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“Is Collaboration a Lost Art?”
Draft 3.2
January 1, 2026
There are times when one plus one can equal three. That magical math used to happen a lot in this state.
In fact, I would have argued that collaboration infused (was part of /was in/made up/?) the state’s collective DNA. The political climate rewarded the risk-takers and those who read the tea-leaves and knew just when to take advantage of the right moment.
Perhaps it’s because Idahoans live closer to the land, are hard-scrabble and level-headed, pragmatic and willing to try things and not act so dogmatically.
There was less ‘labelling’ of people several decades ago. I think back to the jury’s decision in the “Big Bill” Haywood trial of 1907. East coast newspaper reporters had come to Boise for the important trial involving the assassination of governor Frank Steunenberg. On trial was labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood.
When the verdict came out in the very early hours of July 29th, pretty much everyone, including Haywood’s famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, got it wrong. Many reporters had already written their story and quickly rewrote the lead paragraph.The predominant farmer jury had surprised them all: Not Guilty was the verdict. Idaho was not like other states. One historian called it Idaho’s finest hour.
I think of a thoroughly Republican state electing Democrat Frank Church for two six-year terms to the U.S. Senate and Democrat Cecil Andrus for three four-year terms for Idaho governor. Idaho was a state that often confounded national pundits.
Outdoor Idaho witnessed several exceptional collaborations. In fact, we were on the ground floor of several of them – or at least we liked to think we were – as they unfolded. Truth be told, our shows usually documented the collaborations a year or two after they occurred.
A regret of mine is that Outdoor Idaho didn’t use its voice more often to honor collaborations that were occurring all around us. An entire hour-long program on adversaries working together could have led to more collaborations, or at least made Idahoans feel better about what was happening around them.
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In 1993 the Henry’s Fork Watershed Council became a famous collaborative response because of a failure to communicate. Probems had been brewing for nearly a century along the banks of the famous river in eastern Idaho.
To many anglers, the famous Henry’s Fork is their Mecca, their Valhalla, the Holy Grail. The prestigious Trout Unlimited magazine voted it #1 out of the top 100 streams in the country.
Yet all that love and fame were not going to save the Henry's Fork of the Snake River. It would take a change of heart from irrigators and from enviros and anglers.
And that change of heart required a catastrophe, causing at least two people from the warring parties to step out of their comfort zone and begin talking to each other.
Collaboration is like that sometimes. It can start out small, with little hope of success... until people wonder how anything ever got done without it.
The catastrophe that got them talking was a man-made one. In 1992 the Bureau of Reclamation and the Idaho Fish & Game Department drew down the Island Park Reservoir to kill trash fish, like suckers and chubs.
The historically low drawdown sent more than 50,000 tons of mud and silt downstream, turning the river into a muddy mess. Insects and trout died, silt wiped out spawning beds. The tragedy meant that anglers and tourists stopped arriving, and nearby small towns suffered economically.
What became painfully obvious was that irrigators and anglers and a handful of agencies with jurisdiction on the river were not communicating with each other.
And that’s when Jan Brown, the executive director of the nonprofit Henry's Fork Foundation, decided it was time to begin talking to the enemy. The Foundation had forged significant successes since its inception in 1984. But its militant approach was not sitting well with many irrigators, and they were the ones who owned the water.
“We joked that the irrigators would all be rednecks, and they thought we'd all have ponytails,” said Jan in one of our early shows on the famous river. “I mean, everyone had stereotypes.”
Dale Swenson, the executive director of the Fremont-Madison Irrigation District, was the other one who stepped forward. “That's what we had to do as irrigators is let down our guard and realize that the Henry's Fork Foundation and other groups like them were looking out for the good of the river,” he told us in an interview. “At least we had to trust that’s what they were there for.”
The conflict had its roots a century earlier, when farmers and ranchers realized how lush the Henry's Fork watershed was. They then built dams and began de-watering the river.
Not long afterward rich anglers, many of them from the Salt Lake area, discovered the remarkable fishery. They then built lodges and began advertising the river.
Outdoor Idaho devoted several entire programs to Henry’s Fork and nearby Henry’s Lake. The complexity of the river system had always intrigued us. Not only is a shallow lake the start of the famous river, but 10 miles downstream a miraculous spring bubbles from the ground, its water draining the Yellowstone area.
Big Springs, the true headwaters of the river, is one of the largest natural springs in the U.S. The water is a constant 52 degrees, and there’s plenty of it. One hundred twenty million gallons of water a day replenish the river, making it ideal habitat for big trout.
One of the great joys in life is standing on the nearby historic railroad bridge, watching huge trout swimming lazily by. No fish ever had it so good. No human could avoid falling in love with the specialness of the Henry's Fork.
That love shone through in our 1990 “Henry’s Fork” program and our 1996 show, “On the Henry’s Fork.”
“We weren’t talking to each other,” said Jan, “so everyone gathered at Elk Creek Ranch and had kind of a soul-searching session.
“We knew we had to start doing business differently. The same characters and same players, and no one needed to change their missions. But we needed to have some vehicle, some entity, some forum that we could come together and talk with one another on a regular basis.”
And so, out of a sense of frustration, distrust, and even fear, the Watershed Council was born, thanks in large part to Jan and Dale. The group advocated for a total conservation package for the watershed. They even participated in team-building activities to encourage trust and cooperation.
“Once we got acquainted, we found maybe 80 percent of all the issues we could agree on,” said Jan. Still, the smart money gave the Watershed Council 12 months. It’s hard to get past a century of bad blood. But the council has grown and is still meeting on a regular basis.
More important, it is now seen as the moral authority of the region. In time it become the model for other collaborations throughout the West.
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Collaboration can come in all shapes and sizes. The Idaho National Laboratory’s partnering with the state’s universities to create breakthroughs in energy, nuclear and security research.
The Albertson Library at Boise State University collaborating with Idaho's largest independent music store, the Record Exchange, to preserve Idaho’s music history.
The “All-Idaho Firearm” group of 13 recreation-technology companies joining forces in 2015 to create a functioning firearm, using only Idaho-made products. They wanted to showcase the level of manufacturing that exists in Idaho, and they did it.
Two state agencies(?) created something that was rare in the world of television. Idaho’s Fish & Game Department brought to the table experts who were knowledgeable in the ways of wildlife. Idaho Public Television brought a statewide network and an understanding of how to produce a TV program. Together they came up with a name. They called it Outdoor Idaho.
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Before he became chief Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, Idaho native Jim Jones served two terms as the state’s Attorney General.
"During my two terms as Attorney General in the 1980s, those of us in state government took it as an article of faith that we should work across the aisle to advance the public good,” said Justice Jones.
“Both of the Governors with whom I served--John Evans and Cecil Andrus-- were of opposite parties from me. They were Democrats and I was a Republican. While we had dustups at times, that did not impede public business.”
In one of the most pivotal battles fought largely behind closed doors, Jim and Governor John Evans worked hand-in-glove on the Swan Falls water-rights fight. “Our cooperation was largely behind the scenes,” said Jim, “but we were both committed to keeping Idaho Power Company from controlling the Snake River flow.”
Jim handled the legal work and blasted the power company in the press. Governor Evans threatened veto power over legislation favored by Idaho Power. “We prevailed,” said Jim, “but it could not have been done separately.”
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A bagpiper played ‘Amazing Grace’ as 4,000 excited spectators watched tons of concrete crash to the ground in a fit of leaded dust. Five hundred pounds of strategically placed dynamite had demolished four smelter smokestacks, the tallest being 715 feet.
A controversial symbol of Silver Valley history disappeared in less than 30 seconds on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, in May of 1996.
“Good riddance to Bunker Hill stacks,” editorialized the daily Coeur d’Alene Press earlier that morning. The stacks had dominated the Silver Valley skyline for two decades.
The editorial was not gentle. “The stacks stood as monuments to Gulf Resources & Chemical Corporation’s defiance of common sense in its 20-year stewardship of a once great American company.”
Immediately after the stacks came down, a carnival atmosphere in Kellogg prevailed: food and drinks, T-shirts and hats, happy hours at the bars with live music. This was a community event in Kellogg like no other.
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Our 2005 “Silver Valley Rising” show had all the ingredients of a classic Outdoor Idaho program: an entertaining learning experience that featured a good bit of history with old film and photographs... interviews with down-to-earth folks... relatable scientists who could explain complicated matters well... and for good measure, a collaboration that actually seemed to work.
Ours was a complex story told compassionately that seemed to have what you might call a happy ending, if a story about the nation’s second largest Superfund site could ever really have a happy ending.
The Outdoor Idaho crew produced four other programs featuring the Silver Valley: “Mining Idaho,” “Under Idaho,” “Health of Our Lakes,” and “Idaho Tribes and the Environment.” One of the first full-length programs I produced in the 1980s was for IdahoPTV’s daily half hour “Idaho Reports” program.
We always came back from the Kellogg area with renewed respect for the toughness and friendliness of the area’s townspeople. And the immensity of their burden.
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Maybe it was because I’d spent three decades near Idaho City, among the scars of large-scale gold mining, that the story of the Silver Valley resonated with me.
When we think of gold mining, the image that comes to mind is of a lone miner with his gold pan and sluice box, and his pick and shovel, hellbent for bedrock five feet below in creeks like Grimes Creek and Elk Creek, where the gold tended to settle.
But that was 1863. What one sees today are tons of river rock piled unceremoniously along the major waterways of what’s known as the Boise Basin.
In the 1940’s, massive mechanical dredges churned through Grimes Creek, Mores Creek, Elk Creek and smaller streams. A dredge could weigh 900 tons, and be more than 100 feet long, with giant shovels capable of digging out rock and completely upending waterways. Someone got rich, but at what a cost.
The dredging halted before I arrived in the Boise Basin. I’m guessing those huge piles of river rock will likely still be there a hundred years from now.
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It’s always the water that suffers in mining operations. And no place is that truer than in Idaho’s Silver Valley. Such a pleasant-sounding name for such a massive sacrilege to water and land and air.
More than a century of mining, beginning in the 1890s, gave people plenty of time and reason to apply other names to the 40 mile long valley: “Black Basin,” because of the color of the air, water, and streets; “Valley of Death,” referring to the denuded forests, dead swans, horses, and fish that could only live a few minutes in “Lead Creek”; “Lead Heads,” a name callously thrown at school children because of the frightening level of lead in their young bodies.
But for those who owned and worked the mines, that was the price of doing business in the American West.
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Silver mining requires a willing workforce. As a child I used to build tree forts and once even an underground fort, but I gave up the idea after digging down four feet. Imagine taking an elevator thousands of feet underground each morning to spend ten hours working in humid conditions that most of us would consider unacceptable.
And in the really ole days, around 1900, your pay would be $3 a day in unhealthy conditions The history of silver mining in Idaho includes bloody battles between miners and mine owners, the beginning of unionism in the state with leaders like “Big Bill” Haywood, and the presence of federal soldiers to quell riots as miners fought to get their daily wage to $3.50.
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Silver is not mined with a gold pan or a giant placer machine. The valuable ore is found in rich veins that snake through a geology that allows those veins to run deep, requiring expensive, complex machinery, brought into Idaho from foundries back east.
In the Coeur d’Alene mining district there are hundreds of miles of tunnels, stretched out like a vast spider web under the 21 square miles known as the “Box.” This network of extraction is the herculean effort of more than a century of digging and blasting.
For example, the largest mine, Bunker Hill, has 150 miles of tunnels.
The #4 tunnel in the Lucky Friday Mine reached a depth of 1.8 miles, the deepest mine in the valley. That’s some serious digging. It speaks to the proud tenacity of Silver Valley miners.
The Sunshine Mine features 100 miles of tunnels. But that’s not what people will remember about this particularly rich and famous mine.
On the morning of May 2, 1972, 173 miners headed underground for the morning shift. Some arrived at the 3700-foot level; others went lower.
When the fire broke out, it was near where clean air was entering the mine, so carbon monoxide began to circulate through the main airways. Ninety-one men perished that day from carbon monoxide exposure.
The Bureau of Mines ultimately decided it was spontaneous combustion of refuse near scrap timber. Most people who understand mining believe it was a failure of old and inadequate safety equipment and a lack of training that doomed the men that day.
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When I look back at our “Silver Valley Rising,” we could have started our show with images of the south fork of the Coeur d’Alene River filled with poisonous tailings hauled out of the mines and headed to nearby Coeur d’Alene Lake.
Instead, we began our program with smelter smokestacks crashing to the ground in slow motion. Those tall smokestacks were the response to the poisons enveloping the towns of Kellogg, Smelterville, Pinehurst, and Wardner, and to some extent, Wallace.
The thinking was that the higher the stacks, the more smelter pollutants would escape the frequent inversions and spread out away from the towns. And sure enough, the poisons did spread far and wide.
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The purpose of a smelter is to separate out valuable metals like silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium. The smelting process requires intense heat and chemicals and releases poisonous gases, including lead.
In September of 1973, a fire swept through the Bunker Hill baghouse. That’s the filtration system designed to remove emissions from the smelter, before they are released into the air.
What happened next was a pivotal turning point in the environmental history of Idaho.
The Houston-based Gulf Resources & Chemical Corporation had purchased the Bunker Hill Company in 1968. As historian Katherine Aiken explained to us in an interview for the show, when many of the owners lived in nearby Spokane, miners felt connected, even referring to the mine as “Uncle Bunker.” But now, she pointed out, “a corporation from Texas was making the decisions, and that made a huge difference.”
After the fire, Gulf Resources officials met and came up with a calculation. According to written notes, they determined that each poisoned child would likely cost them $4,000 in case of a lawsuit. But this was at a time when the price of silver and lead was approaching all-time highs.
If you cared to use the term “evil” to describe what happened next, you wouldn’t get much pushback from the former Dean of the College of Mines and Earth Resources at the University of Idaho.
“Gulf Resources management made the decision to go ahead and continue running the smelter,” geologist Earl Bennett told us in an interview for our show, “even though, with a part of the bag house gone, they knew there was going to be a tremendous increase in emissions of litharge, or lead oxide, out of the stacks.
“We talk a lot about the sins of our fathers. Our fathers did a real sin,” said the former State Geologist. “It was illegal what they did in 1973. It’s illegal now, and I don’t think there’s anybody that would try to justify what they did.”
Gulf Resources not only kept the mine running, but they ramped up production. This went on for eleven months.
That sin, according to the Academy of Sciences, released approximately 35 tons of lead each month into the atmosphere.
The Panhandle Health District began testing children’s blood lead levels, and what they found was truly alarming. The lead levels were off the charts, some of the highest levels ever recorded in the United States.
Even the best lawyers and lobbyists that the mining company’s money could buy weren’t able to spin that travesty.
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By 1981, sinking silver prices had slipped below the break-even point for most of the region’s mines. Even “Uncle Bunker” closed its doors, along with other mines in the region. Thousands of jobs dried up.
Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Bunker Hill and the 21 square mile Box around Bunker Hill a Superfund site.
Silver Valley, once the most prosperous region of Idaho, couldn’t get a break. The valley slipped into a deep depression. Thousands left, never to return. But some stayed to fight, to find a solution to this intractable mess.
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The collaboration between the federal government and the state of Idaho was always going to be a prickly one. Idahoans have never been keen on having the federal government intervene in their lives. After hundreds of meetings that stretched on for six years, a community taskforce designed a novel approach to the task ahead.
The state of Idaho would be responsible for cleaning up the populated areas, like Kellogg, Wardner, Smelterville, Pinehurst, and Wallace. Part of that involved contractors scooping up the first foot of contaminated soil where children played. They then laid down a barrier and brought in clean dirt, at no expense to homeowners.
Unfortunately, just when Gulf Resources was to pony up millions of dollars for this part of the cleanup, the corporation declared bankruptcy.
The Environmental Protection Agency would tackle the industrial complexes, including the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River.
The EPA paid for removal of the tailings from the valley floor and began the revegetation of the nearby denuded hillsides. Contractors dismantled the smelter and the zinc plant and spent millions of dollars on the restoration of Milo Creek. Without improvements to that creek, annual spring floods would continue to re-contaminate yards and playgrounds that had already been cleaned up.
The job of the Panhandle Health District was to jumpstart economic development and to monitor lead levels of children.
Lead levels did indeed start to drop. The collaboration was working.
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Sometimes one side of a collaboration may want to end the partnership, believing it’s time to move on.
But the EPA had no intention of walking away so soon. Instead, the federal agency dramatically expanded its jurisdiction to include Coeur d’Alene Lake and even the Spokane River flowing into the state of Washington.
Federal officials also suggested cleanup work could continue for another 30 years, possibly longer.
Merchants and others around Coeur d’Alene and the Silver Valley were incensed. They were sick of the cleanup and tired of the stigma of Superfund tarnishing their fine towns.
The area’s newspapers were especially vocal. Industrialist Duane Hagadone, who owned most of the media in the region, as well as the Coeur d’Alene Resort, was particularly adamant that the problem had been blown out of proportion.
One newspaper editorial argued that "no one in the past 20 years has been provably sickened by heavy metals in the Silver Valley." Other stories compared EPA workers to terrorists and thugs. One even wrote, “tongue in cheek,” of assassinations.
Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne also weighed in. "The bureaucracy of the EPA is absolutely non-responsive, and we've had it. Absolutely had it," Kempthorne said in a speech in Coeur d’Alene. "I've become so frustrated with EPA that I'm on the verge of asking EPA to leave the state of Idaho." The governor received a standing ovation.
The state director of the Idaho Bunker Hill project team explained how things worked when you collaborated with the federal government. “You need to remember,” Chuck Moss told us in an interview, “the EPA had a couple of things going for them. One, they had the money. They also had the authority. That makes sometimes who really is the top dog, the top dog.”
Idaho was learning that collaborating with the federal government is a lot like dancing the country two-step with a stubborn lamppost.
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One thing that really impressed director/videographer Pat Metzler and the others who worked on the Outdoor Idaho show was the sheer magnitude of the mining operation in the relatively small area near the Idaho-Montana border. Mining had recovered more than a billion ounces of silver, 3 million tons of zinc, and 8 million tons of lead, all totaling more than $6 billion in value, ranking the Silver Valley among the top ten mining districts in world history.
That’s one side of the ledger. The other side is harder to document, but the Academy of Sciences put the number of pollutants in the air, water and on the land at 300 million tons.
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Early one Sunday morning, Pat Metzler and I headed to the Central Treatment Plant near the Bunker Hill Mine. We had been conducting interviews and shooting video for several days and were ready to drive back to Boise.
But first we needed video of the highly acidic water flowing out of Bunker Hill mine and into the Treatment Plant.
We had been told that the mine water would continue to flow, that it could not be stopped, that it would flow forever. The state of Idaho was on the hook for a million dollars annually.
A fence surrounded the treatment plant and made it difficult to get the shots we wanted. Pat had heard that sometimes a magnetic card could spring certain locks. He happened to have a grocery store “rewards card.” And sure enough, it triggered the lock. The door opened for us.
It was early Sunday morning. No one was around. We walked in and got the close-up shots of the brown-colored water that we needed. Then we quickly left the facility, locking the door. “Rewards cards are usually worthless,” Pat commented, “but not today.”
Indeed, that card got us into Bunker Hill’s central treatment plant.
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Anyone traveling to the Silver Valley these days will quickly discover that the excitement is above ground. Condominiums sold quickly. One of the world’s longest gondolas whisks people to the top of an impressive ski hill that often has snow when others don’t. Bike paths snake gently through the valley, compliments of a train that once carried ore, uncovered, from the Silver Valley into Montana. (check)
I’m guessing few today know the full story of why the bike path is capped with asphalt or why signs warn bikers and pedestrians not to leave the pavement. I’m betting those signs will still be there 100 years from now.
The world’s most beautiful Superfund site has benefitted immensely from the prickly collaboration between state and federal agencies. Both continue to throw money into cleanup efforts.
Courts have transferred ownership of the southern third of the lake to the Coeur d’Alene nation. The Tribe is actively involved in the lake’s restoration. They are also convinced that neither state nor federal efforts are currently enough to clean up the lake.
Seventy-five million tons of contaminated sediment – arsenic, lead, zinc, and cadmium – lay/lies at the bottom of the lake. That represents a lot of money under the waves, and that’s likely where it will need to stay. The consequences of trying to manually bring those heavy metals to the surface has scientists on edge.
And it’s possible that those metals could come to the surface on their own. An oxygen “cap” currently traps those sediments. But as algae and nutrients continue to enter the lake, the oxygen levels drop. Scientists worry that those metals could become soluble and reenter the water column.
I’ve heard that things are safe on the lake, especially on the north side, furthest from the Silver Valley. I think that’s wonderful. It is one of the world’s most attractive lakes.
But I’m pretty sure I won’t be casting a fly into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River any time soon.
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Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Timber Wars,” a term used to describe the fierce conflict between the environmental community and the timber industry in the late 1980s and 90s. Enviros with Earth First chained themselves to trees. Fights broke out. People landed in jail and some in the hospital.
The battleground was primarily in the Pacific Northwest, but the fight did spill into the St. Joe and Clearwater national forests in Idaho, as well.
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Of course, the combatants all believed they had the better arguments. Eventually, a collaborative process engineered by then-governor Jim Risch attempted to solve the riddle of what to do with Idaho’s nine million acres of public roadless land.
Tom Tidwell, then Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, was one of those around the proverbial table, attending innumerable meetings, attempting to reach consensus about old growth, the building of roads, large-scale wildfires, and other issues that had divided westerners for years.
Chief Tidwell didn’t expect much to come of the meetings, he told us for our 2022 program, “The Next Chapter.” In fact, he expected it to be a waste of time.
“But what I saw was something that is still probably one of the more meaningful experiences I've had in the agency,” he said, “about how you were able to bring people together and really allow them to share their thinking.
“You didn’t challenge a person’s values. You listened to them. And what came out of that was an agreement where the Administration could buy off on it, the governors bought off on it, and the communities bought off on it.
“I’m still somewhat in amazement that we were able to do that, and today you see that throughout the nation.”
I’m reminded of something I once read: All I need to know I learned in kindergarten. Listen to each other. Respect differences. Play fair. Say Sorry when you hurt someone. Hold hands and stick together. Oh, and be sure to flush.
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(what I took out, below... good idea? I think so)
People felt good about being part of the process, said Tom. They also came to realize how much everyone had in common.
Lower-case collaboratives began springing up in virtually every forest in Idaho. Fueled by frustration of little getting accomplished, foresters, county commissioners, the conservation community, and others, decided to give collaboration a try.
As one seasoned conservationist told some of us, what did we have to lose? “We had gotten pretty good at shutting things down through lawsuits. But we weren’t so good at getting important things to happen on the landscape.” He figured environmentalists needed a new shtick.
He gave this as an example, “We probably won’t agree on wolves, but maybe we can agree that old growth trees were at risk from dense undergrowth, or that the forest around the edge of town could use some thinning of medium-sized trees. Or maybe we can take out the road that’s running up the gut of the stream and move it to the ridge.
“And so we went from projects that were just hamstrung by one side or the other, and we started liking what we were seeing. Basically, everyone comes together to develop a proposal and then brings it to the Forest Service.”
After Idaho’s Roadless Rule passed judicial muster in 2011, U.S. Senator Jim Risch and Governor Butch Otter, issued a joint press release. “This ruling shows that the collaborative process is viable in resolving federal public land disputes at the state level,” said Senator Jim. “Idaho has the only roadless rule in the nation developed by a state, based on input from the full spectrum of wildland users.”
Governor Butch added, “I believe this decision closes the chapter on a 40-year controversy and validates a new model for resolving natural resource issues across the West.”
Idaho Conservation League’s public lands director John Robison put it this way. “Really effective collaboratives envision what success looks like for all the parties and then celebrates it when it happens. There is no room for a zero-sum game, where someone wins and everyone else loses.”
It reminds me of something I once read: All I need to know I learned in kindergarten. Listen to each other. Respect differences. Play fair. Say Sorry when you hurt someone. Hold hands and stick together. Oh, and be sure to flush.
I too had probably been sued as much as any forest service employee in the, in the assist stone, um, from when I was a district ranger for a supervisor and, and a through the systems. And, um, and to be fair, we won the majority of those lawsuits. But the problem with that is that we were getting sued and, um, and today there's very much less, uh, litigation than there was.
Speaker 3 (00:45:10):
And all, I think a big part of that was this concept of collaboration.
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“A thousand cups of coffee.” That was the strategy Craig Gehrke adopted to save the Owyhee Canyonlands from the encroachments of civilization. And we’re not talking a white chocolate mocha from a Boise coffee shop. We’re talkin’ real cowboy coffee.
“I often suspected that folks in Owyhee County treated coffee like they did their sourdough,” said the director of the Idaho Wilderness Society. “They never made new coffee. They just kept adding to the coffee grounds and kept refilling the water.
“I’m pretty sure our ‘Thousand cups of coffee’ strategy took years of functioning off my poor kidneys.”
But surprisingly, against all odds, the ranchers and the enviros figured out how to work together.
It helped there was a common enemy: modern civilization. It also helped that the major players in the environmental community decided to try a different approach: visit the ranchers in their homes and eat the baked pies they were given, and drink that lousy coffee.
(more of Owyhee Canyonlands, to end of chapter. My goal is to not get deep in the weeds, but to use interesting quotes from ranchers (from our shows) and from enviros like Gehrke and Robison at our coffee gathering where my recorder was running... basically make it about what worked and why... and not so much about acreage)
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