I've posted this "piece of book" before on this site, but I'm feeling impulsive tonight, wanting to amplify an insight Stewart and Anna Vee Brandborg shared with me about Olaus Murie that may be of interest to any scholars and students of conservation history still out there who have survived the flames of neoliberal scorched-earth corporate revisionism (Whew! Did I just write that?!).
Long before I met the Brandborgs or knew who Olaus was, I had Olaus' "Animal Tracks" imbedded within my favorite, beat-up books. "Life on the Mississippi", "Grapes of Wrath", "Winter Wheat", "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not bad for a Peterson field guide, I figured, but I never figured out how--or questioned why--such an odd accident of a classic within a meat-and-potatoes publishing scheme could have come about until I was privileged to bear witness to the following. Brandy and Anna Vee were enlightening individuals, simply put an as we march like lemmings off the next cliff of horrible news that seem to confine our choices from bad to worse, it's worth remembering that there were better times not to long ago when transformative policy was not only possible, but achieved.
We can do it again. Don't let 'em tell you different.
Making Democracy Work
Summer, 2012
AnnaVee's Kitchen
Stewart M. Brandborg, the last true activist to lead The Wilderness Society, maybe the oldest activist still fighting the Wild West’s crazy resource wars, maybe the last old-time activist left in America, was sitting in his motorized wheelchair telling me a story.
It was the mid 1950s, and his friend, the wildlife biologist, Olaus Murie, had come to Washington D.C. on a Greyhound bus from his cabin in Moose, Wyoming to testify before Congress on behalf of some critical conservation issue or other. Olaus was president of The Wilderness Society, a small organization on the cusp of blooming into its name, and the late fifties was the golden age of massive federal projects that were by design and definition bigger and more durable than the pyramids of ancient Egypt.
Congress, like all dynasties, is a rarified club that attracts vulnerable people who accumulate more power than is healthy for humans to handle, and so become prone to the sufferings of pharaohs. These are diagnosable diseases, a timeless itches that have everlastingly tanked societies grown top-heavy, of would-be gods who worship themselves and the big and durable things they could command to be built in their names and then have those big things named after them. So, although Brandy couldn’t recall the exact nature of his friend’s visit when he picked him up at the bus station that day, it was probably a federal dam that Olaus had come to town to school Congress about.
A long trip on a bus back then took some wind out of your sails, even if you were young, and especially when you were in your sixties and dealing with health issues, as Olaus was. So when the bus pulled into the station, Olaus, who had logged thousands of miles on foot and dogsled in the mountains of Alaska and Wyoming, took a walk around the block to stretch his legs while waiting for his ride.
Olaus and Brandy had a lot in common. Both were westerners, uncomfortable in cities and physically-acclimated to living outdoors. Both were wildlife biologists with extensive experience “in the field”. Finally, and maybe most importantly, both came from that pioneer strain of Scandinavian stock that still populates the North-Central Minnesota plains, the farmers and merchants who came to those plains after they were seized from the Dakota people during the violent early years of America’s Civil War.
It’s ironic that those lands were taken during the watch of no less a politician than Abraham Lincoln, who would seek to secure the blessings of liberty for immigrants fleeing tyrants in Europe and for people from Africa whom those Europeans enslaved, but couldn’t seek the same courtesies for the original inhabitants of the Land. True, there were sentimentalists among the abolitionists who yearned to save the savage with Christianity, none of which were words used by the Dakota people to describe themselves or their predicament. For his part, Lincoln used words that were also alien to the Dakota, to describe what his administration took from them, words like “frontier” and "wilderness". Given the radical strain of Swedes and Norwegians who ended up springing from that virgin sod turned upside-down, that’s a pretty fair definition of irony. But what could late-19thcentury Scandinavian farmers fleeing decrepit, autocratic monarchies have known about what the Dakota People thought of their dear, beloved Land, or how they described it?
Not much really, and so the farmers and merchants didn’t think about it much, or at least not at first, and that was the lay of the land when Olaus was born in 1889 along the Red River that defines the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota, to Norwegian immigrants and, four years later, when Brandy’s father, Guy (Big Brandy in much of this narrative) was born in Ottertail County, the next one over from the Muries, to Swedish stock.
By the mid-1950s, Brandy and Olaus were fellow Wilderness Society board members. Brandy’s day-job was Project Director for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), whose director, George Callison, saw potential in bringing “westerners” into the simmering national conservation stewpot, a pot that included the NWF as well as The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, whose cooks were about to serve up the country’s first watershed, environmental victory against, significantly, a federal dam. The monster was to be located in Dinosaur National Monument at a remote stretch of the Green River called Echo Park and, given the success ratio the Bureau of Reclamation had had with the building of dams in the arid West it seemed like just another slam-dunk for the Bureau. Until the conservationists won, and then started looking for their next tasty recipe, one whose ingredients included an overarching national policy to declare all such remaining intact ecosystems off-limits to human exploitation—and especially to dams—so they wouldn’t have to wage draining battles for each and every one of them—and lose most of them because, after all, there’s never been enough money in the world of kindness to match the wealth of pharaohs.
Callison began looking for a western conservationist, one with experience “in the field”, who might like to help him fight a dam or two. It so happened that this was exactly what Brandy was doing at that exact moment in conservation history. He was a young wildlife biologist working for Idaho Fish and Game in central Idaho when Callison's friend, Durward Allen, a renowned biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came upon him skinning a mountain lion and examining its viscera along the Paradise Road in the Upper Selway of Idaho. Allen had just written his pioneering book “Our Wildlife Legacy” that would define wildlife conservation in this country for generations when he and Brandy met, and they would have some stove-warmed conversations later at the Paradise Guard Station just downriver from the skinning. Allen already knew Brandy as a young, fellow-wildlife-biologist who had recently published the first detailed study on Mountain Goats, but in the evening at the guard station Allen also got an earful about his inborn belief in democracy (which he inherited from his father) and about how he was using it to rally the local people in fighting two massive dam projects that had been recently proposed to drown out vast swaths of Central Idaho’s primitive areas. Penny Cliffs was on the Middle Fork of the Clearwater and Bruces Eddy (Dworshak Dam) would plug the Clearwater’s North Fork. In an impressive juggling act, Brandy was fighting both of them at once while simultaneously working for a state agency known more for nepotism than for conservation in those days. But Allen quickly deciphered that Brandy was not only thoroughly-grounded on the land he worked within but had been groomed and primed for the task of prompting anachronistic fish and game departments to evolve into something more than jobs programs. Maybe he’d be interested in tackling some bigger fish. Maybe pharaohs.
Brandy grew up in Grangeville, Idaho, and Hamilton, Montana, small farming and ranching communities perched on opposite edges of the vast, mountainous, heart of Idaho, undeveloped then and now, within which Brandy had hunted and fished as a boy and where Allen met him as an adult. He’d been a Forest Service lookout in his teens, a smoke chaser, timber cruiser and range surveyor. He’d studied mountain goats for several years during and after college. He was at once a wildlife biologist, a conservation activist, and the son of a “social forester” of the Gifford Pinchot mold. Finally, he was a westerner, and so, at some point after Allen got back to D.C., he brought Brandy to Callison’s attention.
It was a novel idea, this seeking out of those who lived in the “field” and who could speak in eloquent counter-arguments to nominally-elected potentates openly pining for their own monogramed Eighth Wonder. Callison set his sights on enticing the young Brandborg family to come to Washington.
It wasn’t long after the Brandborgs, Stewart, AnnaVee and their baby, Becky, had settled into the rhythms of D.C. that Howard Zahnizer, executive director of The Wilderness Society, noted similar potential in this big, young, talkative westerner. “Zahnie” took Brandy under his wing, drove him around town in his Cadillac Convertible (which impressed the young Brandborg as “the bee’s knees”) and tapped him to serve as a board member of the Wilderness Society, as a protégé and also as a taxi-driver for fellow conservationists needing rides to and from bus stations. So Brandy was not surprised when he showed up at the bus station and found Olaus waiting for him, holding a leaf.
“It’s amazing,” he recalled Olaus saying. “How fine-veined they are, how they blow down the sidewalk in the wind as they do. How perfectly designed for their purpose they are.”
AnnaVee was listening to this story from the open kitchen. She had been tolerating Brandy’s telling of it until he came to the part about the leaf. Then she quietly sidled up, which was how they split the duties of lifelong activism all those years in D.C. and then in Montana--evenly. In addition to being a wildlife rehabilitator and education advocate, she was Brandy’s fact-checker, Brandy taking up the airspace, AnnaVee underlying his narrative with the critical combination of introspection and accurate memory.
“There are some things that you should know about Olaus, Sigurd Olson and Zahniser” she advised me in her soft voice that was every bit as earnest as Brandy’s louder one.
“Zahnie was somebody that you just immediately loved. You just felt good in his presence. The same was true for Sig. You were glad to be there, and glad to have him with you.
“Olaus was a little different sort of person. To me, sitting with him was like sitting next to Christ.”
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