Monument Hits Milestone
By Robert Plain, Ashland Daily Tidings
June 13, 2005

On Thursday morning, Dave Willis trekked out to Boccard Point, a steep mountain outcropping that offers scenic panoramic vistas of one of the most ecologically significant areas in the nation.

Willis, chair of a group called the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, had come to this spot to celebrate a great anniversary in the history of public lands conservation.

It was five years ago to the day that President Bill Clinton turned the area Willis was overlooking into the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and gave permanent protection to this botanical diverse and ecologically important habitat corridor connecting the Cascade and Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregions.

“With towering fir forests, sunlit oak groves, wildflower-strewn meadows and steep canyons, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is an ecological wonder,” reads the monument proclamation. “This rich enclave of natural resources is a biological crossroads — the interface of the Cascade, Klamath and Siskiyou ecoregions, in an area of unique geology, biology, climate and topography.”

As Willis sat high above the ancient forest and proposed wilderness area he has fought so diligently to protect for more than 20 years, he recalled the story of how these 53,000-acres of BLM land southeast of Ashland got their designation.

It’s an epic story that starts with timber-sale protests and spans the political process all the way to the president’s desk. Ultimately, it hinged upon 100-year-old federal legislation — but never would have happened without the cooperation of local environmentalists and government officials. It preserved one of the rarest mosaics of forest habitats in North America, allied local and national conservation groups and alienated the ranchers, some of whom have worked this land since the end of the gold rush.

Changing designations

This area has been a checkerboard of public and private land since the late 1880s, when the federal government first gave large tracts to the Oregon and California Railroad Company but then took them back because the company wasn’t selling them off to homesteaders as it was supposed to.

Instead, it was selling off the timber rights. And because this provided no taxable benefit to young Jackson County, the United States took back the land and itself sold the timber rights, with a portion of the profits earmarked for local education expenses.

For more than 100 years, the public lands southeast of Ashland were managed mostly for the benefit of timber and cattle interests of the area.

Willis entered the story in the early 1980s, when he moved to Lincoln — an old logging town on Highway 66 — and became active in the environmental movement.

Already, there was a movement afoot to have the area south of Soda Mountain recognized as a designated wilderness area, thanks to Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. He convinced the BLM to suggest 5,640 acres near Soda Mountain for wilderness designation.

And this movement was furthered by wildlife biologist Bruce Boccard, the first chair of the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, who in 1984 helped to draw up the boundaries for a 32,000-acre wilderness proposal. Boccard died of AIDS in 1987. The vista Willis sat at on the monument’s birthday has been renamed by the government to honor Boccard for his efforts.

By 1987, Willis had begun to spread his political wings. Soda Mountain had a fledgling wilderness proposal before the BLM, but its chances of being designated as such were not high.

That is, until Willis got Bill Luscher, the state BLM director, on horseback down into the drainages below Soda Mountain and nearby Pilot Rock.

Willis often quotes Luscher as saying at the end of their adventure, “If Soda Mountain isn’t wilderness, nothing’s wilderness.”

The first success

Soon after, the Medford District BLM office recommended the Soda Mountain wilderness study area to the first President Bush for wilderness designation, who forwarded it to Congress, which has yet to act on the request.

A provision of the landmark 1994 Northwest Forest Plan gave the BLM the latitude to give the area a special designation and Rich Drehobl, the director of the Medford District BLM and as important player in the history of the monument as Willis is, dubbed it the Cascade-Siskiyou Ecological Emphasis Area.

Years later, Drehobl and Willis would collaborate together to help this area receive the even higher designation of national monument.

On Saturday evening, Drehobl was honored by the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council for his adept and outside-the-box land management practices while leading BLM’s Ashland resource area.

Drehobl is well known for his ability to communicate and his willingness to bridge gaps even at the height of the timber wars in areas as politically charged and volatile as the Applegate.

He was a federal bureaucrat who heard what his constituents were saying and wanted silviculture to be practiced sustainably.

On St. Patrick’s Day 1999, he and Willis were having lunch when Willis asked him about a rumor he had heard about President Clinton wanting to protect some public lands.

Drehobl, who had as reputation for meeting with any of his constituents at anytime about any given issue, said the rumor was true.

President Clinton, Drehobl confirmed, was considering using the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create some national monuments around some of the more pristine and beautiful pieces of public lands across the western United States. He wanted monument status for the Soda Mountain area just as much as Willis did. But he knew the effort had to come from the people, not the agency. And so he urged Willis to seek out the novel distinction.

Clinton, who wanted to ensure a legacy of good environmental stewardship, was apprised of the Antiquities Act by his Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona and University of Oregon student.

Clinton gets involved

The Antiquities Act, Babbitt explained to his boss, gives a president congressionally vested authority to protect areas of historic or scientific value without congressional approval. National monuments are often thought to be for especially scenic features, statues or ruins. In this case the Cascade-Siskiyou Monument proposal, the area was nominated for its wealth of biological diversity.

Willis said that because biological diversity is a difficult trait to show in a postcard or to explain to someone, they never knew if the Soda Mountain area would be named a monument. At the time, the feeling was that the Cascade-Siskiyou monument proposal could be dropped.

Babbitt, though, came twice to visit the Soda Mountain area, once in October 1999, then again in February 2000.

He also joined a public meeting in March 2000 at BLM headquarters in Medford live via an interactive tele-video conference.

Meanwhile, the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council was working with the World Wildlife Fund, which had recently set up an office in Ashland for the express purpose of more closely studying these biologically diverse habitats such as are found inside the monument.

This partnership, and because it had the blessing of Drehobl at the local level, seemed to give weight to the proposal.

It was not without its detractors.

Ranchers affected

Logging has been restricted in the monument as a result of the proclamation and some of the roads have been closed to motor vehicles.

Cattle-grazing was allowed to continue under the presidential proclamation. But it did say that the secretary of the Interior “shall study the impacts of grazing on the objects of biological interest in the monument with specific attention to sustaining the natural ecosystems dynamics.”

To Bob Miller, a rancher from Hornbrook, Calif., this is not very reassuring language for the future of his family trade.

Since the late 1800s, his family has raised cattle on the public lands near the Oregon-California border, lands that have recently become the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

He fears that ranching has fallen out favor with the people of Oregon and the West. As a result of this shift in ethics, he fears he and the 12 other ranchers who are currently permitted to graze cattle inside the monument will soon loose that ability.

The West was settled on the notion that a person could buy cheap land and graze their stock at will. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 codified the latter part of that notion and it was written into law that the government was “authorized to issue permits to graze livestock in grazing districts to settlers, residents and other stock owners upon the annual payment of reasonable fees.”

And Miller argues that the presidential proclamation is not strong enough to override this act.

Miller feels that the new breed of conservationist ethic in the West and elsewhere will ultimately lead to a less robust ecosystem and that environmentalists will soon miss the good stewardship that ranchers provided for the land.

Nonetheless, he is hoping Oregon’s congressional delegation, including Sen. Gordon Smith, agree to finance a buyout of those grazing permits. Currently, Willis, Dominick DellaSala of the World Wildlife Fund and Kerr are in Washington, D.C., urging officials to advance the buyout option.

A history of challenges

The proposed buyout is the hottest political item associated with the monument today — but not the first. Soon after its creation, the Bush administration tried to shrink the boundaries of the monument.

Gail Norton, Babbitt’s successor at Interior, sent a letter to all the elected representatives in areas with new monuments under the Clinton administration, to see if they were satisfied with the boundaries.

The letter spurred three highly attended and hotly debated public meetings in June 2001: one in White City, one in Medford and one in Ashland.

In Ashland, the meeting turned into somewhat of a spectacle when hundreds of people converged on the Grange Hall, as well as mounted horses and American flags.

On July 10, 2001, the Jackson County commissioners decided to shrink the Monument by half or more, and sent word about it to Norton in D.C.

Despite the recommendation, nothing was ever done to shrink the monument, and two of the three county commissioners that voted to shrink the monument have been voted out of office.

And in October 2003, the monument went to the U.S. Supreme Court when the Blue Ribbon Coalition questioned the constitutionality of the Antiquities Act. The Supreme Court eventually upheld the act.

Of course, the monument’s biggest day was the one five years ago when Al Gore announced the Cascade-Siskiyou Ecological Emphasis Area was now the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. He made the announcement from another newly named monument: the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River.

Willis remembered that he found out the day it was to be announced. He barely had time to organize a press conference at the Headwaters building in Ashland.

Drehobl said he was contacted and told he had one hour to suggest any changes to the final plan before the administration went public. By the time he called back his superior in Washington, he was told it was already too late. The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument would be announced shortly.

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