrests in the desert on May 30, 1989, were only the first in a scries of blows aimed at Earth First! Until then the group’s most notable piece of crank mail had been a fan letter from prison-bound Manson groupie Squeaky Fromme. Suddenly Earth First! activists from California to New York were hit by repeated volleys of obscene, threatening hate mail. Faked inflammatory leaflets bearing the group’s name mysteriously appeared in places where they could do the most harm, towns like Moab, Utah, where an annual off-road vehicle race attracted hordes of ham-fisted dirt bikers. Paranoia bubbled over as suspicious-acting newcomers tried to involve veteran members in violent acts. Ordinary stresses magnified, particularly those felt by Earth First! newsletter editors casting back to long-forgotten high-school French to figure out how to pluralize agent provocateur.

After the arrests a number of Earth First!crs asked for advice from people who had been active in radical groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Veterans of the antiwar movement and the American Indian Movement said they recognized a familiar tone in the harassment: incendiary and crude, peppered with racist and sexist epithets. Decades of lawsuits and reams of investigative reporting had identified the FBI as the source of similar harassment against antiwar activists in the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, and other short-lived un-American institutions. Could the FBI itself be the origin of letters beginning “Dear Faggot”? Or was it someone in the Sahara Club, a bunch of thugs who promoted off-road vehicle use in the delicate, spooky moonscape of the California desert? There was neither time nor money to find out. As the trial of the Arizona Five began in the high desert town of Prescott, Arizona, the enemy remained invisible.

Or nearly so. In the late 1980s, a spate of right-wing, pro-industry groups rose up like dragon’s teeth wrapped in yellow ribbons. They claimed to be homegrown, but many of these groups were quietly funded by industry. Some of these down-home folks even claimed their own brand of monkeywrenching. But they were utterly bereft of the wit and good humor that had characterized Earth First! Nobody knew who was to blame when Earth First! activist Judi Bari’s pelvis was blown apart by a pipe bomb in Oakland, California, on May 24, 1990. But it was clear that someone had missed the joke entirely.

Judi Bari survived the bomb, but would walk with a painful limp for the rest of her life. Earth First!, too, was crippled by the abrupt escalation into violence. Even before the explosion, most of the Earth First! founders had begun to move on. They believed it was either time to let the locals take over or to cart Earth First! out to the desert and let the redheaded wattle-necked turkey vultures make it part of the food chain. Because Earth First! had succeeded. Beneath their beer-drinking, gonzo forays into guerrilla theater—and occasional lapses into guerrilla war—Earth First!’s founders shared the goals of the great innovative environmentalists who preceded them, people like Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, and David Brower. With these historic figures very much in mind, the hardscrabble Earth First! cowboys expanded the reach of the hundred-year-old environmental movement to include a truly ecological worldview. But many of them sacrificed their careers—and a few risked their lives—to do it.

The Buckaroos had a good run, longer than anyone could have expected. In a backhanded tribute, former Sierra Club conservation director Doug Scott sharply criticized Earth First! for “playing the Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Their wild ways seduced an entire generation of environmentalists away from the dull, unglamorous work that is the engine of most environmental legislation. If Scott is right, then perhaps the environmental movement was like a lover stuck in a stale relationship. In their well-intentioned effort to ante up to a losing game, many career environmentalists had lost touch with the pure, transcendental rush that landed them at the table in the first place.

Scott was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about at least one. This was not the first generation ripe for seduction. Dave Foreman’s romantic vision had already captured the most daring intellectual environmentalists of a previous generation. Not the least of whom was Foreman himself, who started off his forty-fourth year facing the prospect of spending several decades in a federal pen.

The cottontail froze when Peg Millett dove beneath the acid-green paloverde tree. They stared at each other, the dun-colored rabbit and the woman trying to make herself invisible. A $16-million helicopter hovered above them. Inside it, men peered down through infrared goggles to spot anything warm and living on the desert floor.

Millett slowed her breathing. She waited. After several minutes, the sound of the machine died away. She lifted her head. Visions of Armageddon had subsided hours ago, when she yielded to the rhythm of flight. Now her life was measured by her own metronomic footsteps; by the sky; by the mountain passes and the miles; by hints and intimations carried on the subtle movements of desiccated air.

Before the night was over, Peg Millett would hike sixteen miles through the desert with no compass or flashlight. In the morning she would hitch a ride back to Prescott. She would spend most of the day at her office, shopping by phone for a lawyer. By late afternoon, FBI agents would come to arrest her.

But for now she was safe. The rabbit unfroze, a diorama figure come to life. Gingerly, it began nosing the triangle-leaf bur sage at the edge of the wash. It ignored Millett, as if she were just another creature going about her business in the dry, cracked landscape, under a sheet of stars.

1. The Education of an Environmentalist

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal domestic empire.

—Bernard De Voto

Pm just a hick horseshoer who thinks he’s a bronc rider.

—Dave Foreman, 1991

1960 — Texas

TEXAS HILL COUNTRY starts northwest of San Antonio. Dry flat desert gives way to limestone hills engraved with meandering rivers; prickly pear yields pride of place to juniper and oak. From their southern edge, the rounded hillsides run right up through the middle of the state like a rumpled blanket. The towns here have more churches than bars; people are distinctly, but unoriginally, polite. Generally these towns do not hasten to accept strangers. But in Schertz, Texas, just outside Randolph Air Force Base, they welcome them. Military men and their families are favored guests. It is a patriotic town.

From a small, white-frame building on the corners of Curtis and Pfiel Streets comes the sound of singing. There is a congregation of about 150 inside the double doors. With their own hands, they built the uncomfortable wooden pews they’re sitting on. They hammered up the joists, painted the walls a stark white, installed the Venetian blinds. This is a frontier church, the Church of Christ. There is no figure of Jesus, no stained glass, no cross. In front of the simple wooden baptistery, there is a sunken tub. It measures about four feet by seven feet, like a mini swimming pool or a giant birdbath. A short, skinny kid named David with deep-dish blue eyes and a Leave It to Beaver haircut is standing in it, looking excited and nervous. The preacher strides into the pool, decked out in big rubber waders. In slow motion, intoning words from the Bible, he places his hand on the boy’s head and pushes him all the way down into the water. It is a release; you can hear the congregation sigh. When the kid comes up for air, he breaks into a big, innocent thirteen-year-old smile and the congregation revs up into a hymn. Trust and Obey, they sing, for there’s no other way to be happy with Jesus.

In 1907, Dave Foreman’s great-grandparents drove their wagons across the wide Missouri to Tucumcari, New Mexico, becoming part of one of the great last waves of frontier migration. Later, Foreman would read in the books of Bernard De Voto about the historical currents that drove his family west. Nobody was better suited to unearthing the ironies of the American West than the brilliant and abrasive De Voto, a misfit who fled Mormon Utah for Hazard’s intellectual high country in 1915. In De Voto’s analysis, the western myth was stillborn, laced with nostalgia from the outset but no less poetic for all that. The West’s ultimate irony, De Voto wrote in 1934, lay in the fact that it was the place where frontier culture broke down in the face of aridity. “The pioneer’s tradition of brawn and courage, initiative, individualism, and self-help was unavailing here. He had, that is, to ally himself with the force which sentimental critics are sure he wanted to escape from: the Industrial Revolution.”[1]

In the 1880s the Industrial Revolution began a century-long binge of dam building that would ultimately irrigate half a continent. It brought peaches, apricots, and oranges to the desert. It ripped copper from the heart of Arizona and the mountains of Montana, wrapped railroads like iron chains around the basin and range, made and lost fortunes for magnates in Pittsburgh and New York. It rerouted rivers and shaved the tops off mountains to get at the coal that lay beneath them. It built company towns where rugged individualists toiled year in and year out to live in company houses, shop in company stores, and send their kids to company schools.

But the myth of the frontier persisted. It persisted, not just because it came wrapped in the glamour of celluloid heroes, but because it was deeply embedded in the ethos of a people who sought out the hundredth meridian as if it were a stairway to heaven instead of merely a degree of longitude. From the 1830s until long after the turn of the century, tens of thousands of Scotch-Irish immigrants made their way west, bringing with them a religion founded on the romance of an untouched land. Like many of their fellow travelers, Dave Foreman’s maternal grandparents, the Crawfords, were members of the Church of Christ, a fundamentalist frontier sect that split from traditional Presbyterian orthodoxy in the early 1800s. Its premier theologian was a Scottish immigrant named Thomas Campbell. Reviled as a heretic, Campbell wanted to heal divisions within Christianity by restoring the primitive church of the New Testament, to “recover the primordial past that stood behind the historical past.”[2] In 1801, another renegade Presbyterian named Barton Stone had the same idea. Like Campbell, Stone believed that each local church should be completely independent, with no creed but the Bible. No bishops, no missionaries, no dogma, just the word of God. Stone, a charismatic preacher who thumped the Bible with reckless abandon, started holding outdoor revival meetings in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. It wasn’t long before Cane Ridge looked as if the 82^nd Airborne had landed. White tents billowed like abandoned parachutes on the open grass. Ten thousand people at a time came to the meetings; crowds overflowed into the fields. The wealthy brought their own tents, preferring not to mingle with the hoi polloi even at the gates of heaven. By 1811 the Stone movement had churches in twelve states. After a shaky alliance with the Baptists went bad in 1830, Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander linked up with Stone in 1832. The movement experienced its greatest growth over the next two decades, spreading West with covered wagons, domesticated cattle, and smallpox.

It was a uniquely American religion, a Huck-Finn-on-the-river church where the individual confronted God and his conscience mano a mano. Without an established creed, the Bible was not only the Word, but the Last Word. The lack of a central organization made the Church of Christ anarchistic in the purest sense. It was not chaotic, but organic, with each congregation growing out of a local community and culture. The “Christians in the West” were criticized for being “disorganizers, having no form of government, and aiming a destructive blow at all church government,” explained their leader Barton Stone. Only if we’re lucky, was the gist of Stone’s response to his critics. Members of the Church of Christ “… simply did not concern themselves with organizations, new or old, or with systematic theological construction. Their concern, instead, was for freedom.”

Freedom had its limits, of course. Christians were not allowed to drink or dance. Musical instruments were barred from church. Instead, the human voice became an instrument—in song, debate, and most of all, fiery preaching. These voices rang with a compelling vision. In a raw land that seemed to stand outside time, people dreamed of recovering their primal purity through strict self-abnegation and good works. Legends appeared suggesting that the Church of Christ sprang from an unbroken succession of Christian primitivist outcasts dating back to the time of Jesus. It was as if the church was calling back a sense of rightness, a primeval norm that had disappeared in the clouds of exhaust generated by the combustion engine. “Human time … embodied the disastrous aftermath of the fall” to the frontier Christians. They embraced “the idea of building anew in the American wilderness on the true and ancient foundations.”

Baptism by total immersion was a rite to be taken seriously. When Dave Foreman took the plunge at age thirteen, he took it even more seriously than most. He had already decided that he would be a preacher when he grew up, just like Asa Lipscomb, the minister in Schertz. Lipscomb was a distinguished-looking man who had known David since he was in kindergarten. Not many outside the family had; the Foremans had already moved eleven times since David was born in 1946. His father, Benjamin “Skip” Foreman, was an Air Force pilot. Each time Skip was reassigned, his wife, Lorane, would pack up David, his younger brother, Steve, born in 1953, and their baby sister, Roxanne, who was born in 1955, and move them all to another town or maybe to another country. By the time the Foremans arrived in Schertz, they had lived in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, California, Bermuda, and the Philippines. Yet David’s childhood had been spent in a single neocolonial milieu. Wherever they moved, the Foremans remained part of the military establishment, with its rows of whitewashed houses and PX privileges. Only the scenery changed, from the tropics, where loneliness mingled with exoticism, to culturally barren American towns where the only aesthetic was the magnificent, sculptured desert sky. It was really just a lucky coincidence that brought Asa Lipscomb into David’s life again; as churchpeople, the Lipscombs were part of another gypsy work force and likely to disappear at a moment’s notice. The Foremans and the Lipscombs had become friends while they all lived in Reno, Nevada, in 1951 and Asa Lipscomb had taken a liking to David. David wasn’t a hard kid to like: intelligent, well behaved, and very gentle, especially with animals. With Skip away so much, David attached himself to the older man. Like many Church of Christ preachers, Lipscomb was a raftershaking orator. David wanted to be just like him when he grew up.

It wasn’t that David didn’t get enough attention. Lorane read to him all the time and indulged his fascination with animals. Each night they pored over American Wildlife, Illustrated, with its big, stylized color plates showing jaguars, mountain lions, and bison. David even got upset when Lorane vacuumed up spiderwebs. He was no less tough on himself, praying for weeks that it had been a stick, not a worm, that he accidentally trampled on the way to school. Having grown up on a fann in eastern New Mexico, Lorane shared David’s interest in nature. But she had her limits. When they lived on Randolph Air Force Base, he captured a bull snake. Lorane let him keep it as a pet, but he was allowed to let it out of its cage only while she was out shopping or at church. Mother and son had a code: Lorane would honk her horn as she came up the driveway so that David could return the snake to captivity before she walked in the door.

Foreman may have been a bit of a mama’s boy, but his shyness and sensitivity were tempered by a streak of rowdy self-confidence. He had become an Eagle Scout about the same time he was baptized and excelled at virtually all his Boy Scout activities. He liked to entertain his classmates by dancing on the top of his desk and was a good speaker in church. “He was shy among strangers but not before a crowd,” recalled Lorane. His confidence was tested, though, by a sadistic fluke of the adolescent endocrine system. In fifth grade, he reached the unimpressive height of four feet ten and stayed there. And stayed there and stayed there.

By tenth grade, David still hadn’t cracked five feet. That year, the family moved once again, this time to Blaine, Washington. When Lorane took him to register for his first day of school, the woman working behind the counter at the administration office took one look at him and said, “You must want the elementary school.”

“Embarrassed David something awful,” Lorane said. “He was so small and so smart, when he started school none of the kids would have anything to do with him because they thought he was a child prodigal or something. Oh, gosh. But they found out.”

Foreman was good at turning inauspicious beginnings into triumphs. As a military brat, he had to be. In Blaine, he was helped by the long-awaited capitulation of his recalcitrant gene, which finally let him shoot up eight inches. In eleventh grade, having attained the borderline normal height of five feet six, he was elected class president. But that success was short-lived, because the family moved yet again, this time to Blythe, California, a bland, isolated agricultural community planted smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

“I think that that move hurt David more than any of the others ever had, because he was really starting to have some fun,” said Lorane. “You know, and he had some really good friends and they weren’t rough and tough or anything.”

David seemed to bounce back from almost anything, but his younger brother, Steve, wasn’t weathering the constant upheavals as well. Dave was shy and serious; Steve was a golden-haired charmer. In Blythe, Steve started hanging out with hoods. His parents worried that things came to him too easily, that he wasn’t developing the right kind of character. But there seemed to be little they could do about it.

Foreman spent a miserable senior year in claustrophobic Blythe. He hiked a lot in the Mojave Desert. In contrast to the bleak town, the desert seemed surreal and full of life. It was the kind of life he liked best; fat chuckwallas doing push-ups on dry, superheated boulders and cactus wrens singing their ratchety tune from hiding places in the cream-colored leaves of yucca trees. Even in Blythe, he wasn’t completely antisocial. His eleventh-grade electoral victory had strengthened his interest in politics. Instead of running for office in a brand-new high school where nobody knew him, he worked for Barry Goldwater in the Republican presidential primary. The family moved back to San Antonio, Texas, that summer. In the fall, David attended junior college there. But after his freshman year he decided to go to the University of New Mexico. New Mexico was where his mother’s family lived. What roots he possessed were there. In the summer of 1965, he moved back to Bernalillo and took a dreadful job as an encyclopedia salesman. In the fall he started school.

In Albuquerque, Foreman thrived intellectually. He also began to rebel. His grades were lousy, but he continued a lifelong habit of reading anything that didn’t have its covers hammered shut. At first he signed up as a biology major, but soon switched to anthropology, one of the school’s strongest departments. After discovering the British historian Arnold Toynbee, he became a history major. These days Toynbee is regarded in academic circles as little more than a footnote, but his theory about the crash of industrial civilization made sense to Foreman. It resembled the Last Judgment, with machines doing the work of destruction.

That year, Foreman found another intellectual mentor. Just as some people may be susceptible to a certain virus, a certain number of college students in have a constitutional weakness for the work of novelist Ayn Rand. The 1940s Ubermensch architect Howard Roark, Rand’s protagonist in The Fountainhead, embodies one of the most extreme cases of a novelist falling in love with her creation. The passion was contagious. In Roark, Rand created not just a character but a cultural phenomenon, the enshrinement of a Nietzschean supercapitalist superman. Her cult of the individual won many converts in the late fifties and early sixties, when it seemed to some that the American capitalist system might hold the promise of utopia.

Like most viruses, enthusiasm for Rand’s work generally struck hard, then disappeared. Foreman’s ardor cooled when he discovered Rand’s antipathy toward environmentalism. The only permanent effect of his infatuation was the loss of his religious beliefs. Foreman adopted Rand’s philosophy of atheistic objectivism, almost too energetically. To put his newfound dogma into practice, Foreman gave his father’s watered-down Nixon Republicanism a jolt of 190-proof libertarianism and joined the Young Americans for Freedom. By becoming a libertarian, Foreman stepped outside the traditional political spectrum of liberal and conservative. While conservatives believe in economic freedom and liberals value individual freedom, libertarians believe in maximizing both. In a sense, libertarians have more in common with anarchists than they do with most U.S. politicians. Barry Goldwater was an exception—Goldwater himself had libertarian inclinations and Rand had inspired a whole coven of Goldwater Republicans, including Foreman. In 1966 Foreman became state chair of Young Americans for Freedom, a libertarian youth organization with conservative overtones. Christianity was out. Freedom was in.

Or a new name for freedom. It was almost as if a departmentstore window dresser had changed a set of clothes, but left the mannequins in place. Despite his loss of faith, Foreman retained many of the ideas that he had learned as a churchgoing Christian in the intermountain West. He still believed in individual conscience crashing through the barriers of bureaucracy and dogma. After growing up in a place where the economy was based on raw materials exploited by rich eastern industrialists, he recoiled from any social organization that was not small and locally controlled, feeling that centralized power was anathema to freedom.

Foreman’s own freedom was about to be severely curtailed by the Vietnam War. Brought up on tales of a global communist conspiracy, he had been mouthing off in support of the war in campus debates with the SDS. In 1967 he began to doubt his position, but he kept his reservations to himself. Besides, the military appealed to his competitive streak. He had started a fitness regime back in his ninety-seven-pound weakling days, running and lifting weights on alternate mornings. Now that he was a healthy six-footer, staying in good shape remained an almost obsessive concern. He was confident that he could breeze through basic training. The idea was to be a war hero, go to law school, then run for Congress.

Besides, Foreman didn’t really feel that he had a choice. It was the height of the war and unless they were wealthy or well connected, young men of military age could either enlist, face the draft, or take up duck hunting in the north woods. Foreman chose to enroll in officer-candidate school. The Air Force and the Navy were booked, so he ended up with the Marines in Quantico, Virginia. As it turned out, Foreman and the Marine Corps were a match made in hell.

It took only a week for Foreman to realize he had made a terrible mistake. He might have been strong, but he was also clumsy and uncoordinated, always had been. To his dismay, he discovered that being in good shape didn’t matter if you couldn’t tell left from right on the parade ground. The shy kid who had overcome so many handicaps—being new in school, shorter than everybody else, and way too smart—suddenly found himself back in the role of the class doofus. But this time, the other kids didn’t just ostracize him. The verbal abuse—unremitting and obscene—was followed by nightly raids. Foreman was awakened by a crowd of thugs who beat him up and, most humiliating of all, shaved his head.

Foreman knew when he was licked. On weekend leave, he went to the Library of Congress for help. In that august institution, he researched his way out of the military. The quickest fix, he discovered, was to declare yourself a communist. So Foreman sent a letter to his commanding officer telling him he was no longer loyal to the President of the United States or the Marine Corps. Not only was he a communist, but he was planning to join the SDS and the Progressive Labor Party and “dedicate [his] life to their crusade for true social justice.” Foreman also wrote letters to the Communist Party and to the “Commandant and the Storm Troopers” (aka his base commander) announcing his commitment to “world revolution” and stating that “soon the Fascists will so [sic] against the wall and blood will flow.” Leaving nothing to chance, he made an appointment with the drill instructor. Instead of giving him the Alice’s Restaurant routine (“I want to kill. Keewl! Keewl!”), he took a surer route. I’ve been wrong about the war. I hope the Viet Cong win. Fuck the system, he rat-a-tat-tatted.

Foreman was transferred to casual company, a holding tank for Marine misfits. From there he would either be discharged or sent to the training center at Parris Island, South Carolina, as a regular enlisted man. Known for its brutal indoctrination of raw recruits, Parris Island made Quantico look like a finishing school. Along with its violence, it was renowned for its sand fleas, which swarmed up your sweaty trousers as you stood at attention in the broiling sun like a prisoner on Devil’s Island. It was, in Foreman’s words, “a place where you died.”

One night Foreman was absently pushing a floor buffer across the battered linoleum of an office floor. Outside, a quartered yellow moon ticked off the days before some beefy-necked officer would decide if he was going to live or die. As he passed a desk, he caught sight of his name in a maze of manila folders. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, he kept the floor buffer on, propping it up against a wall while he snatched the folder and read its contents. His eyes moved frantically over the typewritten pages until, beneath the buffer’s mechanical roar, he read the words Parris Island.

Skip was the one who got the call. It was David’s friend Mike. His words rushed out like a clatter of falling rock. Dave was holed up in the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, threatening to shoot anyone who came after him. Hungry and exhausted, Dave had stumbled to a telephone booth and called Mike, asking him to bring him food. Mike agonized over what to do. Finally he called the Foremans in Zuni, where Skip was working for the Federal Aviation Administration.

“God, we jumped in that old car fast,” remembers Lorane. Skip drove up to the mountains with Mike, while Lorane spent a sleepless night with her relatives in Albuquerque. As dawn turned the Sandia range pink the next morning, Skip and Mike showed up with a pale, shaken David. Lorane wept at the sight of him.

After serving thirty-one days in the Marine Corps brig, David was released with a dishonorable discharge. Years later, Foreman would say that his episode with the Marines was more than disillusioning. It caused his whole worldview to implode. “I was crazy as a bedbug throughout this period and for a year afterwards,” he said.

Not knowing what else to do, he moved in with his parents in Zuni. Father and son were barely speaking. Skip and Lorane’s brother, another career military man, had turned David in to the MPs. So angry he could barely look his son in the eye, Skip blurted out that he wished David had gotten killed in Vietnam; it would have been less dishonorable. It took years for father and son to reestablish their relationship. In some ways, they had never really had one, because Skip was absent so much. When he was home, he tried to reassert his authority, but instead ended up alternating unpredictably between strictness and laxity. The equally arbitrary but far more violent discipline of the Marine Corps—“Their educational philosophy is to destroy a person’s individuality and turn them into hamburger” became Foreman’s standard mot on the subject—couldn’t have been better designed to push Skip Foreman’s oldest son into finding out just how far he could stray from his family’s military roots.

At first Dave didn’t go very far, just down the hill to his cousin’s trading post where he worked at the undemanding job of night manager from the spring of 1969 until the summer of 1970. He became friends with a guy named Jack Dembs, a big hunk of a cowboy who worked with Skip at the FAA. At thirty, Jack was seven years older than Foreman. But both men had things to learn from each other. Foreman had been changing fast. In college, Foreman was a stomp, not a hippie. Even though he went to school at the height of the counterculture, he hadn’t smoked pot until after he graduated; he was such a redneck nobody would sell it to him. But by 1970, Foreman was turning into a hippie, albeit a short-haired one. He turned Jack on to marijuana. One night, the two guys drove up to Albuquerque to see Easy Rider, which really blew their minds. Later Foreman would affectionately say he had created a monster. In less than a year, Jack’s hair was long, he was divorced, and he had quit his nice, secure job at the FAA. Jack and Foreman picked up two motorcycles, old BSA 600 cc thumpers, and hit the road in late spring. They toured Yellowstone, then veered west, where they roared down the California coast to Big Sur, searching for the totemic upside-down camera angles and low-budget special effects of the authentic American experience, 1960s-style.

They returned to Zuni in the fall, but the trip seemed to go on and on. An old friend of Jack’s had a surreal subcontracting job for the Air Force and he farmed out much of his work to Jack and Dave. They’d drive 400 miles into the middle of nowhere, lay out an acre of canvas panels in a specific pattern, and leave them there to bake for six hours while a distant satellite snapped a photo. Then they would pick up the panels, drive 400 miles, and repeat the whole process. It reeked of Lewis Mumford, the twentieth-century political philosopher who dated the debasement of the human race to the days of the pyramids, when people first became mere cogs subordinated to a grandiose, inhuman technic. But instead of being crushed beneath the wheels of progress, Jack and Dave scurried happily around the West’s basin and range like bearded, dope-smoking worker ants, the all-seeing eye of the megamachine hovering invisibly above them.

Jack went to horseshoeing school in the spring of 1971 and Dave followed him that summer. Still uncoordinated, Dave was a lousy horseshoer. But he was elected president of his horseshoeing class, which may have been a sign that politics really were his métier, especially because he hadn’t even run for the office. The cowboys all voted for him because he had been helping them with their book work. After the eight-week course was over, Jack and Dave moved up to an old adobe with no running water that Jack’s family owned in the Jemez Mountains outside Santa Fe. They supported themselves with the canvas-humping job and occasional horseshoeing gigs.

The Jemez Mountains were once active volcanoes. Today cattle graze in the bowl of a giant, grassy caldera. Hot springs and waterfalls lie hidden in the folds of steep, reddish hills. When he lived in the mountains in the summer and fall of 1971 Foreman did a lot of backpacking and river running. On days when the solitude of the mountains became too much, he’d drive four hours down to Albuquerque and hang out with his friends from college. One of them, Dave Seeley, was bartending at a joint next door to a Pizza Hut. He introduced Dave to some folks from the Black Mesa Defense Fund, which was based in Santa Fe. Soon Dave added Santa Fe to his usual peregrinations, stopping in at the Black Mesa office to volunteer every couple of weeks.

At Black Mesa, Foreman was introduced to a unique species of anarcho-environmentalism native to the American Southwest. The Black Mesa Defense Fund was formed in 1970 to stop construction of a coal mine atop a brooding desert highland inhabited by Hopi and Navajo Indians. Its founders were artists, musicians, and rich kids. They were educated roughnecks with a bohemian bent and a political passion that for a while, at least, became all-consuming. Piece by piece, the activists amassed information revealing that the mesa was the black heart of a massive, politically interconnected series of public-works projects that stretched from Los Angeles to Wyoming. The fight over Black Mesa became the ultimate environmental David-and-Goliath story. Black Mesa Defense’s puny slingshots ranged from filing lawsuits to vandalizing heavy equipment. It was a frenetic, free-form, wholehearted effort that lasted an exhausting three years, a spindly eccentric cactus with wild magenta flowers but very sharp spines. An aberration, an art form, and a rescue mission all in one, Black Mesa Defense was to the Sierra Club what John Coltrane was to Bach. It was a hell of an introduction to the environmental movement.

In characteristic entrepreneurial fashion, Foreman decided to start his own version of Black Mesa Defense. In late 1971 he moved back to Albuquerque to open a satellite office for River Defense, a Black Mesa offshoot. But River Defense was just the beginning. Dave Foreman had figured out what he wanted to do with his life. To prepare for a career as a conservationist, he enrolled in undergraduate science classes at the University of New Mexico, planning to apply to a master’s program in biology.

As usual, Foreman’s studies took a backseat to politics. Right away, he joined a student conservation group and began writing an environmental column for the school newspaper. He cajoled his way onto the New Mexico Wilderness Study Committee, which was run by a group of hoary old geezers who looked as if they had been working on outdoor issues since territorial days. Realizing volunteer labor was in short supply, the Wilderness Committee reluctantly signed up the scruffy-looking student to coordinate the environmentalist response to the review of the Gila National Forest.

In Albuquerque, Foreman started hanging around a pretty, part-Cherokee bartender named Debbie Sease. Like Foreman, Sease had been a student at the University of New Mexico. She possessed the impenetrable steadiness of an outdoor guide and later became one for a few years. But beneath her steely river-runner’s facade, she was as shy as Foreman. From across the bar, Foreman’s blue eyes and sandy, dark blond hair blended in with a thousand other eager-looking male faces of Anglo-Saxon persuasion. But when they met a little more formally on a wilderness study trip, Foreman was able to make a stronger impression. She gave him a copy of Edward Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire, a loosely connected series of essays that were a lazy seduction, a roar of anger, and a religious offering to wilderness in the Southwest. “It was the first book I’d ever read that I totally agreed with,” said Foreman.[3] By the spring of 1972, they were living together and organizing the third Earth Day at the University of New Mexico. Partway through the semester, Foreman dropped out of school, too busy with environmental work to keep up with his studies. He began the compulsive work schedule that would give him a sense of order in the midst of chaos for the next twenty years.

The geezers on the Wilderness Study Committee were unprepared for this onslaught of obsessive hippie redneck energy. Foreman took over the Gila wilderness campaign, arranging for a poster to be made, putting together a slide show to get people worked up about the region’s beauty, and organizing raiding parties of environmentalists to testify at Forest Service hearings. His work caught the attention of Jerry Mallett, the youthful éminence grise of the Wilderness Society’s Denver office. Mallett spoke to his boss Clif Merritt and in January 1973, Foreman was invited back to Washington, D.C., for a Wilderness Society lobbying seminar. Another young hotshot named Doug Scott showed Foreman around town. Neither was particularly impressed with the other. But Scott’s lack of enthusiasm didn’t prevent seasoned lobbyist Harry Crandell from offering Foreman a job as the group’s New Mexico field consultant. The pay was minimal, even for those days—$250 a month, plus $50 expenses. But money was the last thing on Foreman’s mind. He accepted the offer. And he was thrilled.

In the flush of his exalted new position, Foreman and Sease moved to the tiny town of Glenwood, New Mexico. The best thing about Glenwood was the country that surrounded it. The Gila Wilderness Area and the Gila Primitive Area were made up of nearly 600,000 acres of juniper-clad mountains where you could lose yourself for days at a time. They lived in the town’s oldest house, a tin-roofed farmhouse with foot-and-a-half adobe walls, exposed wood beams, and a corral for Nellie Belle Queen Bee Junebug, their prized mule. They paid only $40 a month to live there—rent even an environmentalist could afford. In October of 1975, they were married in Debbie’s stepsister’s backyard in Albuquerque. They bought land in Glenwood with two other couples. Eventually they hoped to build an adobe of their own. Debbie spent hours sketching its elaborate plan.

Glenwood was the real West, where the past is all recent and the line between myth and reality is weaker than truck-stop coffee. On a lucid day, Foreman’s landlord could be persuaded to reminisce about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The two outlaws had spent a few months working at French’s ranch, about three miles away in the town of Alma. The landlord didn’t remember much about them, just that neither looked a stitch like Paul Newman. But Foreman was enchanted by the thought of the outlaws huddled around a gas lamp on some wintry night a century ago. Who knows? They might have sat in his very own living room, oiling their pistols and listening for the sound of federales’ hooves.

More recently the area around Glenwood had been a stomping ground for a law-abiding transplant from the Midwest named Aldo Leopold. Leopold arrived in the Southwest in 1909, a greenhorn fresh out of Yale forestry school. His superiors praised his intelligence. But the experienced hands who worked under him found the well-heeled college boy an irritating know-it-all. Luckily, even a rich boy could earn his spurs. By the 1920s, after suffering a serious illness that kept him out of the field for over a year, Leopold had matured. His ideas were evolving into the philosophy that would emerge in the century’s most important book on the environment, A Sand County Almanac. Foreman would call it the century’s most important book, period. The Almanac wasn’t released until after Leopold’s death in 1948, but during his lifetime he published a veritable army of essays. They trace the development of Leopold’s great contribution: the idea of land as community, rather than commodity. A ground-breaking essay, was published in 1921 in the Journal of Forestry. “The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy” was the forestry profession’s first formal discussion of the wilderness idea. In the essay, Leopold suggested cordoning off half a million acres of national forestland surrounding the headwaters of the Gila River. All signs of civilization would be barred from the region, which consisted of high mountains and box canyons in New Mexico’s Mogollon Mountains.

Five days after Leopold left the southwest for a new job in Wisconsin, his supervisor at the Forest Service bestowed a parting tribute. On June 3, 1924, the Gila Wilderness Area was established. It was the first wilderness area in the national forest system. Leopold’s biographer noted: “No European nation ever could, or ever would, proclaim such a wilderness.”[4] And, he might have added, no red-blooded young American could live in such a wilderness and not fall desperately, romantically in love with it. More important than any single human being’s joy, sorrow, or neurosis, wilderness existed in a place beyond boundaries. Its preservation was central to the illusion that America was pure at heart, free of the claustrophobic satin-upholstered decadence of the Old World. At least so it seemed to the young couple living in their frontier adobe, with the Gila Wilderness right outside the front door.

2. EAST: Burn On

There’s a red moon rising On the Cuyahoga River Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding Down the Cuyahoga River Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Cleveland, city of light, city of magic Cleveland, city of light, you’re calling me Cleveland, even now I can remember ‘Cause the Cuyahoga River Goes smokin’ through my dreams

Burn on, big river, burn on Burn on, big river, burn on Now the Lord can make you tumble And the Lord can make you turn And the Lord can make you overflow But the Lord can’t make you burn …

—Randy Newman “Burn On,” 1972

1970 — The City

THE FIRST EARTH DAY, April 22, 1970, gave New York City mayor John Vliet Lindsay a novel feeling: relief The epithet most commonly attached to Lindsay’s name was Kennedyesque. The tall, good-looking aristocrat was descended from the Dutch patroons who were the first in a distinguished line of New York City discount shoppers, having purchased the island for a few knickknacks from its native inhabitants. But Lindsay possessed neither the Kennedys’ back-room savvy nor his Dutch forebears’ negotiating skills. By 1970, he was vehemently despised by every union sanitation man and taxi driver in the city of New York. These were not people one enjoyed having as enemies. They sputtered saliva in your face when they yelled at you; they made threats you felt certain they were capable of carrying out. At various times during the Lindsay administration, they did. The city became paralyzed. Cabs wouldn’t pick up passengers. Trash piled up on street corners in the dead stinking heat of summer. Lindsay’s union troubles were a presentiment of New York City’s future as a second Calcutta. So John Lindsay enjoyed the hell out of Earth Day. The city was one giant, pulsing good vibe. The blue-eyed aristocrat marched down Fifth Avenue with 100,000 of the city’s masses. It was the first day he could remember appearing on the street without getting booed.[5]

It was a time of unanimity, brief but sweet. Pollution was the common enemy and victory still seemed possible. The righteous energy had started pumping up back in 1969, a banner year for environmental disasters. The season opener was the Santa Barbara oil spill, a drilling platform leak that washed oil-slicked waves onto a stretch of heavily populated shoreline in late January. Television flashed powerful images of dying grebes, gulls, and murrelets, a macabre Surfin’ Safari on the coast of southern California.

By summer, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River was providing more sensational entertainment for America’s television screens. The Cuyahoga, which bisects Cleveland and pours into Lake Erie, had become so polluted that even the leeches and sludge worms deserted it. The Cuyahoga didn’t flow: it oozed. On June 22, it did something else. It ignited. A burning slick of oil and kerosene floated through the city, exhaling a five-story fireball that took out two railroad bridges like a surge of napalm. The incident made Cleveland the butt of jokes for years afterward.[6] It also inspired a Randy Newman song which suggested that not only was God dead, but maybe Nature was, too. Twenty years later New Yorker writer Bill McKibben would expound this compelling idea more soberly, although with less brevity, in his book The End of Nature.

What few people outside Cleveland realized was that this wasn’t the pyromaniac river’s first inflammatory episode. The Cuyahoga had also caught fire in 1936 and 1952. But by 1969, a new epoch had begun. Television news had become the American family’s equivalent of saying grace before dinner. This time, when the Cuyahoga burned, its flames illuminated the poisons lurking at the edges of the American landscape. Soon every major magazine was trumpeting pollution stories. Time and The Saturday Evening Post both began regular sections covering the environment.

With the media jumping on the bandwagon, politicians couldn’t be far behind. The enthusiasm started all the way at the top. President Richard Nixon, happy to be asked about something other than the Vietnam War, called for Americans to “make peace with nature” and “make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water.” In a heated race for reelection, California Governor Ronald Reagan announced, “… there is no subject more on our minds than the preservation of our environment.”{1} Reagan’s gubernatorial challenger, Jesse Unruh, the sloppy, overweight Tammany Hall-style boss of the California legislature, said it best: “Ecology has become the political substitute for the word ‘mother.’ ”[7]

If doggedly conservative Ronald Reagan was giving lip sendee to ecology back in ‘69, the liberal community was in a positive tizzy. Senator Ed Muskie tried to shift part of the federal highway fund to pollution control and mass transit. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the strongest conservationist in the U.S. Congress, called for the elimination of all nonreturnable bottles, cans, and jars. Why not come up with a practically pollution-free auto while you’re at it? asked Nelson.

In Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, a twenty-three-year-old named Doug Scott joined a group of students planning an environmental teach-in. Scott had avoided the draft by enrolling in the school’s graduate program in forestry. He had done his share of antiwar demonstrating, hanging out with the freaks shouting “Fuck Nixon” on the Capitol mall. Eventually Scott decided that levitating the Pentagon wasn’t his style. Still, he didn’t see why some of the antiwar movement’s tactics couldn’t be adapted to conservation, which had been a mania with him since the two summers he spent as a park ranger at Carlsbad Caverns.

As it turned out, the same idea had occurred to Senator Gaylord Nelson. Scott remembers that the synchronicity was a little, well, deflating. “I remember how … hurt, in a sense, we were, when somebody brought in Time magazine, which in mid-October of ‘69, in their Miscellany column, had a little thing saying the senator from Wisconsin, who was a great conservationist, and whom I had met on and off by that time, had this idea. Because we had it, too. We were the first people who walked in his door and said, Hey, we’re doing this at the University of Michigan,” said Scott.

Nelson and the Michigan students weren’t the only ones suddenly shouting “Eureka!” at the sight of a tree. By the end of the year, little green triangles were appearing on lapel buttons everywhere. Their genesis was obscure, but the meaning was clear. Antiwar activists were realizing that their support for Vietnamese peasants wasn’t just a rebellion against America’s latest clubfooted attempt at manifest destiny in a foreign jungle. It was also a rebellion against the alienating, materialistic, Third World-exploiting American Way of Life. Once they figured this out, college students turned their raging hormones and undemanding schedules to good account. In a Reader’s Digest article drumming up support for the April 22 “Teach-In,” which came to be called Earth Day, Senator Nelson detailed a succession of “small miracles” on college campuses.

“Whether they are burning billboards [author’s italics], burying an internal combustion engine or giving out ‘dishonor awards’ (‘Smokestack of the Month’), students everywhere have shown a flair for spotlighting the issue,” Nelson wrote. “At the University of Washington, conservation militants put out a bucket of oil and invited onlookers to dip their hands in it so they’d know how it felt to be a bird caught in an offshore oil slick. A 19-year-old coed put dye and peanut hulls into the toilets of Miami’s shoreline hotels to see if raw sewage was going into Biscayne Bay; it was. On April 22, a group at the University of Minnesota plans to march to the Minneapolis Mall, where they will set up tents and hand out free oxygen.”[8]

In the early 1980s, Earth First! would refine these guerrilla-theater tactics, outraging their opponents and amusing viewers of TV news. Later in the decade, AIDS activists in ACT-UP and Queer Nation would adopt a harsher brand of guerrilla theater, appropriate to a situation where the results of institutionalized callousness were more immediate.

On Earth Day, things did not seem so bleak. Except for the Daughters of the American Revolution (“Subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them,” warned a Mississippi matron in early April),[9] Earth Day had very few enemies. Much as they would twenty years later, corporations jumped on the environmental bandwagon. Putting their mouths where their money was supposedly going to follow, they snatched public-relations victory from the jaws of potential stock-dividend disaster. For example, the president of General Motors committed his company “to eliminating the automobile as a factor in the nation’s air-pollution problem,” even if it took abandoning the gasoline engine itself{2} Other companies announced pollution-control projects: less-polluting grades of oil and biodegradable containers. When all else failed, they ran antilittering advertisements.[10]

The energetic Scott quickly hitched a ride on the Earth Day caravan. He was in line for a prime position, having already talked himself into a series of summer jobs with big environmental groups. Along with another “token student,” he was placed on the board of directors of Environmental Teach-In, Inc., the group organizing Earth Day.[11] At first, the teach-in depended on handouts from other liberal nonprofit groups. But Earth Day soon grew beyond a volunteer effort. Denis Hayes, an intense prelaw student from Harvard, convinced Gaylord Nelson to hire him as Earth Day’s coordinator. Hayes had an unusual background for a Harvard student. His father, a Washington State paper-mill worker, had been partially deafened by the noise of the mill’s heavy machinery. At twenty-five, the working-class Hayes already felt pushed to the wall by overindustrialization. He saw its effects, not just on his family, but on his hometown of Camas, Washington, set in the green foothills of the Cascade range, where the local pulp mill had polluted the Columbia River and belched sulfur into the air. After serving as president of his undergraduate student body at Stanford, Hayes did the requisite Third World hippie stint before gracing Harvard’s prelaw program. With blue eyes set deep in his bony face, he struck a New York Times reporter as the quintessential angry young man.[12] Calling for Earth Day to “bypass the traditional political process,”[13] Hayes took one disdainful look at the plush, wall-to-wall carpeting in the Common Cause offices and told everyone to start packing. He moved the teach-in over to a building on Dupont Circle, which Scott remembers as a “crummy old rat-infested place that was full of little movement groups.” It was the perfect stage for the bloodless coup Hayes and the others were trying to pull off.

Through the weird chemistry of the times, they did it. Earth Day was a resounding success. Twenty million people either marched, demonstrated, or participated in “happenings” and “teach-ins” at 1,500 campuses and 10,000 schools. It was fitting that Cleveland’s demonstrators wound up on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. It was no longer burning, but the river still oozed rather than doing a proper meander through the midwestern city. Standing at the spot where founding father Moses Cleaveland allegedly landed in 1796, one student flourished a plastic sack full of garbage, groovily intoning, “This is my bag.”[14]

In a slightly more impressive gesture, New York City banned combustion engines from Fifth Avenue for two hours. It was eerily quiet as 100,000 New Yorkers marched down Manhattan’s central artery. Despite a marathon Frisbee game and the ubiquitous haze of marijuana smoke, one reporter characterized Earth Day in New York as “a secular revival meeting.” Speakers urged participants to think more deeply about what they could do to fight pollution. The Environmental Action Coalition handed out a “New York Pollution Survival Kit” with forty things that an individual could do to fight noise, waste, and dirt—or in 1990s hypespeak, forty things they could do to save the earth.[15]

It was going to take more than a laundry list to slay the megamachine. Even on a day that contained much of the hopeful side of the activism sparked by the Vietnam War, something unpleasant was in the air, both literally and figuratively. At an Alaska Earth Day gathering, Interior Secretary Walter Hickel rather undiplomatically announced plans to construct an 800-mile hot-oil pipeline that would slash through the Arctic tundra from one end of the state to the other. In Washington, D.C., as 10,000 longhairs rocked out on the mall, the U.S. Department of Commerce chose April 22 to announce that it was granting a permit for a major new oil refinery outside Honolulu.[16]

But Earth Day participants accomplished many of their immediate goals. Since the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892, the conservation movement’s sole mission had been preserving bits and pieces of the open frontier. With the advent of ecologists like Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall in the 1920s, the movement haltingly expanded its agenda and ideology. But for the most part, it remained in the doughty realm of sensible shoes and funny hats favored by women who would rather slog around a swamp than eat at “21.” One of those women, Rachel Carson, became the link between old-style conservation and the contemporary environmental movement. With the publication of her book Silent Spring in 1962, Carson alerted the country to the dangers of pesticides. This new awareness widened the movement to include crusaders like Barry Commoner and Ralph Nader, ethnic, highly politicized urbanites characterized as populist pollution fighters by historian Stephen Fox. When the children of the sixties tentatively pulled the two strands of old-style wilderness conservation and populist pollution fighting together on April 22, 1970, they created what is now considered the contemporary environmental movement. Both the environmental agenda and its constituency had broadened. The twenty million people who turned out for Earth Day made sure that the environment would never again be considered a special interest.

This new diversity was reflected in Earth Day’s participants, who ranged from Nelson Rockefeller to Abbie Hoffman. If Earth Day was a benchmark for the environmental movement, it was also a benchmark for its participants, many of whom date the beginning of their environmental consciousness to April 22, 1970. In fact, Earth Day was just the most visible manifestation of a groundswell of feeling that was already propelling far-reaching legislation through Congress. In a single year, 1970, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were strengthened, the Environmental Protection Agency was created by executive order, and the National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law. Innumerable environmental laws were also enacted at the state level. The momentum continued through the 1970s, which has been called “the decade of environmental legislation.”

But a mere eight days after Earth Day, the U.S. Air Force began bombing raids on Cambodia. Four days later, four students demonstrating against the war at Kent State University in Ohio were shot and killed by the National Guard. The country was riveted by the emblematic photograph of a young woman crying over the body of a fallen protester. Not long afterward, a majority of Americans turned against the war.

The Kent State killings yanked public attention away from the environment and back to the war. Hard-core antiwar activists argued that it should have remained there all along. From the beginning, they had accused Earth Day organizers of being government dupes. It was true that the environment provided a new focus for the energy of antiwar activists. For some it was temporary. Others found a lifelong cause.

As the Earth Day crowds dispersed, its organizers wondered if a mass movement could truly embody the intellectual and spiritual ideals of twentieth-century environmentalism. Two decades later, Denis Hayes talked about his disappointment with the results of the first Earth Day, even as he prepared to launch the second. “We hoped it would lead to a new kind of ideology, a new value system based on ecology and a reverence for life,” said Hayes. Instead, Hayes charged, the movement was ideologically and geographically fragmented. Dominated by the upper middle class, it ignored the grass roots, labor, and minorities. Its provincialism left it ill equipped to function on the global level, where the most significant conservation issues would be decided in the 1990s and beyond.[17]

Oddly, few of the people who later played important roles in Earth First! remember Earth Day as an important event in their lives. Earth Day was only tangentially related to their romantic vision of wilderness. Most of Earth Day’s momentum came from outside the wilderness movement—from concern over pollution problems that had grown severe enough to warrant a special issue of Newsweek in January 1969, and from the frantic energy of the antiwar movement. In contrast to Doug Scott, most of the people who later joined Earth First! were not active in the antiwar movement. Either they were rightwingers, gung-ho to join the Marines like Dave Foreman, or they weren’t yet of draft age. Born just a few years apart, Doug Scott and the members of Earth First! seemed to belong to different generations. Scott and others like him had been formed by the stable, affluent society of the 1950s and early 1960s. But to the teenagers who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, a disintegrated social order was the only reality. Fed on post-Vietnam cynicism instead of outraged liberal optimism, Earth First!ers turned toward the green tunnel of wilderness.[18]

It was only natural that Earth Day would have marginal appeal to these kids. Denis Hayes said that the overarching purpose of Earth Day was to reform society, not escape from it. Organizers hoped to achieve this by consolidating the antiwar, women’s, civil-rights, and conservation movements. It was a good strategy, at least in theory. For decades, the crabby, brilliant eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin had been trying to make common cause among these social movements. Domination of the environment came from the same nasty mind-set that oppressed women and the Third World, said Bookchin.

Bookchin was right. But there was a big problem with his idea. No matter how much you stirred them, the political ingredients never quite seemed to mix into a viable coalition. Most career environmentalists scoff at the very idea of an environmental “movement.” In a sense, the environmental movement is not political at heart, they say. It is a collection of individuals with very different experiences and agendas: old-line WASP Republicans who like to shoot ducks, lower-middle-class blacks living downwind from a refinery, housewives who turn into ecowarriors when their kids get leukemia. Not exactly a unified bloc. Even the hipster mountain climbers who fancy themselves born-again John Muirs aren’t particularly ideological. They tend to have an aversion to soiling the wilderness ethic with the selfish, grotty needs of human beings. It wasn’t just that environmentalists disagreed about politics; most simply didn’t care.

In the 1980s, Earth First! would inherit a piece of the environmental movement’s traditional apolitical base. But as Earth First! grew, it would attract a second generation. Like the organizers of Earth Day—who were the second generation of the movement as a whole—the new wave of Earth First!ers found the idea of reforming human society more attractive than the idea of dispensing with it. Initially fueled by Dave Foreman’s backslid-fundamentalist vision of apocalypse, most members of Earth First! eventually found they wanted something to hold on to, even if it was only a pipe dream that industrial society could somehow be reoriented toward an ecologically saner system. Foreman and his friends got jazzed about animals; the new generation of Earth First!ers actually thought people could be interesting, too.

This crevasse, which eventually would obsess the left wing of the environmental movement, began as a barely perceptible crack in the sidewalk on Earth Day in New York City. Even then, some left-wing environmentalists were frustrated by the way the rest of the movement turned ideology into Wonder Bread. They worried that conservation’s broad constituency and essentially apolitical nature left it vulnerable to corporate depredations. This situation was particularly galling for Fred Kent, coordinator of New York’s Environmental Action Coalition. Kent was the first spoilsport to criticize the business community’s attempt to turn Earth Day into a public-relations bonanza. “It is irresponsible for business to say that they support us. They are just trying to co-opt us,” Kent said as Earth Day participants frolicked under ecology banners erected by New York utility Consolidated Edison. “The apparent unanimity on the issue of environment disturbs many who fear that genuine progress will be lost amid a flurry of superficial reforms,” the article went on to explain.[19]

Unknown to Kent, new seeds had already fallen into those cracks in the sidewalk. Soon strange plants would grow in them, between Fred Kent and Doug Scott, between the old-line aristocrats and the ethnic peasants, between the Lefties and the hard-faced mountaineers. Already, unshaven ecosaboteurs were hiding in the seashell-colored hills of northern Arizona. In the 1980s, these weird hybrids would liven up a movement that had been coasting on the brief spurt of energy commandeered by Earth Day.

3. WEST: Phantoms

Their night-riding careers are doomed to end probably in disaster….

—Harold Butts, Arizona real estate developer, 1964

We mill never lay down Arms [till] The House of Commons passes an Act to put dowti all Machinery hurtful to Commonality … We petition no more—that won’t do—fighting must.

—Signed by the General of the Army of Redressers
Ned Ludd Clerk

Redressers for ever Amen [1812]

1959 — The Desert

MARC WAS THE YOUNGEST ONE. Blue crystal air held him in its arms as he threw a Molotov cocktail at the dish-shaped billboard advertising Meteor Crater, tourist attraction, Come one, Come all. THUNK. The Coke bottle rolled to the ground, perfectly intact—except for the gasoline seeping out. So was the Meteor Crater billboard, which seemed to mock him as it cast its shadow under the full, bright moon.

The next night Marc came back carrying a cold chisel in the pocket of his Levi’s. He cracked the bolts that held the billboard to its steel legs, watching with satisfaction as it toppled to the ground. After he finished his night’s work there was nothing left but a spindly forest of naked posts. To make sure the billboard couldn’t be repaired, he sawed it into firewood.

It was hard work, but Marc had help. There was his friend from seventh grade, Ted Danson. And then there were the big kids. Some nights there were more than a dozen: graduate students in archaeology who were visiting the Museum of Northern Arizona from Princeton and Harvard, geologists, a couple of Indians. Once in a while they’d detour onto Route 66 to get their kicks. They’d hold a billboard pigout along the old commercial highway. In a single night, relay teams could down as many as thirty.

But mostly they hit Route 180, the road that turned and twisted between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. “It was protection of the entryway to the Grand Canyon, protecting an area that was pristine-looking, so that people wouldn’t have to look at all this garbage on the way to the canyon,” said Bill Breed, a Museum of Northern Arizona curator who took part in the raids. Marc’s favorite target was a housing development that a certain Mr. Harold Butts was inflicting on the road to the Grand Canyon. It was called Fort Valley, a scattering of ranchettes built on a floodplain before zoning laws were introduced in the mid-1960s. The land was impressive, a vista Clint Eastwood could squint across. But when the winter snows melted, the Butts ranchettes looked like a Monopoly set that had been unceremoniously dunked in a swimming pool.

It was 1959. The tsunami of uncontrolled development was ramming its high, blind edge up against an old way of life. Los Angeles native and student of Americana Randy Newman wrote about it in the song “Dayton, Ohio—1903” on the 1972 album Sail Away. “Let’s sing a song of long ago/When things could grow/And days flowed quietly/The air was clean and you could see/And folks were nice to you,” Newman sang in mock simplicity. In the cities, young people were wearing green lapel buttons and marching to stem the tide. In the Southwest, people are less likely to join groups, carry signs, discuss political philosophy. Marc’s friends were desert rats. They did what they could to make things right.

To Harold Butts, Marc and his friends were criminals. To Stanford University professor Iain Boal, they were populist defenders of the status quo—Luddites. Luddites were rebellious nineteenth-century Nottingham weavers who began losing their jobs because of automation. They called themselves followers of “King Ludd,” or Ned Ludd. Nobody knows if King Ludd was real or mythical. But the Luddites were real enough. Their midnight raids were effective—for a short time—in destroying the new looms that were putting them out of work.

The popular conception of Luddites is that they were angry, infantile vandals whose attempt to stop progress was doomed to failure. Boal suggests something different. Citing the work of British historians Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Boal believes that the Nottingham weavers—and the followers of Captain Swing who destroyed threshing machines for similar reasons in the 1830s—were engaging in a primitive form of collective bargaining at a time when unions were outlawed. Food riots in England served a similar purpose. When wheat prices became unbearably high, a peasant, usually a woman, would go to the town square and call out for a riot. The peasants would seize the wheat from millers. They would agree on a fair price among themselves, which they paid to the owners of the wheat. Food riots, like Luddism, were a way for ordinary people to gain a measure of authority over their lives at a time when technology and social organization were growing increasingly complex, centrally controlled, and unresponsive. In the twentieth century, the Guerrilla Girls borrowed from both Luddism and guerrilla theater to protest discrimination in the art world. They donned masks, just as the early Luddites had, and sneaked into art shows, where they exhibited pointed, well-researched statements about the art establishment.

Contrary to popular belief, the Luddites did not fail. The new technology eventually took hold in the Nottingham mills, but King Ludd’s followers slowed its adoption long enough for the work force to adapt. Appropriate-technology supporters like Boal—people who believe technology is not intrinsically bad, but that new forms of technology must emerge organically from less destructive social values— tend to believe that Luddism is not antitechnology per se. In the publication Utne Reader, Daniel Grossman described a phenomenon called Neo-Luddism. He contended that today’s Neo-Luddites don’t believe in saying no to all changes, just the ones that “threaten valued traditions, customs, and institutions.”[20]

Grossman may be right. But then again, some people say no a lot more loudly and frequently than others. From 1959 to 1964, Marc and his monkeywrenching team were in a defensive frenzy. Real-life Beaver Cleavers, they gnawed at the supports of billboard commercialism. Driven by the demon of Babbittry, they turned the work ethic on its head as they sweated through the nights outside Flagstaff, speeding the death of their own Puritanism as the country flew toward sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Even though he was only twelve when he started monkeywrenching, Marc Gaede was sophisticated beyond his years. He was a unique species of archaeology brat, a child who could only have been produced by a landscape of dark monsoon clouds over high red mesas. Marc’s father was an alcoholic reporter back in the bad old days when those two words were still synonymous. The elder Gaede had checked out of Marc’s life years before and Marc’s mother wasn’t far behind. Marc was raised by his sister and her husband, an archaeologist named Alan Olson. From the age of eleven, Gaede spent his summers working on archaeology crews, surveying Glen Canyon before it was flooded by the big dam, getting to know Monument Valley the way a suburban kid knew his own backyard. He developed a reverence for the skeletal landscape of the Southwest, its bony canyon walls, the honeycombed eye sockets of its cliff dwellings. Everywhere he looked he saw white men chipping away at the stone that knitted the landscape together, dynamiting a canyon here, blasting away at a mountain there, building dams, digging mines, turning rivers into sandy wastes. He became a German shepherd protecting his home, a pack rat counting coups. He stacked his trophies—the remains of enemy billboards —in the woods outside Flagstaff. Maybe protecting nature was in his genes. Marc’s maternal grandfather was Irving Brant, a newspaperman who had been an adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes. Brant also was a crony of the National Audubon Society’s Rosalie Edge, the only woman in the early conservation movement with real clout. He played an important role in preservation issues, including the establishment of Olympic National Park.

Irving Brant was not your average skeptical journalist. He was attracted to pantheism and subscribed to John Muir’s central belief, which he characterized as “the idea that the world exists in part for its non-human inhabitants.” Brant was no revolutionary, but if he had been born later in the century he might have been. By then some of the most dynamic and literate members of the conservation elite were considered radicals, including Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower, authors Edward Abbey and William Eastlake, and the social theorist and writer Joseph Wood Krutch. The virus of radicalism was most prevalent among people who had become intimate with the delicate landscape of the Southwest, a place where even a brief touch of civilization leaves an ugly, visible scar. But Marc Gaede was the first of a new generation. For him, going underground was not an agonizing mid-life transition, but a rite of passage into adulthood. Before he and his friend Ted reached voting age, they shared credit for helping to topple virtually every billboard between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. More than five hundred unsightly road signs ate dirt before the rampage was over.

By the late sixties, Marc Gaede and Ted Danson had both moved on to other pursuits. Ted became an actor, with a sideline in Hollywoodstyle environmental activism. After a stint as a Marine paratrooper, Marc immersed himself in the drug culture. He became a nomad, staying at hippie houses all over the West. Several times, he visited the canyon at Laguna, where orange sunshine was being manufactured by the Brotherhood, a confederation of drug manufacturers that included the famed LSD pioneer Augustus Owsley Stanley III, also known simply as Owsley. Marc was even there the day Timothy Leary wandered outside to announce his candidacy for president in front of a crowd of stoned hippies.

Being a flower child was great. The girls were pretty and the dope was good. But by the end of the decade Marc found himself living in his own private Altamont, which arrived wearing a blue uniform at the crash pad in Tucson where he spent the majority of his time. One by one, his friends got busted. Paranoia seeped out of the adobe walls; it shot out of cactus spines; it vibrated along the power lines that were beginning to march in unhealthy military formation across the Sonoran desert. Everything felt poisoned.

In the spring of 1970 Marc drove from Tucson to visit friends in Aspen. He dropped a hit of acid with them and suddenly he couldn’t stand being there anymore. Leaving Aspen in the middle of a snowstorm, he headed south. By the time he reached the dreamscape of southern Utah canyon country he was coming down from his high. Driving his VW bug into Moab, Utah, Marc recognized familiar landmarks. In the early-morning light the serrated ridges of Deadhorse Point looked apricot colored; they stretched for hundreds of miles, a fleet of barks and brigantines bigger than the imagination of any sixteenth-century Spanish monarch. He nearly cried when he saw the old stone house at Arches National Park where park superintendent Bates Wilson lived. He was stunned by the brightness of sunlight reflecting off the last of the spring snow; he was bowled over by the intensity of Moab’s blue sky deepening against warm, red rock. In the midst of all this, Marc Gaede had a revelation. A simple one. He was home.

“When I came into Moab I didn’t necessarily want to be an environmentalist. I just wanted to be with gentle people, to live in beauty,” he said.

“This was southern Utah. It was beautiful. The people were beautiful and the country was spectacular. The cliffs were clean. Everything was clean. There were no more drugs. There was no more paranoia. I can’t tell you the joy I felt coming into that place.”

Leaving Moab, Marc passed through the Navajo reservation, where mesas rise out of the flat plains like startling, elegant altars. He passed all the places he had worked as a kid. Navajo Mountain. Shiprock. Monument Valley. Kayenta. And just outside of Kayenta, Black Mesa.

Since the early 1960s Marc had known that the Peabody Coal Company had plans for the mesa. News like this always hit the archaeology crews first. Because of the Federal Antiquities Act of 1906 they were called in to do surveys before the draglines lumbered across the land. And in this case, there was no doubt that the draglines, sooner or later, would be coming. Black Mesa, a brooding 3,300-foot-tall highland, scrubby and overgrazed, contained the largest coal deposit in Arizona. It was inhabited almost exclusively by Navajo families and their sheep. But the situation was complicated by the fact that both Navajo and Hopi tribes had rights to the mesa. Before the coal company could come in and dig up the earth, the mesa’s ownership had to be clarified.

By the mid-sixties, Peabody Coal had a clear field. The land rights had been determined by a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1963. The following year, mining permits were secretly granted by the Hopi and Navajo councils, with the encouragement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[21] The Navajo sold their coal rights for a royalty of twenty-five cents a ton, which turned out to be less than one tenth of market value once the coal was mined. Peabody also made a highly advantageous deal with the Hopi, who were even less capable of protecting their interests. Most of the Hopi did not even participate in the tribal government, which had been established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and did not reflect the village-based structure of Hopi society, with its local leaders, called Kikmongwi (pronounced Kee-mnng-wee).

Black Mesa’s fate was decided once and for all in 1968. On February 1, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall announced the cancellation of two dams slated for the Grand Canyon. The controversial dams had been designed to power the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the multibillion-dollar Rube Goldberg water-diversion scheme that would pump Colorado River water over a 1,200-foot mountain pass to Udall’s home state of Arizona. But when the Sierra Club brought out the heavy artillery, the secretary’s advisers were forced to come up with an alternative. Instead of building the dams, the federal government would help fund construction of the Navajo Generating Station, one of six enormous coal plants planned for the Four Corners region of the Southwest. In return, a portion of the plant’s generating capacity would be used for hauling CAP water over the mountains. The coal deposits under the mesa would be the Central Arizona Project’s black, dusty lifeblood.[22]

By the time Marc Gaede began working as the staff photographer for the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Black Mesa deal was a fait accompli, at least as far as everyone in Washington, D.C., was concerned. But in Arizona and New Mexico, it was a different story.

“That whole summer of 1970 the Black Mesa thing was cranking up. Everybody was talking about it,” Gaede said. “Then I started going up there. When I saw those first cuts that they had made I was blown away. I mean, the open ground just ripped open and all that black, ugly coal … You just looked at it and you knew it was wrong.”

All of a sudden the world had become ugly again, this time without the aid of artificial stimulants. The ugliness was seeping into Gaede’s home, his new life, his hope for the future. He took pictures of the mesa, documenting each slice of land hauled away. In October, he started the Black Mesa Defense Fund. It was pretty much a one-man show, although he had help from a Navajo named Bill Lee and Bob Lomadapki, a Hopi jewelry maker. Around the same time, Alice Luna, a Navajo who had ties to the American Indian Movement, organized The Committee to Save Black Mesa. Together, Gaede and members of the committee spoke at Navajo chapter houses, trying to gain support for stopping the mine.

“I never lectured to Hopis. Hopis are like, kind of, people you can’t really tell something. Hopis know it, you see. You don’t tell a Hopi…. Most of the Hopis are very much against strip-mining, about 80 percent of them are traditionalists, they believe in Hopi kachinas. But they don’t run the tribal council because they don’t vote. It wouldn’t do me any good to talk to a bunch of Mormon converts at New Oraibi. And the traditionalists don’t want to hear me talk anyway, they know more than I do. They know all the spirits live here and there and you shouldn’t do that and they have their own protests going.

“But the Navajos, I’ll tell you what, it made a big impression on them. But you know what they really liked, I think? They liked that here was a white guy, and a couple of white guys sometimes, or a girl would come with me, with the Indians I was with, that paid attention to them, that would come to their chapter house. Nobody else did. Not even the strip miners.

“They knew the issues, but I think they considered it an honor that we were there. Most of their chapter meetings are nothing. It’s just a feast with fry bread and the kids run around, the same old thing. Most of these places didn’t even have electricity, so we had to bring our own generator to run the slide show.

“I think they felt powerless to do anything about it. Most of them didn’t like it. Money didn’t seem that important to these people. They didn’t want the strip mine. But they didn’t know what to do about it. It didn’t fit into their political process to protest it so much except for AIM.

“But the lectures were greatly appreciated from an entertainment point of view. Here we were bringing slides, you know? I mean, they get to look at Black Mesa, all these color slides.”

Marc didn’t know how much good it was doing, but he felt compelled to keep trying. Soon he heard about a group of bohemians in Santa Fe who were putting on their own show. In the spring, when Marc had been rediscovering the Southwest, a jazz musician named Jack Loeffler had been making the rounds of the region, too. When Loeffler visited the town of Shonto, on the Navajo reservation, a school principal told him about the mine at Black Mesa. And Loeffler, too, decided to do something about it. But he did it in his own unique way.

Born just a hundred miles from Home, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of The Monkey Wrench Gang author Edward Abbey, Jack Loeffler migrated west under the auspices of the U.S. Army. In 1957, he found himself playing his trumpet in the cold dawn of the Nevada Proving Grounds while an atom bomb exploded overhead. It was just a test, of course. But after the third one, the U.S. military-industrial complex had most definitely failed, at least as far as Private Loeffler was concerned. “I performed three bombsworth before the Army relinquished me to the streets, my horn in my hand, my mind thoroughly blown, unstuck from mainstream American values but definitely not unhinged,” he wrote many years later.[23] And like succeeding generations of young Americans who became similarly unstuck, Loeffler took his blown mind and his musical instrument to California. San Francisco, to be exact.

It was the beatnik era. Loeffler smoked pot and played jazz. He hung out with poets like Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Sometimes he lived on the beach. At night he cuddled a tire iron for protection; during the day he used it to pry abalone from the rocks at low tide. He learned to meditate at Esalen. And he read political philosophy. Struck by Prince Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book, Mutual Aid, Loeffler became an anarchist. Unlike the bomb-throwing species of anarchist exemplified by Mikhail Bakunin, Prince Kropotkin was a gentle fellow who loved nature. Resisting the entreaties of his ambitious family, who wanted him to accept a military appointment to the court at St. Petersburg, Kropotkin chose instead to do his military service in Siberia. Siberia was a biological island, a Noah’s ark of nature before the advent of man. There Kropotkin made an observation that few in Western civilization had ever made. He noticed that although different species may compete for a biological niche, animals of the same species usually help one another to survive. It was a sweet and compelling argument against nasty, brutish social Darwinism. Unjustly ignored in recent years, Kropotkin’s book was a landmark in the post-Darwinian debate over meaning and morality. Along with Darwin’s work, it was one of the earliest social theories to grow directly from observations of animal behavior.

As Loeffler’s feeling for nature grew stronger, he was increasingly drawn to Kropotkin’s ideas. He became peripatetic, traveling constantly between California and the Southwest. He wandered through the ancient Indian kivas and cliff dwellings of northern New Mexico. On long hikes, he lost himself in the sandstone fins and needles, molded turrets, and sheer canyon walls of the Colorado Plateau. Eventually he came to believe that the cultures that had grown up in these places—both Native American peoples and the old Hispanic settlements of the Rio Grande del Norte—exemplified Kropotkin’s anarchist ideal. These societies had been formed in response to the realities of an arid landscape. Isolated from any central government, they operated on a small scale. Most of them had succeeded for centuries because of voluntary cooperation that did not seem to rob individuals of their dignity or sense of freedom. It made sense to ex-Private Loeffler—especially compared with being forced to stand at attention and play nationalistic claptrap on your trumpet as giant mushroom clouds exploded overhead, dosing you with cancer-causing radiation. In 1962, he moved to Santa Fe, resolving that he would do whatever it took to stay there.

Two years later, the artist John Dupuy introduced Loeffler to Ed Abbey. In the next quarter century Abbey, Dupuy, and Loeffler would hike together across the equivalent of the length of the United States, “talking all the time” according to Loeffler. When Loeffler decided to work full-time on environmental issues, Abbey stayed behind the scenes. But he developed a knack for appearing at the moments when Jack needed him most. These moments started coming more frequently once Loeffler started Black Mesa Defense Fund.

In 1968, when Loeffler learned that a mine was planned for Black Mesa, he imagined “a small coal mine so that the Navajo families would burn coal instead of pinyon and juniper.” Eventually he discovered that Peabody was planning a huge operation. The strip mine would cover 26,000 acres. It would mine eight million tons of coal a year for thirty-five years, earning an estimated $750 million for the company. The mesa was at the heart of a development scheme hatched by WEST (Western Energy Supply and Transmission Associates), a consortium of twenty-three utilities. Energy from the coal plants would be linked to a grid stretching from Wyoming to Southern California.

In 1970, Loeffler began a frenetic campaign to keep the coal company off the mesa. He called in friends to help, people like Dennis Hopper’s brother Jimmy and photographer Terry Moore. Eventually Gaede found out about Loeffler’s group and suggested that they work together. In theory it was a good idea. Practice was something else.

“Loeffler kept his phone in the freezer,” Gaede remembered. “He figured it was tapped and if it was in the freezer they couldn’t hear anything. That isn’t how phone taps work, but he thought with the phone just sitting there, they could hear you. So he’d put the goddamn phone in the freezer. So you’d try to call Jack, goddamn him, he couldn’t hear the phone in the fucking freezer. And I’ve got important shit to talk over with Jack. Jack, I’ve got to talk to you.

“But when he doesn’t answer, I know the phone’s in the goddamn freezer again. You go into his house and the wire goes up through the kitchen and into the freezer.”

In contrast to Marc Gaede’s local-boy roughhouse style, Loeffler’s group was sophisticated, if unconventional. Despite the occasional difficulty of reaching them by telephone, they were expert at public relations. Loeffler appeared on network television several times and was one of the first people to be interviewed on the National Public Radio show All Things Considered. Articles quoting members of Black Mesa Defense appeared in Newsweek, Time, and Life. The twenty-four-year-old Dave Foreman, on his occasional visits to the Santa Fe office to stuff envelopes and run errands, was impressed with the publicity bang that Loeffler and the others got for virtually no bucks.

There was so much press that even politicians in Washington, D.C., began to pay attention, according to Brant Calkin, a legendary southwestern environmentalist who recently retired as director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “When Black Mesa got all this publicity, it was not lost on Congress. The Senate held five hearings on the Four Corners,” said Calkin. “It was the Sierra Club that talked to Congress and got the hearings going. The Sierra Club was good at gathering information and doing that sort of thing. But when it came to getting the attention, frankly, it was Loeffler and Terry Moore.”

The reason for all the publicity—and all the commitment—was that the issue was bigger than Black Mesa. In the go-go years of the late sixties, utilities were predicting an increase in energy use of 5 percent a year. Forever. As they madly rushed to build power plants, many utilities overextended themselves. In the 1980s, the worst of these pyramids collapsed when a string of nuclear plants turned into a multibillion-dollar catastrophe for the Washington Public Power Supply System or WPPSS (ironically pronounced “Whoops”‘). In the Southwest, utilities also ran into financial trouble as the country’s appetite for electricity slowed.

In retrospect, a 5 percent annual increase in energy consumption seems not only unbelievable but horrifying. But in the late sixties and early seventies, Black Mesa Defense was one of the few groups trying to pull leather on the utilities’ runaway horse. Terry Moore, the photographer who worked on the Black Mesa issue in Santa Fe, recalled, “We were fighting not just the mine; we were fighting all of those power plants and all of those mines,”—the six coal-burning plants planned for the Four Corners region and the many strip mines slated to supply them with coal.

Slowly, awareness of the energy issue spread. Black Mesa became a rallying point for this new consciousness. Support groups formed in Tucson, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, all calling themselves Black Mesa Defense Fund. They operated autonomously, checking in now and then with Moore or Loeffler, or whomever they happened to know in Santa Fe. “What I tried to say was, if you have something you’d like to do, you’re welcome to do it with us,” Loeffler said. “We were really a bunch of anarchists.”

In 1970, Moore and Loeffler recruited advertising genius Jerry Mander. In 1965, Mander and his partner, Howard Gossage, had pioneered full-page ads with clip-out coupons in the fight to save the Grand Canyon. Mander came up with a similar one for Black Mesa. Mining on Black Mesa was “like ripping apart St. Peter’s to get the marble.” The copy explained how Black Mesa was just a small part of the country’s misguided energy policy.

In the space of two years, Black Mesa Defense Fund participated in six separate lawsuits, made a film that was shown to the New Mexico state legislature, and lobbied every governmental body from Congress to the United Nations. They also tried—and in true anarchist fashion, failed—to blow up a coal slurry line. By the end, Loeffler was so emotionally and physically drained that he almost collapsed after testifying at the last Senate hearing on the issue, held in Page, Arizona. Ed Abbey had to hold him up as he walked away from the microphone.

“I was reading testimony of Hopi people who couldn’t speak in the microphone,” Loeffler said. “And the next thing I knew, it was over. That whole period of concentration was over and I was utterly wasted. It just all hit. I felt myself start to go. I was standing onstage. I felt a hand on my arm and somebody literally just lifted me off the stage. And it was Ed. He got me out of there.”

As they sat around a campfire that night, the two friends made a pact. They agreed that when either one of them died, the other would give him a proper burial. That meant burying his body in the desert, illegally, at midnight.

With the drama of the Black Mesa fight, musing about death didn’t seem out of place. The Southwest seemed to be overflowing with Rhett Butlers gung-ho to join the Confederate Army after Atlanta had already fallen. Practical-minded people like Sierra Clubber and billboard bandit Bill Breed, Marc Gaede’s boss at the Museum of Northern Arizona, couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Black Mesa was hardly pristine wilderness; the Navajos’ hoofed locusts had taken care of that. But even Breed admitted that something about Black Mesa inspired revolutionary fervor.

To most of the people who tried to save it, Black Mesa’s mystical significance was as important as its political role. Traditional Hopis believed that Black Mesa was the final refuge on earth. Its destruction would signal the coming of environmental Armageddon.

The mesa also figured in Navajo mythology, although it was not as central as it was to the Hopi. The Navajo called Black Mesa the female mountain. Lukachukai was the male mountain, and the two together were symbols of harmony, which, along with beauty, is the Navajo Way. If the balance were lost, the Navajo Way would be destroyed. According to historian Alvin Josephy, “Even the unbelieving white man visiting the mesa can feel the truth of the warning, for it is an awesome and timeless region of solitude, wonder, and beauty.”[24]

For rationalists, the mesa’s strategic importance was equally compelling. Even before its role in the Central Arizona Project was clear to them, both Gaede and Loeffler were aware of Black Mesa’s connection to the network of six noxious power plants planned for the Four Corners area. It galled Gaede that almost half the output of the Four Corners and Mojave plants would be fueling the rapid growth of Los Angeles at the expense of air quality in the Southwest. By the mid-seventies, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory estimated that emissions from the plants had cut the region’s visibility in half. Air pollution engulfing the Four Corners was the only sign of civilization in the Southwest visible from space. Jack Loeffler and Ed Abbey took turns appropriating the National Academy of Sciences description: “a national sacrifice area.”

The mine on Black Mesa also signaled the last major depredation of the Colorado River, a once-terrifying wild river that had become an inkwell for the industrial West to write checks against the future —checks that were starting to look suspiciously rubbery. To run the slurry line that would transport Black Mesa coal 200 miles away to the Mojave power plant, Peabody would be draining water from the Colorado, plus pumping 2,200 gallons of scarce groundwater out of the mesa each day. In return for approximately 300 mining jobs, the Navajo had donated rights to 34,100 acre-feet of the Colorado, leaving less than 16,000 acre-feet for their own needs. This donation, helpfully drafted by the Interior Department, is now estimated to be worth $6.8 million a year.[25]

Soon Black Mesa became a symbol of everything that was wrong with development in the West. In his book Indian Country, Peter Matthiessen called Black Mesa “the ugliest ecological disaster of our time.” Jack Loeffler was blunter, saying, “It is the most complete model of an environmental fuck-up in the world.” Matthiessen wrote that a year after the strip-mining started, a Navajo living on Black Mesa told the photojournalist Dan Budnick, “I think as I walk this earth, what will next summer bring? Since the company started their work, people began to change. The air began to change. The plants seem to have no life. When the wind blows our way, the dust covers the whole ground—the food, the animals, the hogans, the water.”

In Flagstaff, Marc Gaede joined Native American demonstrators to stop the mine. First, in the winter of 1970, Hopi elders peacefully protested in the Peabody Coal office. In the spring, AIM staged a more militant protest. Several hundred Navajos camped out on the mesa for days, chanting and drumming. About thirty wore the red shirts and Levi jackets that were the AIM uniform. Marc Gaede was excited. Things were finally starting to happen. He drove out to the mesa in a van borrowed from the Museum of Northern Arizona, where he was the staff photographer. The owner of a local trading post lent him an unloaded rifle to use as a prop. He was going to take a picture of a young Navajo named Leroy Kearns. Kearns would hold the gun aloft in a gesture of defiance, with the Peabody Coal dragline in the background. But something went wrong. When Marc started clicking away, the dragline operator swung a bucketful of dirt toward them. Marc, Leroy, and the others ran for the van, which, in rather impolitic fashion, had the museum’s name on the door. They raced away, but the dragline cut them off. Thinking fast, Marc swerved into the shelter of a cluster of parked pickup trucks that belonged to coal company employees. Surely, they wouldn’t attack their own vehicles. For a few moments, Marc and the Indians were safe. Then Marc saw an opening and made a break for it. The dragline followed in lumbering pursuit. Behind them a half dozen police cruisers appeared. Dust trails crisscrossed the mesa like Isadora Duncan’s scarves, as the van, the dragline, and the cop cars performed their awkward dance.

Marc was arrested that day, along with a handful of others. But his photo turned out to be a classic. It was made into a poster that showed Leroy Kearns, complete with high Navajo cheekbones and western hat, brandishing the rifle in front of the Peabody Coal dragline. The AIM-inspired headline “INDIAN power” on the poster’s first press run was eventually changed to “save BLACK MESA.”

Public demonstrations were not the only form of protest used by Black Mesa Defense Fund. Luddites were surfacing again in northern Arizona, and they were doing more than failing to blow up the slurry line. A ghostly figure called the Arizona Phantom was making the rounds of Peabody Coal after dark. Night after night, he was tearing up the tracks of the Black Mesa railroad. Heavy equipment suffered, too. A scraper, a grader, and a battalion of Caterpillar tractors fell to the Phantom, who had a knack for getting to their vital parts.

But neither guerrilla warfare nor lobbying could save the mesa. Construction of the mine went forward, and by 1972 Black Mesa Defense Fund had quietly expired. It would have been out of character for the southwestern anarchists to hook up with an established environmental group—a bit of political maneuvering that might have given them greater longevity and success. But reforming U.S. energy policy was probably too big a job for anyone, including President Jimmy Carter. When they tackled the issue in the mid-1970s, the big national groups didn’t meet with much success, either. They discovered that they usually had to be satisfied with mitigation, rather than redirecting policy. But at least the big groups were trying. Black Mesa’s publicity helped get them focused on the energy issue.

“Black Mesa became a cause célèbre for the emerging ranks of environmentalists across the country through articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Audubon, and Wassaja and shows on CBS and ABC. Although the publicity did not stop the mining of Black Mesa, it had repercussions among both Indians and non-Indians that are still felt today,” wrote historian Marjane Ambler in her book Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development.

Black Mesa Defense did manage to wrest a few concessions from Peabody. The company agreed to reclaim land on Black Mesa after strip-mining it. Black Mesa Defense was less successful in forcing the utilities to install pollution-control devices on the power plants. “I get sick when I hear about the Navajo plant with its eight-hundred-foot stacks,” said Terry Moore. “They slipped in this high stack theory. We said, ‘High stack, high shmack.’ You’re not solving a problem, you’re creating one.” Twenty years later, the federal government would agree, requiring new pollution-control devices on the enormous Navajo Generating Station.

But the environmentalists’ biggest victory was forcing a reconsideration of at least one of the six proposed power plants in the Four Corners region. Ultimately, Southern California Edison dropped out of the consortium which was planning to build an enormous coal plant on the wild Kaiparowits Plateau. The utility’s decision effectively shut down the project. Even utilities were starting to realize that the boom was ending.

When Peabody tried to open a strip mine on the Cheyenne reservation in Montana, there was a brief revival of activity. In 1972, The Committee to Save Black Mesa invited a delegation of Cheyenne to the Four Corners to see what had happened to the mesa. For the Cheyenne who couldn’t visit Black Mesa, Terry Moore and Alvin Josephy, a former editor of American Heritage, took a slide show up to the reservation. According to historian Maijane Ambler, the fate of the Northern Plains tribes was radically changed by what they learned.

The Phantom disappeared in 1972. Nobody from the daytime crew of the Black Mesa Defense Fund ever figured out who he was. Marc Gaede speculates that the Phantom might have been one of his old billboarding pals, but even he is not sure. The Phantom would reappear later … but perhaps that is not the right word. He would leave invisible traces of his presence buried in tree trunks along certain forest roads. In a few select basements and garages, neophyte monkey-wrenchers would find gifts: hammers, tool belts, ten-penny nails in bulk—the tools and supplies for tree spiking. He would even write to the Earth First! Journal with tips on shooting cows and euthanizing billboards. But nobody—not even the reporter he would finally tell about his exploits—would ever see his face.

The same was true of a shadowy figure in the Midwest who called himself the Fox, after the Fox River in Illinois. The Fox’s existence was one more piece of evidence that monkeywrenching was not isolated criminal activity but an allergic response to runaway technology. In 1970 the Fox plugged the illegal drains of soap companies and capped their smoking chimneys to protest water and air pollution. Hounded by police and shot at by guards, the Fox courted further danger by sending notes to the media to make his point. He was even interviewed on television wearing a black mask. The Fox’s most publicized action was the presentation of the “Fox Foundation for Conservation Action Award,” a fifty-pound jar of sludge that he poured onto the office carpet of a U.S. Steel executive. “They keep saying that they aren’t really polluting our water. If that is true, then it shouldn’t hurt the rug, right?” he remarked. Then he disappeared, apparently forever.[26]

The Tucson Eco-Raiders should have borrowed a few more gizmos from the Fox’s Houdini bag of tricks. In the summer of 1971, a group of college-age boys got fed up with the shopping center mania that was eating their hometown of Tucson, Arizona. At that time the city had no comprehensive planning legislation. Tacky housing developments and convenience stores were mowing down the Sonoran desert landscape that made the city unique. Stripped of saguaro cactus, delicate-branched paloverde, and the smoky scent of creosote after a rain, Tucson was turning into a last chance trailer park on the road to hell.

“We bear a particular grudge against developers who go in and flatten out everything,” one of the Eco-Raiders told Berkeley Barb correspondent Tom Miller. “In general, if we see a nice area of the desert being destroyed, we’ll do something about it.”

“Something” encompassed a whole palette of vandalism techniques. The Eco-Raiders had a fine time cutting billboards, claiming hundreds during their two-year run. But that was just the beginning. The Eco-Raiders pulled up survey stakes from housing sites, poured lead in the locks of developers’ offices, ripped out electrical and plumbing fixtures in unsold houses, broke windows, sabotaged bulldozers, and, in Miller’s words, trashed “any object representing the outer edges of urban sprawl.”

Occasionally the Eco-Raiders instructed Tucsonans on other environmental issues. “One time they carefully piled up thousands of aluminum cans and broken bottles at the doorstep of the Kalil Company, a local soft-drink bottler. They left an accompanying note: ‘A little non-returnable glass: Kalil makes it Tucson’s problem. We make it Kalil’s problem.—Eco-Raiders.’ ”

The Eco-Raiders had a good run. But in 1973 the developers struck back. They pressured county officials until the sheriff’s department agreed to put nine investigators on the Eco-Raiders case. Six weeks later it was a done deal. After profiling their suspects, the cops busted an Eco-Raider named Chris Morrison, correctly guessing that he would talk. The other four were rounded up within forty-eight hours. The phantoms of Southern Arizona had been made flesh.[27]

They would be made flesh again, but only after Edward Abbey, a seasonal park ranger who spent his winters in Tucson, made them fictional. The Eco-Raiders had no idea that more than half a million people would read Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which was loosely based on the Eco-Raiders’ approach to citizen activism, along with a healthy dose of scenes borrowed from the Black Mesa bandits. And they could never have guessed that five years later, five disillusioned refugees from the mainstream environmental movement would decide to become another real-life monkey wrench gang.

Abbey wasn’t the only one to take the craziness of the Eco-Raiders and Black Mesa Defense Fund to heart. Dave Foreman, former stomp and ex-nerd, considered the Santa Fe bohemians one of his biggest influences. Foreman had done his share of monkeywrenching up in the national forests in New Mexico, pouring sand in the odd bulldozer gas tank, yanking up a survey stake, retiring a power line here and there. But that was kid stuff. Foreman always thought big. Black Mesa Defense Fund, a collection of bright, talented people all doing their own thing without a boss or a committee: now that seemed like the right way to run an environmental group.

Foreman’s unseemly departure from the Marines had fostered a real change. It wasn’t just that he took a toke off a joint now and then. The years in Zuni had given Foreman a new respect for his own intuition. On the reservation, he found a way of looking at things he had never experienced in hick military towns.

“The Zuni rituals probably had more effect on me than I realized,” he said later. “Just coming into contact with that whole different approach that was so different from the Church of Christ.”

In 1967, Foreman had spent his first summer in the pueblo, teaching in the local Head Start program. When a sixteen-year-old Zuni girl drowned in a nearby lake, someone was needed to retrieve the body. None of the Zunis could swim, and only a few whites lived on the reservation. Police came to the whitewashed house on the hill where Foreman lived with his parents and asked him to do it. It would be baptism by total immersion all over again. But this time the result would be different.

Foreman and a friend from college slid on snorkeling masks and flippers. They found the body, still lifelike at the lake bottom. When they dragged it up on the shore, the Zunis stepped back in fear. They believed there was a water monster in the lake. Because Foreman had recaptured the girl’s body before the monster was willing to give it up, he had become a marked man. They held a purifying ceremony for him, using a proxy because a white was not allowed in the ceremonial stone kiva. Even so, the next day Foreman’s Head Start class was empty. Stay away from the lake, he was told. The water monster is after you. Foreman, who claimed to be an atheist, never went near the lake again.

Maybe it was the long tentacles of the water monster that brought Foreman closer to life and death in Zuni. He made a practice of going on solo hikes around the big mesa east of the pueblo. All alone, he free-climbed rock walls, risking his life for no particular reason. Floating on a handhold or on a boot tip lodged in a crack, he felt unmoored but not unhappy. He stumbled on cave paintings, including a multicolored parrot five feet high. Investigating crevices and caves, he discovered etched stones and altars made with prayer feathers. These holy places were still used by the Zunis, whose pueblo dates from the 1300s and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America.

Foreman went drinking with the Zunis, which gave him another view of the culture. Ever the adaptable military brat, Foreman found he could get into their mind-set. “There was a different worldview, a different basis for relationships,” he said. “I’d go out in a car full of Zunis, be the only Anglo in there. I mean, their sense of humor is very strange. You wouldn’t get one of their jokes. But it was as though my head could make a shift and get in their frame of reference. And I could even start telling Zuni-type jokes.”

Like Jack Loeffler, who had lived for a year in a forked-stick hogan on the Navajo reservation, Foreman was experiencing a different way of life. This culture took its rituals from the changing seasons, from the rocks and rain and blood and growth and the births and deaths of humans and animals. It was a far cry from the political realities that filtered into your brain with the dirty air you breathed in the East. Out here, something else was alive. Loeffler’s anarchism was just a word for it, a white man’s construct for something innate. It promised a way to make complete freedom work on a social scale, by setting up a community that would be small and tribal, with its own rituals and agreements, spoken and unspoken, shifting if necessary, but never coerced. No one would ever have to take an order. As Foreman later would be reminded, no one could give one either.

4. Coyotes and Town Dogs

The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it…. He is always hungry….

But if you start a swift-footed dog after him … [t]he coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder…. And all this time, the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile….

—Mark Twain
Roughing It, 1871

1973 — New Smyrna Beach, Florida

BY TWENTY-FIVE, Bart Koehler had done a lot of hard shifting from reverse into overdrive. High-school athlete. College fuck-up. Top student in his graduate program at the University of Wyoming. After he fell, he always climbed back up. He went higher each time, using signs and symbols from his personal mythology as handholds. Place names—obscure ones like Otto Road—surfaced with uncanny regularity in his wanderings. Grizzly bears changed his life. Peak experiences were all he knew.

But that winter, Koehler was uncharacteristically stuck in neutral. When Clif Merritt called him from the Wilderness Society’s Denver office, Bart was living with his parents in Florida, saving money from his construction job so he could travel to Alaska. His April 21 departure date was carefully chosen. April 21 was Bart’s birthday; it also was the birthday of John Muir, the brilliant and eccentric transcendentalist who had founded the Sierra Club. Even spookier, the exact day Koehler was born, April 21, 1948, was the day Aldo Leopold had died. Bart couldn’t help thinking all this synchronicity must mean something. Maybe he was destined to save a great wilderness or something. Whatever it was, April 21, 1973, felt like the right day to start a new life.

In the meantime, Koehler was the only guy on the construction crew with a master’s degree and “Help Save the American Bald Eagle” plastered on his hardhat. Each morning he’d gulp down his orange juice, then hump it at work for eight hours. At night he would run home across miles of flat white beach, plant himself in front of the TV, pound down a six-pack, wolf down his dinner, and pass out. In the mirror he saw a beefy guy with the dulled sensibilities of a farm animal.

So when Merritt asked if Bart would consider working for the Wilderness Society, Bart was speechless. Well, almost. “Fuckin’ A, Clif!” were his exact words, or at least how he remembered them a decade later. All his carefully laid plans for April 21 went out the window. The negotiations were simple. Merritt told him that the Wilderness Society could pay him $400 a month for three months. Koehler made a counterproposal, asking if he could reduce his monthly pay to $300 and lengthen his job to four months. Offer accepted. Five years later, Koehler still hadn’t learned his lesson. When the Wilderness Society was having financial problems, Bart and Dave Foreman offered to take a pay cut so that an additional staff person could be hired. Bart believes that this selfless gesture forever stamped the two cowboys as blatantly unprofessional in the eyes of William Turnage, who had recently taken over as the Wilderness Society’s executive director.

“We didn’t care,” he said. “We didn’t care at all. Our job was to go out and defend the country and save the world. As long as we had enough money to get gas, beer, and cheeseburgers, we’d sleep on the floor or outside. Screw it. I was twenty-five and ready to rock and roll.”

Since the 1960s, Clifton Merritt had been building the perfect beast, the best field staff ever assembled by an environmental group. Merritt’s Buckaroos were a new breed of environmentalist. They weren’t really hippies. Yeah, their hair was kind of long, but they were just as likely to trail the odor of mule shit as marijuana smoke. They were some kind of weird hybrid. Redneck hippies, you might call them. Tough, a little rough, almost low class, the Buckaroos were cut from a more homespun cloth than their predecessors. They were the scruffy coyotes in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, a collection of archetypal tales filled with pathetically ignorant eastern dudes and savvy westerners of all species. Merritt’s populist approach was distinctly western; its rough edges concealed a smooth intelligence. He said he looked for three things in his employees: education, an ability to work with people, and “a gut feeling for wilderness.”

Merritt was a Montana boy with more than his share of gut feeling for wilderness. In 1956, he had founded the Montana Wilderness Association. It wasn’t long before he faced the western conservationist’s usual dilemma. Success in his home state led to an offer to work in Washington, D.C., light years away from the land that he was devoting his life to fighting for. Reluctantly, in 1964 he took a job at the Wilderness Society’s Washington, D.C., office. But he kept his ear to the ground back at home. What he heard were the words “Copper Creek.” It was a name he and his twin brother, Don, both remembered from their grandfather’s hunting and fishing trips.

“I had it rumored to me that they were surveying a road up there,” said Merritt. Sure enough, on a trip home, he hiked up the creek bed and saw a road stake planted in his family’s old base camp. Roads meant logging, or even worse, seismic blasting for oil exploration. Merritt followed the trail of stakes over a rise leading up to a fishing spot named Heart Lake. As he walked, he came to the “violent” conclusion that they “would build a road there over my dead body.”[28]

Merritt joined forces with an ex-forest ranger named Cecil Garland, who had been trying to whip up the citizenry to save 70,000 acres of backcountry outside Lincoln, Montana. The Lincoln back-country wasn’t full of big timber; what it had in abundance was fish. And bears. More than 10 percent of the grizzly bears killed each year came from the backcountry.[29] The term biodiversity hadn’t been invented yet, but anyone who grew up fishing and hunting knew this was a hell of a place.

Merritt persuaded Garland to add Copper Creek to his proposal. In deference to local people who resented the federal government’s “locking up” their land, he convinced him not to try to add the land to the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Instead, Merritt’s strategy was to gain protection for the Lincoln-Scapegoat Wilderness separately, to avoid looking “hoggish.”[30] It took them eight years to convince Congress to designate the wilderness area, which eventually consisted of 300,000 acres. Two decades later, Clif and Don Merritt were getting ready for a trip into the Lincoln-Scapegoat. By then, they were in their seventies. “There are still grizzly bears there, and wolves come through,” Merritt said proudly.

When he assembled the Wilderness Society field staff with his lieutenant Jerry Mallett, Merritt found plenty of candidates with the requisite gut feeling for wilderness. The time was right. California may have led the 1960s cultural revolution, but the Rocky Mountain West was setting its sagebrush stamp on the pop culture of the 1970s. In Denver, the Mountain Gazette’s Western hipster New Journalism was setting the tone of a fleeting cultural renaissance. Gary Hart and Dick Lamm, good-looking Colorado cowboys with a progressive slant, were elected on a promise that environmental responsibility would replace rape-and-run.

But the old guard wasn’t going down without a fight. A group of born-again privatizers called the Sagebrush Rebels wrapped themselves in the Marlboro man’s mantle to cloak their true goal—keeping western resources flowing into corporate coffers. When he was elected president in 1980, Ronald Reagan chose one of their foot soldiers, James Watt, to be his Secretary of the Interior. Watt was affiliated with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an antienvironmental bastion bankrolled by the right-wing union buster Joseph Coors, owner of the Coors Brewing Co. The southern Californian president who liked to play cowboy knew that the Sagebrush Rebels were the front men for the West’s monied class, which happened to include some of his biggest campaign contributors. To be fair, Congress was hardly immune to their influence, either. For their parts, environmentalists were prostrated by the Reagan landslide. At first, even the powerful Sierra Club didn’t oppose Watt’s appointment.{3} Eventually a small-scale mutiny in the club’s Washington, D.C., office generated opposition. But with Reagan’s strong backing, Watt was confirmed.

Merritt’s Buckaroos were sickened by the sight of the wimpish James Watt brandishing spurs and a ten-gallon hat. The cowboy image was their domain. They owned it. People like Bart Koehler and Dave Foreman had fallen deeply and irremediably in love with the American West. They were smitten with its sunset colors and prehistoric size, with the way empty spaces on the map translated into a long, lonely horizon. They were western heroes themselves, marked by the classic signs: macho flair, undying loyalty, and hearts of mush. The Buckaroos might have been naive in the ways of Washington, D.C., but their vision was right on target on their home turf, where a new generation was reclaiming the western myth.

“We were people who didn’t make much money, and were, you know, sort of proud of being redneck wilderness people,” said Tim Mahoney, a New England—born convert to the frontier who spent his twenties hanging around the Wilderness Society’s Denver office until Clif Merritt finally had no choice but to hire him. “We drank beer and listened to country music and hit the bars and wore cowboy boots and things like that. We did not like the wine and Brie stereotype. And we didn’t like the stereotype that was being used by wilderness opponents, that we were somehow effete Californians or easterners or city dwellers who were coming after their [turf]…. We felt like we were descendants of the frontier ethic, not them.”

For Mahoney, Foreman, and Koehler, the soundtrack of the 1970s wasn’t the mechanized disco beat that was terrorizing the Top 40, but the reborn country-western twang of Willie Nelson, Wayion Jennings, and Jerry Jeff Walker. Even their name for themselves, the Buckaroos, came from a song on a Jerry Jeff Walker album titled, with self-conscious irony, Viva Terlingua.

“At the time in the 1970s, country music was going through one of its Nashville glitter kind of showbiz ways, really saccharine stuff,” said Mahoney. “Willie Nelson and Wayion Jennings put out an album called Outlaivs and it was a big hit. It was sort of Austin-oriented as opposed to Nashville-oriented. These were long-haired rednecks. They weren’t Merle Haggard types who talked about the flag. They talked about drinking, pickup trucks, and having a good time. We liked that image, outlaws.”

It all rubbed Doug Scott the wrong way, this messy, enthusiastic coup at the Wilderness Society. Scott had become the consummate Washington, D.C., insider. He left the Wilderness Society in 1973, after failing to convince Stewart Brandborg, the society’s executive director, to set him up in Seattle as the West Coast counterpart to Clif Merritt. Anticipating the problems that would later cause major upheavals at the Wilderness Society, Scott landed a job as the Sierra Club’s Northwest representative. He soon became known for his ability to maneuver legislation through Congress. Amateur hour was what Scott called the Buckaroos’ Wilderness Society. Amateur hour.

It must have irked Scott that the legacy of his shadowy mentor, Howard Zahniser, was the real reason that the Buckaroos were embarrassing him with their crude humor and tacky clothes. Zahnie, as he was affectionately called, was a former civil servant who had succeeded biologist Olaus Murie as head of the Wilderness Society in the 1950s. Scott had written his graduate thesis on Zahniser’s life work, the twenty-year effort to enact the Wilderness Act. In fact, the summer he spent researching his thesis at the Wilderness Society had been Scott’s entree into the world of professional environmentalism. It would not be too much to say that Zahniser, who died before Doug Scott could meet him, became a father figure to the young environmentalist. Scott laboriously traced Zahniser’s strategy of compromise and consensus building, which he would use as a model for his own career. Over and over, Scott saw how Zahniser, like a benign, bookish spider, made delicate and not-so-delicate adjustments to the bill’s language. There were sixty-six rewrites before the Wilderness Act finally passed Congress.

Zahniser’s achievement was a turning point for the wilderness movement, and possibly for the American land ethic. Before its passage, wilderness had been only feebly protected by administrative designations. These could be subverted or overturned on a bureaucratic whim. The Wilderness Act gave legislative protection to nine million acres of wilderness and introduced a mechanism to protect more wilderness in the future. It was the terminal moraine left by the closing of the frontier, the mark left by a slow transformation of America’s attitude toward its landscape. Seventy-five years after the frontier slid finally and forever into the Pacific Ocean, Americans decided that islands of wilderness in the United States had a right to exist.

For environmentalists, the Wilderness Act completely changed the ball game. It gave three of the four largest federal land-management agencies—the U.S. Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the enormous task of reviewing potential wilderness areas in their jurisdiction. The agencies were expected to make recommendations based on these reviews, but Congress had the ultimate power to designate wilderness. The Federal Land Policy Management Act, or FLPMA, also known as the BLM Organic Act of 1976, later set up a timetable for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which administers more land than any other federal agency, to go through the same process.

This was not exactly the way Zahniser had envisioned the law. Originally Zahniser intended wilderness designation to be a presidential prerogative. The right president could create the kind of national wilderness system that environmentalists dreamed about, reasoned Zahniser. Look at what Teddy Roosevelt had done with the national parks. But a last-minute deal brokered by President John F. Kennedy gave Congress the right to designate wilderness. Kennedy agreed to the change in order to appease a powerful legislator, Congressman Wayne Aspinall of Colorado. Aspinall had killed the bill in committee for eight years running. Kennedy’s move may have been the only way to break the logjam.

Giving Congress the power to declare wilderness was only one of a series of significant compromises in the Wilderness Act. Some were truly awful. For instance, existing mining claims could be worked in wilderness areas until December 31, 1983, which led to an attempted fire sale under the Watt regime. Cattle grazing was also allowed in certain wilderness areas.

Weeks before the Wilderness Act passed, Zahniser died of a heart attack. The legend was that he died of a broken heart. A similar myth had grown up about the death of Sierra Club founder, John Muir, who died not long after Congress ignored his pleas to save a beautiful Sierra canyon named Hetch Hetchy. But although overwork may have contributed to Zahnie’s early death—he was in his fifties—Doug Scott believes that Zahniser was far too resourceful a politician to regard Kennedy’s deal as a defeat. Zahniser was not a mad Scot like Muir, careening off a battered childhood into an ecstatic world of nature and poetry. He died knowing that his life’s work was about to become a reality, even if the price for victory was high. It may have been a fitting end for this master of strategic compromise.

It was left to Stewart Brandborg, Zahniser’s successor at the Wilderness Society, to turn the expanded role of Congress into an advantage. After all, Congress could be lobbied. But it was a daunting, multifarious task. Federal agencies administered hundreds of millions of acres of federal land, most of it in the West. The tiny, underpaid staffs of environmental groups simply couldn’t ride herd on all the places that would be hauled onto the chopping block in the next ten years. Brandborg’s vision could be achieved only by tapping into a reservoir of volunteer labor.

Under Brandborg’s regime, the Wilderness Society took the revolutionary step of forming citizens’ wilderness committees. While the Sierra Club’s highly politicized volunteer hierarchy rivaled the Boy Scout merit-badge system in complexity, the Wilderness Society ran on seat-of-the-pants esprit. Sometimes it wasn’t safe to be seen lurking in the hallways unless you were ready to become a star witness. Doug Scott worked for Brandborg in these early days. He remembers Brandborg closing down the office and chartering a bus to bring his entire staff, including secretaries and receptionists, to speak at a wilderness hearing for Shenandoah National Park. Somehow Brandborg even persuaded the bus driver to testify.

This was a whole new way of doing business. Historically, conservationists had relied on an old-boy network to get their message to government officials. Even the movement’s noisy public crusades to keep dams out of Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon in the 1950s and early 1960s had been orchestrated by a select few. Now the old boys couldn’t do it alone. As pressure mounted to divvy up the public lands, a whole raft of professional field organizers was needed to stage-manage the efforts of citizen activists. That’s where people like Dave Foreman, Bart Koehler, and Tim Mahoney came in. By the mid-1970s they were in Doug Scott’s face, on his turf in Washington, D.C., like a low-budget movie of his fonner life. And the soundtrack was the roar of thousands of students yelling “Fuck Nixon!” straight into his delicate, early-middle-aged eardrums. Or maybe it was “Earth First!”

Even the most arrogant New West hipster had the feeling that if Wayion Jennings or Willie Nelson ran into Dave Foreman at a Texas honky-tonk, they’d have a lot to talk about. Women, booze, putting up fence, or maybe, in Foreman’s case, cutting it. All the young field staffers wore dusty cowboy boots and sported bandannas, but Foreman, well, Dave was the real thing, down to the Texas twang and the squint when he smiled. He had that ineffable quality, that presence, that made people seek his approval. Charisma, it was usually called. Foreman had joined Merritt’s band of Buckaroos in the fall of 1973. He didn’t have the most impressive credentials in the bunch, but he had a solid track record on national-forest issues in New Mexico. He and Debbie Sease had spent the previous summer camping out in the basement of the Albuquerque Environmental Center, learning the intricacies of U.S. Forest Service bureaucracy. Mostly, they were trying to get the agency to expand Aldo Leopold’s prized Gila wilderness. In the process, they found themselves watchdogging the agency’s first Roadless Area Review and Evaluation, known as RARE. When they weren’t convincing people to write letters or attend hearings, Foreman and Sease were backpacking, checking maps to make sure the Forest Service was giving out accurate reports about the areas that it was studying. Like environmentalists all over the West, they were startled by how little the agency knew about the land that it managed.

Forest Service officials knew they had a problem and RARE was their first attempt to solve it. The inventory was kicked off in 1971, after an official suddenly realized that the new environmental laws passed around the time of Earth Day would be coming home to roost under the eaves of the agency’s roof. Foremost among these was the National Environmental Policy Act, which for the first time required government agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their actions. The passage of NEPA was the biggest environmental victory of the decade, perhaps of several decades. But when Richard Nixon signed the act into law on January 1, 1970, it went virtually unnoticed.

Most environmentalists believe that two men, at most, understood what the president was signing that day. Ironically, the president wasn’t one of them. One of the few people who may have understood the bill’s ramifications was its Senate sponsor, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson’s support for the Vietnam War had earned him the epithet Henry Hawk, but he also was an ardent conservationist. It was Jackson who recruited an Indiana University professor named Lynton Caldwell to write NEPA. Caldwell became the legislative equivalent of a sniper behind enemy lines when he included the revolutionary “action enforcer” provision. This section required government agencies to assess the environmental impacts of major projects in a document called an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS. Then the American public could comment on the agency’s plans. If an interested party didn’t get satisfaction through administrative challenges, a lawsuit could be brought.

NEPA was the equivalent of handing over a fleet of F-14s to a scrawny bunch of guerrilla fighters. The law was put to the test fairly quickly. Stewart Brandborg at the Wilderness Society and Brock Evans at the Sierra Club, two of the environmental movement’s top leaders, decided to use NEPA to stop the Trans-Alaska pipeline that Interior Secretary Wally Hickel had so proudly announced on Earth Day. It was a lopsided battle, with the environmentalists on one side and oil companies, the federal government, and most of the media on the other. Even Brock Evans, the eloquent, Princeton-educated attorney who ran the Sierra Club’s Washington, D.C., office, wasn’t surprised when NEPA’s godfather, Scoop Jackson, dumped his own law by refusing to oppose the pipeline. Evans had once been the Sierra Club’s Northwest field representative and he had worked closely with Jackson. One of the arguments for the pipeline was national security, and Jackson wasn’t called Hawk for nothing.

“Besides, when the two conflicted, NEPA being a symbol and the oil being real … nobody’s gonna let ten billion barrels of oil go,” Evans said.

Despite an all-out effort that virtually broke the bank at the Wilderness Society, the pipeline was approved. On July 17, 1973, Alaska Senator Mike Gravel pushed through an amendment that exempted the pipeline from the provisions of NEPA. The Senate was deadlocked forty-nine to forty-nine; Spiro Agnew cast the tiebreaking vote.

Today Evans claims that the administration’s reliance on a vice-presidential tiebreaker indicated its desperation. “Spiro Agnew!” he expostulates. “They had to resort to Spiro Agnew.” But that was scant comfort in 1973. Chafing in defeat beneath the “pale sun” and the “cold mountains” of Alaska’s magnificent Brooks Range, Evans wrote a heartbroken dispatch that was published in the Sierra Club Bulletin:

At that moment I came completely under the spell of the North; and for the first time 1 understood what Jack London and the others who came before us had written. There is a silence to this vast empty land, a special feeling that comes only from being so far away from people or roads. It is something of the human spirit, touched by ancient memories of what it once must have been like for the entire race so long ago…. What really has happened—even more than the physical damage—is damage to the spirit of this land. This road has broken that spirit, forever….[31]

The Alaska pipeline battle set a pattern that was to be repeated with other strong environmental laws, most notably the Endangered Species Act. In cases where “social consensus,” as Doug Scott calls it, is lacking, or the interests of oil companies—or so-called national security—appear to outweigh the rights of snail darters or red squirrels, Congress simply overrules the law. Critics charge that the environmental movement has an unfortunate tendency to pass legislation that is ahead of the mainstream. But it may simply be that Americans think that squirrels and snail darters have rights most of the time, but not if a major public-works project is on the line. Democracy, to paraphrase James Madison, is sloppy.

So sloppy, in fact, that what appeared to be a devastating loss turned out to be one of the environmental movement’s greatest victories. The environmentalists’ hard line ensured that the pipeline received more supervision than any oil project in history.{4} The environmentalists routed the pipeline away from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain, a tundra at the foot of the remote Brooks Range that has been compared to Africa’s Serengeti. Most important, the pipeline battle established the parameters of NEPA, “the environmental Magna Carta.”

Under this new rule of law, even the U.S. Forest Service needed a rationale for its actions, or lawsuits would hail down from all quarters. For decades, the Forest Service had enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom from political controls. Unlike the national parks, which were lined with roads and tacky concessions, large sections of the national forests looked as if they had been frozen in a nineteenthcentury landscape painting. The agency itself had a tradition of professionalism that sometimes bordered on arrogance. But as population increased and resources dwindled, developers began to gnaw away at the painting’s edges. The Forest Service became the lightning rod for a conflict that involved ideology as well as land. From 1970 to 1990, the wilderness movement was caught in the long, convoluted, and frequently bitter process of imposing a new land ethic on a deeply entrenched federal bureaucracy. A more confrontational relationship between conservationists and government emerged out of this process. For people like Doug Scott, Bart Koehler, and Dave Foreman, it redefined not only their philosophies, but also the directions of their lives.

The storm was already brewing. With behind-the-scenes coaching from people like Clif Merritt, citizen activists—nobodies like eighthgrade dropout Cecil Garland and Alabama housewife Mary Burks— were propelling wilderness bills through Congress. Hell, these people weren’t professionals, complained the Forest Service. But Congress didn’t care. After all, the Forest Service doesn’t vote, as veteran lobbyist Ernie Dickerman once pointed out. It wasn’t enough for the selfimportant men in green to tell an irate Montana senator named Lee Metcalf to hold off on preserving the Lincoln-Scapegoat because they hadn’t studied it yet. If they didn’t get their maps and compasses out—and do it soon—the great unwashed would do it for them. Between the fall of 1971 and the summer of 1972, the Forest Service defensively launched RARE, the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation. The agency studied almost 1,500 roadless areas totaling 55.9 million acres, held 300 public meetings, and received more than 50,000 comments. It was the biggest public-involvement effort ever conducted by the federal government.

But it wasn’t good enough. The Forest Service attitude toward wilderness was still in a Neanderthal stage—or as Dave Foreman might say, not Neanderthal enough. Absurd as it sounds, the agency insisted on writing environmental-impact statements on protecting roadless areas. Not too many detrimental effects there. But the agency refused to study the impacts of logging and mining. The logging practice called clearcutting, in which all the trees in one section of a forest are leveled, was especially controversial. In the 1960s clearcutting had become the method of choice for foresters. All over the country, logging companies were leasing tracts of national forest at bargain-basement prices and chopping down every tree in sight. Entire watersheds were left looking like scarred, dying victims of triple-canopy napaiming.

Environmentalists had taken on this issue before. In 1973, a lawsuit over the Monongahela National Forest culminated in a decision that outlawed clearcutting. Once again, Congress responded by changing the law. The 1976 National Forest Management Act made clearcutting legal, but required replanting.

But foresters soon learned that it was impossible to re-create a dense, varied old-growth forest. Spraying herbicides and planting neat, orderly single-species tree farms just wasn’t the same. Sometimes even replanting didn’t work, especially on steep, eroded hillsides where seedlings had problems surviving. By the 1970s, less than 10 percent of the country’s old-growth forest remained. Losing the remainder to clearcutting meant more erosion, a smaller gene pool, the loss of many species of birds, mammals, insects, and endemic plants. Yet another frontier would be closed.[32]

Environmentalists were determined that the Forest Service inventory reflect a commitment to preserving the frontier. The agency’s first attempt was not reassuring. RARE set aside 12.3 million acres for further study, thereby opening the other approximately 67 million acres of roadless land to development. After the results were announced, the Sierra Club prepared to sue. But first environmentalists had to deal with dissension in their own ranks. Wilderness Society honchos were counseling the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund against bringing the lawsuit; they considered it hopeless. Certain members of the Sierra Club also argued against it. They didn’t want to damage the good working relationship that they had with the Forest Service. Like other venerable environmental organizations, the Sierra Club had a tradition of working with government agencies, not confronting them as adversaries.

The tough-minded SCLDF attorneys prevailed. Sierra Club v. Butz charged that logging or otherwise developing a potential wilderness area was indeed “a major federal action” that required an environmental-impact statement under NEPA. Before the judge could make a final ruling, the Forest Service backed down. This lawsuit, settled in 1972, gave environmentalists a handle for saving wilderness for the next 20 years.[33]

Once this question was settled, the Forest Service tried again. This time, the agency instituted a decentralized review process called unit planning. Because its implementation was left almost entirely up to the forest supervisors, unit planning was extremely inconsistent. In one case, a 400,000-acre roadless area was divided into twenty separate unit plans. In another case, three enormous roadless areas were lumped together for consideration. The process dragged on for years, inspiring innumerable lawsuits and administrative appeals. As the review process limped forward, it drew increased public scrutiny. Even Congress began to question the Forest Service. For its part, industry wised up, adopting the grass-roots tactics pioneered by environmental groups in the early sixties.

As wrangles in the sticks became increasingly nasty and chaotic, the Washington, D.C., pros were busy figuring out a way to turn the carnage to their advantage. In 1976, Doug Scott and Chuck Clusen, who were both working for the Sierra Club, came up with the artful concept of introducing an omnibus wilderness bill. They carefully selected potential wilderness areas that had enough political support to make it through Congress, packaging them under the label Endangered American Wilderness. The second criterion Scott and Clusen used to select places was how they had fared in the RARE process. Certain places were included to show how wrong the RARE evaluations were. It was a brilliant move from the point of view of Washington, D.C., a massive wilderness coup that would at least partially preempt the Forest Service.

But a blue-eyed nurse named Nancy Morton thought it stank. Morton had just spent several years of her relatively young life trying to protect 61,000 acres of oak-studded foothills outside Lassen National Park in northern California. The area was named for a Yahi Indian named Ishi, the last Native American to grow up isolated from whites. In 1911 Ishi had emerged from these hills, a lonely ghost in search of a vanished civilization. Even today, the place conveys a sense of mystery, its curving, lion-colored hillsides marked by drifts of chaparral. But like many other areas suggested by local activists, Ishi’s land was not included in the Endangered American Wilderness bill. Because it had only lukewarm support from its congressman, an infamous wilderness opponent named Harold “Bizz” Johnson, it didn’t fit into the sure-thing strategy.

All over the country, grass-roots activists were finding out that the Endangered American Wilderness Act was merely a postponement of battle. In Oregon, an articulate, aggressive college dropout named Andy Kerr had been trying to include in the bill an old-growth forest called the Kalmiopsis. Kerr’s attempt failed in the face of opposition from Sen. Mark Hatfield. The Oregon Republican was a liberal, Kerr discovered, except when it came to confronting the timber companies that had clearcut the state’s politics for generations. But the Kalmiopsis—and Kerr—would surface again in national environmental politics.

Several places in New Mexico were also aced out of the bill, which galled Dave Foreman. Maybe he had been spending too many days in the hot southwestern sun, baling hay and turning on the charm with local ranchers. His patience with the laggards in Washington, D.C., was slowly draining away. He and Scott had never hit it off anyway, and Scott’s glitzy PR approach to Endangered American Wilderness irked Foreman. He took pleasure in pointing out that Scott had actually chosen the least endangered wilderness to box and package in the bill.

In the following years, Scott was more than happy to cop to this strategy. His reasoning was that a bill that couldn’t pass would merely confirm the Forest Service’s faulty RARE II diagnosis. It was better to let those issues ripen, concentrating on areas around which consensus had already formed, the A Number One Easies, as Brandborg called them. “Each area was ready to go but didn’t look it—that was the stroke of genius about it,” Scott proudly told Forest Service historian Dennis Roth.[34] In any case, not all environmentalists were so critical of Scott. Steve Evans, Nancy Morton’s partner in the late 1970s, worked with her on the Ishi wilderness proposal. Scott’s strategy was effective, but it set an unfortunate precedent, said Evans, who is now conservation director of the environmental group Friends of the River. “The Endangered American Wilderness Act was the first big omnibus bill, so it showed it could be done. But it set the tone of future wilderness bills. It meant that areas that were very endangered, with lots of conflict, tended to be dropped.”

That was tough, as far as Doug Scott was concerned. True, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 election had created a friendlier climate for environmental legislation. But why take chances? So far things were looking pretty good. For one thing, the lanky Mo Udall had risen to even greater heights of power in the Democratic election sweep. When the six-foot-five Arizonan found out he had become chair of the House Interior Committee, he hugged the much smaller Chuck Clusen, Scott’s colleague at the Sierra Club, saying heartily, “Now let’s pass that Endangered Bill.” You could almost hear the word pardner dangling in the air like a promise of environmental victories to come.[35]

But the forces of darkness never rested. One day, Doug Scott was listening to the drone of voices in a stuffy hearing room, waiting for Rupert Cutler to give testimony on behalf of the Endangered American Wilderness bill. Cutler had recently been appointed by Carter to a high post in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the government agency that included the Forest Service. Scott knew he could count on support from Cutler, who had been assistant executive director of the Wilderness Society in the 1960s. When he took the microphone, Scott didn’t expect any surprises.

Scott wasn’t reckoning on the pressure Cutler was facing from powerful timber and mining interests. Before his confirmation hearing, he had met with timber industry officials and listened to their fears about the “uncertainties” plaguing the national forests. Cutler agreed to speed up the inventory process.

Cutler duly testified on behalf of the Endangered American Wilderness Act. But then he dropped a bombshell, announcing that the Forest Service would be undertaking one gigantic programmatic EIS to determine the fate of the nation’s forests.

Doug Scott was floored. The next morning, he ran over to the Forest Service. The chief showed him the sketchy outline of the sixmonth inventory that was to become RARE II, the Second Roadless Area Review and Evaluation. Scott says his first thought was: “Here’s another quick and dirty attempt to get rid of the wilderness issue.”[36] Nevertheless, swayed by his friendship for Rupe Cutler, Scott decided to support RARE II. As it turned out, the inventory process would last not six, but eighteen months. And its results would be even worse than Scott feared.

Scott’s support for the project was important. The eager graduate student had become one of the most powerful environmentalists in the country. Doug Scott was a Horatio Alger figure. The son of a kitchen-cabinet salesman, he grew up camping in the national forests of his native Pacific Northwest. In the early days of his career he had handed out copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radical like candy to children. Like Alinsky, Scott never lost his belief that the system worked—if you knew how to work it. That was what Howard Zahniser had done. Now Scott was doing it, too. In the 1970s, Scott became recognized as the environmental movement’s foremost strategist. But critics charged that his tactical brilliance prevented him from seeing the big picture. Scott spoke in a moving fashion about the little people, the volunteers in Iowa and South Dakota. But his hardheaded practicality—like his decision on the Ishi wilderness—sometimes left them feeling betrayed.

When Scott moved over to the Sierra Club, he and Clusen edged out the more passionate, emotional Brock Evans. Evans was a holdover from the regime of David Brower, the “archdruid” who had almost singlehandedly steered the Sierra Club to national prominence. Brower was ousted in 1969 when his difficult management style and fiscal freehandedness alienated the club’s board. But many of his hand-picked staff remained. Like Brower, Evans believed in doing a thing because it was right. Even when he lost the first round, Evans was confident of eventual victory because he believed history was on his side. If he could nudge history forward a bit, so much the better. But that wasn’t good enough for the new pragmatists at the Sierra Club. They considered Evans soft. For their taste, he was too willing to go down in bright but useless flames. It wasn’t long after Scott moved up in the Sierra Club ranks that Evans, along with several other holdovers, was kicked upstairs. Soon he accepted a high-level job at the National Audubon Society, where he continued taking aggressive stands on controversial issues.

Doug Scott prided himself not so much on his idealism as on his ability to get things done. He felt it was his responsibility to the ballooning membership of the Sierra Club. Many of the club’s members were volunteers who devoted significant portions of their lives and incomes to its activities. By the mid-1980s, when he became the club’s conservation director, Scott’s power was enormous. With a few machinations and a stroke of a pen, he could get tens of thousands of letters fluttering their way into congressional mailboxes. Political wisdom holds that when an elected official receives one letter, it represents the views of one hundred like-minded but lazier people. Scott had no intention of diluting the Sierra Club’s substantial clout by enrolling his precious letter writers in a lost cause—nor was he willing to risk losing their loyalty by being branded a loser. “I used to suggest that, Doug, you want to always consider the ethical approach, too,” said Merritt. “He said, ‘Well, as a youngster I had to grow up as the smallest and youngest of four brothers. I had to fight to survive and that’s all I know.’ ” Scott’s career had become a perfectly tuned aesthetic response to the forms and rituals of Washington, to the symmetry of the game.

By 1978, Scott’s approach seemed to be vindicated, not just by his legislative successes, but by disarray at the more gung-ho Wilderness Society. In the early 1970s, Stewart Brandborg had dipped into the group’s endowment to fight the Alaska pipeline. For a short time, it had actually looked as if Brandborg’s troops had stopped the militaryindustrial complex dead in its giant tire tracks. At this heady point, the Wilderness Society made a disastrous effort to computerize. Membership figures became a guessing game as a dozen keypunch operators sent membership lists into an electronic twilight zone, where the Red Queen of magnetic tape bestowed no privileges, but rained down renewal notices at a hectic nonsensical clip. This failed attempt to go high-tech multiplied the society’s financial woes.

As money got tight, Brandborg’s administration became erratic. Finally he sparked an all-out war by firing the editor of the organization’s magazine, The Living Wilderness. Appalled at the change of attitude at the Wilderness Society, which had always functioned more like a family than an employer, Harry Crandell quit. His fellow lobbyist Ernie Dickerman stayed loyal to Brandborg.

The uproar reached all the way to the Wilderness Society’s governing council. After a period of agonized soul-searching and frantic bean-counting, Brandborg left the organization in late 1975. Clif Merritt once again agreed to camp out in Washington, filling in as executive director. But Merritt’s heart was always in fieldwork. He used his temporary elevation to juggle a few budget items so that he could rebuild the western field staff gutted by Brandborg in an earlier costcutting move. After two and a half months, the board sent Merritt back to Denver. George Davis, a conservationist from the Adirondacks, was hired as executive director. But Davis, too, was unable to get the organization’s financial or administrative problems under control. In 1977, the Wilderness Society governing council took the unprecedented step of asking a woman to rescue the once-thriving conservation group. To this day, Celia Hunter remains one of the few females to head a major U.S. conservation organization. But that was not the only thing that made her tenure at the Wilderness Society revolutionary. Hunter was an Alaskan frontierswoman with a progressive bent. She hauled the Buckaroos into Washington, D.C., like a band of dirty, thirsty, saddle-sore cowboys in from the range. Washington might be the same again, but the Buckaroos wouldn’t.

5. West Meets East

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride

—Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders “My City Was Gone,” 1982

1978 — Rosslyn, Virginia

THE RAT SWAYED in the breeze. Gently, because it was an eastern breeze. A wimpy current of air, not likely to push the dead rodent out of his hangman’s noose onto the nests of newspapers, catcher’s mitts, old boots, and dirty socks that lined the back porch. He was safe up there. Safer than he had ever been before, probably.

The rat proved one thing: it wasn’t easy being a Buckaroo in the big city. Certain accommodations had to be made. For instance, when they moved into the bilious-green house, Dave Foreman, Debbie Sease, and Tim Mahoney christened it the Bunkhouse. The Buckaroo Bunkhouse. Of course, they had a sacred mission to make it live up to its name. When the varmints railroaded out from behind the kitchen stove, there was only one thing to do. String them up on the back porch the same way ranchers strung up dead coyotes, a crude warning to their furry kin. The effect on other rats may have been negligible, but the dangling rodents added a pungent je ne sais qnoi to the Bunkhouse mystique.

Not that it needed much help. The Buckaroo Bunkhouse quickly became a rowdy safe house for western environmentalists on their periodic D.C. trips. Most of the regulars worked for the Wilderness Society. There was Jim Eaton, a stocky, unassuming guy who was mastering the sleazy art of California’s backroom politics. Sweetvoiced Susan Morgan, the education director at the Denver office, was also a frequent flier to Washington. All the women who hung out with the Buckaroos had to win their spurs as Buckarettes, and Morgan was no exception. But she refused to participate in the Buckarette initiation ceremony. “Sorry, guys,” she explained. “I’m just not going to pee off a bridge.” Fortunately, the requirements were flexible. The only things you needed to qualify were balls, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Morgan became a Buckarette. Eventually they all decided Buckarette was sexist and she became a Buckaroo.

Bart Koehler was another welcome visitor. Bart was the one who had spotted the Bunkhouse, which seemed appropriate to everyone. Bart, who had that funky, magical touch, a guy who played howling rock and roll, drew funny, quirky, little pictures, and saw signs and portents everywhere. Years later, talismans kept his morale up as he achieved the impossible: stopping logging in over one million acres of old-growth habitat in the Tongass National Forest, a piece of Alaskan rain forest bigger than Rhode Island. By then, nobody was cracking a smile at Bart Koehler’s rodeo-star-sized belt buckle with a grizzly bear on it or the howling coyotes on his red power tie. They just swallowed hard and begged him to make their cause his next congressional end run.

But in 1978, Bart was still in the chorus line. His buddy Dave Foreman was the one with the big promotion. The fifth-generation New Mexico redneck with the near-genius IQ had agreed to move to Washington for just one year. He would be the liaison between the Wilderness Society’s entire field operation and its lobbying staff, although his title—Coordinator of Wilderness Affairs—inspired him to describe his duties as “making sure everybody got laid out in the boonies.”

At times, Foreman probably wished his new job were that easy. Washington, D.C., was a tougher league than Foreman had ever played. Like the other western wilderness freaks, Foreman felt penned up in the airless, shuttered rooms of the capital. In the concrete bull’s-eye of Pierre L’Enfant boulevards, jaded bureaucrats decided the lives and deaths of uncounted species, of timber rattlers, elk, and caribou, grizzly bears, timber wolves, coyotes, trumpeter swans, and whooping cranes. The city hummed with power; the opportunities were staggering compared to what you could accomplish in Laramie, Wyoming, or Phoenix, Arizona. Whether they saw it as a political mecca or an urban hell, it was hard for a serious environmentalist not to be drawn to Washington, D.C.

That snowy January, the raw recruits to urban hell were being mysteriously beckoned not by the capital itself but by “the dismal canyons of Rosslyn, Virginia,” to quote an unsung tabloid poet. Bart had agreed to keep Dave and Debbie company while they searched for a suitable habitat for themselves and Tim Mahoney, who was moving to Washington in a few weeks. Should any landlord question the morality of their living arrangement, Foreman was prepared to pass Mahoney off as Debbie’s ne’er-do-well brother, although he neglected to devise an explanation for why their checking accounts bore three different names. Leaving such minor details for later, Bart, Debbie, and Dave squeezed into the front seat of Foreman’s pickup and started scoping. The requirements were simple. No Formica in the kitchen. (Dave insisted that Formica reeked of urban life.) With a yard. (Obviously.) Cheap, because none of them made more than $14,000 a year, not even Foreman.

Minimal as these demands were, Washington, D.C., couldn’t seem to satisfy them. Ergo unglamorous Rosslyn. Because it lay just over the border in Virginia, it had weaseled out of the rule that buildings in the nation’s capital could not exceed the height of the Washington Monument. Once upon a time Rosslyn might have been a nice, if unpretentious, town. But skyscraper office buildings and luxury high rises were swallowing up any modest claim to all-American ambience Rosslyn might have boasted. Only a few scattered remnants of it remained, including a decrepit farmhouse painted a bizarre shade of chartreuse.

“That’s your house!” roared Koehler. “It’s straight out of American Gothic!” Foreman made a quick turn, parking in front of the house with the wraparound porch. A sleazy used-car dealership shouted polyester and vinyl on one side, a vacant lot died quietly on the other, and a For Rent sign was planted haphazardly out front. They piled out of the truck and walked up to the front door. Inside was a thicket of lath. A fine mist of plaster dust swam in the air.

“No Formica,” said Sease.

Koehler pointed to the bombed-out vacant lot next door. “Yard,” he said.

They took it.

A trust-fund beneficiary might have balked at their lifestyle, but the young environmentalists were rich in what really mattered: political capital. The decade preceding their arrival in Washington had transformed environmentalism into a mass movement by combining the traditional wilderness-preservation agenda with antipollution activism. Historically, the conservation movement had been a creature of the romantic sensibility, an elitist, primitivist reaction to the frontier’s closing in 1890. When the noose of barbed wire tightened around the American West, wilderness ceased to be the dark, satanic force of the Puritan imagination. Instead of being threatening, wilderness itself became threatened. As the wheels of the machine hummed closer in the latter half of the twentieth century, the wilderness ethic filtered out of country clubs and into barrooms and truck stops. The Buckaroos were the link between the two stages of the movement, blue-jeaned, beer-drinking ambassadors to the trailer park.

A new culture was evolving with this consciousness. Dave Foreman, the onetime anthropology major in cowboy boots, called the people who shared it the wilderness tribe. These were the people who knew they were losing ground every time a mall developer plowed up a Joshua tree or a “nuisance” grizzly bear was shot in Yellowstone. Foreman didn’t go so far as to call the Buckaroos a loudmouthed subset of the tribe, young braves out for the kill. But he could have. Their leader was just as much of an outsider, an uppity, unconventional woman. Like them, the woman was not disheartened even though she knew the entire throw weight of industrial society was aimed at the things she cared about most. Every inch of lost ground just made her more determined to kick ass. Politely.

The daughter of a Washington State stump farmer, Celia Hunter arrived in Alaska in 1948, after flying pursuit planes as a World War II WASP (Women’s Air Force Service Pilots). She and her fellow WASP Ginny Wood staked land outside Mount McKinley National Park, constructing a few tent cabins for tourists seeking an out-of-the-ordinary wilderness vacation. Anticipating the Park Service, they named their resort Camp Denali. The two women ran it successfully for twenty-five years before selling out in 1975, when wilderness travel had become a luxury commodity.

But Hunter was more than a frontier entrepreneur. She had grown up as a Quaker and felt strongly about a wide array of liberal causes. By the time she retired from the tourist trade, Hunter had become a power in Alaska’s new, embattled conservation movement. The Wilderness Society had deep roots in Alaska, where Olaus Murie, one of its founders, had conducted pioneering studies of predator/prey relationships. In 1969, Hunter joined the society’s governing council. In 1976, she became its president.

Within six months of Hunter’s accession to the post of acting executive director of the Wilderness Society in June of 1977, the organization’s structure had changed dramatically. The biggest change was that field representatives were no longer reporting only to Clif Merritt. The lines of authority had gotten murky. More often than not, they were answering to a new coordinator in Washington, D.C.. who was being used by Celia to consolidate her power. His name was Dave Foreman. Along with Foreman, most of the Denver office staff had been transferred to Washington or out to the field.

By agreeing to the transfers, the field staff was reluctantly supporting Hunter’s decision to gut the Denver office. Although Merritt would always be revered, a personality clash between Hunter and Jerry Mallett, Merritt’s lieutenant, had caused a rift that was threatening to destroy the organization. Even Foreman believed that leadership had to be centralized if the Wilderness Society was going to survive.

Merritt and Mallett remained in the Denver office for a few months, while nearly everyone else moved on. Tim Mahoney was given the choice of becoming a field representative or moving to Washington. He sweated over the decision, but finally resolved that he could do the most good by using his RARE II expertise in the largest possible arena. Foreman had already been promoted to the D.C. office. Mahoney joined him there in early January. The pressure on the two rookies was enormous. Celia Hunter and the other staff members were consumed with the organization’s financial and administrative problems. Foreman and Mahoney found themselves making policy decisions formerly handled by men twice their age.

If Clif Merritt’s flannel-shirted field reps were ugly ducklings to Doug Scott, they were swans-in-waiting to Hunter. “We loved Celia because Celia loved and valued us,” remembers Tim Mahoney. “She saw us as talented and deserving of more support than we had been getting. She promoted us—we didn’t have any money so there wasn’t much salary—and brought us to Washington and really let us run the program.”

By the end of their climactic first year in Washington, Foreman and Mahoney had gone in separate directions, although they remained close friends. Foreman was moving toward an emotional center that lay somewhere west of the hundredth meridian. Mahoney was learning how to be a high-functioning schizophrenic: keeping his heart pure, but getting his hands dirty.

Foreman had learned his formative lessons from the unabashedly populist Clif Merritt. He wasn’t about to change his style just because he was going back east. For instance, his mother, Lorane, had insisted that he buy a suit after his big promotion. Skip, finally proud of his son, anted up the cash. Foreman strutted home wearing a westerncut suit and a big ten-gallon hat. This egregious outfit proved that it was a long way from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the carpeted environs of Brooks Brothers or J. Press, those stalwarts of bureaucratic mufti. To be fair, Foreman’s clothes weren’t any worse than those of the other Wilderness Society staff members, who had an unfortunate propensity for polyester leisure suits particularly ill chosen for those formal lobbying occasions.

But Foreman wasn’t just an awkward dresser; he was openly rebellious. Confined by the neoclassical lines of official architecture and systematic deal-making of Washington, D.C., Foreman reacted by becoming more redneck-than-thou. Even before his promotion, he had a habit of flying in from New Mexico for lobbying trips wearing cowboy boots caked with mule shit, courtesy of Nellie Belle Queen Bee Junebug. Then he’d make sure to cross his legs elaborately in the Senate hearing room, just to let them know he was the real thing, not some Robert Redford cowboy. Not that they couldn’t see him coming a mile off. They might even have smelled him.

Like most of the Buckaroos, Foreman wasn’t the least bit embarrassed when rough edges poked out from beneath his too-tight collar. Back in his field-rep days, Foreman had designed a slide show on the history of wilderness in America. Ron Kezar, a Texas medical librarian and Sierra Club conservation chair, got a kick out of the hokey presentation, particularly when Foreman referred to those “effete easterners” while flashing a slide of Gainsborough’s curly-locked and beribbonned Blue Boy. The next slide revealed the stirring sight of a mountain man on horseback, representing the virile West. It was a myth Foreman would cling to for a long time.

More comfortable with giving orders (genially, of course) than taking them, Foreman found his perfect boss in Celia Hunter. “We got along well because I left him alone. He did his thing and I did mine,” Hunter said. “Dave’s a rugged individualist. He always kidded himself about being—what was it?—a male chauvinist. He really can play the role beautifully, but he isn’t that at all. I think he’s very respectful of women in many ways. He certainly gives them credit for having brains. But he’s not a political animal. He’d be fine in New Mexico, in the local rough-and-tumble of politics at that level. But he doesn’t like this whole slick thing of how you buy your way into power you don’t earn.”

Hunter was right about one thing. Foreman was out of his element. Like Mahoney and the others, he was still learning how to negotiate with the horse traders in Congress. The New Mexico delegation wasn’t caving in to him the way he’d hoped. In fact, Dave was being forced to lobby for a New Mexico wilderness bill that actually contained less land than the Forest Service had recommended. Exhausted by a decade of seventy-hour work weeks and frustrated by the trade-offs he was making, Dave Foreman fantasized about resurrecting the Striders. Whimsically named after the woodland scouts in J. R. R. Tolkien’s books, the Striders were an off-the-cuff political group organized by Bill Mounsey, a Denver-based outdoor guide who occasionally worked for the Wilderness Society. The Striders crashed a few hearings in the mid-seventies, making outlandish proposals that reflected the spirit of true wilderness freaks. In Foreman’s view, these proposals weren’t any more extreme than the ideas being tossed around by the Sagebrush Rebels. Yet the poisonous little nerds in cowboy hats were considered normal. Mounsey’s idea was to provide a counterweight to the phony cowboys by offering a radical environmental alternative. That way, the Striders would move the parameters of the debate and come up with a truly fair compromise. It was a strategic way of thinking, but very different from the clockmaker’s art of internal springs and levers that Tim Mahoney was learning. It was an outsider’s strategy, an obvious choice for the perennial new kid in town—and for a grown-up whose guiding passion was to change the politics of the American West. After all, nobody knew exactly where Middle Earth was supposed to be, but it sure as hell wasn’t inside the Beltway.

It was ironic that of all the Buckaroos, it was the house radical, Tim Mahoney, who learned the lessons of Washington, D.C., best. As the Rocky Mountain range wars grew increasingly bloody, Mahoney emerged as one of the environmental movement’s toughest gunfighters. Shy, but with a core of self-confidence, Mahoney grew up Irish Catholic in a hardscrabble central New Hampshire town called Contoocook. When he moved to Denver in 1975, he felt a strong physical affinity for the Colorado high country. Its steep granite mountains and dark pine trees were an idealized portrait of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he had spent the happiest summers of his youth. When he moved to Denver he immediately became, in his own words, “a western chauvinist.” After a few discouraging years of beating on the door, Mahoney carved himself a job as a hired gun for the Wilderness Society. He specialized in fighting Forest Service logging plans, traveling from state to state in the West to coach local environmentalists. Later Mahoney would reflect that the beginning of his career was more similar to Doug Scott’s than to Dave Foreman’s. Like Scott, he started with a big national group, rather than as a citizen activist on his native turf. Educated at Tufts University outside Boston and the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in plant ecology, Mahoney was also more sophisticated than most of the Buckaroos. As an easterner, he was familiar with how formidable the opposition really was, its tightly woven strands of power and influence stretching from prep school to global corporate monopolies. And like Doug Scott, Mahoney began his career steeped in left-wing politics. He was young and emotional, a street fighter.

But when Mahoney came to Washington, he discovered that the schtick that played to a packed house in Boise laid an egg in the Senate lunchroom. It hit Mahoney like a bolt of white light when he heard a presentation by veteran lobbyist Ernie Dickerman at a Wilderness Society conference. “I had never lobbied. All my work had been with the Forest Service in a very confrontational way. I would analyze their plans; they were terrible. I would attack them venomously, threaten to undo them, threaten to go to court, file administrative appeals. We changed a great number of plans throughout the Rocky Mountain region. In a very confrontational way, not the way you lobby Congress.

“Ernie Dickerman, in an hour of explaining to a group of green people—I was just sitting there eavesdropping—explained more about how to lobby … he explained what simpleminded, malleable people members of Congress were. If you would just treat them nicely, really all they wanted to do was get reelected. If you remembered that, and that they really wanted to be kind of popular and that they didn’t really want to fight, in fact would go to great lengths to avoid fighting … it all kind of clicked into place.”

Eventually Mahoney came to believe that it was the “uncompromising” local activists who got creamed in Washington. Dickerman’s soft-sell technique concealed negotiating skills equal to those of the toughest used-car dealer—or politician. Modulation was the key: knowing when to push harder and when to back down. Mahoney found himself intrigued by the subtleties of the game. Eventually he would play it better than anyone else. But that didn’t solve the immediate problem. In 1978, the Wilderness Society was long on guts, but short on the most valuable commodity of all—experience.

By the summer of 1978, the furor over RARE II was building. But for the Buckaroos it was nearly eclipsed by the furor at the Wilderness Society. Hunter had been able to do little more than hold the line in the red zone. Finances and membership, the two vital signs for any environmental group, were disastrous. The group’s original endowment, left to them by Bob Marshall, had vanished. For eight of the previous ten years the society had run a deficit. The computer operation was such a mess that for a long time nobody knew how many members there were. But as Celia Hunter and her staff struggled to make sense of the data-entry nightmare, they realized that the figures seeping out from the system’s cracked silicon innards didn’t look good. They indicated that the group’s enrollment had dropped from 70,000 to something like 40,000.

Around Labor Day, the governing council cleaned house in a big way. They told Celia to book her passage back to Alaska; they had hired a Yale- and Oxford-educated mountain climber from the exotic enclave of Big Sur, California, to replace her. His name was Bill Turnage. His claim to fame was that he had worked as a business manager for Ansel Adams, the photographer whose black-and-white panoramas of Yosemite had indelibly etched the park’s image in the public’s imagination. Turnage was a well-heeled hit man, the result of a seventeen-month search to find someone with sufficient toughness to turn the organization around. Arrogant, blunt-spoken, and unremittingly upper-class, with a mouth so full of marbles he sounded like he was choking, Turnage couldn’t have been better chosen to infuriate the Buckaroos.

Despite his pretentiousness, Turnage was not a lightweight. He had an intelligently conceived idea of the niche he wanted the Wilderness Society to fill in the environmental movement. It was somewhere between the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, a think tank with political teeth. So far, no environmental organization had combined hard science with the Sierra Club’s legislative clout. Turnage wanted to return the Wilderness Society to the glory days of Bob Marshall and Aldo Leopold. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Wilderness Society had been the most influential conservation group in national politics, as well as the movement’s intellectual and philosophical leader. At the very least, Turnage was determined to keep the organization alive—and to leave his stamp on it.

Their den mother may have been gone, but the young coyotes weren’t going to leave the den without a fight. At first, the conflict was discernible only as a subtle tension that permeated the office and gave an interesting edge to social occasions. Ron Tipton, a staff member hired after the purge, vividly remembers his first meeting with both Turnage and Foreman. It was a social evening; the guests even took a sauna together. But Tipton says he could sense the two men preparing for war.

In fact, Tipton remembers a special dynamic existing between Turnage and Foreman. They seemed to like each other, although Foreman later remarked that the idea of Bill Turnage liking him caused him “undying uneasiness.” But Tipton believes there was an odd attraction between the two, an intensity that neither experienced with other people on the staff. “Dave always respected people who were intelligent,” Tipton said. “Bill has a first-class mind. Bill and Dave were very formidable adversaries. They took each other on in a very interesting way.” He paused before adding, “It was an unfair fight, of course, because Bill was running the show.”

Before the struggle over the future of the Wilderness Society could erupt into full-scale war, RARE II did. On January 4, 1979, Rupert Cutler announced the results of the survey. Only ten million acres in the Lower 48 states were recommended for wilderness. Thirty-six million acres were opened for development and eleven million acres were set aside for further planning. In addition, Cutler had succeeded in getting five million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest recommended for wilderness preservation. Dave Foreman and his friend Howie Wolke, a Friends of the Earth representative in Wyoming, believed there were an additional eighteen million acres of roadless land throughout the West that had not even been included in the study, either because of bad map work or bureaucratic finagling. That land would be open to development, too.

A hasty summit meeting was called. The Wilderness Society was represented by Dave Foreman, Tim Mahoney, and Roger Scholl, Celia Hunter’s former second-in-command. But Doug Scott and John McComb, who were working for the Sierra Club, dominated the talks. Doug Scott expressed himself in his usual vehement way. His position was that a RARE II lawsuit would provoke a violent anti-environmental backlash. Still working on Zahniser’s model, Scott wanted to “control the politics” in the way that environmentalists had in years past, when small-scale wilderness bills were maneuvered through Congress. After hours of unhappy negotiations, Foreman and the others quelled their doubts and agreed not to sue over RARE II. Instead, they resolved to work on several bills that would repair some of the damage.

But as the months passed and no significant bill left the starting gate, Huey Johnson got restless. Johnson was California’s commissioner of natural resources under Zen governor Jerry Brown. California had fared particularly badly in RARE II, and Johnson wanted to sue. In the summer, the Wilderness Society dispatched its California representative, Jim Eaton, to talk sense to Johnson. Tim Mahoney flew out from Washington to lend weight to the argument and Trent Orr of the Natural Resources Defense Council drove up to Sacramento from San Francisco. Eaton remembers orbiting in a rattan chair that hung from the ceiling in Johnson’s office, wondering what straitlaced industry people thought when they entered this garden of countercultural artifacts. If they underestimated Johnson, they were wrong. Johnson was a tough customer who had pioneered successful land-preservation schemes when most of the conservation movement was still bouncing around in tennis shoes. Eaton, Mahoney, and Orr extracted a promise that Johnson would give the environmentalists thirty days to pull together a response to RARE II that didn’t involve litigation. Five days later, with no warning, Johnson sued the Forest Service.

The political impact of Johnson’s suit was enormous. Not only did he win, but the precedent left the Forest Service RARE II recommendations in every western state open to similar challenges. The political landscape was changing very rapidly. In Johnson’s case, California v. Bergland, the court decided that site-specific environmental-impact statements were required before a roadless area could be developed. The court also ruled that RARE II did not fulfill this requirement. Once again, the Forest Service had blown a chance to meet the requirements of NEPA.

After the Johnson suit, statewide wilderness bills became the political medium through which management of the national forests was filtered. The new statewide system had a number of disadvantages. Environmentalists often were forced to negotiate on the basis of overall acreage instead of on the merits of individual areas. Even worse, the price for passing virtually every bill was something called “release language,” which meant that environmentalists couldn’t bring a Huey Johnson—style lawsuit in that state. The days when a lobbyist could patiently let political consensus ripen around each wilderness area were over. It was the antithesis of the slow, strategic Zahniser style; now everything was on the block. Whether this meant less or more wilderness protection in the long run is still an open question. Whatever the answer, the change to hard-fought statewide bills became inevitable as wilderness issues attained a higher profile.

But in 1978, nobody knew if Johnson’s suit would stick. All that environmentalists knew for sure was that they had lost big on RARE II, despite Rupert Cutler’s being on the inside. And inside the Wilderness Society, Dave Foreman was getting the same sick feeling of defeat. His biggest humiliation occurred around Christmas at a staff retreat in Coolfont, West Virginia. Foreman’s presentation was the first item on the agenda. He was given two-and-a-half days of the three-day retreat to make an eloquent appeal to the entire staff, and to Bill Turnage in particular. Summoning Asa Lipscomb’s penetrating preacher’s voice from the deep recesses of his childhood, Foreman made his case for keeping intact the romantic, egalitarian style of the Hunter era. Sitting with the staff in a circle on the floor, Foreman talked about how they were a family, a tribe united by a common belief in wilderness. Debbie Sease, Tim Mahoney, and Bart Koehler chimed in when Foreman talked about the value of the consensus approach that they had developed over the past year.

Nobody wanted it to be over.

But the fix was in. Soon after he began work, Turnage had been shocked by the news that the society’s endowment had been siphoned off into day-to-day operating expenses. Not long afterward, he paid a call on Brock Evans at the Sierra Club. Evans called in Doug Scott and John McComb, who had both recently left the Wilderness Society. They proceeded to give Turnage a thorough rundown on every staff member at the society, calling practically every one of them radical, undisciplined, and unprofessional. Turnage’s attitude hardened. It wasn’t long before he was at loggerheads with the staff. “No one wanted to take orders. No one wanted to do anything, except what they wanted to do,” he complained. A female Yale graduate with good fund-raising credentials who had been referred to him via the school’s old boy network was rejected by the staff for the absurd reason that she didn’t look outdoorsy enough. Turnage huffily replied that she was one of the best squash players in the country. Clearly, the Buckaroos were living on borrowed time.

Turnage had already gotten the message to close the Denver office. Even without his staff, Clif Merritt was too strong a counterweight to the Washington, D.C., operation. It was a measure of the organization’s dire circumstances that even Margaret Murie, the universally respected widow of Society cofounder Olaus Murie, acquiesced in this decision. Merritt’s head wasn’t the only one about to roll. A war over the environment was beginning—soon the Sagebrush Rebels would lay siege to Washington—and Turnage was determined to assure the Wilderness Society’s survival, even if it meant canning the whole flannel-shirted staff and replacing them with Ivy League graduates who knew how to fill in a balance sheet. He proceeded to do just that. The Wilderness Society became solvent, although it never regained the position of political and intellectual leadership that it had once held.

Of all the holdovers from the Hunter era, Turnage was amenable to keeping only Tim Mahoney, a former congressional staffer named Joe Hooper, and Dave Foreman. Foreman was bound to be difficult. If Turnage couldn’t keep him at his right hand like some bound-and-gagged Lucifer, he would let him take a six-month sabbatical before resuming his previous duties as New Mexico field representative.

As 1979 approached, Foreman made plans to leave Washington. He had no idea yet how far he would travel. The end of the decade would bring enormous changes that would push Foreman to the edge of the political landscape. These changes went deeper than ideology or economics, according to the Pulitzer Prize—winning poet Gary Snyder. Snyder, who has thought deeply about human society’s relationship to nature, believes that the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan signaled no less than a turning point in the national mythology. At that moment, the corporate warrior replaced the cowboy as the country’s dominant archetype. As the CEO ascended the mythological ladder, the cowboy became an outlaw. It was merely ironic that Ronald Reagan, an actor who liked to play dress-up in cowboy clothes, presided over the archetype’s demotion.

When he examined the tangible roots of the western myth, Snyder discovered that the cowboy is heir to an aesthetic of living close to the land. The tradition began in Arabia, where the finest horses were bred. The Moors carried it to Spain. From Spain, it sailed with the conquistadores to the New World, where it found its way into the callused hands of Mexican vaqueros.

The cowboy moved north to the United States in the 1800s, as the giant buffalo herds were slaughtered. This inglorious, politically motivated massacre cleared the way for domesticated cattle, but its real purpose was to destroy the power of the Plains Indians. Despite this ignoble genesis, the American cowboy is a preindustrial hero, Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocrat.

“No matter how poor you might be, no matter what other kind of social status you have, it was part of the preindustrial world that a man who knew horses and a man who could ride horses had a certain kind of automatic status. Regardless,” says Snyder.

“The next phase is that the cowboy becomes the finally crystallized version of the frontier. The frontier is the embodiment of a certain kind of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, the egalitarianism of people whose esteem is based on nothing more than their ability and their capacity, a kind of camaraderie and conviviality and humor and distance from authority.”

It was as good an epitaph as any for the Bunkhouse crew. The anointing of Bill Turnage was a minor footnote to the apparent triumph of corporate culture on the larger stage of American society at the close of the 1970s. If an alien from outer space relied on Time or Newsweek to learn about America over most of the following decade, he would believe the public narcotized by the repetitive hammerlock of a disco beat, bored and brainwashed into believing the happy talk of an aged and possibly senile president who made them feel that the bills for a consumptive lifestyle would never come due, and that life was full of limitless Levittown possibility, just as it had been circa 1959.

But beneath the shiny, four-color surface of New York and Washington, D.C., journalism, a sea change was taking place in small towns and cities all over the country. By the middle of the 1980s, hundreds of grass-roots groups—nobody knew exactly how many—had formed to work on local environmental issues, from cleaning up a toxic-waste site on the poor side of town to establishing a wilderness preserve. The members of these groups were double-knit people: cowboys, working-class blacks, hardware-store owners, housewives, longhaired, dope-smoking construction workers. If you weren’t living in Glenwood, New Mexico, or Lander, Wyoming, or Austin, Texas, these people were probably invisible to you.

When they were still living in the old Glenwood adobe, Foreman and Sease had agreed to spend a single year in Washington, D.C. That year was over. Foreman was ready to heft his belongings into the back of his pickup truck and head home. But Debbie told her husband she wasn’t ready to move. As his quid pro quo for moving to Washington, Dave had insisted that the Wilderness Society give Debbie a job trying to reform the Bureau of Land Management. Finally, Debbie had found work that gave her a chance to use her brain, not just her hands on a set of oars or her legs pumping up a mountain. She wanted to stay.

Now Foreman had lost everything.

6. Trouble Waiting to Happen

I turned on the news to the Third World War
Opened up the paper to World War IV
Just when I thought it was safe to be bored
Trouble waiting to happen

—Warren Zevon and J. D. Souther “Trouble Waiting to Happen,” 1987

1979 — Wyoming

THE PICTURE WINDOW in his office makes a satisfying crash as Bart smashes it. Rain flies in through the hole. He kicks out the jagged glass to the percussive sound of thunder overhead. The phone rings. He rips it out of the wall. Stepping out onto the ledge, he sees lightning fork down behind the domed statehouse. Rain soaks his hair and makes his face shine like the moon. He throws his head back and roars.

“Come and get me, you motherfuckers! C’mon, Exxon. Fuck you, Arco! I’ll take you all!!!!”

Sirens cut through the cacophony of thunder and screaming. Up on his wet pigeon’s perch, Bart looks into the faraway black gun barrels of five Cheyenne, Wyoming, cops. One cop shouts to him, but his voice is lost in the wind. Bart stares. With the politeness he can’t seem to shake even when he’s freaking out, he gently tells the cop to hang on just a minute. He hops back into his office, runs a hand through his rainy tangled dark hair, and opens the door so that they can arrest him. His seven-year tenure as the Wyoming representative of the Wilderness Society was over.

It was the end of the environmental decade and Bart Koehler was self-destructing. Koehler had just been through his seventh session of the Wyoming legislature, forty days and forty nights of what he called “hell on wheels.” For the past seven years, Koehler’s big heart and manic energy had attracted dozens of smart young volunteers. During the legislative session, they all crashed at the same house, downing cases of beer and pulling all-nighters in what High Country News called “The Children’s Crusade.” The Children’s Crusade helped pass landmark environmental laws in a tough, conservative state. But by 1980, Koehler was fraying badly. The new regime at the Wilderness Society was nothing but a source of frustration to him. His whole approach to public lands was built on fending off industry’s attempts to colonize BLM lands and the national forests. A staggering majority of the country’s wild land was administered by these agencies. This was the Wilderness Society, wasn’t it? Then this snotty guy named Turnage who drinks Perrier out of a fancy French canteen gets hired. The new guy wants to do something about national parks. (Well, sure, he used to work for Ansel Adams. All those tasteful scenic views of Half Dome with the little scratchy trees lurking in the lower edges of the photo.) Who cares about national parks? They’re already protected. Not to mention full of tourists. This guy Turnage is into playing an acreage game. Who cares about acreage if you’re taking it up the ass on the important stuff like wildlife habitat? It worked for funders, maybe, but Koehler just didn’t see the point. On April 21—his thirty-first birthday—he got very drunk. From a bar’s pay phone he dictated a telegram to Bill Turnage. “I’m leaving the reservation,” he grandly announced. “Your blankets are thin and your meat is rotten.” Then he repeated the telegram’s contents to a drinking buddy who happened to be a reporter. There was no going back. Bart became the first Buckaroo to quit the Wilderness Society. April 21, again. John Muir’s birthday. The anniversary of Aldo Leopold’s death. It must have seemed like a good day for Bart to take a powder himself.

In all fairness, it wasn’t just Turnage. Seven years of hard work and hard play were starting to catch up with Bart. Unfortunately, he had a chink in his physiology that most people didn’t have, a deficiency of something called lithium that kept you from going manic. The problem was, Koehler didn’t know about the deficiency. He just kept getting more and more pumped up. By the spring of 1979, he was so pumped up that the Cheyenne cops couldn’t get the tranquilizer needle into his arm when they busted him; it was like a steel rod. Koehler’s mania would reach flashpoint several times before a South Dakota psychiatrist finally figured out what was wrong and gave him a better life through chemistry. In the meantime, Koehler was lucky. He had spent seven years being generous to his friends. Now his friends stood by him, fastening their seat belts when they saw him getting hyper. They knew it was going to be a bumpy night, but for Koehler’s sake, they’d do whatever it took to help him make it through.

Barton Koehler had traveled a long way to get to this particular nadir. All the way from Great Neck, Long Island, a crass New York City suburb. Koehler’s parents were always a little different. They weren’t accountants or real estate wheeler-dealers or hyper-manicured bleached-blond housewives like his friends’ parents. His mother was an art teacher, and his father commuted into the city at night to work as an assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic. They didn’t really belong in Great Neck and neither did their son. So Bart Koehler’s journey really began when he was thirteen and the family moved to Mayfield, a small town at the very southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. At six million acres, the Adirondack Park is the largest wilderness east of the Mississippi. The old, worn-down mountain range has recovered gracefully from turn-of-the-century logging. By the 1960s, its tall spruce and fir trees had recaptured the dark, cubist shadows of primeval forest. Bart steeped himself in the dark green quiet. But at the tumultuous age of thirteen, learning the land proved to be easier than learning local culture. When classes began at the tiny Mayfield school, Koehler quickly realized he’d better stop saying “Pass the bawl” in Long Islandese if he wanted to fit in at soccer practice.

Fortunately for Koehler, the musician’s ear he inherited from his father got him talking like an upstater pretty fast. By the time he reached high school, he didn’t just fit in, he excelled. He was an honor student and an athlete. College was a different story. After he entered the State University of New York at Albany in 1966, Koehler followed in an older brother’s footsteps, majoring in booze and spending his nights playing in a rock-and-roll band. It was the first in a tumultuous series of ups and downs that would characterize Koehler’s life. This time, a trip across the country turned things around.

It was 1971 and Koehler and his friends were driving an old beat-up Chevy to Alaska, hoping to find the last frontier. On the way, they stopped for a hike in Montana’s Glacier National Park. The park is famous for its classic Rocky Mountain scenery, a Coors commercial in Sensurround. It is also known for having the largest concentration of fatal grizzly bear attacks in the United States, including the case of a young woman who was ripped apart as she lay asleep in her tent. Even if you never saw them in the flesh, silver-tipped grizzlies roamed through your mind when you hiked in Glacier. They hung out there, picking blackberries, turning slowly as they caught your scent on the wind. At night they kept you awake in your sleeping bag, the way their ancestors kept your ancestors awake ten thousand years ago.

Bart and his friends were no exception. They hiked up to a mountain pass, where they spent the late afternoon watching a family of mountain goats poking their way down a scree slope. That night they were so spooked by the prospect of running into a bear that they all jammed into a steel hut for an uncomfortable night’s sleep. None of them had traveled farther west than Pennsylvania before. “I mean, you get out in this country and they say climb a tree if you see a bear …” Koehler laughs. “I mean, there are no trees anywhere and the wind’s blowing the wrong way and the hairs are standing on the back of my neck and we’re going, wait a minute. So we came walking back and a grizzly was just coming around the other side—we had just gotten out of there in time. So I thought, well, you know, that’s as close as I want to get to a bear for now. I didn’t know anything about grizzlies except I knew they were serious.”

Koehler and his friends hiked back to the car singing a song they called “The Grizzly Bear Blues” to make up for the bells and whistles that they hadn’t brought along to scare off the bears. Koehler was terrified but exhilarated. Most of all, he was hooked. He wanted to spend the rest of his life here. The way to do it, he figured, was to work for the U.S. Park Service.

Despite his bad grades in college, Koehler talked his way into the graduate program in outdoor recreation, resource management and planning at the University of Wyoming. On probation. By the end of his first year, he had the highest average in the department. When it came time to choose a thesis topic, Koehler stumbled onto an attempt by local foresters to do their bit for KAKE I and decided he would help out. Almost twenty years later, his thesis, catchily titled Ait Evaluation of Roadless Areas in the Medicine Bow National Forest, was still being used by local environmentalists in their disputes with the Forest Service. It was a monumental piece of work, three master’s projects in one. First, it offered a critique of how the Forest Service was conducting its review of the roadless areas in the Medicine Bow National Forest. Second, Koehler conducted a targeted survey of leaders of various interest groups, asking for their opinions on wilderness versus timber cutting. Third, Koehler, who had majored in geography as an undergraduate, hiked through every roadless area in the Medicine Bow forest. He mapped them and inventoried their resources, using the criteria set out by the Wilderness Act of 1964 to evaluate their suitability for wilderness designation. It was a tour de force, a letter-perfect example of what the Forest Service should have been doing.

Koehler was a graduate student working part-time as a boatman on the North Platte River when he ran into Clif Merritt. A year later, when the Wilderness Society gave Merritt the go-ahead to hire more staff, he immediately thought of Koehler. In his first year with the society, Bart spent a lot of time flying back and forth to Washington, D.C., serving an apprenticeship that would pay off later on. “It’s a very tough league,” said Koehler. “My two mentors when I got here, the guys who taught me to work the Hill—I don’t like to call it lobbying because lobbyists are sleaze buckets who work for oil companies. We work in the public interest. Anyway, I learned from the good old boys, from Harry Crandell and Ernie Dickerman. They just had a marvelous way of being straightforward and open and honest with people and not being your typical charge-ahead pushy person on the Hill.”

Koehler was a good student. In fact, he was so good that after a year at the Denver office, he got a call from the Wyoming Outdoor Council. They wanted to hire him as executive director. He wrestled with the idea for a while—he liked his job, but he hated Denver. And he loved Wyoming. So he turned in his resignation. But Clif Merritt had a better idea. He asked Koehler to become the Wilderness Society’s half-time Wyoming representative, a job he could do while he was working at the outdoor council. Koehler’s salary climbed to a whopping $400 a month. Out of that, he paid the rent on an office next door to the historic Buckhorn Bar in downtown Laramie. Laramie was a minor countercultural hub, a graceful western college town that had kept both its architecture and its nineteenth-century atmosphere intact. Naturally, there was no money left over for his own rent, so Koehler slept in the back of the office. With no home to escape to, things got pretty intense during the state legislature’s fortyday session. “We started out just easygoing, with a case of normalsized beers. And then by the end we were drinkin’ cases of quarts. And we’d play a lot of music and be bad. We were very effective,” said Koehler, grinning.

After a year and a half, the Wyoming Outdoor Council was running out of money and Koehler was running out of a job. He was kicking ass in the statehouse, but his rowdy ways were starting to alienate the more conservative members of the outdoor council’s board. Once again, Clif Merritt materialized. Like the good witch in The Wizard of Oz, Merritt waved his magic wand and Bart became a full-time representative for the Wilderness Society. He moved up to Jackson in the winter of 1975 and opened a field office. He was new in town, but Jackson was a happening place, an enclave of the young and hip and old and rich, so Koehler got along. Then in July he met someone he could really get along with. Howie Wolke became the second in the eventual trio of Wyoming Buckaroos.

Howie was a huge guy with pretty blue eyes and dark blond hair, a gorgeous hunk with the social graces of Sasquatch under a full moon. He had been born in Brooklyn, New York, but when he was five years old, his father, a traveling salesman, moved the family to the outskirts of Nashville. “I come from a working-class family. You can write the American dream and it’s my family. There’s no indication, no wilderness there,” said Wolke. But Wolke remembers spending summers driving through the countryside with his father, straining to see what lay behind the green curtain flashing past the car window. Back home, he explored the woods and streams and hills near his house. He decided that the only thing he wanted to do in the world was be a forest ranger.

Wolke achieved the first part of his dream, attending classes at the University of New Hampshire’s forestry department. What he found there depressed him. His professors were teaching the same brand of U.S. Forest Service—approved industrial forestry being taught in forestry schools around the country. The schools were turning out platoons of tree farmers. Maximizing yield was the goal, even if it meant turning the forest into the outdoor equivalent of a mini-mall. Soon the whole country would be a giant Kmart.

Wolke stuck it out as long as he could. But in his junior year he was glumly watching a computer spit out timber-yield tables when a friend told him about a new program in conservation studies. Relieved, Wolke switched his major, finished up his degree in 1974, and headed west. He wound up in the town of Dubois, Wyoming, because he had read somewhere that the Sierra Club had an office there. After he had worked as a volunteer for a while, the Sierra Clubbers tactfully suggested he look up Bart Koehler in Jackson.

“He was a wild-eyed college student and wanted to save the West,” says Koehler. “He was doing some national forest work for these two women and they couldn’t deal with him. He crawled out from under a rock, he was like a caveman to them. So they said, well, we know a guy who you ought to meet, maybe he can put you to work. I met him in a bar, which he thought was a good sign. We got to like each other right off.”

When Howie got to Jackson, both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management were inventorying their roadless areas. Environmentalists were analyzing the inventories, trying to influence decisions as much as they could on the local level before the agencies turned in their formal recommendations to Congress. Koehler was splitting the work with the Sierra Club’s local representative, a soft-spoken, red-haired guy named Bruce Hamilton. Koehler handled the Forest Service RARE II work, while Hamilton tried to keep the BLM honest. Even dividing the work this way, there was a lot of it.

Koehler not only liked Wolke, he could keep him busy. “I said, look, you know, I don’t have a lot of money and I’m not getting paid much but I’m willing to give you a hundred bucks here and there whenever you need it, food and beer, and I need somebody to do a bunch of fieldwork. We’ve got a lot of country to understand before we take this thing to the wall.”

Under Koehler’s tutelage, Wolke disappeared into the mountains for weeks at a time. He was ecstatic. This was the whole reason he had come out West. Every few weeks he would wander into town like a lost elk: dirty, smelly, hungry, and very thirsty. Koehler would feed him and the two would spend hours on bar stools, taking meetings and drinking beer. Through Koehler, Wolke was hired by Friends of the Earth, the group David Brower had founded after leaving the Sierra Club. In true Brower fashion, FOE was chaotically managed but intellectual and creative, a vehicle for turning cutting-edge ideas into reality. Wolke was hired—although he claims that “hired” may not be the right word, given his $50-a-month salary—to assume the title of FOE’s Wyoming representative.

Wolke worked at a variety of menial jobs to supplement this tiny stipend. In the winter of 1975, he was employed as a busboy at a restaurant called Cache Creek Station on Jackson’s town square. He was in the back room squirreling away a couple of pastries, trying to beat the rush, when the next shift arrived to do their bit of minor theft. Wolke found himself competing with a tall, skinny guy who looked as if he could eat the whole restaurant. He turned out to be Mike Roselle, just twenty years old, a refugee from the counterculture who Wolke described as “a skinny vegetarian” and “a walking leftwing slogan.” Roselle was a stray dog with a gleaming intelligence, a self-educated runaway from a poor, violent, alcoholic family in Los Angeles.

Wolke adopted Mike Roselle the same way Bart Koehler had adopted him. Roselle’s girlfriend had just left town, so he was available for Wolke’s gonzo winter camping trips, excursions Roselle later called “breakneck endurance hikes.” Roselle was eager to learn about environmentalism. As a runaway teenager, he had attached himself to the Yippies at the historic, bloody 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. After the Vietnam war ended, he hitchhiked back east. He ended up in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “I’m a pretty urban kid,” Roselle said. “My parents never took me into the wilderness. I think that’s probably why when I got there it was the closest thing to a religious experience I ever had.”

Wolke lost no time getting Roselle into the environmental movement. He even made him the front man for a quasi-imaginary group called “Construction Workers for Wilderness.” Still struggling to make ends meet, Wolke was working a day job on a construction crew. At night and on weekends, he was helping Bart Koehler organize environmentalist testimony for a public hearing on the DuNoir section of the Shoshone National Forest. The DuNoir, which already had limited protection, was a place some mainstream environmentalists considered “trading stock” in negotiations over the Wyoming Wilderness bill. But the DuNoir was one of the first places Howie had explored in Wyoming; neither he nor Bart nor Bruce Hamilton was willing to give it up. He drew up a petition, typed “Construction Workers for Wilderness” at the top of the page, and persuaded the guys on his crew to sign it. At the hearing Wolke testified for Friends of the Earth. Then he introduced the petition from Construction Workers for Wilderness, Mike Roselle, chairperson. The press ate it up. Years later, Mike Roselle managed to keep a straight face when he told reporters about the ground-breaking alliance of construction workers, hunters, and sportsmen that he and Howie had organized back in Wyoming.

Roselle’s theatrical skills didn’t develop overnight. He was shy and tall, a gangly six-foot-six giraffe. At public hearings, he tended to mumble indistinctly into the microphone, stooping his shoulders like a professor peering over a pair of spectacles. Behind-the-scenes action was Roselle’s forte. He had read The Monkey Wrench Gang and he liked the general idea. He bought a collapsible saw and started harvesting billboards outside Jackson. Soon it became a regular thing. On Sunday nights Roselle would hang out at the Stagecoach Bar, which had a live band. After the bar closed at ten, he would hit the highway. For months, he tried to get Wolke to come out with him. Wolke resisted, thinking that he would be too obvious a suspect because of his connection with Friends of the Earth. He actually preferred Randall Gloege’s idea of leaving Friends of the Earth entirely and starting an underground movement. Right now, he wasn’t even going for that. He still believed in doing things the responsible way, working for mainstream conservation groups. But after a particularly noisy, drunken night at the Stagecoach, he somehow found himself on a late-night expedition to the billboard funeral parlor.

In 1979, Howie finally became disillusioned with mainstream politics. That was when he showed Roselle real monkeywrenching. Knocking down billboards barely qualified as a minor form of vigilante justice. Through hands-on learning, he showed Roselle how disabling expensive machinery might actually have some effect when applied strategically to a political issue, namely oil exploration in the Gros Ventre section of the Bridger-Teton National Forest. The Gros Ventre was an ark of endangered species, including grizzly bears, bison, elk, trumpeter swans, and eagles. By the time Getty Oil decided to search for oil there, the two Buckaroos also had figured out that, when all else failed, a combination of monkeywrenching and public relations could provide a satisfying palliative to losing the battle against environmental destruction. They got a chance to exercise their skills on a “show-me” tour Getty organized in 1979.

Wolke and Roselle got wind of Getty’s propaganda tour a few days before it was going to be held. They had plenty of time to paint big wooden signs with slogans like “Getty Out of the Gros Ventre Wilderness!” and “Stop Forest Service Oil Industry Destruction!” Standing on each other’s not insignificant shoulders, they hammered the signs to trees that lined the trail, placing them too high to be removed in time for the press tour. After the tour arrived, they hung around long enough to watch the photographers click away, then scurried off to a local bar to celebrate.

That night at the public hearing, Wolke gave his sincere, wholesome, I’m-a-nice-young-crusading-environmentalist testimony. He cited facts, figures, even science, for Chrissake. Afterward, Roselle took the microphone. He started off in his usual low tones, but then a strange thing happened. Roselle became forceful. Wolke listened openmouthed as his protégé spewed forth brilliance, fueled by a combination of vast quantities of alcohol and the morning’s excitement. But as Roselle’s momentum increased, he couldn’t seem to stop. “All of a sudden he’s up there just ripping the oil industry a new asshole. He’s going on and on about how the future economics of Jackson is in tourism and not oil and gas extraction. And he goes, ‘And you know what? We got hunters, we got fishers. We don’t need any fuckin’ oil rigs.’ ” Wolke said. “This is in front of the whole hearing room. And nobody said ‘fuck’ at these public hearings. Mike broke the ice on that. So he’s a true linguistic pioneer in Wyoming.

“So he’s going on and on, ‘We don’t need any fuckin’ oil rigs. These fuckin’ people think that they can come over here and take over our fuckin’ country!’ I was just … it was hilarious. The director of the chamber of commerce is sitting right next to me. He says, ‘Howie, where’d you get this guy?’ ‘Oh, he’s a good friend of mine, Bob.’

“At the end of the hearing, your basic public hearing, everybody mills around. Roselle stands on top of a chair—you’ve got to remember, I’m the only one in the room who knows how much he drank during the day, how shitfaced he was—he stands up on top of a chair and goes, ‘Long Live the Gros Ventre Wilderness and Death to Its Destructors!’ And he kind of slips off the chair onto the floor, regains his balance, and goes staggering out the door. Everybody goes, whoa, who was that guy?

“I think Roselle lost a lot of his shyness that night. It’s kind of like the second losing of his virginity or something like that.”

It didn’t end there. Later that night, Wolke and Roselle were drinking at the same bar with the Forest Service officials and the Getty Oil people. When one of the Forest Service guys came over to their table, Wolke told him that he’d like him better if he came right out and took his paycheck from the oil companies. Roselle went even further, striding over to a table of Getty Oil executives and challenging them to a fistfight. Roselle may have been skinny, but he was six feet six. Wolke was built like a Clydesdale. Needless to say, the Getty men declined Roselle’s offer. And the odds are they never thought of environmentalists as wimpy bird-watchers again.

When he wasn’t telling off the Forest Service, Wolke was working with somewhat greater seriousness on a wilderness proposal for Wyoming. As the Forest Service conducted RARE II, environmentalists were scrambling to produce their own recommendations, hoping that negotiations would eventually land somewhere in the middle. Wolke drafted Alternative W, along with Bart Koehler, Sierra Club staffer Bruce Hamilton, and Sierra Club activist Phil Hocker. Hocker, who would later found the Mineral Policy Center in Washington, D.C., knew more than any sane person would ever want to about the country’s outdated, environmentally destructive mining laws. If you lived in Wyoming during the oil boom it was easy to become obsessive. Oil rigs were as ubiquitous on the basin and range as prairie dogs, passenger pigeons, and buffalo had been a century earlier. Any attempt to bring land into the wilderness system threatened the way these giant steel grasshoppers continually expanded their range.

After the details were hammered out, Alternative W proposed wilderness designation for 2.4 million acres out of 4 million acres of roadless land managed by the Forest Service in Wyoming. But that wasn’t enough for Wolke. He supported Alternative W but issued a statement that Friends of the Earth also endorsed wilderness protection for another half million acres.

When the Forest Service released its RARE II recommendations on January 4, 1979, Bart Koehler, Howie Wolke, and Mike Roselle joined Dave Foreman in the ranks of newly minted cynics. The RARE II proposal for Wyoming totaled fewer than 700,000 acres. It was mostly alpine country that Howie Wolke called “rock and ice.” The other half of the ecosystem, the productive valleys that provided winter range for deer, antelope, and elk, usually contained timber as well. Strange to say, the Forest Service wasn’t recommending many of these places for wilderness protection.

“We made moderate proposals,” said Wolke. “We showed up at the hearings with facts, data…. I looked at the loggers who had organized. Didn’t follow the Forest Service’s parameters. They shouted down their buddies in the Forest Service. They bused loads of loggers down to public meetings, telling them, if this RARE II wilderness thing goes through, you’ll lose your job. And they won. They kicked our butts.”

Maybe Roselle’s spontaneous eruption at the public hearing wasn’t exactly the model Wolke wanted to use. But his method didn’t seem to work, either. On top of that, Friends of the Earth was faltering financially. Wolke was informed that even his lousy $50 salary was too much. The folks at FOE headquarters in San Francisco magnanimously offered him a chance to keep on working without pay. He declined. God, it was frustrating. Friends of the Earth was the only organization whose staff people seemed to understand the ecosystem approach that Wolke believed in. If they hit the skids financially, the rest of the environmental movement would blithely go on with its archaic emphasis on scenery and recreation. In the meantime, elk and grizzlies would lose ground to drilling rigs and logging roads, leaving the northern Rockies a gorgeous stage set with no actors. The oil companies that had been unleashed by the so-called “energy crisis” were reaping a bonanza on the public lands, particularly in the northern Rockies that Howie loved. Even though the environmental movement was gaining cash and membership every day, Howie believed that on an intellectual level things were slowing down just when they should be speeding up.

The Buckaroos in the northern Rockies weren’t the only ones who were discouraged. By the spring of 1979, just about everybody was at loose ends. Foreman was back at the old adobe moping over Debbie. Occasionally he would rouse himself to go on a death-march hike with his friends. The group usually included Ron Kezar, the Sierra Club guy he had met down in Texas. Kezar had invested in land near Glenwood and was hanging around pretty regularly. A local environmentalist named Bob Langsenkamp came along pretty often, too. So did Wes Leonard, a honcho with the El Paso Sierra Club. The four men would sit around the campfire, get shitfaced, and fantasize. Sometimes the talk turned to weird paramilitary eco-commandos, Green Beret tree-huggers. At other times, they daydreamed about initiation to a wilderness elite via a painful ritual inspired by the Plains Indians. “Ordeal of suffering …” Leonard would mutter semi-incoherently, as the fire burned low and the smell of stale alcohol exuded from his pores. Prowling around the Southwest, they were “lonely, ornery, and mean,” as Wayion Jennings sang it. They looked like trouble—or maybe a new environmental group —waiting to happen.

7. Desert Heart, Devil’s Highway

On a whizzing cold night in January, 1907, Dr. Daniel Trembly MacDougal said to me: “Look here! I wish you to go with me on a Jine desert trip, in the near future; and I also wish you to know that there are mighty few men whom I ever invite to go with me into the deserts.”

—William T. Hornaday

Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava, 1908

1980 — Sonora

CERTAIN PLACES ON EARTH attract more than their fair share of strange occurrences. The unfortunate thing is, word usually gets out. Ojai, California, is that kind of place. Around 1900, devotees of Eastern religion were drawn to this town on a high plateau of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was rumored that Ojai was some kind of energy magnet, nearer my Krishna to thee. Sedona, Arizona, is another case in point, a once-charming village in redrock canyon country overrun in the 1980s by rich Texans and stoned-looking counterculture types brandishing crystals.

A scattering of these spooky places remains undiscovered. Some are even uninhabited. In this select group is Mexico’s Pinacate Desert, where, legend has it, Earth First! was founded. The Pinacate is a blank spot on the map just east of the Sea of Cortez. For centuries, it was a dehydrated Bermuda Triangle, blocking travel for 600 square miles between the main part of Mexico and the long, dangling province of Baja California. A blue-black spine of mountains divides the desert into two parts. To the east, waves of lava spread across the desert, frozen in a moment of geologic time that occurred a mere 5,000 years ago. Occasionally the waves part to reveal long stretches of sand pocked by giant craters. Some are more than 500 feet deep: huge cave-ins blasted into the sand, volcanoes gone awry. In other places the volcanoes blew cinders into the air, heaving black cones on the desert floor like spent hourglass sands. Pinacate Peak and its near-twin, Carnegie Peak, are large enough to be called mountains.

The western section of the Pinacate is a light-skinned cousin to the rugged lava of the east. It is Lawrence of Arabia blown up to 300-millimeter, a Sahara-like configuration the Mexicans respectfully call El Gran Desierto. Wind-scored drifts of sand susurrate down the west flank of Pinacate Peak. Dunes dip and eddy for a hundred miles, glowing an unearthly pink in the distance, nearly vacant of life. They taper off into the silty remains of the much-abused Colorado River as it trickles into the Sea of Cortez. Geologists call El Gran Desierto an erg, a term borrowed from the Arabic. It is rumored to be the only erg on the continent and that, said Edward Abbey, is probably a good thing.

It was Dave Foreman’s idea to go to the Pinacate. A big fan of Ed Abbey’s, he had read about the region in 1973’s Cactus Country. The book was written for the Time-Life American Wilderness series, an obvious bread-and-butter job. But even the tedious patina of Time-Life editing hadn’t stolen Abbey’s voice. He brought the desert as close as a cactus spine lodged in your thumb. Foreman liked to quote Abbey on the Pinacate. “Abbey once said Saguaro National Monument is high school, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is undergraduate, Cabeza Prieta is graduate school, and Pinacate is post doc, as far as the Sonoran desert goes.”

Foreman was eager to prove himself once more. During his six-month sabbatical he had divorced himself from the national political scene, aimlessly roaming the West while the RARE II bloodletting occurred at a far distant point over the horizon. He did his best to divorce himself from the Wilderness Society, too. But the rift was more a fractious separation than a divorce. In early June, Foreman met with newly appointed executive director Bill Turnage and the rest of the field staff at Claire Tappan Lodge in the California Sierra. After the meeting, they went on a sketchily planned overnight backpack into a proposed wilderness area called Granite Chief. It was one of those camping trips where everyone rushes into a grocery store and grabs whatever catches his eye. Foreman thought that each person’s choice revealed something about his personality. His dinner was a T-bone steak. He joked to the others that if they were real men, they’d buy steaks, too, and eat them raw. Foreman remembers Bill Turnage being unmoved by his bluster and laying in a schizophrenic repast of SpaghettiOs and French mineral water.

It was already dark when they got to their campsite. According to Foreman, Turnage and a field rep named Joe Walicki laid plans to break into a cross-country ski hut to sleep for the night. Foreman was annoyed. Why come to the Sierra if you were going to shut out the sight of flat-faced granite batholiths cast in silver by the moon? His irritation was compounded by hunger. When Eaton and the others teased him about his real-men jibes, Foreman thought, what the hell? It was too late to build a fire. He ripped the raw steak out of its cellophane package and tore into it with his teeth, horrifying everyone except Jim Eaton. Eaton joined in and they both did a caveman jig, grunting and hopping around in front of Bill Turnage, who seemed more hurt than disgusted. Foreman didn’t know or didn’t care. Jim Eaton always made a good audience and Jim’s dog, Stickeen, the beneficiary of Foreman’s T-bone scraps, was even more appreciative.

This caveman telegraph failed to discourage Turnage from his enthusiasm for Foreman’s less denticulate talents. On July 1, Foreman resumed work as the Wilderness Society’s New Mexico representative. His parents were living in Rio Rancho, a suburb of Albuquerque. Foreman moved in with them once again and opened a Wilderness Society office nearby in the old Spanish town of Bernalillo. In the wake of Huey Johnson’s lawsuit, environmentalists were scrambling to develop statewide wilderness bills. Foreman duly began drafting one for New Mexico. But part of his mind was off somewhere else, casting issues in thematic terms. Ronald Reagan was headed for the White House and the Sagebrush Rebels were riding behind him in a cloud of expensive rose-colored dust. An ideological counter-offensive was desperately needed. In the fall of 1979, Foreman organized a conference in Denver where environmentalists could plot anti-Sagebrush strategy. They would have to play a lot of catch-up. Soon, the media would be headlining stories on Reagan’s cuts in social services. But only sporadic attention would be paid to the equally energetic effort to gut a less visible sector of the public trust. Reagan made plain his commitment to dismantling wilderness when he appointed card-carrying Sagebrush Rebel James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. Until he was forced out of office in disgrace, Watt worked to implement an agenda that was part radical-right, part pork-barrel giveaway. From the environmentalist perspective, his sins were staggering. They ranged from trying to strip-mine national parks to selling federal coal leases to Colorado wheeler-dealers at a staggering loss to taxpayers. On top of everything else, the guy looked like a total geek, with a cue-ball head, thick glasses, and an idiot grin blaring out from beneath his beaver Stetson. It was enough to give cowboys a bad name.

In one way, at least. Watt was a true democrat. He gave equal time to all the West’s vested interests. That included ranchers. Cattle grazing on federal land became a major topic at the anti-Sagebrush conference, marking the first time environmentalists seriously took on the task of ranching reform. Overgrazing had caused an environmental disaster in the West, but generations of conservationists had felt compelled to tiptoe pragmatically around the problem. Foreman and some of the others who attended the conference, like Howie and Bart and Johanna Wald of the Natural Resources Defense Council, were unhappy that the environmental movement had taken, at best, a defensive position. The most effective action on grazing had been taken by an outsider, journalist Bernard De’Voto. In 1946. De Voto received an assignment to travel to the West. With his wife and son. he drove his old Buick from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the landscape of “dry grass and stiff sage” which he had fled many years before.[37] Now that he was middle-aged and successful, De Voto fell in love with the West he had once despised. In typical reporter fashion, he managed to squeeze a few lucrative travel articles out of the trip. He also scored an investigative coup by uncovering a plot by stockmen to privatize federal grazing lands. One of their more subtle maneuvers was the introduction of a bill that would have shifted ownership of federal grazing land to the states. It was a slick move that would have allowed states to auction off public land. Almost singlehandedly, De Voto turned back this attempted coup with a series of powerful, well-documented articles in the pages of Harper’s, including the aptly titled “Sacred Cows and Public Lands.”[38]

The Utah-bred De Voto was a misfit who had grown up as a Roman Catholic intellectual surrounded by the middle-brow regimentation of the Land of Mormon. He found fame in Cambridge and New York by exposing the hypocrisies of the western booboisie. Conservationists, on the other hand, tended to stick around town. So they played their cards a little closer to the vest when it came to facing down ranchers. Like De Voto, they knew that it wasn’t just money at stake, but mythology, too. The western myth was a baseline, not just for people who lived in the arid region west of the hundredth meridian, but for Americans in general. Freedom lay at the heart of the American ideal and the cowboy was its living, ranching, roping, and tobacco-chewing embodiment. The frontier was his stage set, a place where the restraining hand of Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly couldn’t reach. It was a good myth. It was just too bad that cows came along with it. This minor detail dated from the 1880s, when the West was a preindustrial society and lack of refrigeration meant that beef had to be produced on the western range. But in the twentieth century, western cattle ranching was just plain stupid. The American West was so arid that it took almost thirty acres in a state like Nevada to feed one cow. In Alabama a cow could live on fewer than four acres and think it was at a Howard Johnson’s All You Can Eat Night.

Economically, raising cattle on federal land was a disaster. Low grazing fees had been institutionalized since the last free-roaming buffalo shuffled off to ungulate heaven. As late as 1992, grazing fees were only $1.92 per cow. A minor scandal occurred when it was discovered that ranchers were subleasing their grazing rights for a profit of between $2.76 and $8.34 a head.[39]

All in all, the government was paying more for range maintenance than it was getting in grazing fees, subsidizing cattle grazing on federal lands to the ratchety tune of approximately $14 per animal. This inspired the term welfare ranching among antigrazing activists.[40]

But the cost to taxpayers was not solely economic. “Range maintenance” doubled as a euphemism for destruction of native ecosystems: hauling down native pinyon pine and juniper trees with chains and bulldozers; spraying pesticides to eradicate native grasses. Once they had scraped the landscape into a tabula rasa, government officials planted non-native species like crested wheatgrass—cow food.

Foreman and other environmentalists saw clearly how cattle ranching had transformed the western landscape. The range had been cow-burnt since the 1880s and things were not improving. By 1975, the Bureau of Land Management reported that only 17 percent of its range was in good condition. When the subject of grazing comes up, Howie Wolke likes to quote Aldo Leopold, who wrote: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”[41] To the Buckaroos’ educated eyes, the consequences of overgrazing stood out in sharp relief all over the intermountain West, where erosion had flattened rivers into muddy channels, or dried them up completely. Streams that once had been lined by birds, trees, and grasses looked like vacant lots in the South Bronx, minus the graffiti —usually.

The costs of western cattle ranching seemed even more outlandish when you considered that no more than 10 percent of the nation’s beef ever set hoof west of the Mississippi, whether to graze for a few months, or to spend a week in a feedlot before being shipped out. Only 2 to 3 percent actually spent their entire truncated lives on the range. These figures held steady despite the best efforts of federal land managers, who by the 1980s were allowing grazing on 250 million acres of federal land, an area more than three times the size of the entire national park system.[42] As cottonwoods wilted along streambeds, it seemed that the cattle industry’s imprint on the settlement and character of the West would never be erased, even when winter winds lifted the dry, desertified soil into whirling dust devils.

Despite all this evidence, the immense power of ranchers—the West’s version of a landed aristocracy—promised to stymie any efforts to make grazing a political issue for years to come. Even in less aristocratic western circles, ranching was not unpopular. It still had the aura of the cowboy—the “grasslands biome technician” of Gary Snyder’s rodeo-inspired poem “Grand Entry.”[43] And it was true that the nineteenth-century cowboy tradition had been kept up by a few hardy souls, including a fair number of sun-browned women with tough, stringy biceps and a self-contained manner. Some of these ranchers were too proud to graze their cattle on public land. But most cattle operations were geared to turning as much federal land as possible into the brown, trampled equivalent of a war zone. To loosen your grip on the myth, you might have to sit next to a potbellied rancher in his V-8 as it rumbled over hills and gullies of destroyed meadows and eroded washes. In the summer of 1979, Dave Foreman was back to watching the emperor’s red neck frying in the sun, as he fruitlessly tried to convince stockmen that it was okay to fence cows out of a few places in the West. It was a frustrating job. Years later, there would be an edge in his voice when he asked, “How does looking at the hind end of a cow make you a great romantic lover of the West?”

The 1979 Anti-Sagebrush conference was a step forward. But taking a hard look at the grazing issue merely strengthened Foreman’s belief that nature would quit before the BLM (aka Bureau of Livestock and Mining) would. The New Mexico wilderness bill was limping in at just over 700,000 acres. In May 1980, after making one last attempt to work for Bill Turnage, Foreman himself quit. Always loyal to his friends, Foreman announced that he was leaving to protest Turnage’s wholesale firing of the other Buckaroos. But it was more than that. Foreman was burned out. Burned out on fighting the lie that westerners were a race of hardy, independent souls when they were really just a bunch of welfare crooks. He was sick of the assumption, which environmentalists pretended to share, that the western grasslands had been created as a convenience for man. He had spent way too much time quarreling over how best to use the land. Most of the time, he didn’t believe in using it at all.

Foreman’s frustrations were not born entirely from altruism. His personal ambitions had been torn apart by his departure from Washington. In his early thirties, he was at the point where the curves of knowledge and energy intersect. He knew more than he ever had before, and he still had the nonstop drive to pound this knowledge home to other people. He was at his peak. He could feel it. But what the hell was he supposed to do? Leaving Washington had seemed like the right thing at the time. But ditching the Wilderness Society entirely meant he had no arena for his ideas. And there wasn’t another job in the whole environmental movement that appealed to him. Who would be his audience now? It wasn’t as simple as it had been back in sixth grade, when he could fly up onto his schoolroom desk and dance around like a happy voodoo penitent.

After his trip to the Pinacate, Foreman found his niche. The desert—the black lava mother desert of them all—gave him the raw material to invent Earth First! In classic frontier fashion, Foreman also managed, in the dark cinder cones and soft pink desert sands, to reinvent himself.

The funny thing was, not a whole hell of a lot actually happened on the trip.

One of the first things that Foreman did after returning to the Southwest in late 1979 was trade in his beat-up, bent-up pickup. The old Ford had seen good service transporting him to Washington, D.C., and then safely back to his native Southwest. But baling wire and chewing gum only hold things together for so long. Besides, Foreman’s image was changing. He bought the classic desert-rat vehicle, a 1960s Volkswagen minibus. Its paint was rubbed raw by sandstorms and beating sun, and its mechanical aptitude was rated as far below normal as Foreman’s. Because of its starter problems, the VW acquired the nickname “Parks on a Hill.” Despite its decrepitude, in the spring of 1980 Foreman and Ron Kezar planned the bus’s maiden voyage to the desert’s black heart. Howie Wolke and Mike Roselle lassoed a still whacked-out Bart Koehler and scissored their extra-long legs into the cramped seats of a Greyhound headed for Tucson. At twenty-four, Roselle was eight years younger than Foreman. Ron Kezar was the oldest one in the group; he was already thirty-seven. There were a few generational differences, not the least of which was that Roselle’s drug of choice was marijuana, not beer. But after Foreman and Kezar picked up the Northern Buckaroos at the bus station on March 29, their first stop was a loud party that lasted most of the night. Roselle lost any qualms he might have had about the trip or his companions.

The next morning a bleary-eyed Foreman piloted the VW south. As they left the outskirts of Tucson, the Buckaroos entered the country’s second-largest Indian reservation. The Papago tribe, or, as they are now called, the Tohono O’odham, own 4,600 square miles of prime Sonoran desert, an area larger than the state of New Jersey. For some mysterious reason, known perhaps by elders of the tribe, the reservation is lusher and greener than most of the surrounding desert. Looking at the roadside passing by, the Buckaroos were each, in his own way, awed by the sight of the Sonoran desert, with its long-armed saguaro cactus, its gold-lit cholla, and unexpected grassy stretches. With some relief, they realized that they had chosen the perfect time for their trip. Temperatures were mild and the winter rains had sent the creosote and brittlebush into bloom. Hanging a left at the town of Why (population 135, one gas station, a ramshackle cafe, and a boarded-up but still functioning post office), they cruised through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, past the iron-lit Ajo Mountains and into Mexico. They crossed the border at Sonoyta, a funky but relatively sleepy border town. After the ritual pit stop at the cervecería, they were on the road again.

Within forty-five minutes, the Buckaroos had entered another world. It was as if a door had opened and someone were whispering the word “Away.” The rusty crushed cans and signal flags of white toilet paper, standard detritus of civilization on both sides of the border, disappeared almost immediately after they hung a left into the Pinacate. The quiet was immense.

There are several ways to enter the Pinacate, which is a Mexican National Park. But once you are in it, you are caught in a maze of sandy washboard roads that curve and intersect like the tracks of a quail feeding on scattered seeds. The only signs marking your way are old wooden posts jammed crookedly into the dirt. At one time they were painted white. You can almost make out the faded Spanish words scrawled on them.

Because it is so far from any substantial amount of civilization and crammed with things like rattlesnakes and loose blocks of anklecrunching black rock and no water, the Pinacate might sound like a threatening place. It is wise to be cautious there, but it is more spellbinding than scary. As the Buckaroos rattled down the cactus-lined roads, each started to feel the excitement of the place, the funny catch in the throat, the sensation that an ordinary lens has been replaced by another one. They were not the first to have this experience. People tell stories about doing crazy things in the Pinacate, falling in love with someone they just met, hiking forty-three miles down to the Sea of Cortez and back in a mere twelve and a half hours just to get a glimpse of water, going down alone into the lava tube called I’ltoi’s Cave. Abbey called the Pinacate “the final test of desert rathood.”[44] Astronomer William Hartmann characterizes it as something else: the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Once you enter the Pinacate lavas, writes Hartmann, you sense that something is different. “The spatial scale of variety is small—yards. That is part of its strange charm. There is a fierce intimacy. Volcanoes form enclaves where variety occurs on a human scale. A path encountered leads not in a line for miles toward a vanishing point, but around the next corner, behind a cinder cone, into some unexpected cavity. The lava cannot seem to flow without forming nooks for soil, crannies for flowers, folds and crenulations, vesicles, cracks filled with seeds.”[45]

The mystery that lies at the hearf of all deserts is particularly strong here. Between 1936 and 1945 most of the Pinacate’s animal life vanished. Pronghorn antelope, desert bighorn, even jackrabbits became scarce.[46] Nobody knows why. It was as if the erg had swallowed them whole. Secret atomic tests, of course, would explain the disappearances. But there is no evidence, no hint, that such tests took place. And atomic tests could not explain the drift of a distilled, invisible essence … the mystery. It emanates from Pinacate Peak and Carnegie Peak and from the saddle that dips between them like a delicate female concavity. In this low country, the blue-black mountain range follows you everywhere. It lies at the corner of your sightline as you crouch in the shade of a crater listening to a curve-billed thrasher. It is a distant, unapproachable god you bow to, rubbing raw your knees and hands on a stumbling hike over reddish black lava. The mystery (“Mystery itself, with a capital ‘M,’ “ Abbey called it) is by definition unquantifiable and nearly indescribable. It goes something like this: by binding himself to physical survival, the desert rat finds the transcendence that lies at the core of the real world. (Not that he would ever say anything so pretentious.) It is the old law of alchemy, of shamans and psychologists: If you’re looking for something, immerse yourself in its opposite. Then go as far as you possibly can.

The American desert has a venerable tradition of eccentrics who did just that. John C. Van Dyke was the first white man to dive into the furnace of the American desert and see the face of God. He returned to write about it in the archetypal book The Desert, published in 1901. Van Dyke was an asthmatic forty-two-year-old art historian from New Jersey, a college professor, and a friend of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. In 1898 he rode his Indian pony into the California desert, accompanied by a fox terrier named Cappy. Over the next three years, he would crisscross the Mojave, Sonoran, and Colorado deserts, traveling from Oaxaca to Oregon with no apparent plan. “He came to the Southwest and ultimately to the desert because of illness, but there is a great discrepancy between his subsequent behavior and any recognized cure for asthma,” writes the poet Richard Shelton. “And there are repeated references in his autobiography which suggest that he later recognized his behavior for what it probably was—compulsive and out of control. He was on a binge, possibly the greatest binge of his life, an enormous flirtation with death and a love affair with the desert’s beauty.”[47]

Van Dyke’s training gave him tools to translate his passion into the art of seeing. An entire chapter of The Desert is devoted to the subjects of light and color. Van Dyke combines a technician’s exactitude with a metaphysician’s awe. “I mean now that the air itself is colored,” he tells you, grabbing your shirtfront.[48] Desert air contains a greater concentration of dust than ordinary air, he explains. More dust means more refraction. More refraction means more color. This is why, in the space of a few hours, an island off the coast of Baja will turn from greenish blue to salmon pink to purple. Pyrotechnics alone, however, are not the genesis of the desert’s beauty. Color is born from light and Van Dyke is at his best when describing this dynamic relationship. “All color—local, reflected, translucent, complementary —is, of course, made possible by light and has no existence apart from it. Through the long desert day the sunbeams are weaving skeins of color across the sands, along the sides of the canyons, and about the tops of the mountains. They stain the ledges of copper with turquoise, they burn the buttes to a terra-cotta red, they paint the sands with rose and violet, and they key the air to the hue of the opal. The reek of color that splashes the western sky at sunset is but the climax of the sun’s endeavor.”[49]

Even to a half-mad aesthete, beauty was not an end in itself It was a means to an end, the sugar coating for an idea that most people can’t swallow. Van Dyke’s illness pushed him into seeing how closely life and death are linked. It is only through accepting death that one can truly be alive. This is what Van Dyke discovered and it is the desert’s ultimate lesson, the true desert heart. A desert journey is a nearly universal metaphor for a near-death experience, for a prolonged period of spiritual and emotional isolation. To reveal oneself to another person during this journey is excruciatingly painful—only those who have traveled there before you can understand your utter despair. Even they cannot join you. There is no comfort. At times, there is no hope.

Not everyone is called on this journey. And the people who take it almost invariably experience long periods during which they wish to be someplace else. McDonald’s. A Motel 6. Anywhere. But that’s too bad. Turning back is impossible. And it should be. There are no second chances. Take Jesus, for instance, who visited the desert for purification. Only after forty days and forty nights of thirst and hunger was he ready to climb a mountain to confront Satan, who personified the biggest sin of all—spiritual pride. The desert defies such pride. Even Father Kino, the Italian Jesuit who may have been the first European to enter the Pinacate region, left only a few traces of colonialism behind him. Far better known than any of Kino’s whitewashed missions is the road out of the desert. It is called the Devil’s Highway.

To the godless humanists of contemporary society, the desert journey translates into a confrontation with the false self; the symbolic death of the alcoholic hitting bottom, the stockbroker losing it all in a crash. Or a rather bizarre art history professor facing his own loneliness. Provoked by his subconscious, Van Dyke sought out this mythic death-seeking and life-seeking ritual in the desert. “He had heard all the horror stories about the desert,” Richard Shelton writes, “knew its dangers, but chose to go into it anyway. ‘I was just ill enough,’ he says, ‘not to care about the perils and morbid enough to prefer dying in the sand, alone, to passing out in a hotel with a roommaid weeping at the foot of the bed.’ ”[50] When Van Dyke surfaced, he used his first choking, asthmatic breath to speak of what he had learned. He described the depths and pinnacles of isolation and beauty. He wrote that man’s attempts to break the stillness of the desert night—to conquer the world with steel and smoke, to rise above his own animal nature, to live forever—are ugly and intrusive, a rent in the fabric. “A cry in the night! Overhead the planets in their courses make no sound, the earth is still, the very animals are mute. Why then the cry of the human? How it jars the harmonies! How it breaks in discord upon the unities of earth and air and sky! Century after century that cry has gone up, mobbing high heaven; and always insanity in the cry, insanity in the crier. What folly to protest when none shall hear! There is no appeal from the law of nature. It was made for beast and bird and creeping thing. Will the human never learn that in the eye of the law he is not different from the things that creep?”[51]

The same vision grew in the mind of a ragged hiker during his first lonely, ecstatic days in the humid wilderness of the American South. “The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts,” wrote John Muir in 1916.[52] Virtually anyone who has spent significant time alone in nature has arrived at the same belief. The desert has its own fierce way of teaching it. And the Pinacate is the ultimate desert.