Dear HCN,
To the people of Wallowa
County, Oregon: My dictionary says an environmentalist is “a person
working to solve environmental problems such as air and water
pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources.” Andy Kerr and
Ric Bailey are true environmentalists (HCN,
11/14/94).
If you in Wallowa County are not yet
concerned about the conservation of the scenic, diverse natural
resources of the area, you should be. For a hundred years,
generations of you in Wallowa County have overgrazed public and
private land, overcut public forests, and destroyed high public
meadows in the Wallowas with nearly 200 bands of sheep at the turn
of the century. How can you afford not to be involved in a strong
movement to prevent further damage to our public
resources?
Surely you understand that public land
is as available to me, or a New Yorker, as it is to a resident of
Wallowa County. Somehow the belief that local residents “own it
all” must be revealed for the lie it really is, especially in a
county made up of large public land holdings. Such thinking has to
change. Public land is in public trust: We all own it. Our mutual
responsibility is to protect it for future
generations.
In my work as a fishery biologist in
Wallowa County from 1948 to 1957, I saw it all – the indiscriminate
use of steelhead streams as logging roads in the lower Imnaha, the
complete denuding of the Hobo Lake Basin by sheep in the summer of
1949, the stupidity of the Lostine City Council who refused to
allow salmon passage through their city intake dam, and the
bulldozing of Little Sheep Creek “to straighten the channel,” that
is: create more cow pasture.
When will county
residents ever discover that cows are environmental liabilities,
especially along streams? Destruction of riparian vegetation by
grazing removes cover, exposes streams to higher temperatures,
erodes banks and impairs water quality.
When will
ranchers make the connection between poor land practices and fish
losses? From 1948 to 1957 we in the state game and fish department
tried hard to screen, at state expense, irrigation ditches in
Wallowa County to save salmon. But even the 2-inch bypass pipe that
carried migrating salmon fingerlings from the ditch safely back to
the river was often plugged by some small-minded land owner whose
greed or meanness prevailed, to the detriment of future salmon
runs.
There are lots of us outside of Wallowa
County who come back often to hike, fish, camp and hunt in what’s
left of the Wallowas. We are going to work even harder to create
large public reserves where logging, grazing, mining and
road-building are abolished for good. Protection of land and
natural resources in the Snake River Canyon and the Wallowas will
be a great benefit for those of you with enough vision and guts to
make it happen.
Homer J.
Campbell
Corvallis,
Oregon
The writer belongs to
the Oregon Natural Resources Council, the Hells Canyon Preservation
Council, and several other environmental
groups.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Boycott, effigy-hanging disgraces Joseph, Oregon.
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