by Mitch Friedman

In 1989, a different George Bush had entered the office of President, and radio DJs were playing Fight the Power by Public Enemy and Love Shack by the B52s. Seattle was a small city that fit between the Space Needle and the King Dome. Few homes had computers; and email, if you had access at all, was slow and cumbersome. It was still easier to make a phone call. But remember those big brick, cell phones?

The headlines that year were often about spotted owls as the Forest Service clearcut two square miles per week of the owls’ Northwest ancient forest habitat. Passionate youths—and I was one of them—were frequently getting arrested trying to stop all that.

I suppose these nostalgic memories don’t stack up well against our venerable seniors who can remember world wars, horse carriages plying dirt streets, and people living in cedar stumps, but 1989 today still seems like a distant, different world to me.

Founding of Greater Ecosystem Alliance

I founded the Greater (later renamed Northwest) Ecosystem Alliance that year, along with some friends who now have mostly moved on to other projects. On our minds was to champion bold new approaches to saving biodiversity. With big goals envisioned, we wanted to protect not just the big trees, trails, and owls, but the entire old-growth ecosystem.

We wanted to protect not just the alpine gems, but the entire North Cascades, capable of sustaining a viable grizzly bear population. We wanted to infuse new ideas of science and conservation to keep the Northwest wild with large interconnected wild ecosystems from the Washington Coast to the BC Rockies.

If I could have known then that I would still be at it 16 years later, I don’t think it would have surprised me to learn that I would be reporting changes to the name and other features of the organization.

The challenge I saw in the late ‘80s was that the conservation movement had broad and deep public support, but wasn’t succeeding fast enough to save nature. I was alarmed by how the science was calling for much vaster natural areas to be protected than what we were achieving, and it seemed the time was ripe for boldness.

Science-based activism

Our record of success during these 16 years is somewhat mixed. On the one hand we have accomplished many extraordinary things on the ground. We played an important part in how the ancient forest issue played out with President Clinton’s sweeping Northwest Forest Plan. That plan is based on the science that forested areas have to be large enough and close enough to one another to meet the population needs of spotted owls and other forest-dependent species. We fought the infamous 1996 salvage rider by posting a high timber sale bid for conservation of Thunder Mountain.

We led the extraordinary success of the Loomis Forest Fund and the subsequent establishment of Snowy Mountain Provincial Park just across the border.
We’ve seen logging on federal roadless areas trickle down to near zero in Washington, at least for now. The Mount-Baker Snoqualmie National Forest logs no old forest these days.

We even helped bring about revolutionary change on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, ending the era of hostility and old-growth logging, beginning the era of common ground collaboration to restore health to second-growth forests. The Gifford Pinchot National Forest also no longer logs old growth, largely because of our forest watch work and outreach to the Forest Service.

And to realize perhaps the most ambitious dream of all, we set about keeping the Cascades ecosystem of Washington State intact by providing habitat linkages across the I-90 checkerboard lands. We've accomplished this through the The Cascades Conservation Partnership capital campaign and the I-90 Wildlife Bridges Coalition.

The big battles for the future of the Olympics and the Washington Cascades have come out pretty well. The wild places of these public lands are relatively safe and the trends are, for now at least, toward restoring these ecosystems. I could not have imagined this 16 years ago.

Serious challenges

On the other hand, other challenges remain or have arisen. British Columbia continues to heavily subsidize a devastating rate of deforestation, threatening wild areas and species around our shared border, particularly in the southeastern part of the province. And the grizzly bear population in the North Cascades is today still no larger than it was 16 years ago. Grizzly bears have yet to be recovered in the Cascades.

The gains we’ve made in western Washington have not been matched on the eastside. Less than one percent of Washington’s four million acres of designated wilderness is east of the Okanogan River. Yet hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness quality lands survive in eastern Washington.

The public support we once took for granted has slipped terribly. Mouthpieces of special interests have made great gains in increasing public skepticism of conservationists (witness the framing against us, e.g., radical preservationists in the environmental industry) and also scientists (e.g., with their junk science). Conservation leaders including me share responsibility for this slipping support, as at times we neglected basic communication in our urgency to battle the many immediate threats to wild places.

Want proof? When we performed market research in 2004 as part of our name change process, we found that the very types of people that NWEA wanted to reach in our aim to expand our base of support had broadly negative reactions to our name. I wish it weren’t so since it is highly descriptive to ecologists, but the term ecosystem is itself considered elitist and distant. Yet try to come up with another word that means ecosystem and you see some of our dilemma.

Retooling for a future for wildlands

We cannot afford to cling to last year’s successes or to battle for the sanctity of our name. Our job is to retool to meet the challenges ahead and to succeed. The staff and board of Northwest Ecosystem Alliance faced head-on the hard choices about our future focus and “brand,” and we made the right decisions.

We decided to shift our emphasis more to the eastern part of our geographic mission, increasing protection for the high forested mountains between the North Cascades and BC Rockies. And we decided to restructure the organization to make us as effective as possible in that landscape.

Last year we merged with Kettle Range Conservation Group, gaining the advantage of almost three decades of field knowledge and community relationships in northeast Washington. We now have offices in Spokane and Republic, as well as in Seattle and the Bellingham mother ship.

In 2005 we rolled out our new name and mission statement, chosen to best communicate our values to the broad community of people that we need in our tent.
Conservation is not an urban New Age religion being pushed on rural communities.

Conservation is not a closed club of high-minded college professors. Conservation is a set of bedrock American values.

An overwhelming majority of people in our nation share a view of nature and a future that fulfills our dreams for the world we want our children to enjoy. We’re an eagle flying high over an unspoiled landscape, out in the open for all to see, displaying admirable strength and vision.