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Home My Public Portal AboutTobias, Nellehe L aia lid, l�s ap)P — Nelle Tobias reminisces s es by WilIN 'Lieber Nelle Tobias has lived in the Long Valley area for 44 years. She first came to Long Valley when the railroad was being put in. Nelle rode into McCall from the outskirts of Town with her parents who were ranchers in the Nampa, Caldwell area. At that time the railroad was not finished, and only went to the edge of town. Nelle Tobias built and ran the Edgewater Cottages. She bought wood from the mill to fire the stoves, and ice from the Boydstuns who harvested it from the lake. They used the ice in ice boxes at the cottages because there were no refrigerators back then. Nelle men- tioned two things they had to do that people still do today. Those two things are shovel snow and go to the post office every day. Nelle Tobias is very talented. She weaves and makes pottery, and studies petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are Indian rock writings. Ms. Tobias is a very interesting lady who keeps busy and seems to enjoy life. THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE -- PAGE View of Jughandle ,Mountain from Nelle Tobias' window. 3 to W Ylq 4_1 �- CONGRATULATIONS �q Nelle Tobias Wild Idaho! Scholarship Granted Glenn R. Stewart Executive Director Jerry Dixon served'on. the ICL board from 1974 to 19$0 —ten years before my . time. Still; he is an inspiration to me ,and others active in the organization today. Jerry created a special fund within the ICL Endowment to support the attendance of an. Idaho student at each Wild IdahM conference. He calls it the "Nelle Tobias Wild Idaho! -Scholarship" in honor of the consistent and dedicated conservationist in McCall who encouraged him. to join the conservation movement many years back. Jerry Was a smokejumper at the time. His passion for Idaho's Salmon `River country remains strong And he returns each summer to do things like hike, raft; kayak, mountain bike and then swirri his way from the Montana Bitterroots to the .Oregon side of the Snake. Jerry usually pokes his head in the ICL office during the.ldaho visits. He is full of praise *for the organization, enth xst- asm for Idaho's wild country, and .creative new ideas for making ICL stronger. One of his ideas was the Nelle Tobias Wild' 'ldahol. Scholarship. In one swoop, he wanted to honor one of our best and pull new sparks of:errergy into the conservation move -` ment. Now, it's a reality. I suggested some application process options to select the scholarship recipient each year. Jerry responded that a process would be fine, "although I would be just as happy to see the executive director say, `Let's see, what young,hot- blooded soul out there hasadream in their heart and a fire-in their belly that We* can send to Wild Idahol and show them this is a very constructive way to channel their ener- gies." Sometimes, those that most should go. are last to. fill out applications. So, for Jerry and for Nelle, I am happy to _ pass this year's Honor to Greg Gollberg, - a student at the University of Idaho who has been pitching in as a volunteer well above and beyond the call of duty. :Join. us at .Wild Idaho!, .Greg,-with the spirit of your benefactor, Jerry. Dixon, In your heart! Glen R.: Stewart Executive Director st', - Mill,,, McCaUls Tobias subject of show McCall resident Nelle Tobias will be featured on an episode of "Out- door Idaho" titled "Living Legends," which will air tonight at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on Idaho Public Television. Locally, the program will be aired on KAID -TV. The 89- year -old Tobias is recog- nized on the episode for her activ- ism in the conservation movement, and her work photographing and working to preserve the Frank Church River of No Return Wilder- ness. She remains active in local conservation issues, and continues her life -long passion for the out- doors. "Let's take care of it or we'll be just like other parts of the country, denuded and wondering where to go next to get our soul back," Tobias says. Szarz - J`/e to s 'Outdoor Idaho' Nelle Tobias of McCall will be featured as part of an Outdoor Idaho special on Idaho Public Television next week. The show will air at Tp.m. Mountain Time next Thursday and repeat at 6 p.m. Mountain Time on March 10.. Idahoans have witnessed dramatic changes in the world around them. Some of their favorite places are irre- vocably altered. Mementos and struc- tures are wistful reminders of the ways of life long gone. Outdoor Idaho takes a look at what Idaho once was in an hour -long special Festival '96 pro- gram, "Vanishing Idaho." Idaho's barns, some 100 years old, stand as mute reminders of change. "The reason Idaho's barns have be- come a part of a vanishing legacy is that we no longer do our farming with animals, and that changes everything," historian Arthur Hart says. These old wooden giants have in- spired painters and photographers to features Tobias record their likeness. Tobias records the barns for posterity. "We need to take a record now as soon as we can," she said: "Just like our old- timers, we need to talk to them right now, before they're gone." Other stories in this Outdoor Idaho episode include that of long time film- maker George O. Smith, who docu- mented the state. in the 1950s and 1960s - a time when Idahoans were intent on taming the land and building for tomorrow. SamJackson, a rancher turned poet, captures in rhyme the life and times of sheep ranching in the West. And the show cranks up the old Travelair, the favorite plane of pilots who opened up the mountains of cen- tral Idaho. "We've rummaged through Idaho's attic and discovered some marvelous old films and stories," said Victoria Osborn, writer and copro- ducer of "Vanishing Idaho." McCall's Tobias cited for conservation work Nelle Tobias of McCall was re- cently honored as a "Pioneer of Idaho Conservation in a dinner and tribute staged in Boise by a variety of groups. Tobias, 89, was honored during the Feb. 24 event held at the Esther Simplot Performing Arts Academy. Also honored were Bruce Bowler and Ernie Day, who were cited along with Tobias for giving "their energies, time and resources to defend Idaho's natural resources," according to the event's program. "Before and after we had faxes, photocopiers and e-mail (these three people) took up the vital work of teaching the public and our elected leaders how to preserve our public lands and water," the program notes said. The evening was hosted by the Idaho Conservation League, The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, Idaho Rivers United, the Idaho Environmental Council, the Ada County Fish and Game League, the Idaho Wildlife Fed- eration and the Inland Empire Pub- lic Lands Council. Local spbnsors included the Long Valley Preser- vation Society, Gerry Wisdom and Frank Eld. Remarks about Tobias were given during the evening by Mary Kelly McColl, former executive director of the Idaho Conservation League. McColl noted the efforts of Tobias in opposition to the Swan Falls - Guffey Dam project on the Snake River, and her work in see- Nelle Tobias Pushed for wilderness ing the establishment of the Frank Church - River of No Return Wil- derness Area east of McCall. Containing 2.3 million acres, the, Frank Church wilderness is the larg- est designated wilderness area in the lower 48 United States. Tobias also helped the Long Val- ley Preservation Society establish itself, and the society now operates the Valley County Museum in a complex of buildings in the former Roseberry townsite east of Don- nelly. "My personal observation is of Nelle as a role model of quiet effec- tiveness," McColl said. "Why honor (Tobias and the others)? Because we honor what we ourselves aspire to be, because they challenge us by example," she said. "(Tobias)" is a tiny bundle of energy and deeply held beliefs whose huge heart is full of love for Idaho, its natural inhabitants and its defenders," McColl said. Star -News Photo by Jeanne Seol Nelle Tobias notes 90th Nelle Tobias of McCall celebrated her 90th birthday on May 8 at the McCall Public Library. Tobias, who helps the Friends of the Library, works on historical files every week at the library. She is also a noted conservationist who was instrumen- tal in establishing the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness area and the Valley County Museum near Donnelly. 41/r 9/96 Star -News Photo by Roger Phillips Noted conservationist Nelle Tobias takes in the view from her home near McCall. P, , `� 3 the Snake River. inspired others to follow in Tobias' he is an Idaho pioneer in "1 tried to keep Her opposition to the dam centered ' footsteps. many ways. Around the around a 20 -acre field in the Wees Bar ._ She was honored last February as turn of the century, her the country as it area that held Native American a "Pioneer of Idaho Conservation" at parents homesteaded a petroglyphs. She had spent years survey- had been I a tribute dinner sponsored by various farm along the Snake when ing, studying and cataloguing the outdoor organizations. River near what is now got there. I petroglyphs, which she presented to the Speaker Mary Kelly McColl, a Marsin She has spent almost all of her g. p decision makers. former executive director of the Idaho life in Idaho, and much of that time doing guess that's The official environmental studies later Conservation League, described her her life's work - protecting Idaho wild- concluded preserving the Wees Bar been my dam as "a tiny bundle of energy and deeply held beliefs huge heart is full lands. petroglyphs from the of ;cts of the whose "I look upon the natural world around ob'ec would cost $10 millionThat fact was a � tive rom of love for Idaho, its natural inhabit - me as near a family as I have. It's alive major blow to the now- defunct dam ants and its defenders." and responsive, it nurtures me and I the beginning. " project. Mike Medberry, who currently certainly love it," Tobias said. In the 1970s, Tobias led a University works for the Idaho Conservation During her nearly 60 years in McCall, — Nelle Tobias of Idaho professor on a hike in the French League, agrees. she has fought numerous battles on be- Creek area north of McCall. The botanist, "She's really spent a lifetime (pro - half of the environment and took part in Dr. Pat Packard, found a rare alpine flower tecting the environment);' Medberry one of the environmental movement's Tobias enjoyed the that was an undiscovered subspecies of said. "She is always there making a greatest victories - the creation of the effort to create the wil- Saxifrage. Packard in turn named the plant few gains. She's not jaded; she's very 2.3- million acre Frank Church - River of derness area, but down "Tobias Saxifrage" in honor of Tobias. fresh and passionate about it. I really NoRetuinWildernessareaeastofMcCall. plays her role in it. "It To this day, Tobias is an advocate of admire that about Nelle." She served several years on the River was a big victory, but I the French Creek area, where she has Tobias takes such talk with a glint - of No Return Wilderness Council, which didn't consider myself a spent countless hours hiking, studying ing smile and a self- deprecating headed the drive by publicizing the area big cog in the wheel by and photographing. one- liner. "You can't trust what and campaigning for it to be declared a any means," she said. She would like to see the area pre- friends say about you. They get kind wilderness. Years before the wil- served for research to provide a better of carried away," she said. She flew to Washington D.C. to tes- derness campaign, understanding of the environment. ButTobiassays she is "very happy" tify before Congress on behalf of the Tobias had successfully "Everything you learn isn't from a if she affected people in the environ- area, which was designated in 1980 and fought against the pro- classroom," she said. "We have a tremen- mental movement. is now the largest wilderness area in the posed . Swan Falls- dous laboratory there to work on." "It's very encouraging that there continental United States. Guffey Dam project on Tobias remains a persistent envi- are those young people coming along - -- ronmentalist. She still attends and I hope they carry on," she said. meetings, writes letters to the editor "They didn't need any inspiration, and contacts politicians. but maybe the fact that some old lady She said she's been around long is still in there will encourage them." enough that she can speak her mind Despite being a quarter century without "worrying what the neigh- beyond retirement age, Tobias re- bors think." mains active in the community. She Tobias has neither patience nor works as a volunteer for the Long to6ance for industries that destroy Valley Preservation Society, clipping the land, be it ranchers who over- and saving old newspaper articles to graze, loggers who overcut, orammers record the history of the area and who tear down mountains. relate how the settlers affected the She has seen the logging and min- land and the land affected the settlers. ing go from cross -cbt saws and picks She also tends to her pets and works and shovels to mass mechanical op- in the garden at her home south of erations that can permanently alter McCall, which she designed. the land almost overnight. Despite her accolades and accom- "The mechanism of our industry is plishments, Tobias said she is not one of the things that frightens me the concerned about her legacy. most," she said. "I find that many people who have Tobias speaks on behalf of the done good things are soon forgotten. environment with a loud, soft voice. We are here a short time, and that's The television commercial in which how it is," she said. she appeared was funded by Wild- "My needs are small and what ever Eyed Media of Boise to promote I am doing is not for my particular conservationist views before the No- benefit, but for the species that claims vember election. to be the brainy one," she said. "If She also puts her money where her that's so, we should be able to learn mouth is. She has donated thousands more about what the creator gave us of dollars to campaigns, including and has lasted the over millennia." $30,000 for Democratic candidates in The seed of Tobias' environmen- the last election. For that she was tal concern was planted on the family's dubbed a "big spender from out of Snake River farm and itbloomed while state," in one of Republican Sen. Larry she was at college. Craig's campaign ads. She credits a College of Idaho bi- "He missed his mark," she said. ology professor named Lyle Stanford Tobias has also supported numer- for shaping her attitude about nature. ous environmental organizations, "I think he was the spark plug that which she sees not so much as dona- got me interested and intrigued by the tions, but an exchange of resources. beduty, the serviceability and the prac- "They support me," she said. "They ticality of nature's plan," Tobias said. are trying to do the things that I want "He made it so obvious that every- to see done." thing worked together, that you Walking point through a slough of couldn't damage anything without environmental battles in Idaho has damaging other things." J � -ti�,,,ti t1— a ? I�`fCo Tobias went from the College of Idaho to Oregon State College, where she earned a degree in landscape ar- chitecture. She later studied architecture and city and regional plan- ning at Cornell University. After college, Tobias worked for National Park Service in San Fran- cisco until funding ran out there. She returned to Idaho after the Depression started and found not much was dif- ferent here. "No one was very flush before (the Depression) so they didn't know the difference for a while," she said. Tobias also found there wasn't much demand for her trade as a land- scape architect. "No one knew what a landscape architect was or wanted one," she said. "It wasn't very lucrative in those days," she said. But Tobias main- tained her independence and her flair for adventure. In her mid -20s, she loaded up her 1930 Chevrolet Coupe and took off with her friend, Edith Crookham, on a no -frills 16,000 -mile, four -month tour of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. She moved to McCall in 1938 after buying property along the Payette River south of the Lardo Bridge where River's Bend condos now sit. She designed a batch of cottages for the site and had them built, but she saved the landscaping for her own hands. "I tried to keep the country as it had been when I got there," she said. "I guess that's been my objective from the beginning." P13 � 3 NELLE TOBIAS Nelle Tobias, it days short of 99 years old, died peacefully on April 30, 2004 in McCall. Memorial services will be held at 2 pm. Sunday, May 15, at the McCall Community Congregational Church presided by Past Charlottie Haviicak. Cremation and arrangements were by Heikkila Funeral Chapel, McCall. Nelle was born May 11, 1906 on her parents' homestead in Peaceful Valley near the Snake River. They moved to Nampa where Nelle rode horseback to school' and graduated from Nampa High School in 1924. She attended The College of Idaho for two years, Oregon State College for three years and later Cornell University for a year, graduating as a landscape architect. She worked for the National Park Service in San Francisco before coming to McCall in 1938. Her parents brought her to McCall for the first time in 1911 via horse- and - buggy and they camped out on the way. The Tobias family owned land in McCall since 1911, and in 1939 Nelle saw a need for cleanmoderately priced quarters for out -of -state tourists. She built Edgewater Cabins on the North Fork of the Payette River, near where the fish hatchery is now located, and operated and managed them. Nelle was a native of Idaho, an avidenvironmentalist, student of rock art, historian, researcher and writer. Her love' for Long Valley is apparent in her writing and development of the research center in the Valley County Museum at Roseberry that bears her name. Her energy, interest and crdativity were unmatched for her age. The legend of Nelle Tobias will enrich Idaho and its environment for years to come. s�&V,4 9/3a /Zn4, NEUE TOBIAS 1906 -2004 1,11UIXay P Nelle Tobias was a trained landscape architect and 1928 College of Idaho graduate. This photo is from 2001. Idaho activist led the way for conservation By Rocky Barker The Idaho Statesman The little white flower that carries Nelle Tobias' name was ignored until the tiny Idaho conservationist saw it while hiking in her beloved French Creek roadless area north of McCall. Idaho leaders could not ig- nore Tobias, who spoke out, wrote letters, took pictures and signed checks to pre- serve places like Hells Canyon and the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. The Idaho Con- servation League founder died in McCall on April 30, ll days short of her 99th birth- day. Although she was a petite See Tobias on page 5 Photo by Bob Moseley / Idaho Department of Fish and Game The Tobias wildflower The wildflower, saxaf rage to- biasiae, which Nel le Tobias discovered while hiking in French Creek, is unique to the Payette National Forest. It was named after Tobias. This photo of Lava Butte Lake in the French Creek - Patrick Butte road - less area wastaken by Nelle Tobias. Tobias From page 1 little lady she had a very strong voice in meetings and she wrote with a strong right hand with her check book," said former Gov. and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus. "She had a lot of historical wisdom that was very important to the con- servation movement in Idaho." A memorial service will be held for Tobias at 2 p.m Sunday at the McCall Community Congrega- tional Church. Tobias was born May 11, 1906, on a homestead near the Snake River at a time when people still traveled by horse and buggy. Af- ter college and a career as a land- scape architect for the National Park Service, she returned to Ida- ho in 1938 and opened Edgewater Cabins on the Payette River in Mc- Call. In the 1950s, she became one of the early voices calling for the preservation of wilderness in the state. Ernie Day said Tobias was among the small cadre of conser- vationists who challenged the dam - builders and timber barons. Day was one of Idaho's leading wilder- ness voices from the 1960s through the 1980s She was ahead of me," said Day, a former board member of the Wilderness Society, a nation- al group devoted to the preserva- tion of wilderness. Tobias was involved in nearly every preservation effort in the state from the 1964 Wilderness Act, to the Wild and Scenic River Act in 1966, to the preservation of Hells Canyon, Gospel Hump, the Saw - tooth National Recreation Area and the Frank Church River of No Return. Today, more than 4 mil- lion acres has been designated as wilderness, where logging and mo- torized travel is banned. "She was so ahead of her time," said Kim Pierson, a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service. "She was talking about wilderness protec- tion 50 years ago." Pierson came to know Tobias when she was writing her masters thesis on the saxafrage tobiasiae. Tobias discovered the little wild- flower, which unique to the Payette National Forest, and botanists gave it her name. "It was a funky little thing that reminded me of her," Pierson said. "It was just hanging on and sur- viving just like her." Tobias had no family and lived by herself in her McCall home un- til her death. Many people told sto- ries of how she continued to be ac- tive outdoors — hiking and taking scenic drives — long into her 90s. She climbed onto her roof at 92 to clear snow away from her stove pipe. Fires burned through the French Creek - Patrick Butte area in 1994 and threatened land where her wildflowers grew. She raced up the forest roads in her Subaru as soon as she could to protect them. Trees fell behind her blocking her in. A forest employee saw her pass and sent word so that workers came up behind her to clear away the trees, Pierson said. Andrus remembered how she sent photographs, maps and let- ters to him and Sen. James Mc- Clure as they worked on a wilder- ness bill in 1987. Her efforts con- vinced them to add protection for the salmon fishery in the forest around Rapid River near Riggins. "She did a lot of the behind -the- scenes work and funding to keep conservation organizations afloat," Andrus said. Tobias was one of the 173 founders of the Idaho Conserva- tion League, the statewide envi- ronmental group, and a donor to its endowment fund in the 1990s. But her money and efforts helped conservation groups statewide and nationwide. 2-- `1 2- She also was a supporter of his- tory preservation, and Valley County named its museum after her, the Nelle Tobias Research Center in Donnelly. Tobias worried that her native state and the world was becoming overpopulated. She expressed guilt that she had contributed to at- tracting people to Idaho with her tourism business. "We don't need chambers of commerce and state agencies Friday, May 13, 2005 reaching out for more people to clog our highways, schools, pris- ons, fishing streams, farm land, health care facilities and the like," she wrote in one of her frequent letters to the Idaho Statesman. "The costs in dollars, frustration and family life trauma are show- ing up every day." Rick Johnson, executive direc- tor of the Idaho Conservation League, said Tobias personified the group's motto of "keeping Ida- ho, Idaho." "Idaho is a small state, so indi- viduals like Nelle still can make a big difference," he said. Spring mushroom foray to be named after Tobias The Southern Idaho Mycological Association members will convene at McCall's Quaker Hill June 2 -4 for their 20th annual spring foray, which this year is called the Nelle Tobias Spring Foray. The foray honors Nelle Tobias, a charter member of SIMA from the McCall community, for her many years of contribution to the success of the annual forays. Dr. Nancy Smith Weber will serve as SIMA's mycologist. Dr. Weber is a member of the faculty of the De- partment of Forest Science at Oregon State University. She is presently do- ing research studies on Western American Pezizales. Her specialties are the morels and cup fungi. She is also working on a revision of her book, "The Morel Hunters Companion." Weber will be the featured speaker Friday evening when her topic will be the fungi that fruit in carbonaceous burn areas. This will be preparation for SIMA club members who plan to foray in such an environment the following day. Weber is not a stranger to the McCall area, as she spent several summers with her parents, Drs. Alexander and Helen Smith in their research of the mushrooms indigenous to Valley County and adjoining coun- ties. More recently she served as my- cologist for SIMA when forays were held near Cascade Reservoir in 1986 and 1990. On Saturday afternoon, June 3, the collections from the morning's foray will be identified and displayed and a critique of species found will be given by Weber, according to Marie Bailey, recorder for the club. The past two spring forays have averaged some 150 species. Speaker for Saturday evening will be Alma Hanson, botanist for the U.S. Forest Service at McCall. Her lecture will include a slide showing of local endangered plant species. Friday and Saturday night programs will start at 7:30 p.m. The Saturday foray will leave from Quaker Hill at 9 a.m., and viewing of identified fungi will start at 3 p.m. Registration will begin at 4 p.m. on Friday. Saturday's guests will need to come early enough to sign up before the foray. For more information call Genille Steiner at (208) 345 -2515 or write to 1903 N. 9th Boise, ID 83702. OH 11 92 NARRATOR: Nelle Tobias INTERVIEWER: Linda Morton - Keithley DATE: February 5, 1993 LOCATION: near McCall PROJECT: February 5th, 1993. This is Linda Morton - Keithley interviewing Nelle Tobias at Nelle's home near McCall, Idaho. [ Nelle moved to McCall in 1938 where she built and operated Edgewater Cabins, tourist rental cabins located along the east bank of the Payette River, until 1951 -ed.] LMK: I'd like to start by just asking you to tell me about where you grew up. NT: Well, I grew up on a homestead down near Snake River originally called Peaceful Valley and we lived in what they called Dead Horse Canyon. They later changed the name to Riverside, upriver from Marsing. After we sold the ranch there, we moved down to the river edge, just across the river from the Gem pumping plant which is upriver from Marsing. From there moved to Nampa where I finished the eighth grade and lived there thereafter. Home was there. LMK: In Nampa itself? NT: In Nampa. My mother had taken me back and forth to school in there for, I guess, started in the third grade for three months and fifth grade for five months, sixth grade for about five months and the seventh grade was out in Riverside. They had a new school building then and I rode horseback to school, then went to that school until mid -year when they sold that ranch and moved to town. So, I'd been in the Nampa schools quite a while. The rest of the time I was taught at home. 1 0 Idaho State Historlca! OMF Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) LMK: Who taught you at home? NT: My mother. She had been a teacher for ten years so she did that. Fed the crew of hired men and family and gardened and did all those things that a woman does on a homestead in the country. LMK: You said a ranch. What was it you were- - NT: It was a farm; we called it a ranch. We had a few sheep, a few cattle one or two years. We were not cattle people. The sheep, there was only enough to be a nuisance. We had maybe a hundred, something like that and that wasn't worth all the hassle that goes with that sort of thing. That didn't last very long either, so it was farming for the main part. LMK: What kinds of crops? NT: Hay and grain and eventually into corn. My father was- - well, I have his medals. He won a national corn show in 1916, 117 and 118, I think. There were two great big silver cups and one's in the state museum and one's in the Nampa museum. For his corn exhibits. One was at St. Paul and one as at Dallas. The 1916 one, I don't know just where that was now. So that was his major interest right then, having come from Illinois where pretty much the territory of the Baldridges and the Crookhams and that background, came from. It worked together. LMK: What about high school, where did you go? K Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) PTT: Nampa. I started at Kenwood in the third grade and finished there in the eighth grade and then there was the new high school at that time. Which is now the city hall or something. LMK: Where did you go to college? NT: College of Idaho for two years, Oregon State College for three years. Then six years later I went for a year at Cornell 'University and that was enough. LMK: What were you studying at that time? NT: Landscape architecture. I had taken landscape architecture at Oregon State and Cornell was considered one of the better colleges for that. One of the girls that was at Oregon State at that time went there for two years and then went to Cornell and finished. She became southern California's foremost landscape architects. Last summer, she visited me. LMK: Who was that? NT: Ruth Shellhorn Kueser. Her husband had just died about a year before and he was a brother of Ed Kueser who was a friend of mine, through friends. He and his wife had a cottage up here and also lived in Boise and Ruth and her husband had been here once or twice to visit them. She came to visit me this time. That was fun. LMK: Did you work in the field of landscape architecture? NT: Not very extensively. I worked for a landscape architect for two years in California,, in Oakland. I went to work in Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) August before the crash in October of 1929 and he hung on for two years. But people who had lost their shirts in the stock market and managed to keep going that long. Then I came home and I did a little garden in Caldwell for $25.00 and I did the addition to the Nampa Lakeview Park for $25.00 and helped lay it out and plant it. So that was my professional career. LMK: You had told me before I started taping that you came up here to McCall in 1938. What else did you do just before you came up here? NT: Just before I came up here, I was with the National Park Service in San Francisco. This was on emergency programs, you know, recovery programs. We did mainly, I guess, an extensive recreation study on Nevada of the sites and parks and that sort of thing. Before that I was planning assistant to the consultant for the Idaho State Planning Board, which only lasted a short time. Under that study I had supervised a WPA crew. But my main interest was looking into recreation possibilities and what was done elsewhere and what wasn't done in Idaho and that sort of thing. While I was working there, friends came and we went to Sun Valley. Sun Valley was just being built; the lodge was being built. Then came on through Stanley to stay all night. There was a rodeo on; there was no place to stay and then I began to realize that people needed a place to stay if they were 4 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) going to enjoy our state recreationally. And that's why I came to McCall. LMK: Why did you pick McCall? NT: Well, there wasn't any other place as far as I was concerned. [laughs] I had come here early in life and when we acquired land down here at Lake Fork at that time. It was a sight unseen and the family wanted to know what it was, so we came up to see it with a team and a buckboard. Came u.p over Dry Buck and camped out and that sort of thing. Every few years, occasionally, we came up from home to -the ranch and cramped out there, this place down here. When I first saw a pine tree I would blow and when we went back down, I would look back at the last pine tree. It was just kind of natural that this was the place I wanted to come. LMK: Was there much of tourist market in this vicinity at the time you decided to come up'? NT: As far as I knew, this was a resort town; always had been. That's all I ever heard about. It was a place to go. There was not a great tourist industry in Idaho, but Boise Valley, Ontario people had summer homes up here and that's where they, were coming. This was :it. So there were several other cabin places but I tried to make mine the most modern at that. particular time. Before long, of course, we were in the war and I had quite at run of Gowen Field people on three 5 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) day passes, winter and summer. Digging out the driveways and the paths all winter was fun. LMK: Let's start with your coming up here. What was your first move to develop your business, when you came up to McCall in 1938? NT: The first move was to acquire land, I guess. Friends of mine knew that Boise - Payette had some land that they were going to sell. At that time my grandmother was living with us in Nampa and she died and my father and I went east to Illinois where she was buried, where my grandfather was buried. In the meantime, I got on our trip and my mother wrote and said that this particular piece of land along the river had become available. The first piece, I told my friends, "You take the first piece, then if there is a second piece, I want it." So it was available so she went ahead and she made the steps necessary, until we got back, to secure this strip of land along the river. [see attached maps -ed.] About, let's see, a week or two later, after we got back, my father and I came up. We stayed at the old Lakeview Hotel and went out and looked over the ground. This was in April and there were still snow banks here and there. Then in May, I guess it was, we came up and started building what he called the shack. And that was where the carpenter and helper eventually lived in the shack and I rented a little house that belonged to the Boydstons, just N Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) about where Hometown Sports is at this time. So I lived over there and they built three cabins that first summer. One was :ready for the Fourth of July and I had a reservation on it. Of course, it had just a wood stove. It was raining so I: would run down and stoke the fire and wish they would come.- And then they didn't come and I ran down and stoked the fire again and then wiped myself out because I tracked in water,. All that good stuff. When the third one was finished,, I moved into it: and spent the winter in that one. Then the next year, my house: was built. That went on for quite a while. Then a man came into McCall and started some cabins. He also poured a lot of concrete right there by what is now called Charlie's. It was the Stockman, the Sportsman. There's a great big - -right at: their gate- -onto the park area, there's a whole lot. of concrete, big buttresses there. That was to be part of his development for, I suppose, a hotel of some sort. He was going to have tours around the lake and all these cabins and, it was a great promotion. One Saturday night there was no money to pay anybody and that was the end of that. So these cabins were for sale and I bought three of them. [The cabins were moved to Nelle's property c. 1942 or 1943 -ed.] None of them finished. Three years ago maybe, four years ago, I saw one of them going by and .it's located over in :here in Alta Vista [subdivision] 7 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) now. One is down in Meadows. I think Dr. Smith bought it. And the third one, when I decided I was through running cabins for the public, I sold two lots off of this property and one went to people in Payette, I believe. I think their grandchild has it now. Shall I go tend to the dog and shut her up? (tape turned off and on] LMK: Now, these three cabins that you bought from this gentleman, did you use those as part of your business? NT: Oh, yes. Finished them for -- One was a duplex, one was just two rooms. One was a very small, little cabin and the other one was probably the largest one I had. I ran them for several years, a few years after they were available. My father came and helped me and a carpenter that had built our house in Nampa came up. He was not into the resort merchandising business and he would send to town for a certain sized casing nail or box nail or something and well, they didn't have that kind; they had something else. And he said, "All they have in there is fish hooks." (laughs] He was a little annoyed. To get plumbing equipment, let's see, this was during the war. I went up and down Lake Street bumming connections, a half -inch "L" or a half -inch "T" or a coupling or something in order to do the plumbing on this cabins. It was a cut and fit proposition. LMK: What did the cabins that you built look like? What amenities did they have? 8 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) NAT: Well, they had bathrooms; they had showers. They had bathrooms with showers. No tubs. The ones I built were rough siding, rough overlap :siding. The ones that I bought were asbestos shingles. I don't know where the asbestos shingles are now. They all had, the first ones had upstairs attic bedrooms. Beds, they were not separate rooms upstairs. They had a bedroom and a bath and a living area and kitchen downstairs. Tha_y were knotty pine finished inside, furnished with dishes and bedding and pots and pans and that sort of thing. I think they were well kept and people who came seemed to enjoy them. The public was, to me, very interesting. It was quite confining to be there all the time. You'd run to the post office and back and that was about it. The world was sort of crossing your doorstep all the time in those days and very interesting people. Some of the Gowen Field families would come up. I remember one group went out and I think one of the fellows said, "Well, I hope we left your cabin alright, in good shape" or something. And this little gal said, "Well, I swept it." There were those who didn't sweep it however and some from Boise that were not. particularly careful what happened. That seemed to be acceptable in a good many circles. [laughs] LbIK: What about after the war years? N.: Let's see. Things just went on, I guess. Nothing startling 9 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) after that. There was, I think, I'm not sure just what period this was, it could have been after the war. When the city sewer system emptied into the river, just below my place and I complained to the man in charge. And so when the river was low, here it was spilling out over the rocks. I complained about this and they came out and extended the pipe out about 40 feet further said, "It's just sewer gas so what are you worried about ?" (laughs] On a quiet evening and the smell was coming up the river. Finally we got a better sewage system. I also had my own water system and drilled a well. It was my family's theory that you should always have water before you did anything else. So I drilled a well and got water and it was so full of iron. Your coffee was kind of purple and when they made drinks out of it, it was purple. So I tapped into the penstock that went down to the fish hatchery and that was pumped out of the lake, see, but it was way out there. When they extended the water system down Lake Street, I wanted to tap into it. So we made a deal that they would dig the trench and I would furnish the transit pipe. Pay for it. They dug a trench with a backhoe, except they'd run into rocks. So there the rocks were. By that time the ground was freezing but I got out there with my pick and I tried to pick this frozen ground and get those rocks out. I wasn't able to finish; I got a man to help. He had a bad back, he couldn't do it. I M Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) don't remember just how we did get all the rocks out and they laid the transit pipe. Came along with a bulldozer and bulldozed the frozen ground in on top of the transit pipe. Spring came and they turned on the water and [makes noise]. The transit pipe was broken. I never paid for the transit Pipe. I figured if that's the way they were going to do it, they didn't have any sale of water, I didn't have any water. So I never did pay for the transit pipe. Eventually, before I left, they put a line down with a meter and everything on the other side of the road, into the cabins. So we were on city water. Eventually after I left, they had a new sewer system. LMK: When did you get out of that business? N'T: 1951. the Williamsons took over. I lived in my house several more years. The dam went out and they built a new dam and I bought that little bit of property which adjoined mine on the north. There was a little - -we called it the dam house. We did that one into a little rental and then moved into it for a whale after I sold my house to the Williamsons. Then on that property, built another house, a little three -story house which is the first one down the river. [356 Mather Road -ed.] And sold that to the Bushs. They were in California then but they were relatives of people who lived across the river and had a home in Boise. LMK: What were you doing for your work then at that time, after 11 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) you sold the cabins? NT: Well, I still had the shop. I had shop in my house and so I had that. I guess I was working building rock terraces and things down at the little dam house after I got that. I guess I hadn't begun my rock business. LMK: What were you selling in the shop? NT: Well, the thing that I was interested in, I was making pottery. But I did have all kinds of junk that I'd gotten from other places. Had some Indian things and some furs. I saw a story in the Statesmen this morning about Babe Hansen and her cougar hunting. I had bought some of her cougar skins and some also from Deadshot Reed or his son. I don't know which. Which now makes me a little squeamish. My father had been in taxidermy work in his early days and he thought that was the thing to do. Get all these skins. So, okay, we got skins. Had a beautiful coyote skin mounted on the wall - -not as an animal but as a rug on the wall. I rented rooms upstairs and people who came and went had to come through the shop. I heard the people come in and I heard voices and I decided they must have had company because after a while, somebody went out. What it was, they were taking the coyote skin off the wall and walked off with it. [laughs] END OF SIDE 1 SIDE 2 12 'Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) LMK: Did you ever get the skin back or figure out who took it? NT: No. I thought if one made a survey around the lake, you might find it on somebody's wall or maybe in Boise or Nampa or Caldwell, heck and gone. LMK: Before we continue the chronology, I wanted to go back and ask a couple other questions,. What do you remember of the filming of Northwest Passge:? N'T: That happened the year after I first came. I didn't get out to see very much of it but I did have one couple that lived in the house next door to me. That must have been 140. They came! in 139 and had trouble with their color, I guess, and came back the next year. Because I was living in my house and they lived in the cabin next door where I had lived the year before. They were the McBrides, Don McBride. Isabelle Jewell also lived in one of the cabins for a while. I couldn't get away to go out and watch them very much to see what they did. I did go over once and took pictures at Crown Point of McBride and of Guererro. He and his wife stayed at my place; must have had a room or something at one time. Then I went up on Brundage one day when they were filming there. Whoever the fellow was who ran around with the head with his arms, he was doing that up there. Went once to the Indian villager up on the Payette River and watched them on the river just below my place, below the fish hatchery, in there with boats crossing the river, 13 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) crossing the river in boats. I think that was in 139, though. I guess that's the only times that I was out on location at all. But there was much going on at that time and I knew the McBrides had a beach party down on the river one night and some of the stars were wandering through the yard. I knew things were going on but I wasn't much involved in the photography, filming of it. LMK: Do you know why they chose McCall to film that particular movie? NT: Well, we promoted, at least the word was going around that the skies were blue. There was clear air. There were not planes going over all the time and that they did take footage and footage of the sky and the clouds and that sort of thing, just to have it. I don't know whether it was MGM, but somebody had been in here a few years before to do another film. Hudson Bay, was that it? I understood that it was done up on the point before you get to Dead Horse Creek, going up on the west side of the river. At least that's where they headquartered. So I guess they had learned about the clean air and the clean sky and clouds and not much noise. LMK: What were the recreational activities that people were partaking in when you first came up here? NT: Fishing, trolling, you know, trolling and then going out and fishing on the streams. Before I came, they had horseracing 14 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) out on Ponderosa Park and then there were the dog races. I always wanted to go to the dog races and when I came, they quit having them until later. I think it was pretty localized unless they were energetic people to hike out. They'd go along the streams, along Lake Fork and the river and to, I guess they went up to Upper Lake up the upper river. Out here and there. I really wasn't aware that there was a mill here when I came, except my father loved to go over and watch them cut up logs. Watched those big logs go back and forth. It was an entertainment, I think, for some people. Slot machines, of course, all those good things. L11K: They were legal at that time? ! NT: Yes. I think at that particular time, I'm not sure. They were periodically here and there. A lot of people did the up and down the boardwalks. UIK: What was the status of skiing when you first came up here? NT: It was pretty rudimentary. There was a crowd that came up from Caldwell. I guess it was the first winter, at least, soon thereafter. Either the first or second winters. Several were friends of mine and they would come up in a crowd and we'd go out to the :Little ski hill and ride up on the sled and ski down the hill. One of the pictures over in the Lodge is one of pictures that I took of a crowd at the foot of the hill there at the lift house. The Lodge was, I 15 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) i think, built when I got here and it was quite impressive. It was a hangout and people had the big dinners there and the ski awards and that sort of thing. Then it burned and it's never been as impressive since. And the Mighty Mites, of course, were very important. It was in 1941 that the Millers came to live in my house. Helen, of course, has written many books and her husband was a newspaper man. He had been with the Spokesman Review and they came here with their young son (Mac Miller], nine years old. He's well - known in the skiing circles. They would take him out after school. They would go out to ski in the morning, then they'd pick him up in the afternoon and go out and ski. It was a very dedicated program with them. Of course, all those other kids that were about his age and it was quite a thing going. I was more involved in it then than I have ever been since so I don't know whether it has had its lapses, whether it's as universally around the town supported as it was then. For the local kids and the school program, I don't think it is as well supported by the school as it was. LMK: What do you remember of the CCC camp that was here in town? NT: Well, it was quite a layout. They were telling about the people that came out and they didn't know anything about fires and wood and that sort of thing. The chopped u the g Y PP P furniture and all kinds of things to stick in the stove to 16 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) make fire. [laughs] I think a lot of the fellows were city kids and they weren't used to this sort of thing and if they needed a fire, they got .it. I never met up with much of them because I was pretty well situated. where I was and stayed put. But they were right there on Lake Street, on the highway and had a big camp. They did a lot of work around the community. I tried to get them, tried to work through the State Forester to get the peninsula made into a park: using the CCCs as labor to develop it. The word was from. the State Forester ghat: they were just about to get it done when they abandoned the CCC program. So that took care of ghat. They had done some road building out there anyway and opened it up some. It was not too popular a program i with some people in town to do anything about a park out there, I guess. At least I was told by some of the leading citizens that was just newspaper talk. LN[K: Was the CCC already in existence when you moved here in 138? NT: I don't know whether it was in existence or not. I don't think it was here. LMK: That's what I meant. NT: I don't think it was. LMK: What happened to the camp after it was abandoned by the CCC? NT: Then it became a rest camp, an R & R camp for Gowen Field. And then it became a survival training camp after that. Then I guess it sat there for a while 'til it was sold off 17 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) in lots. The last house, by this women who runs the McCall Hotel, was built where - -what was it, the rec hall, I suppose it would have been, with a fireplace in it. The fireplace stood there for years after the building had been torn down or burned or whatever happened to it. I can't remember. So it was a nice piece of property. LMK: Where was it located in relation to something that's there now? NT: I guess the Warren Browns to the McBrides. I think the McBride's been sold. But as you come out from the hospital, Masonic Hall, you run into this last house with the big rock posts, that would be the farthest west of the property. And then it would go east, I guess, Armstrong's is the last lot to the east. Pretty much up against Lloyd Williams, Edwards? [tries to think of name] Pretty close to the big condos, Crescent Beach condos. There's a lot of waterfront in there. LMK: The years that it was being used by the -- during the War as a R & R camp - -what was that like in the community? What impact did the servicemen being up here have? NT: Well, I only knew it from the people who made reservations at my place and I don't know what was going on down in the bars. But I think that was probably our most commercial, most economically beneficial patronage that we had during the winters, you know, because we were not really geared up 18 'Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) j to winter sports very much. There was that going on but it wasn't commercialized like it has become. I know that I had, probably every weekend had somebody in a cabin or two, which was better than nothing. IMK: What: was the access in McCall at that time? Transportation? NT: Automobile. I don't think they ran any passenger trains. I suppose maybe you could have hopped a ride, I don't know. I don't even know about buses, whether there was a bus that came regularly. I doubt it but I don't know. IMK: How were you marketing your cabins to let the public know that they were available? NT: That's a good question. [laughs] I guess by word of mouth more than anything else. After people came, I tried to keep in contact with them, you know, with Christmas notes or something of that sort. I did have a little folder that I sent out a little bit with reservations and stuff to send back, but: it was no big campaign. I guess it was pretty much word of mouth. It wasn't a big money- making but as long as I: was busy, I thought: that was well. LMK: What kind; of help did you have to do the chores that needed to be done? NT: I had one. person usually during July and August at least. One year, no two years, one year I turned it over to a woman from Boise and her friend, I guess, and the first week she was here she fell and broke her arm. She got the friend and 19 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) ; they ran it that summer. Another summer a friend of mine -- she became a friend of mine - -had recently come in and she had married one of the Forest Service smoke jumpers and she took it over for that summer. Then I had high school, college girls. One very good friend was here two different seasons; another girl, one season. I had an older woman one year and a girl that claimed to be a teacher but she could hardly read the newspaper. She had taught, I guess. So I tried to have somebody on deck, so I could get away to go to the post office, and be there in the shop when somebody came. I had a wonderful Chow dog who would lay at the curve in the road where I could see her when I was cleaning cabins and she could see the office. If she remained lying there, I knew everything was alright and if she was gone, I went and looked. So she was a great help. My folks came up. My father always had some project he wanted to do. Sometimes it was upsetting my plans. [laughs] He did a lot for it; he was always thinking about something to do that I needed done. LMK: You mentioned that the Lodge was here at that time. What other competition- - NT: Shore Lodge, you mean? It came in later, yes. Let's see, to begin with there was Cook's Cabins where - -what do they call it ?- -the first condos there. [Brown Palace condos -ed.] And Carney's Cabins which is the first condos going west Kul, Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) [Crystal Beach condos -ed.] and Bowling Green was out around the lake.. Elevation something or other is there now. [Elevation 5000 condos -ed.] The hotel downtown, but they were in a different category. Shady Beach, I think, still had cabins and tent houses. Conifer Cabins came in later, on the south side of the road there. [now Brundage Bungalows -ed.] So there were other going concerns. IM: What about the Payette Lakes Inn? ITT: Well, it had so many ups and downs. It was closed, it was transferred, they were in litigation, one thing and another. There was a period there where it was the thing to do to be at the I:nn. Yet in the 130s when I was working in Boise, I think, I brought my friend up here who was from California. She was teaching in Boise. I wanted to show her the lake and the :Inn, so we went over to spend the night. Well, it was closed and there was a couple there, "Well, okay. You could have a room upstairs." So we went upstairs. We spent the night there not too comfortably. The walls were sort of beaver board walls and I guess, I don't know what they've done to it since it's become church camp, but everybody has said to remodel, to fix it tip, to restore it to get it into habitable shape is just impossible. It had been closed down even at that time and then it, opened with dinner /dancing and gambling, that sort of thing, I think, in the 140s. That's what I'm trying to nail down in some of my research. I have 21 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) the story by telephone from a couple of men. One was president of the association for quite a while and the other one might have been also. I sent my version of what they said back to them along with a bunch of questions. I'll learn more as time goes on, maybe. But it was in a fluctuating condition. LMK: What was the financial situation of it? NT: That seems to be one of the things that brought about all of this litigation and finally, opening up the -- See, in front of the Inn was this great, 200 foot wide panel down to the lake and that was public access property, tennis courts. There was a dance hall down on the lake and there used to be a skating rink and all this. I don't know just what brought on all this, but one story I have read about in the Nellie Ireton Mill's book, I think it was, that Mr. Cottingham in Nampa built the lodge, the Inn in 1916 and ran it for ten years in order to get his money out of it. That he wasn't paid. I don't know whose obligation it was to pay him, whether it was the association or Hays who was promoting the association or whether it was the real estate promoter Arnold, who was supposed to pay him. Then in 1953, I don't know just what happened all up to that time, a judge accorded Randolph Robertson the panel. Of course, it's full of houses now and I don't think the church got it then. I think the church had to buy it from whomever got that wl% Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) property, maybe Randolph Robertson got that. I don't know. So .it's been in litigation and hard times much of its life, but it was such a glorious place there for a long time, from my viewpoint. And so beautiful. I14K: What do you remember of 'Winter Carnival, the beginnings of it? ITT: I've never been much involved in Winter Carnival. I remember watching it go across the bridge from my place at Edgewater in a "July" rainstorm, with floats, all the paper things dripping. It has been a Main Street promotion, chamber of commerce -type of thing. I was secretary of the group that called itself the Chamber of Commerce for a while but that didn't come up. We put out some stationary and maps and things like that. END OF TAPE 1 SIDE 2 TAPE 2 SIDE 1 LMK: Before I forget to ask, what did you rent the cabins for when you first started out? Do you remember? NT: Seems to top was $8.001. I would have to look in to that to be sure. LMK: A day? ITT: A day. The duplex, I don't know, probably four, somewhere along in there. But my carpenter that built the first cabins, I paid $1.25 an hour and the helper was 350. So that's a whole different scale. And at the time that I sold 23 i Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) them, I figured I was taking in about $4,000 a year. LMK: Now you had, I think you already mentioned that you sold the cabins the 1951 and then you kind of alluded to your rock business or interest. What was that all about? NT: Well, that was recording the Wees Bar petroglyphs. LMK: How did that all come about? NT: Well, it came about because of a mining operation along the river's edge at that place. I think it was Rowland - -do you know that name? Anyway, my mother knew Mrs. Frank Stevens in Nampa and Frank Stevens had gone out there to see what was going on at this operation, this mining. And saw this field of petroglyphs and brought back pictures and Mrs. Stevens gave my mother some of these pictures. So for a z good many years when I was either off working or at school, I remember my mother would write to me and say they had gone out in Owyhee County trying to find those rocks. And they got stuck in the dusk and high- centered and all kinds of things on this escapades to find these rocks. It was after I came up here that a woman who was staying here with me and she had written for the Geographic magazine and had photographed during the war and she was here hoping to do a story on the smokejumpers and get it into the National Geographic. Turned out by that time, they had people available that had big cameras and they didn't take her 35mm pictures. But anyway, she was interested in the country and 24 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) i we went down to the valley and she and my father and I and the boy from the ranch, they had a boat with a motor. We hauled that up to the little water gauging station below Swan Falls on the Canyon County side. Put the boat in there and went, over and I'm not sure if that's the first time that we got there, because we went another time. I can't just remember how we got across the river that time. Then the second time was after Thanksgiving and it was just about as cold a day as I ever experienced. Wind was blowing. We finally found that these rocks were there and what their location was and after that, when I was working on them, I went by Murphy and out through the potato fields and came to the top of the butte to the south and then walked down and up each day to do my recording. The more I was there, the more fascinating it was to sit down there and imagine the Indians--why they did it, how they must have enjoyed it. Probably, did it in the winter when the sun came into the southeast and went down to the southwest. Caught this point the first thing in the morning, the last thing at night. That was my supposition, I'd know whether it was right or not. ]FMK: What was your reason for going down and doing that? ITT: Somebody should record them! They just needed to be recorded. I had talked -to 'the man over at Pocatello at Idaho State [tries to think of name], the archaeologist. I 25 I s Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) i talked to Jerry Swinney at the Idaho Historical and they encouraged me to do something. Earl Swanson is who I was trying to think of. So I also talked to - -I call him a 42nd cousin who is an artist in San Francisco. He said, "Oh, go down there with rice paper, press that on there and have it commercial printed up. You'll have yardage, you'll have all kinds - -" I still have the rice paper upstairs. I tried it but it all fell apart. I wet it to press it in the depressions and a lot of the depressions are not deep enough to get an impression on the paper anyway. So that was a hair - brained. After I got started, there was no place to stop. I was too interested in it. I'd go down, I think I went down in April and maybe in May and in October, for maybe three days - -maybe it was five days one time, maybe just three days - -until I thought I had finished. I traced them on plastic, polyethylene plastic sheets and did it with marking pencils. I think I may have ruined my eyes. I wore a hat but the sun all reflected right back in your face anyway. That was a satisfaction to get them done and I was thrilled with it. I guess the Historical Society came up with the money and Boise State, Max Pavesic, engineered the printing of the report. The woman who did some of the drawings for the publication was the one who went to Easter Island and was recording Easter Island petroglyphs. I went over with one of her teams and worked for three weeks over M Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) i there. So it led to interesting things. I met Jack Peterson - -I was helping at the senior citizens's breakfast the other morning - -and he came up and he said that I had introduced him to Wees Bar and he had enjoyed it so much and he loved. to go down there. I was in some kind of a tour, trip that was taken, and I guess he was on that jaunt. I don't remember it. LMK: What was the time period that you were doing the recordings? NT: In the 160s. Part of the time I was going down from here. Part of the time I was doing it when I lived south of Caldwell there, when my mother was in Caldwell. So it would have been, I guess most of it was in the 160s. LMK: What was Easter Island like? ITT: Well, it's a different place and the petroglyphs there- - This is her book.1 She did her Ph. D. on the Orongo - -the little book there - -on that particular part of it. That is where the "birdman" headquarters was and there those fantastic birdman figures are everywhere. They had little stone houses; there doorways are about so [gestures] and you crawl in. There are paintings and things on the walls in there. All over the island there are petroglyphs, just occasionally. Being on a volcanic island, there are lava slabs and lava that you fall over and enormous petroglyph patterns out there. Even on the moai, the statues, there 1The Rock Art of Easter Island by Georgia Lee. 27 k y Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) are some petroglyphs on them. She's been on this for five, six years, maybe longer, with crews of people recording and they just hope they've got most of them. Not sure. LMK: When you were doing the Wees Bar ones, what kind of use was going on in that area of the land? NT: There were occasional cows coming through; they just wandered through. I think I saw a motorcycle or two, or a motorcycle once or twice, up around the hills. There was a man who apparently went up to the dam every day with his dog and his little kicker boat and went back down every afternoon. There wasn't any boat traffic as such at that time. The road was open on the other side of the river. I don't know if they could get up the hill on the west end, but they could get down it. An oil tanker, or big tank truck, hung up on a rock. You know, one of those sharp corners about where that little water gauge station is one time. You'd see several cars going back and forth over there. I don't anybody, maybe once, somebody was down there, had driven in on the road. But I think by that time, they had put a big bank, barrier, at the end of the ranch about a mile up the river from the Wees Bar. Only motorcycles could get in. LMK: Was that ranch still habited at that time? NT: No, not that I know of. I didn't see anybody there. LMK: Was there any other evidence of human habitation in that 28 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) area? ITT: Only up on the flat where the new farms were put in. LMK: I remember being once down there a couple years ago and there's the remains of a rock building. ITT: Oh, yes. I didn't know anything about that until the archaeology trip that went over there two or three years ago. Did you go on that? They had a poster of the history. I can't just remember it clearly, but it was -- I don't think it was connected with the mining; I think it was something connected with ranching. I think it was a helpers, some of the work people's housing in there. I took some pictures of that. If I can find them, maybe I can read what it said. T,MK: Well, coming back up here to McCall, you've been up here for a number of years now. :How would you describe the changes in the community from when you first came up to more recent years? ITT: Well, it's a whole different community people -wise. I don't know that the thrust is so different commercially, economically -wise but it's been being taken over by different kinds of people and the neighborliness that you feel, that I feel, comes through from the people who, "Oh, where are you from in California." "I'm from here in California." So then we begin comparing notes on California. Seldom see anybody whose name I know. I see 25, Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) them maybe everyday or whenever I go to the store but I don't know who they are or anything about them. That's probably my fault. I went to the Senior Citizen's for dinner last night, sat beside a woman who dates back to the early days, she said, "I don't see anybody I know." So we were comparing and saying that we think these strangers and find out they've been here six or eight or ten years. Then I remember how - -until I'm about the only leaf on the tree- - that I thought I was a newcomer. So I guess that we are the last ones hanging on so we think these are all newcomers and they don't even belong here. [laughs] And I guess they thought I didn't belong here either, so it's just people probably. LMK: I know that you have a real strong interest in the environment, natural history. How did that interest develop? NT: Well, it's developed in a lot of different ways, I guess. As it has grown, it seems to have become a sort of a spiritual philosophy and in the first place, it wasn't that. At least I didn't label it that. Maybe I haven't labeled it that until just recently anyway. The outdoors, the natural things, seem to me so powerful. Of course, I'm a devoted Idahoan. My mother told a story that when they took me back to Illinois to visit grandparents that I at two years old proudly said I was from "Itaho" [sic] and it sort of hung 30 'Tobias, Nel.le (February 5, 1993) with me all these years. I don't want to lose what I know about it and as it's grown and people - -I hear now people talking about "Well, fish are more important than people" and the snail, they're going to do in the snail because who cares about that? And the spotted owl. Those are the things that are telling us that we aren't going to survive if we don't take care of the land. It's not a matter of either/or. And as far as the economy is concerned, you can't have one without the other. The economy and the environment go together. If we are going to ruin our environment, what will life be, you know, worth living? We'll be living back in the ghettos with not much air and not much water and not much food and not much anything. I think the fast buck is what is pushing people to refuse to see that their future is in the balance. And that we and the little critters and the big critters and the plants - -to me the plants are the basic. You have :your geology and then you have your plants and the rest of us all depend on that. And that we're all intertwined and if we don't mend our ways, we're all going to go clown together. LIKK: Based on that interest, what types of things have you become involved in to pursue that? NT: Well, locally, of course, it's the forest. But it isn't just the trees; it's the ground and the plants, the little stuff that holds the ground together. When you gash the 31 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) s ground - -it has a very thin cover. You go out there to cutting, there's only about this much cover on the thing. [gestures] When you cut it, it starts to bleed and there it goes. It hemorrhages. The fish people tell you the story after that and it isn't just the fish. What's going to grow there again? We're in a pretty dry climate when it comes down to things. Only in these little gullies that are protected, are things going to regenerate. When you destroy the gullies, everything is gone and out on the bare hillsides where the big old yellow pine grow that the loggers want, probably in this country it's just almost impossible to regenerate those little trees on the dry, sandy, gritty hillsides. There's a way - -I don't think that wilderness is the answer to everything, but it's the only answer that is provided so far to protect these things. And you certainly can't leave it up to a forest supervisor because they are just vacillating as anybody else. One comes in and he may have good intentions and the next one is a timber beast and Washington says, "Get the cut out." And he goes and gets the cut out, regardless of what happens to the land. So we do have one federal law -- there's some others that nobody pays any attention to also - -and that's the only way that we can go at this particular moment is to put those things where they will not be destroyed without knowing what's out there. That's the thing that bothers me. 32 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) s I took my friend Pat Packard, a botanist, up to one of my favorite playgrounds and ,there are plants up there. There are flowers up there but I didn't take her up for that purpose. She wasn't there more than half an hour and she found this plant that nobody knew was here. It's maybe a [ ?] from the Pacific but not here. Unless you get out there and cover the ground, people don't know what's there and we're destroying it before we even know it. Take this Taxol business and the Yew trees. I imagine the loggers have cut those things down and thrown them over their shoulder and gotten them out of their way. And I know I think it's just as destructive -- probably more so - -but they're finding how very crucial they are in the treatment of cancer. Supposedly, I don't know. I'm afraid we're going to cut them all before we find out that something else is better. But we're going into projects that are so unknown, "We'll see what happens. Let's do this and see what happens." We can't heal that fast; nature doesn't heal that fast. Technology is going too fast for nature to overcome what it does to it. LMK: Well, considering that the timber industry has been a part of the economic development of this area here, what happens if 'that's eliminated? NT: Well, it. probably will be eliminated without environmentalists' help because they are running out of 33 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) timber. There is a law on the books that they harvest timber on a "sustained yield" basis. If they had been doing that, they wouldn't have to go out and go into wilderness for that purpose. You just get up in the air and look at the white spots on the ground now, in the timber base, and it's just a bunch of chopped -up bare spaces. And the regeneration is not coming fast enough, as fast as they predicted it would. It's going to come back in so many years and in that case, we will have something to harvest. Well, it isn't doing that. The mathematics and the science behind it hasn't caught up and I think the industry, big companies, they know that. They're trying to harvest every bit they can before they do pull out. They will get every dollar they can out of it and then there'll be a conglomerate and go into something else. And the poor loggers will be out of a job, but I maintain loggers are not stupid. In so many businesses, we've - -over the years - -felt that when you were advanced, you moved, you did, you know, you were going a step up and'you moved here and you moved there. Wasn't that wonderful. I can understand them not wanting to leave the area but there are other things to do. There are services to do. Probably don't pay as much but I think we're all going to have to cut back. We are living too high on the hog, much too high on the hog. Go down to South America and Mexico and see how those people live two 34 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) -- or three families in a house on top of each other. END OF TAPE 2 SIDE 1 SIDE 2 NT: Well, everybody seems to admit that we have problems, but there are very few of them that I do not see stemming from overpopulation. They almost all seem to go back to that and until we stop having these families that reach out and are glorified as being so wonderful, we're just going to compound our problems. But nobody seems to be addressing that. Very few experts, politicians, even mention overpopulation as being something we need to curb. LMK: Well., the election that we just came through several months ago - -or the last administration we had - -the family has become sacred as a political theme. NT: Oh, yes. Well, I think the family that's here certainly needs a lot more attention than it has gotten, you know, the kids that are here. We need to be thinking about them and providing basic opportunities, but let's not have any more. I guess we'll allow a couple to a family. [laughs] I think of some of my friends of my generation and they had two parents and they were the farthest back that I knew anything about. This one family had five children. One of them didn't have any and I'm not sure about the other. But three of them did very well with having children. That's the third generation. Then those: children have children and 35 A 1 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) when you get that couple and their family together, you have a mob. Just in my lifetime and, of course, I'm still hanging on and I'm adding to the overpopulation too. But that's a statistic that they're talking about; people are living longer. There seems to have been some philosophy in the early days that you lost so many children so you had to have a lot in order to come out with any. Well, we're solving a lot of that and having people last too long anyway, so we certainly don't need to be reproducing at the rate we're reproducing. That's not just an old maid's opinion. [laughs] LMK: I also wanted to ask you about some of the groups here in McCall that you've been involved with, like the Ponderosa Natural History Association. What is that all about? NT: Well, I guess I got involved with it because I have always been interested in the park, that peninsula and then we laid out a nature trial which I could contribute to. So we did that the first year and developed the plants that we labeled and put little pins around so people along the nature trail could read what they were and know that this was it. But those have been treated with something that killed some of the plants. So that kind of shot that down, at least, some of my enthusiasm. We went back one more year to freshen up the plants that were there and take the trash off and whatnot. But that's been the end of what I've done that way 'Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) and I haven't done much any other way. The main thing that the group does is foster, I guess you would say, the selling of books, postcards and such to raise money for the park to spend in its development of whatever program it's trying to promote. Exhibits in the visitors center, a seat up on the promontory somewhere or something like that. Tapes to explain to people what they are seeing and that sort of thing. 'There's nothing much to do, again, for me. You go to the meetings and sort of authorize that they go ahead and buy books and how much money we have to raise for this or how much we turn over or how much we've taken in. It's a treasurer's function, not too much planning except okaying what the park superintendent decides what we'd like to do. If there were enough people to go out and do some little projects there, I think that it would maybe inspire. But people are all busy. LMK: How long has that park been there now? NT: Oh, dear„ I should know that:; I don't know. The park, must have been in the 150s that it: became a park. [talks to bird in window] LMK: How about: your work with the museum ?2 NIT: Oh, that "s been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed that. I have found since I moved out of McCall that there has been - -and I think it still persists--there is McCall and then there is 2Long Valley Preservation. Society at Roseberry. 37 Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) * Valley County. McCall is unto itself and I didn't know i anything about what went on out in the valley until I moved out here. One of the things that I keep thinking that the museum may some influence on is bringing a conscious feeling of relationship to the whole area. I know Ginny was saying, "Well, but those feelings are old feelings and these people who are coming in now don't have that feeling." And maybe they don't. So maybe it will just come of its own accord. I don't know. The new museum that is being developed in McCall- -Gerry Wisdom is on the board of the Arts and Humanities Council and so she talks to these people and she feels that it's going to be a networking sort of thing and we'll help each other. I think that the people who are doing it probably will feel that way but I wonder about the support that will come to furnish and refurbish the SITPA3 building and develop that whole thing. Since it's in McCall, they'll rush to do it and maybe there will be not the really Y Y cohesion that we would like to see for that. It's supposed to be concentrating more or less on the mining and lumbering, I think, and ours has developed into-- artifact- wise, I guess - -more of a farming, ranching exhibit. Then we're putting up the Finnish part, of course. Since it's become the Valley County Museum, trying to get input, if not 3Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association 38 L 'Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) artifacts, from the out of the way places to try to bring the whole picture together. That's what I would like to spend my time on for the most part. Since Bev now has an accessionist in the wings, i't's going to be a help that way. So I've been taking pictures of old buildings and some of the newer buildings and a friend of mine who was visiting said, "I never saw a place where people moved houses around, moved buildings so much.''' Well, that's a whole great, big subject because they are moved all over the place, maybe here more than lots of placer. [tape turned off and on] LMK: Would you tell me a little something about this house here that you're living in now? NT: Well, it was built in 1966 and it's on a pretty small piece of land. The old road went right through here. LMK: Through the house as we're sitting? NT: Right through the house, before the Farm -to- Market Road was built. Then there is a road along the line back here, which is on my property, that dives access to the land that is adjoining on the north and also on the west. It apparently was a public road at one time although I don't know what it did about: the water down in the foot of the hill. It was built the. summer of 166. In the fall of 165, the well was drilled. I acquired the land because a friend of mine who was an Idaho, a Nampa girl, was living in Washington, D.C. and she was out on vacation and she thought, well, maybe she 39 s Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) would like to have a home here sometime. Well, I could look for some property for her. I began looking around and I found this and a few other sites. We also - -my mother was here - -we also drove down toward Cascade and went up to the east, to the valley there beyond where the rock crusher is, and asked in there, "Is there any land for sale ?" "Well, no, no, but we're selling sky -high places." You could usually buy it for $25.00 an acre, now it had gone up to $250.00 an acre around there. But they didn't know of any that was for sale now. When I showed my mother this and I said, "I don't know whether Mary Beth would like it or not." She said, "Well, if I were you, I'd buy it now and if she wants it, she can have it." Because by that time, living down on the river, there were flashing lights across the river, Shore Lodge was across the river, traffic was coming up and down, people were building right across the street from me, and that was getting too crowded. So I bought it and Mary Beth eventually didn't want it. She did buy 100 feet to the north of this then and then she gave it to me eventually. So that's how come we're here. LMK: If I remember correctly - -and you can tell me - -Bev [Ingraham] told me that you designed this home? NT: Oh, yes. The house I built south of Caldwell was on this order; it wasn't quite as big as this one. I found that it was kind of hard to sell; it was too small. Then the little 40 r Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) house that I built down just on what I called the dam property was also what my neighbor down in Caldwell called a chicken house -type. So this is the chicken house -type. So I had two other houses before this that I practiced on. LMK: What were the features that you were trying to incorporate when you built this? NT: Well, views for one thing. LMK: And it has a spectacular view. NT: Always views. The reason that it's up so high, I had a camper at: that time and I ha.d'. to have a high basement. So it's high off the ground, however it needed to be about that high or 3: would have had a drainage problem back here because that ground slopes this way. But it wouldn't have r been much lower than this anyway. I still thought I was going to do some more pottery then, so had one room that I called my pottery room and I didn't do very much there. Put a greenhouse on the back so I could grow my vegetables, having lived down in the valley where I got sprayed by my neighbors, on my vegetables and on me. So I hoped to have something that was edible, that I could start in the greenhouse. LMK: Can you think of anything I've forgotten to ask you about? NT: I think you've covered a lot of territory. LMK: Okay. END OF INTERVIEW 43. Tobias, Nelle (February 5, 1993) Transcribed by Linda Morton - Keithley, July 21, 1993; Audited by Ruth L. Hall, September 15, 1993; corrections entered by Linda Morton - Keithley, September 15, 1993. i'V f �ti s t Staking a Claim in Nature's Trust Mary Christina Wood' McCall Arts and Humanities Council January 10, 2007 McCall, Idaho Dedicated to the memory of Nell Tobias, a McCall citizen and champion of Nature who epitomized the intergenerational spirit of humanity. I. It is a real pleasure and honor to give this talk and I thank the McCall Arts and Humanities Council for sponsoring it, and the church for welcoming us here tonight. As many of you know, I live here part time with my family and spent last year on sabbatical here working on a book called Nature's Trust. And while I didn't study McCall issues in particular, my experience here has helped shape my thinking about how different people relate to the environment, and how environmental law determines their future. The abundant Nature surrounding us here has been a source of unparalleled inspiration in my work. So I feel I am indebted to this community, and I am privileged to share with you some of the thinking that is going into my book. One of the people I came to know when I lived in McCall during my first sabbatical here eight years ago was Nell Tobias, who many of you knew. Nell was a beloved member of this community, a friend to many of you, a friend of this church, and, perhaps above all, a real friend to Nature. She played a major role in securing the vast ' Mary Christina Wood, Philip H. Knight Professor of Law and Morse Center for Law and Politics Resident Scholar 2006 -07. This address will be posted at hqp : / /www.law.uoregon.eda/faculty /mwood/ and on file at the Nell Tobias Research Center and the Nell Tobias Room at the McCall Public Library. f Frank Church Wilderness that anchors this community. My visits with Nell over the years were in her home. Inevitably the conversation began with talking about my work in environmental law, but it always ended with the future of McCall. Even in the very last chapter of her life, Nell's paramount concern was with the future of McCall. She saw the for -sale signs on huge ranches, and she was worried. She wanted the coming generations to experience and cherish what she had enjoyed in her life. Nell Tobias epitomized the inter - generational spirit of humanity, which may be the most powerful and hopeful aspect of our lives, and so I want to dedicate my remarks this evening to her memory, and present this book to the Church in her name. It's a rather remarkable book called The Creation, by E.O. Wilson, Harvard professor and no doubt the most prominent conservation biologist in the world. The subtitle of this book is "An Appeal to Save Life on Earth" — that says it all. Much of my talk is about how we can re- conceive of our government's role towards Nature. When people think about environmental concerns these days, they often focus on how they can reduce their own footprint on Nature. That, of course, is very important. We can all do so much, like recycle, use less energy, drive less, stop using Styrofoam and wasteful packaging, and so forth. But at the same time we citizens are making great efforts to reduce our individual footprints, our government is doling out permits on a daily basis to pollute and deplete our resources. So if citizens want to shape their own future, they must not only reduce their own footprint, but they must expand their political imprint to steer their government in a different direction. So tonight I will explain why government is not working to protect our resources, and then suggest how we can all reframe our government's role to engage 2 these agencies in protecting Nature. When I use the term "reframe" I don't mean throw out our environmental statutes. I mean, rather, taking control of the language we use to hold government accountable. For too long, special interests have controlled the framework and the language, leading to devastating natural loss that affects each and every one of us. Before delving into this broad discussion of environmental law, I wanted to make three observations about this community. First, I think there is a unique intelligence here among the core, rooted, local citizens. By intelligence I don't mean I.Q. I mean more the CIA type of intelligence. I mean how you decide what to do every day, where you spend your energy, where you spend your money, how you plan your future — essentially your mental paradigm. Your intelligence, I think, is shaped by your close proximity to the backcountry. Imagine you are on a three -week backpack trip traversing the Frank Church wilderness. You wake up out there one morning 50 miles away from any civilization. What do you focus on? Where do you spend your energy? I will bet that anyone of you who has engaged in backcountry experience would say that your daily energy focuses on the four elements of survival: food, water, shelter, and health. There's nothing more basic than that. And if you fail at one for too long, you will die. Every backcountry person respects Nature's Law. When your mental approach to life focuses on these four things, I would say you have environmental intelligence. What I have observed about a core group of McCall people — and that certainly does not include everyone — is that there is a shared environmental intelligence. Many or most of you really understand how dependant human survival is on Nature. Oddly enough, you share this outlook with the homeless people of all major urban areas. You share it with many Indians across the United States. You share it with ranchers and farmers. You share it with the survivors of Hurricane Katrina — who are some of the first victims of present day global warming. Let me move to the other extreme to provide a contrast. There are many people who seem to have nearly no environmental intelligence, and again, I don't mean I.Q. Many of these people have never faced survival situations, and they are so disconnected from Nature that they really don't seem to realize that our future is dependant on natural infrastructure. Many have been insulated by our economic system and their own wealth. They have no clue where drinking water comes from. They think Pepsi Cola makes water, because they only know water from a plastic bottle. These people also exist in McCall. The classic example is the family that hauls a freightliner RV into Ponderosa Park -- complete with satellite dishes and 8 ATVs hanging off the end. If you talk to these people and get to know them, you see that the vectors of their minds are much different from the people I just described with environmental intelligence. Their four vectors are: luxury, convenience, leisure, and status. Most of their time, money, and planning energy goes into sustaining those four things. In short, survival is just not part of their outlook. They are not bad people. But they have little sense of the importance of natural infrastructure because the market economy has always provided for their four needs. Now obviously, most of us in the room here don't fall at either extreme end of the spectrum. We are all to some extent a composite of both types. But overall, I think it's safe to say that the core community still present in McCall has a sense that Nature is important for survival —that it's not just a playground. And that sense will .motivate 4 these local people to engage the political system to secure their environmental future, even on problems so encompassing as global warming. The second observation I've made is that this community is at an environmental turning point. A land rush grips Long Valley. If you just open the newspaper you are hit with an onslaught of proposals and issues. The endless subdivision projects, the 35 foot height limit, the asphalt plant permits, the Payette lake motor boat use, the roadless policy, the mining waste issues, the sewer treatment plant expansion, the salmon decline, and on. A high growth scenario projects McCall's population at 42,000 peak residents by 2033 — that's just 26 years from now, and that number doesn't include the tourist population. You need only look at other towns in the West with a similar population explosion to see that the future brings on air pollution, water pollution, subdivision sprawl, traffic, toxic waste disposal, water depletion, species extinctions, and a host of other problems. For McCall citizens, you will essentially be moving to a different city — one that looks very much like Bend, Oregon -- and you'll make this move without ever leaving your home. That is, unless you steer government towards securing a more abundant future on your behalf. Decisions made by governmental officials today will determine the quality of life here for you and your children into the far distant future. So this community is at an environmental turning point — unlike any that it has faced before. The third characteristic of this community, however, is that it seems to be taking the reins to steer its own future. When the construction of Tamarack unleashed the land rush a couple of years ago, these local people were caught unorganized. That is so typical of a community blindsided by a barrage of development proposals. But that is 5 changing. A critical mass of citizens seems to be organizing to secure their own environmental future here. So you have, on one hand, a land rush — the same kind of rush that is gripping the entire West -- and on the other hand citizens here with environmental intelligence and motivation to determine their own future. But how do citizens accomplish this? Well, they have to engage their government because agencies hold the power to permit immense destruction of natural resources. These agencies exist at three different levels of government — local, state, and federal. They include the City Council, the County Commissioners, the Planning and Zoning Commission, the State Dept. of Environmental Quality, the State Lands Department, the Forest Service, and the list goes on an on. It's not my intention to talk about local issues tonight, but rather to give people here a really broad perspective on environmental law, because environmental law provides the interface between all of these agencies and the public. Citizens often feel bullied by their own governmental agencies. They often feel that their government is not working for them, the public. They find that they are spending all of their free time writing letters, showing up at hearings, testifying, calling agencies, reviewing documents — all because their government is not protecting the resources so basic to their human welfare. Many citizens have unwillingly assumed a second career just to maintain their community's natural infrastructure. So tonight I will talk about these general dynamics of environmental law with the hope that you may be able to take some broad points and apply them locally. Let me begin by taking stock of where our civilization as a whole sits on the trajectory of environmental loss. As E.O. Wilson documents, we are rapidly loosing life G on this planet. In this country alone, the Council of Environmental Quality estimates that 9,000 species are imperiled. Toxic fish advisories are in effect for 25% of all rivers, 35% of all lakes, 71% of all estuaries in this country, and 100% of the Great Lakes. That means you can still fish, but you can't eat the fish you catch because they are contaminated with toxins. And according to your Environmental Protection Agency, 95% of all Americans now have an increased risk of lung cancer, just from breathing outdoor air. On the global level, the World Conservation Union reports that Earth's natural ecosystems have declined by 33% over the last 30 years. There are now 200 "dead zones" in the world's oceans, covering tens of thousands of square miles .2 Nearly one- third of the sea fisheries have collapsed, and that rate of decline means complete loss of wild seafood just four decades from now.3 If this collapse isn't arrested, a child born here today will not see crabs, canned tuna, shrimp, or any seafood at Paul's Market when he or she is 40 years old. Global warming is a threat that eclipses all others. Carbon dioxide, the main contributor to global warming, has reached a level in the atmosphere higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. The Polar ice cap and almost all of the glaciers of the 2 See John Heilprin, U.N.: Number of Ocean "Dead Zones" Rise, ASSOCIATED PRESS (Oct. 19, 2006). The dead zones are as far -flung as Finland, Ghana, China, Britain, Greece, Peru, Portugal, Uruguay, the western Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest in the United States. Id. 3 This was the finding of an international team of researchers, which published its results in the journal SCIENCE. See Richard Black, "Only 50 Years Left "for Sea Fish, BBC NEWS ON -LINE (Nov. 2, 2006), available athttp://news.bbc.co.ukl2lhilsciencelnaturel6l08414.stm. The team found that the fish decline was closely tied to broad loss of marine biodiversity and concluded that "[t]here will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue ...... Id. (paraphrasing study). Lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, stated: "At this point 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed -- that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating.... If the long -term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime -- by 2048." Report: Seafood Faces Collapse by 2048, CNN.COM (Nov. 2, 2006). Researcher Steve Palumbi, Stanford University, commented: "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood." BBC ON -LINE, supra. 7 world are melting rapidly. Glacier National Park, just 417 miles to the Northeast of us, is projected to have no more glaciers in 15 -20 years.4 Greenland is melting.s I've left a short article in the back of the church that I urge you to read. It is by Jim Hansen, leading climate scientist for NASA, and he clearly explains the consequence of melting the great ice masses of the world. If society does not cap and reverse its greenhouse gas emissions, there will be an 80 -foot sea level rise that will inundate private property and major cities along United States coastlines. Temperature increases worldwide are projected to send more than a third of the planet's species to extinction within the next 44 years. If you are one of those people in this room with environmental intelligence you can't fail to see the consequence of mass extinction to the web of human survival. Two months ago, British Prime Minister Tony Blair went on the media around the world to unveil a landmark report on global warming. He said: "This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime. Unless we act now ... these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible. There is nothing more serious, more urgent, more demanding of leadership... in the global community. "6 4. Id. at 47. s Id. at 195. 6 Simon Hooper, Report Sets Climate Change Challenge, CCC.COM (Oct. 30, 2006). The British report, THE STERN REVIEW ON THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming January, 2007), is authored by Sir Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist at the World Bank. The pre- publication version is available at http:// www .hmtreasury.gov.uk/independent— reviews / stem_ review_economics _ climate_change /stem revie w_report.cfm. See also Elsa McLaren, Global Warming Report Calls for Immediate Action, TIMES ONLINE (Oct. 30, 2006); Sarah Clarke, The World Today, ABC ON —LINE (Oct. 30, 2006), available at http: / /www.abc. net. au/ woridtoday /content/2006 /sl776868.htm. The STERN REVIEW concludes: The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change is a serious global threat, and it demands an urgent global response.... Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world — access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms. . .. [I]f we do not act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of the global GDP [Gross Domestic Product] each year, now and forever. If a wider range of 8 And yet it is as if the majority of Americans, including perhaps most people in McCall, Idaho, are treating these circumstances as if they are merely a science fiction movie. We see luxury second homes popping up everywhere, motorized recreation everywhere, and massive waste, as if we had no global warming. The American population is not doing what it needs to do. Ross Gelbspan, author of Boiling Point, a leading book on global warming, says: "It is an excruciating experience to watch the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of persistent and pathological denial." Il. Obviously, government has a role in this environmental collapse. The most fundamental duty of government is to provide for the health and welfare of the citizens. That duty has encompassed, since ancient times, the protection of natural resources. Government's most important job is to keep us in compliance with Nature's Law. III. risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more. . .. If no action is taken to reduce emissions, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could reach double its pre - industrial level as early as 2035, virtually committing us to a global average temperature rise of over 2 degrees C. In the longer term, there would be more than a 50% chance that the temperature rise would exceed 5 degrees C. This rise would be very dangerous indeed; it is equivalent to the change in average temperatures from the last ice age to today.... All countries will be affected. STERN REVIEW, supra, Summary of Conclusions, at vi. -vii. The STERN REVIEW projects a narrow window of time — 10 to 15 years — in which to curb greenhouse gasses. See Clarke, supra. Despite international scientific consensus on climate change, the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator James Inhofe, R- Oklahoma, gave a speech on the floor of the Senate on September 28, 2006 urging his colleagues to "start speaking out to debunk hysteria surrounding global warming [so as not to] derail the economic health of our nation." See http:speech:Hepw. senate .gov /speechitem.cfrn ?party--rep& id= 264027. As a result of the 2006 elections, Senator Barbara Boxer (D -Cal.) became chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Senator Boxer and the Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (Senator Bingaman), as well as the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (Senator Lieberman) have called upon President Bush "to pass an effective system of mandatory limits on greenhouse gases," stating, "Scientists are now warning that we may be reaching a `tipping point' beyond which it will be extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change." Press Release from Senator Barbara Boxer, Boxer, Bingaman and Lieberman Ask President to Commit to Working with Congress to Fight Global Warming (Nov. 15, 2006), available at http: //boxer.senate.gov / news /releases /record.cfin ?id= 265906. E So, the next question is, where is government these days? Well, your government is hard at work. In the 1970s, Congress passed a set of statutes that boldly addressed environmental damage. As a result, we have more environmental law than any other country in the world. And, we have more environmental officials than any other nation on Earth. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money funds their work. So why, then, is our environment spiraling towards disaster? The problem is not that these officials lack authority. These statutes give tremendous authority to federal, state, and local officials to control just about any environmental harm you can think of The problem is that, along with this authority, these laws also give discretion to the agencies to permit the same damage that the statutes were designed to prevent. Of course, the permit systems were never intended to subvert the goals of environmental statutes. They were never intended to be the end -all of regulation. But most agencies today spend nearly all of their resources to permit, rather than prohibit, environmental destruction. Whether you are talking about the EPA, or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or a state water agency or a city planning agency, or just about any other, these agencies simply are not saying no. Two weeks ago I asked the head of DEQ's air quality division how many air permits are denied in the state of Idaho. He answered less than I% -- and that includes permits for toxic air pollution. And he could not even say that those 1% were flatly denied; they were sent back for more analysis. The overarching mindset of nearly all agencies is that permits are there to be granted. Let's look at the Clean Water Act as an example. When Congress passed the act in 1972, it said clearly: "It is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the 10 navigable waters be eliminated by 1985. "7 Congress allows five -year permits so that businesses could use the transition time to put in new technology to eliminate their discharges. But EPA and the state agencies grabbed hold of this permit system and started issuing permit after permit, and soon it became the agencies' way of doing business. We are now 22 years beyond the date Congress set for no more pollution in our rivers, and yet pollution is now worse than ever. Toxic chemicals never heard of back in the 1970s discharge to the waters, bioaccumulate in the entire food chain, and end up in our bodies.8 We have so much pollution that EPA's 2000 Strategic Plan warns: "[P]olluted water and degraded aquatic ecosystems threaten the viability of all living things . . . . " 9 Environmental law was not supposed to work this way. The entire premise of administrative law is that agencies are neutral and will use their discretion to serve the public interest. In reality, though, the discretion built into the law works as a political club. Public servants in these agencies are stormed by developers, vetoed by their supervisors, taken to the mat by Senators and often risk losing their jobs if they say no. Drawing the line against environmental harm is often career suicide. Consider how agencies like EPA and your state DEQ deal with human exposure to toxins. These agencies knowingly put the public at risk when they refuse to draw the line against pollution. In decision after decision, they allow toxic releases that carry a certain probability of causing cancer cases to your families. The toxins that EPA and the 7 Clean Water Act, § 101, 33 U.S.C. § 1251(a)(1) (2000) 8 David Ewing Duncan, The Pollution Within, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC (October, 2006). In fact, EPA reviews, under another law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), about 1,700 new compounds every year and allows 90 percent of them to enter the marketplace without restriction. There are 82,000 chemicals used in the United States, and only a quarter of them have ever been tested for toxicity. Id. 9 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Strategic Plan, EPA doc. 190 -R -00 -002 (Sept., 2000), available at http: / /www.epa.gov/ cfo /plan/2000strategicplan.pdf. 11 state agencies permit are causing soaring cancer rates in our communities. Among children aged 1 -14, cancer now causes more death in the United States than any other disease and, overall, cancer in children has climbed 10% in the past decade alone. Yet these agencies continue to allow more and more toxic pollution into our airs and waters, telling us it's o.k. to cause cancer to a modeled number of people. This sniper -style regulation is never questioned. You see, this line- drawing framework that the agencies have constructed offers no value system to serve as a counterweight to political pressure. While Congress wanted us to have clean air, pure water, and recovered species — aspirations the public could identify with -- the agencies have substituted an entirely new focus: how much pollution and resource scarcity can we impose on society. It is rather like starting with a just- say -no approach to drugs and then asking how many drugs we should give the addict. The addict will never want us to draw the line. That is precisely why we are reaching an endpoint with so many resources. Agencies keep doling out those permits until they have the sense that the next one would break the camel's back. But you can see the problem with that approach: you are left with a very diminished camel. So it is with all of Nature. That is why we have deforestation, species extinctions, rivers running dry, dead zones in our oceans, an atmosphere dangerously heating up — and why the most prominent conservation biologist in the world has written a book subtitled: "An Appeal to Save Life on Earth." Unfortunately, there are few citizens at the gates of environmental law clamoring for a new set of values. Quite the contrary. The population today is passive. Part of the reason for that is people have lost their environmental intelligence. Attention to survival 12 is not a priority in their lives. And, for those who think about survival, many take false comfort because we do have the most developed set of environmental laws in the world — they think the laws must be working. Finally, for those who know it's not working, the complexity of environmental law has largely muted their voices. The agencies have created a monster from their statutory authorities. Every regulation is so weighted down by acronyms and technojargan that we hardly know what they mean. We have ARARs and TMDLs and TSDs and SIPS and Biops and RPAs and PRPs and EFHs and ESUs and hundreds, yes hundreds, of other acronyms. We even have antonym acronyms. And if the public wants to advocate for pollution control, it should know the obvious differences between Best Control Technology, Best Available Technology, Best Available Control Technology, Best Available Control Measures, Best Available Demonstrated Technology, Best Available Retrofit Technology, Best Demonstrated Achievable Technology, Best Demonstrated Control Technology, and Best Demonstrated Technology, among others.10 Great. We can't expect people to fight pollution using this language. The agencies have so complexifiedl I their permit systems that the average American is left at the gates. Agencies have learned that complexity operates as a wonderful shield from public scrutiny. IV. 10 See U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, TERMS OF ENVIRONMENT: GLOSSARY, ABBREVIATIONS, AND ACRONYMS, available at http: / /www.epa.gov /glossary /aaad.html. 11 Yes, that's our new word. 13 Without an engaged public voicing core environmental values on a regular basis, a very different set of values steers the agencies' discretion. The call of private property rights is heard in the halls of almost every agency every day. Asphalt plant operators and chemical manufacturers, land developers and timber companies, auto manufacturers and computer chip makers, industrialists and individuals of all sorts scream out to these agencies not to draw that regulatory line on their activity — because doing so would hurt their economic goals. This private property rights movement has cowered officials at every level of government. And when this bureaucratic oppression continues long enough, it changes the mindset of the agencies. The people working within them get mind -numb and develop tunnel vision. The bureaucratic processes become the end -all of their work, and they fail to see the big picture. Then they start to doubt that they even have authority under the law to say no to a permit, and they create a new reality. And the deeper they get into this morass of environmental law, the more they shed accountability to the public and to the core value of protecting resources. It is at that point that you hear people in the agencies saying, "It's not my job," or, "There's nothing I can do." And then it becomes, "I don't have the authority," even if the authority is plain and clear in the statute. And then it becomes, "I have the authority, but politically I can't do it." And when you start to hear this last statement — and we've heard it a lot lately -- you know the agency has collapsed from the inside out. Agencies are supposed to be neutral creatures that carry out statutes. So when they start prioritizing their political standing over long -term public welfare, that is a clear signal that the legal mechanism has shut down, and government is not serving its purpose. That is a dangerous situation for all of us. 14 These dynamics drive the most catastrophic danger we face -- global warming. Just two years ago, 48 Nobel -Prize winning scientists warned: "By ignoring scientific consensus on ... global climate change, [our government is] threatening the Earth's future." 12 I'm going to quote Jim Hansen, the top NASA climate scientist I told you about, to give you an idea of the time frame we are dealing with to solve this problem. He says: [I]t will soon be impossible to avoid ... far - ranging... consequences. We have reached a critical tipping point.... [W]e have at most ten years — not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. 13 The United States is responsible for 30% of the greenhouse gasses causing global warming. Yet EPA has still not regulated greenhouse gas emissions. The Clean Air Act clearly gives EPA authority for controlling carbon dioxide. But top government lawyers are claiming that EPA -- the only federal agency charged by Congress to control air pollution -- can sit back and do nothing about this monumental problem that threatens us all. 14 In fact, rather than using its authority to avert global warming, EPA is spending its time telling us all to get used to it. In June, 2006, EPA released this guide, the Excessive Heat Events Guidebook. 15 Its cover has a picture of a small human hand held up in vain trying to block the beating sun. The first line of the guidebook says, "Excessive heat events ... are and will continue to be a fact of life in the United States." 16 For our convenience, EPA has given this new "fact of life" an acronym — EHE (Excessive Heat 12 AL GORE, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH 269 (2006). 13 Hansen, supra note 17, at 14, 16. See also supra note 22 (STERN REVIEW warning of 10 -15 year time frame to take action until worst disaster becomes inevitable). 14 See Massachusetts v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 415 F.3d 50 (2005)(reviewing EPA's denial of petition to regulate greenhouse gasses). is U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, The Excessive Heat Events Guidebook, EPA # 430 -B -06 -005 (June 2006), available at http:// www. epa. gov/ hiri /about/pdf/EHEguide_flnal.pdf. 16 Id. at 5. 15 Event). And just a few lines later, the guidebook says, "EHE conditions can increase the incidence of mortality ... in affected populations. "17 Well, that's certainly true. In the summer of 2003, 35,000 Europeans died from a massive heat wave. 18 But EPA won't regulate. Get used to your new facts of life, Americans. Unchecked, global warming will unravel our social and economic systems through food scarcity, droughts, decreased water supplies, flooding, frequent and intense natural disasters and massive environmental dislocation. It will affect each area differently, but no area, not even McCall, can escape climate crisis if we don't act now. Twelve states have taken the EPA to court, arguing that EPA should regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.19 But these states lost in the D.C. Circuit court. The court said that EPA has the discretion not to regulate greenhouse gasses. 20 People, it is as if your house is on fire, twenty fire trucks are in the driveway with hoses drawn, and the fire chief is saying that he has discretion to not take action. And the judge agrees. V. So let's summarize all of this. You can think of environmental law, with all of its statutes and regulations, as one big picture. The private property rights movement and agencies themselves have constructed a frame for that picture. The four sides of that frame are discretion, discretion, discretion, and discretion, to allow damage to our natural resources. All of environmental law is carried out through that frame. And so our 17 Id. 18 AL GORE, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH 75 (2006). 19 Massachusetts v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 415 F.3d 50, 58 (D. C. Cir. 2005). 20 Id. at 58 (opinion by Judge Randolph, noting that EPA does not have to base its decision on solely scientific evidence, but may make "'policy judgments. "'). The case is now on appeal before the United States Supreme Court. 16 aspirational statutes are carried out through that frame to serve short-term profit interests at the expense of public welfare. It is time to frankly admit that vesting so much discretion in the agencies was an experiment in administrative law that had 35 years to yield results, and we are now running out of time to reverse the damage. The good news is that this vast bureaucracy holds the tools and funding to reverse much environmental damage, and do so quickly. But we must find ways and words to reinvigorate the citizens and reclaim environmental law. We do not need yet another set of statutes. Agencies have plenty of authority. We just have to convince them to use it. To do that, we have to find a new frame for our existing statutes. The author George Lakoff says this about frames: Frames ... shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as good or bad outcome[s]... In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out our policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Refraining is social change. Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense. VI. We need not search far. There is a proven framework of thinking that is organic to our landscape here in the Northwest. This frame is reflected in the goals of every federal environmental statute. The Supreme Court expressed it in cases rendered over a century ago. It has guided societies of the world for millennia. But, it has been all but forgotten by our agencies. 17 I refer to this frame of environmental law as Nature's Trust. Let's close the statute books and imagine the resources important for present and future generations. They are the air, the waters, the streambeds, the wildlife, the fisheries, and other elements. Nature's Trust characterizes these natural resources as being in a trust managed by government for future generations. A trust is an ancient concept of property law. It is a legal type of ownership whereby one manages property for the benefit of another. There are always three parts to any trust: there is the trustee, the beneficiary, and the corpus. I taught this concept to a high school class here a week ago, and the students really grasped it. I asked them whether they had heard of college accounts. And of course they all said yes. The trustee is the person who manages their college account. They are the beneficiaries. The money in the college account is the corpus of the trust. The money belongs to them, but they don't manage that money. I asked the students how they would feel if they had a college account worth $100,000 and their trustee mis- managed that account and spent it down, so they'd have practically nothing left when the time came for them to come to college. They didn't like that idea. That seemed to hit home with them. Our government, as the only enduring institution with control over human actions, is a trustee of our natural resources — it holds them for us. The beneficiaries of this trust are all generations of citizens -- past, present, and future. All of us in this church are beneficiaries. Our grandchildren, even those unborn, are beneficiaries. Our grandparents were beneficiaries. With every trust, whether it's a college account, a retirement account, 18 or a natural trust, there is a core duty of protection.21 This means the trustee must take action to defend the corpus against injury, and where it has been damaged, the trustee must restore the corpus of the trust. The trustee is accountable to the beneficiary, for the beneficiary has a property interest in the corpus of the trust. So, as trustee of our resources, government is accountable to us for its handling of property that belongs to the people. In our legal system, Nature's Trust principles were penned by judges long ago as the first environmental law of this nation. Beginning in 1892 with a landmark Supreme Court case called Illinois Central,22 courts across this country have said that the government holds wildlife and navigable waterways and air in trust for the people, and government must protect these resources. 23 This obligation to protect Nature's Trust lies at the very heart of government's purpose. The amount of natural wealth passed to future generations depends entirely on how well the governmental trustees defend the trust. As the world has learned since time immemorial, a government that fails to protect its natural resources sentences its people to misery — remember that hand blocking the sun? This trust doctrine reaches back, literally, to Justinian times and is present in many other countries of the world. 21 GEORGE GLEASON BOGERT, THE Law OF TRUST & TRUSTEES ch. 29, § 582 (2d ed. 1980) ( "The trustee has a duty to protect the trust property against damage or destruction. He is obligated to the beneficiary to do all acts necessary for the preservation of the trust res which would be performed by a reasonably prudent man employing his own like property for purposes similar to those of the trust. "). 22 Illinois Central Railroad v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892). 23 The Supreme Court said in Illinois Central: "[T]he trust ... requires the government ... to preserve such waters for the use of the public...." In another landmark case, Geer v. Connecticut, the Court characterized wildlife as owned by the people through a trust held by government. It said: "The power ... resulting from this common ownership is to be exercised, like all other powers of government, as a trust for the benefit of the people, and not as a prerogative for the benefit of private individuals as distinguished from the public good." Geer, 161 U.S. 519 (1896). 19 Let me give you just one example of how this trust responsibility has been applied in another country to preserve natural resources. In 1993, children in the Phillipines brought a lawsuit against their government to end logging of ancient forests. in that country. The Supreme Court of the Phillipines found that the rate of logging would result in no more rainforest by the end of the decade. This was a case of a governmental trustee allowing eradication of Nature's Trust, and the end was in sight. Not unlike the situation we face today. Here is how the children framed their claim to the Court: "This act of [government] constitutes a misappropriation ... of the natural resource property [it] holds in trust for the benefit of ... succeeding generations." Quite simply, the children were saying that their government was stealing from their future, violating their property right to the natural resources held in trust for them. The Phillipines government framed the issue by saying that the rate of logging was a "political question" within its discretion. Sound familiar? The Supreme Court adopted the trust framework. It wrote: Every generation has a responsibility to the next to preserve that rhythm and harmony [of Nature] .... * ** The right to a balanced and healthful ecology ... concerns nothing less than self - preservation and self - perpetuation . . . -- the advancement of which may even be said to predate all governments and constitutions.... [T]hey are assumed to exist from the inception of humankind. And so the Supreme Court halted further logging, noting, "The day would not be too far when all else would be lost not only for the present generation, but also for those to come — generations which stand to inherit nothing but parched earth incapable of sustaining 20 life." So there you have it — a property right to natural inheritance for the children of the world. It is important to recognize that, for thousands of years these same principles formed the controlling law on this landscape. Until 150 years ago, the native nations managed the natural trust across all of what is now the United States. Though tribes did not describe their laws in western legal terms, the governing sovereign mandate across of Native America was, and still is, a trust concept. The very core of their governmental responsibility was preserving resources for future generations. You have heard the ancient Indian proverb: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." And most of you may know that, in traditional native governance, decisions are made with the voice of the Seventh Generation at the council. Perhaps you think of these native principles as poetic reflections of a noble culture, and nothing more. No, this principle of conserving resources is at the same time both a religious principle and a principle of governance. You see, in traditional governance, there is no gap between law and religion — it is one and the same. The Nature's Trust paradigm has a moral imperative at its core -- the duty towards future generations. This is an environmental value that speaks universally to all cultures, all ages, and all classes. Whether you find the doctrine on the pages of a United States Supreme Court opinion, or on the pages of a Phillipines Supreme Court opinion, or hear it voiced at a tribal ceremony, or hear it in the words of someone like Nell Tobias, this law encompasses a spiritual value that transcends all governments and cultures of the world. 21 VII. I want to show you how different we view our natural resources when we look at them through a trust frame rather than through the frame that our agencies have created. Consider the great salmon trust of the Columbia River Basin. The corpus of this trust has existed in some form for five million years. How many of you fish or eat fish? You are the beneficiaries of this trust. Until just 150 years ago, the Columbia River tribes were the sole trustees of this trust. Even during times of starvation, the tribal leaders — the trustees -- would not allow more harvest than the trust could sustain. Under their stewardship, ten to sixteen million salmon returned to the Columbia River every year. The salmon trust supported native life here for 10,000 years. Now, that's a paying asset. When the tribes ceded their lands, the federal government and the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho became new sovereign trustees in the Columbia River Basin. These new trustees were infant governments that had just come into being. They had no experience at all in managing a natural trust. You might say it was like putting a child in charge of a cookie jar. These new trustees gave little thought to sustaining the fish. Under 150 years of their management, wild salmon runs in the basin are now at 2% of their historic levels. And those remnant fish are contaminated by toxic chemicals present throughout the Columbia Basin. Next time you cook up a fish from the Columbia River Basin, first go on -line and find EPA's Fish Contaminant Survey for the Basin. The 22 fish you eat contain any number of 92 chemicals in varying concentrations. 24 These include chlorinated dioxins and furans, PCBs, arsenic, chlordane, mercury, and DDT.25 So the salmon trust -- a trust asset that belongs as property to the non -Indian and Indian people of this region -- has been nearly fully eradicated, and what is left of it is being poisoned. All of this is made legal by permits and regulatory decisions made by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the EPA under federal statutes that are supposed to protect our species and our waters. These agencies simply are not saying no. Now, if you were the beneficiary of 16 million dollars in a trust account and the trustee permitted this kind of phenomenal loss, you would not just sit by. Your trustee has the core duty of protecting and restoring your trust. VIII. By now you may be wondering how citizens can reconstruct the frame of environmental law to steer our agencies in a different direction. Remember, officials within these agencies prioritize the private property rights of those seeking to profit at the expense of the trust, because those are the loud voices that make themselves heard every day. The public is dizzied by the complexity of modern environmental law and isn't speaking in clear terms to the fundamental duty of government. Abraham Lincoln once said: "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed." 24 U.S. ENVTL PROT. AGENCY REGION 10, Doc. No. EPA - 910 -R -02 -006, COLUMBIA RIVER BASIN FISH CONTAMINANT SURVEY 1996 -1998, p. E -1 (1998), available at http : / /yosemite.epa.gov /r10 /oea.nsf (follow "REPORTS" hyperlink; then follow "Columbia River Basin Fish Contaminant Survey" hyperlink; then follow "Entire Document" (PDF) hyperlink). 25 Id. at E -1, E -3. 23 Members of the public can begin thinking of themselves as beneficiaries with a clear property right that is supreme to individual private property rights. They can hold their government accountable under a trustee's measure of performance. Long ago, when a railroad company used its private property rights to harm the shoreline of Lake Michigan, the U.S. Supreme Court said, "It would not be listened to that the control and management of [Lake Michigan] -- a subject of concern to the whole people of the state - - should ... be placed elsewhere than in the state itself." You can practically hear those same Justices saying today, "It would not be listened to" that government would let our waters be poisoned, our air polluted, our species eradicated, and our atmosphere dangerously warmed to serve short-term private interests. Protecting our natural trust is not at odds with safeguarding private property rights: Quite the opposite — it is essential to private property rights. All private property ownership depends on natural infrastructure. I'm think of a colleague of mine who lived in a nice house in New Orleans — that is, up until 15 months ago. He had a deed to his property reflecting fee simple absolute ownership. He had raised a family in his nice home and had expectations of staying there. He evacuated that home and left the deed behind when floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina rose to his neighborhood and delivered dead bodies to his doorstep. So, no, protecting Nature is not incompatible with protecting private property rights. Citizens all over the country, including those in McCall, Idaho, can go out and stake a property claim to Nature's Trust. Your trust is being destroyed all around you. You can define a tangible part of this trust and make its protection your responsibility, as 24 beneficiary. It may be an aquifer, or a river, or a wetland, or a species, or an airshed, or a forest, or an ocean, or just, maybe, the planet's atmosphere. Remember, agencies have authority to protect the environment. But they also have enormous discretion to allow its loss. Each agency is like a stadium with a huge political playing field. Companies with polluting businesses are out on those fields on a daily basis. They are meeting face to face with the regulators and shouting their private property rights. And the beneficiaries of the trust — the public — are outside the gates and not making their voices heard. Modern environmental law does .one and perhaps only one thing well: it tells people when agencies are permitting destruction of common property. You'll see these notices in the Star News, and you can sign up with agencies like DEQ to be notified of permit decisions. So, citizens can find those stadiums, walk right through those gates, and start making their voices heard on those playing fields. In nearly every case of environmental destruction, there are three levels of government with authority -- local, state, and federal — and there are several agencies at each level. Therefore, citizens have many stadiums to play in. Remember, citizens only need to win in one of those stadiums. But to win, you have to re -frame the government's perspective. You have to find that state official who is poised to permit toxic air pollution in your community and point out that the public owns the airshed, and that the state is a trustee with a duty of protection. Allowing further harm is not protection. Get to know these trustees personally. Bring them to the site and show them up close the part of Nature's Trust that hangs in the balance of their decision. Do not succumb to the discourse of environmental gibberish. Above all, do not shy away from 25 property rights. Bring them on! You are defending your property to public assets held in common, on behalf of you and your children and your descendants along down the line. Engaging agencies to protect Nature's Trust will pay off. Constant reminders of the trust framework will re -orient the agencies' perspectives. There are already courageous officials out there, and they need public backing. I'll give you an example of one. In September, the Attorney General of California brought a federal lawsuit against General Motors, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda and Nisson, for their contribution to global warming. 26 The complaint said that their fleet of cars account for nine percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, and that those emissions are causing a public nuisance. The Attorney General brought this action based on his trust duties. The complaint says: California ... has a public trust interest in the State's natural resources [which] include] water, snow pack, rivers, streams, wildlife, coastline, and air quality ... . These [resources] have been injured by global warming .... So, while the top attorneys at EPA are using all of their legal talent to avoid regulating auto emissions under the obvious statute (the Clean Air Act), the top lawyer in the State of California is using all of his legal talent to assert his trust obligation, and in doing so, he is single - handedly taking on 9% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. IX. I want to end our hour together by coming a bit closer to home. We are sitting in the heart of salmon country here in McCall, Idaho. There is an organization called Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon, that promotes a concept called Salmon Nation. Essentially the concept is that, while I am a citizen of Oregon and you are all citizens of Idaho, we 26 California v. General Motors, Complaint for Damages and Declaratory Judgment (N.D. Cal. Sept. 20, 2006). 26 are all united together in our citizenship in Salmon Nation. Salmon Nation represents a freedom to reframe your place in the world according to natural boundaries. What I have been talking about this evening is a freedom to reframe property relationships. I'd like to end this evening with a story of how ordinary people living up on the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington staked out their claim to a salmon population and emboldened local regulators to save the last habitat for these salmon. The story takes place at a tiny creek called Joseph's Creek. This creek and its surrounding springs have one of the last three significant spawning grounds for the Columbia River chum salmon. The generations of salmon spawning there go way back in time. They were spawning there during the year 1805, when Lewis and Clark traveled by in canoes. They were spawning thousands of years prior, when the Indian people lived at the creek. Some of the arrowheads and sinkers from that time still appear in the cobbled tidelands after the spring waters* recede. But this place is a rarity. Today, all of the rest of the urban shoreline is destroyed — turned into subdivisions, industrial sites, marinas and the like. So this little place up at Joseph's Creek is a last refuge, and nearly a third of the remaining population of Columbia River chum salmon go there to spawn every year Five years ago, a developer got hold of the private property on one side of Joseph's Creek and set out to do what developers do — take out a large number of trees and put in new construction. 27 And normally these developments go in before anyone takes much notice. Priceless habitats that have endured for millennia are snuffed out in the blink of an eye, all with the blessing of numerous local, state, and federal agency 27 The development plans involved creating four single- family lots. See Pre - Application Conference Request Form for Subdivisions — Planned Development — Short Plats (Oct. 22, 2003) (on file with author). 27 trustees that fall in line with their permits like a row of falling dominoes. The developers know how to work the system. And they usually don't waste any time after getting those permits before they haul out the bulldozers start eradicating nature. Their giant machinery rips up trees, tears into the soil, and bludgeons riparian areas. After a day of this there's nothing left -- not so much as a reminder of the civilization that existed for time immemorial at these places where little streams come into the Columbia River. It's like going into a bank and tearing into bags of money and throwing it to the winds — only, up there on the Columbia, the wealth takes the form of natural assets that have accrued over millennia. This kind of thing happens every day up there, and the people just stand by, because they don't think of themselves as citizens of Salmon Nation. They think of themselves as citizens of Vancouver, Washington, and they have faith that there must be nothing worth protecting because their City, after all, has land use laws and wouldn't give out any permits to destroy things worth protecting. And, too, it's the developer's private property, after all. But in this case, the neighbors and community people saw those salmon spawn, and they began to think of themselves in a new way. They began to think of themselves as citizens of Salmon Nation. They saw the salmon as their property, shared through the ages with the rest of the citizens of Salmon Nation. They brought their regulators out to see these salmon spawning. And they invited Columbia River tribal people out there to give blessings that those regulators heard. Those words stirred more hearts than any regulatory gibberish under the Endangered Species Act could. And pretty soon school children and retired people, local workers from Frito Lay and Hewlett Packard, historians, fishermen, educators and scientists all came out and spoke of protecting those W salmon. And the press ran stories on this, because one of the oddest things was that people of all political persuasions and backgrounds were coming together speaking as one voice. Well, unfortunately for the fish, it became clear that the agencies legally charged with protecting the salmon — the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife — were not going to use their authority to stop this development. 28 But the community didn't give up. (Remember, there's always more than one stadium.) They turned to their local planning department and told them that there was no other trustee left to save this chum habitat. Well it turns out that Vancouver, Washington has a little tree ordinance that requires a permit before you cut trees. The developer applied for a permit to cut 88 trees on this property, saying he needed to create space for an outdoor badminton court. Now this seemed a strange sort of thing — after all, how many people play outdoor badminton in Vancouver, Washington (you know it rains a lot there). But it seemed clear that the tree permit would be granted because, after all, most permits to destroy Nature are granted without much thought. Nevertheless, the community people continued undaunted, speaking in the same voice. And they kept bringing out these local regulators and telling them, face to face, that they now held the fate of these salmon in their hands. Well, when the planning department finally issued a decision on the tree permit application, it surprised everyone. Buried in the 21 -page document was language flatly denying the tree permit on the basis that the developer didn't need to cut so many trees to 28 These agencies did, however, issue strong comments urging protection of habitat as part of a City tree permit process, see note 36 infra. 29 create an outdoor badminton court .29 And for this proposition the planning department cited the International Law of Badminton, which provided the official dimensions for a badminton court — which, if you are curious, are 20 feet by 44 feet. 30 That permit denial bought enough time for the city and county to purchase the property and put it into conservation ownership. So in the end, it was the International Law of Badminton, not the Endangered Species Act, that saved those salmon. And I'm guessing it was the first time in modern land use law that the Law of Badminton has saved endangered species habitat. But what we see from this story is that local officials took personal responsibility for protecting the great salmon trust for future generations. And virtually no one, no one, will lament the absence of another subdivision along the Columbia River, even one that promised an outdoor badminton court. M As we close this hour, we go forth in our lives knowing that our actions have profound consequences for our descendants. Somehow fate has delivered all of us across the world, all of us across the country, and all of us in this church -- into this position at this pivotal moment. We did not live 100 years ago, when it was too early to even imagine the collapse upon us, and we will not be here 100 years from now when it will be too late to save what we still have. We can only claim this moment. 29City of Vancouver, Washington, Tree Removal Request — Denial, PRJ2002- 00096/TRE2002- 00015 /SEP2002- 00033, page 9 -10 (Sept. 26, 2003). 30 Id. at 9; see also International Badminton Federation, The Laws of Badminton, section 1. 1, http: / /www.worldbadminton.com/ibf laws.htm. The denial also cited court dimensions for volleyball (USA Volleyball Association) and croquet (U.S. Croquet Association), as the developer had expressed an intention to use the court area for those recreational activities as well. See Tree Removal Request, supra note 36, at 9. 30 McCall citizens, you are, quite personally, the beneficiaries of this marvelous natural trust that surrounds you. You have the environmental intelligence and community fortitude to go out and defend your property rights in Nature's Trust for yourselves, your fellow citizens, and for the descendants of your generation. But you can't look elsewhere for others to do it. It's going to take the entire generation of people living upon Earth at this time. I'd like to leave you with a few lines from a poem that my great - grandfather, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, wrote in 1921 as he was sitting on the banks of the Metolius River at our family camp in Oregon. He was a lawyer, an author, and a poet, and about 70 years old when he wrote this poem. I'm going to read you just the lines where he bequeaths certain things to his grandson, Erskine, who was my father. I Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Make now my last sure will and testament For those grandchildren who share with me this solitude And whom I must too shortly leave. To Erskine Biddle Wood,..., I give all trout in the Metolius.. . I give him mornings on the river -bank, Song of the river when the new sun shines... And the solemn discourse of the pines, At evening when the melting shadows fall And Peace sits on the bank with folded wings' The birds all [offering] a good -night call, And deep in dusk a yellow warbler sings. The river is for Erskine's delight. If you're great - grandchildren can wake up in the middle of the Frank Church wilderness 100 years from now and there is still snow in the winter, and fish in the waters, game in the mountains, and fresh air and vast open Western spaces, if they have 31 to them the same natural resources that we have today, they will know that you -- their ancestors — secured their trust at this crucial moment in time and bequeathed to them the natural wealth you rightly inherited. The trust frame I spoke of this evening is nothing other than the intergenerational spirit of humanity manifesting itself in our environmental law. Thank you. 32 Star -News News Page—Announcements Stuebner, Wilson receive award named for Nelle Tobias Two Boiseans have received an award named after the late McCall conservationist Nelle Tobias. Steve Stuebner and Wendy Wilson received the Nelle Tobias Award for Environmental Integrity from the Fund for Idaho at a recent awards ceremony in Boise. Fund for Idaho is a community- supported nonprofit grant making organization that supports Idaho grassroots social change organizations in human rights and environmental health. Ad The award is given each year to recognize exceptional Idahoans who have contributed their time and talents, as exemplified by Tobias, in furthering the vision of a just, compassionate and environmentally healthy Idaho that is Steve sruebner and respectful of its history and its peoples, according to the award announcement. wenaywilson Stuebner is a journalist and environmentalist who has written about and participated in a wide range of campaigns to protect Idaho lands. He has written more than 10 outdoor books. Stuebner is a former director of recreation development at Tamarack Resort who has been a leader with Valley County Pathways, a group working to create a series of public pathways between McCall and Cascade. Wilson was moved to become active in protecting the environment by Earth Day 1970. She has worked for a range of organizations in Idaho, including the Idaho Conservation League, Idaho Rivers United, Rivers Network, and currently for Advocates for the West. Tobias, who died in 2005 at age 98, was a well -known conservationist during her lifetime who worked to protect areas such as Hells Canyon, the Gospel Hump Wilderness and the Frank Church - River of No Return Wilderness. She also discovered a wildflower in the Payette National Forest that was named after her. After her death, she left $3.5 million in her will to 20 organizations, including five McCall groups. The local organizations that each received $175,000 were MCPAWS Regional Animal Shelter, Snowdon Wildlife Sanctuary, McCall Public Library, Long Valley Preservation Society and the McCall Community Congregational Church. illstamews. com/pages /announcements _page.php Page 1 of 1 6/12/2014