SELECTIONS FROM:
THE CONVERSION OF SENATOR FRANK CHURCH
EVOLUTION OF AN ENVIRONMENTALIST
By Sara Elizabeth Dant Ewert
Church's final bid to set aside roadless areas in Idaho involve the long sought effort to establish a River of No Return Wilderness, the heart of which was comprised of the Idaho and Salmon River Breaks Primitive Areas in central Idaho. The Forest Service set aside the two tracts, separated only by the Salmon River, in the 1930s and together they encompassed more than 1.4 million acres." In 1974, a decade after the original Wilderness Act, the Forest Service proposed the creation of a 1.5 million acre River of No Return Wilderness embracing both primitive areas and adjacent roadless lands of familiar merit. The report also recommended the Main Salmon for inclusion in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system. While conservation organizations praised the Salmon River endorsement, they were disappointed by the wilderness recommendation, proposing instead a more expansive 2.3 million acre set-aside that included 13 roadless areas omitted by the Forest Service. Not surprisingly, Idaho's resource interests lined up to oppose the wilderness classification. At three Forest Service hearings in Idaho, logging and mining interests, livestock associations, power and irrigation interests, and motor-sports advocates voiced their opposition to wilderness in Idaho. Lumber giant Boise Cascade lobbied hard for the release of 870,000 acres from the primitive area wilderness. Yet the proposal enjoyed solid support from the state's sportsmen's clubs, environmental organizations, and Idaho's conservation-minded governor, and Church ally, Cecil Andrus. Also during this review period, a broad-based citizen advocacy group had coalesced to form the River of No Return Wildness Council, and according to Field and Stream editor Ted Trueblood, testimony at the Forest Service hearings ran at "almost a four-to-one margin supporting the council's wilderness stand."
In 1974, however, Church was already pushing the Eastern Wilderness bill on
a reluctant White House, and President Richard Nixon responded with an administration
proposal to slash the 300,000-acre Chamberlain Basin, in the heart of the Idaho
Primitive Area from wilderness consideration. Church blamed Secretary of Agriculture
Earl Butz, who had earlier quashed the executive order to curtail clear cutting,
for the elimination of the basin. Though he was not yet prepared to introduce
a River of No Return Wilderness proposal, Church vowed that he would not preside
over the "gutting of the Idaho and Salmon River Breaks Primitive Areas."
The following year, the senator lashed out again at the Forest Service for concocting
"flimsy" excuses for the deletion of "the best elk range in North
America." In a form letter sent to outraged Idaho conservationists, Forest
Service Chief John McGuire had explained that "the potential for minerals
development and timber harvest at some future date outweighed the merit for
allocation of Chamberlain Basin to wilderness." Environmentalists had assumed
that the real battle was not to save the primitive areas but to enlarge them.
When Ernie Day of the Wilderness Council heard of the proposed removal of the
basin, he was shell-shocked: "This has been the worst day of my entire
life." In the spring of 1976, High Country News, a self-described "paper
for people who care about the West," ran an extensive article on the wilderness
proposal and the potential loss of the Chamberlain Basin. Calling it "the
secret of secrets," the article described the basin as "the one jewel
that locals had hoped to keep to themselves." In addition to the spectacular
elk herds, the basin boasted significant wildlife communities of mountain lions,
bighorn sheep, deer, marten, falcon, lynx, wolverines, and even timber wolves.
And unlike many of the steep and remote wilderness areas in the system, the
high plateau of the Chamberlain Basin possessed a more subdued topography, making
it highly accessible and potentially exploitable. As the Nixon administration
gave way to the Ford administration, however, Congress proved reluctant to act
on the executive recommendations for wilderness, and the proposals languished.
Thus in 1977, when a more sympathetic President Jimmy Carter ascended to the
White House, both Church and the environmentalists were optimistic about the
fate of an expanded central Idaho wilderness. In May, as part of his environmental
message to Congress, Carter indeed endorsed a larger River of No Return Wilderness
and directed the Forest Service to review and expand its proposal for the area.
In December of 1978, the president submitted a revised administration proposal
for a 1.9 million acre wilderness; which included the Chamberlain Basin; following
the completion of RARE II in January, the White House added an additional 284,000
acres to its recommendation, bringing the total acreage to well over 2.1 million
acres.
The administration also advocated the addition of the Main Salmon River to
the National Wild and Scenic River System."76
In early 1979, responding to this favorable climate, Church introduced three
separate bills to reclassify the Idaho and Salmon River Breaks Primitive Areas
as wilderness. The first, drafted by the River of No Return Wilderness Council
and called the "citizens bill" by its backers, designated 2.3 million
acres for wilderness protection and added 237 miles of the Salmon River to the
National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. The second bill, proposed by the Idaho
Forest Industry Council, outlined a 1.3 million acre "Central Idaho Wilderness,"
designated approximately 840,000 acres for multiple-use management, and made
no recommendation for protecting the Salmon River. The third bill was the 2.1
million acre administration proposal, which also included protection for the
Salmon River. Church's trio of proposals shrewdly insured that the Idaho wilderness
debate would focus not on whether but on how much to preserve. By September,
following extensive public hearings throughout Idaho in April and May during
which nearly 600 individuals testified, Church was prepared to advance the "citizens
bill." The Idaho Statesman, which had traditionally opposed wilderness,
called the measure "an excellent piece of legislation" that "both
the logger and the backpacker" could support; "the day for the River
of No Return Wilderness has come." In the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee (formerly the Interior Committee) Church hoped to forge a viable consensus
- by now a hallmark of his policy-making- and willingly accepted amendments
to the Wilderness Council proposal. Indeed the Idaho County Free Press conceded
that Church's bill "seems to offer something for everybody, and not just
for environmentalists." In early November, the committee unanimously recommended
legislation - now called the "Central Idaho Wilderness Act of 1980"
designating 2.2 million acres of wilderness in the Salmon River country and
an additional 105,000 acres of wilderness in the long-contested Magruder Corridor
of the existing Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, and adding 125 miles of the Salmon
River to the Wild and Scenic Rivers System. As the Lewiston Tribune humorously
editorialized, the proposal was "not a wildernut's dream," nor did
it "whet the appetite of the timber beast," but in the end it was
"about as good as could be expected - probably even better." Church
believed the measure also advanced Idaho's goal of resolving, once and for all,
the controversy over the region's land management that had existed in limbo
for years.
Once the Central Idaho Wilderness bill moved to the Senate floor, however,
Church discovered that its most formidable foe was none other than his own colleague
from Idaho, Republican James McClure. The Lewiston [Idaho] Tribune even editorialized
that should the wilderness bill succeed, "as it should - the credit will
go to Sen. Frank Church," and if the bill failed, "the blame goes
to Sen. James McClure."79 Though Church and McClure had cooperated on important
aspects of the legislation, McClure bore a strong allegiance to resource interests
in Idaho, and the mining and timber industries in particular. He confessed to
having "reluctantly agreed" with Church that the River of No Return
Wilderness proposal was "the best we can do under the current political
climate." But McClure feared that too much wilderness threatened to shut
down the state's lumber mills and jeopardize national security by locking up
minerals, cobalt in particular, which he deemed "absolutely essential"
to the machine tool and jet aircraft industry. Church's wilderness bill, he
believed, contributed not only to the country's economic malaise but also to
the decline in American military preparedness: "The people of the United
States are becoming aware that we are not the best prepared military power on
the face of the Earth, that we are today No. 2." After characterizing Church's
Gospel-Hump consensus as "take this compromise good or bad, but take it
or die." McClure proposed an amendment directing the Forest Service to
release all RARE II lands in Idaho not designated as wilderness "for uses
other than wilderness," and to insure that "no such lands shall again
be considered for designation as wilderness." As he concluded his remarks,
McClure invoked the current national security crisis in Iran; cautioning that
"we do not know what Khomeini's [sic] there are in the House that can hold
us hostage," he urged the Senate to adopt his amendment for "a statewide
RARE II solution."
Church voiced strong opposition to the proposed amendment, calling it "unnecessary"
and "mischievous" and charging that its true purpose was to jeopardize
the bill in the House. The intent of the amendment, Church argued, could be
accomplished by appropriate release language in the committee report, and both
the Departments of Interior and Agriculture concurred. Surprisingly, even the
lumber companies most vulnerable to cutbacks in timber availability voiced their
opposition to the McClure amendment, stating that they would rather address
the "question of statutory release language for Idaho RARE II areas in
a future Congress when the nation's entire 64 million acres are opened up under
Congressional scrutiny." On November 20, in a roll-call vote, the Senate
first rejected McClure's amendment 21-67 and then passed the Central Idaho Wilderness
bill by a vote of 69 to 18. McClure voted against the measure."
On June 1, 1980, the House approved the Central Idaho Wilderness bill 271 to
137, and later that month, Church brought the conference committee report before
the Senate for final approval. Though the struggle to provide statutory protection
for the "magnificent Salmon River country" of central Idaho had spanned
15 years, Church promised that this newest addition to the wilderness system
would be "the best in the country." Before turning to a short description
of the pending legislation, however, Church set aside a few moments to reflect
upon the importance of wilderness. Alluding to McClure's earlier criticism of
the bill, the senator explained that wilderness was an integral part of a balanced
public land use equation. His own philosophy about wilderness as well as his
motivation for sponsoring the present bill, Church believed, were best captured
by the words of A. Starker Leopold, a distinguished zoologist and son of Aldo
Leopold, one of the fathers of the wilderness movement: "We owe it to ourselves
and to the good earth that supports us to curb our avarice to the extent of
leaving a few spots untouched and unexploited." Without these untrammeled
lands, Church warned, "never again will we be free within our own country
from the noise, the exhaust fumes, and spreading congestion."