Conservation Northwest

15 years of Northwest Ecosystem Alliance Fifteen Years of Kee A NWEA Timeline: What We've Done Together The limited space available for a timeline barely scratches the surface of all the work a forest advocacy organization does. A single list can scarcely record the countless volunteers, interns, and staff of NWEA who have worked thousands of hours on hundreds of projects building protection for the greater Northwest habitat and wildlife. What we can do is focus on the highlights. A look at NWEA by the numbers is revealing. Northwest Ecosystem Alliance has protected (since 1997 and on the westside alone) 165,000 acres of forest, and in total, nearly 290,000 acres of wildlands. It has been party to 44 lawsuits, and won 74% of those. In partnership with our allies, we have raised $88 million for direct land preservation. Thousands of NWEA members have supported us over the years, financially, spiritually, and in kind. The following brief timeline lays out NWEA's major accomplishments over time: 1989, Greater Ecosystem Alliance is founded in Bellingham, "to promote the protection of biological diversity through the conservation of large ecosystems, focusing on the greater Olympic, North and Central Cascades, and Columbia Mountain ecosystems." Holds its first annual "Stump Stomp" dance marathon 1989, launches the Ancient Forest Rescue Expedition, touring a section of a 700year-old Douglas-fir log around the country to introduce Americans to the clearcutting of their national forests and to sound the call for protection of old-growth forests. The expedition is run four times through 1992. 1989, hosts an "Understanding Ancient Forests" workshop and seminar 1989, begins designing recovery programs for gray wolf and grizzly bear in WA continued page 10 8 N orthwest Ecosystem Alliance, first conceived as Greater Ecosystem Alliance, started as many activist nonprofits start, driven by a grand vision and moved forward by volunteer power on a shoestring budget. Founder Mitch Friedman, trained as a zoologist and grounded in conservation biology, wanted to protect and restore big areas connected together across the US and Canadian border, to create functional wildlife habitat and wildlife passages. No other group then was working at that level in the Pacific Northwest. Before founding Greater Ecosystem Alliance in 1989, Mitch was a frontline activist and member of the local Earth First!, participating, for example, in one of the first tree-sit actions in 1985 in the Millennium Grove in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon. In a speech he gave a decade later at the 1996 Ancient Forest Activist Conference in Ashland, Oregon, at the time of the Salvage Rider, Mitch saluted the role that civil disobedience has played in the history of the ancient forest protection movement, but went on to say how that tactic had evolved, and how he had evolved in his own thinking. In 1988…I looked left and right and saw the same people sitting next to me on the logging road [protesting] that I had seen the week before…I started to wonder why the scientists in Audubon, and the little old ladies in tennis shoes, weren't sitting next to me on the logging road....And I started to think that there would be better ways to convey our message to the public, which poll after poll shows supports our issues. Don't take offense if you like to feel kind of cutting edge and radical, but what we stand for [protecting our ancient forest heritage] is mainstream. People may argue today whether NWEA is either too mainstream or still too radical. It's a weird sort of either/or, and labels only go so far. Verbs, telling what we do, are far more descriptive than mere labels. NWEA researches, strategizes, creates, convinces, inspires, and makes happen. We invoke bold and innovative strategies, and use common sense, science, a love of wildness, and the power of our members to find new and collaborative ways to protect the Northwest's wildlife and wildlands. All this, on a landscape where nature knows no borders. It's been 15 years since the birth of NWEA, and along the way many people have shaped the organization and the work it has done. Their stories in this issue of Northwest Ecosystem News best tell the tale of a dynamic and broad band of people who still believe passionately in keeping the Northwest wild. Northwest Ecosystem Alliance www.ecosystem.org

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