Way back when. I guess I can say that about 1983. That was the year that I first saw helicopters dropping white balls on pine plantations in the Shawnee National Forest near our property. After a little research, Kristi and I discovered that the white balls were not snow, nor confetti, nor ticker tape. They were an herbicide called "Velpar" in the form of "gridballs." Don't you just love that word, gridballs? Brings all kinds of things to mind.

We hadn't been notified about the spraying. The Forest Service officials we contacted afterwards told us it was perfectly safe, but we were to find out otherwise. It's not safe at all. It's a very toxic material. A trip to Metropolis, Illinois, to an open office by our then congressman Paul Simon, expressing our concern about what the Forest Service was doing, is what got us started in our national forest management "activism." Our beginning attempts at organizing lead us to an SIU zoology teacher, Dr. Ann Phillippi, who advised us to start a local organization, which we did - ACE - the Association of Concerned Environmentalists. This was basically us, our neighbors Jan Wilder and Craig Rhodes and Charlene Brown, and a friend Lou Coots. We started putting out a newsletter. Our organization became a real entity.

This has lead us down many a winding road through the mountains and hills, but the particular path I am going to wander down the memory of today regards encounters with the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club dates back to the days of John Muir, who they claim is their founder. John Muir, luckily for us and for him, lived in a time where a person could wander the country and actually find untouched natural areas - wilderness. He loved these areas and thought they should be protected from exploitation and development. The Sierra Club was an outgrowth of his travels, observations, writings, and activism.

And let's not kid around here - Sierra Club is a large national organization that has a multi-million dollar budget and wields considerable influence in our nation's political discourse. It has a pretty high name recognition, and the full support of the Sierra Club in a campaign can often times push it over the top.

When we first started being active in national forest management, we were lead to the Sierra Club. Of course, we had moved down to the bowels of one of the most rural, highly forested counties in southern Illinois, where being an "environmentalists" (I never liked that word) was unheard of, and the Sierra Club was the enemy because they were trying to "lock up" the forest through "wilderness" designations.

The Sierra Club was happy to have someone advocating for the environment down in the rural counties. Up to that point, environmentalism was the domain of Carbondale, southern Illinois' college town. And we were happy to have the powerful Sierra Club on our side. (so we thought)

The first big project which brought Kristi and I together with the Illinois Sierra Club was the first Shawnee national forest land and management plan development. This occured primarily from 1985 - 1987. We were still learning about national forest management, but we had learned that they were developing their first plan under the National Forest Management plan.

The Sierra Club's main contact person at the time (and still, actually, having been entrenched in the position for so many years there doesn't seem to be anyone else) was a young man named Jim Bensman. Jim handed me a Wilderness society publication at a public meeting sometime in the early-mid 1980s entitled "How to Appeal a Forest Plan" which I found very useful. We ended up working with Bensman and the Sierra Club in appealing the Shawnee Plan.

The Sierra Club insisted on writing the appeal, and we let them. We could have done it though, as we had already successfully appealed herbicide projects on the Shawnee, in effect, shutting down their program. And Mr. Bensman did a fine job of the appeal. But, instead of deciding the appeal, the Forest Service requested that we enter into negotiations with other appellants and intervenors to try and resolve the appeals outside the formal process. We all agreed that would be ok.
To be continued