Not only during this time period did we meet and start to work with folks from what we called the "west" side of the Shawnee - particularly Joe Glisson and Jackie Turner, Bill Cronin and Mindy Harmon, and others, but we also were befriended by Richard (Dick, as we all called him) and Jean Graber. Dick and Jean were retired ornithologists from the Illinois Natural History Survey. They, like their friends the Stannards, had moved to Pope County to places they had bought after they retired. Both the Stannards and the Grabers were highly regarded in the academic world of ecology, having worked for the University of Illinois and the Illinois Natural History Survey.

We actually had met the Stannards first, through the Paducah Audubon group. Dr. Lewis Stannard was a well known entemologist, and had been an outspoken advocate for protecting natural areas. In fact, his work with Dr. George Fell, was instrumental in having the Illinois Natural Areas Protection Act passed into law. Lewis liked Kristi and I because for one thing, we loved Pope County and had been dedicated enough to the area to actually buy land and move here. He also liked the fact that we were working to protect land, and he did not like the direction that the natural areas protection movement was going - toward more and more heavy handed management and less appreciation of allowing natural processes to be the major force on wildlands. He particularly did not like the rush to subject much of the public lands to prescribed burning. He had studied the impacts of burning on small insects that lived in duff habitat, and found that some species either didn't repopulate or didn't repopulate very quickly after a burn.

The Stannards had told us that we would have to meet their friends the Grabers, who were about to move down to Pope County full time. We were looking forward to it. They had a great reputation as ornithologists, but we would come to learn that their reputation didn't come close to describing just how knowledgable they were (well, in the case of Jean, still is) about the birds, plants, reptiles, insects - all aspects of our environment.

One day in 1987, Kristi and I were out working in the yard. We heard a car pull up and stop on the gravel road out front, and I walked toward the path through our hedge in front of our house. As I approached the path, a small but intent woman who I had never seen walked through the hedge path and, seeing me, approached. She asked "are you the ones trying to stop the BT spraying in Oakwood Bottoms." That's a whole other story, but the fact is that, yes, we were the ones. Not knowing who this person was, or whether she was for us or against us, like most of the other "environmentalists" in Southern Illinois, I hestitated to speak, but finally said, yeah, we were the ones. Much to my surprise, she pulled a checkbook out of her pocket and said that she wanted to make a donation to help us, and wrote a $50 check to ACE. After that, we became good friends. And, by the way, the Forest Service did squander untold taxpayer dollars spraying thousands of acres of Oakwood Bottoms with BT to kill forest tent caterpillars. We hadn't learned to file lawsuits yet.

So as the settlement negotiations over the Shawnee plan ground on, the pressure for us to accept "interim timber sales" become progressively more intense. The Sierra Club seemed intent on having an agreement. Besides having the Forest Service agree to recommending all 9 of the inventoried "roadless" areas on the Shawnee for "wilderness study," the most that the agency could do in promoting the areas for congressional designation (something that we had insisted), the main concession that was being offered was that the Shawnee would change their "primary" timber harvesting method from clearcutting to "group selection." The volume of timber to be cut annually from the Shawnee was substantially unchanged, and the definition of what "group selection" meant was clearcuts up to 2 acres.

This was unacceptable to our group. But we tried to continue to work with Sierra Club and the other appellants, who weren't particularly active in the negotiations. But the real straw that ended our staying together with the Sierra Club was when they agreed to language in the settlement establishing a "study" to identify 286 miles that could be suitable for Off Road Vehicle use on the Shawnee.

The Off Road Vehicle interests actually had an appellant - a commercial pilot from the Chicago area, Al Englehardt. Mr. Englehardt liked riding his ORV in the Shawnee with his son. In fact, he said that "it was better than Disneyland." And, he had filed an appeal of the plan. I can't remember his issue. But the ORV groups figured out pretty quickly that Mr. Englehardt was their path to involvement. Before long, he was the face of the entire ORV movement on the Shawnee.

They so badly wanted the settlement agreement to include Off Road Vehicle trails. Ideally, they wanted trails designated by the plan, so that the day the plan was signed, they could out and ride. (Not that they weren't riding now - it's just that we had figured out that all ORV use on the Shawnee was illegal - and there was way too much of it - and we were making noise for enforcement. The ORV riding interests wanted to do as they please on the Shawnee and not have to worry about it.

We were at an impasse. And it was a little hostile. But we had been so badly impacted by wild, illegal off road vehicle use in our neighborhood that we knew if it ever got legal, would become intolerable. We were determined to do what we could to keep that from happening. Kristi was adamant about it.

Finally, there was a showdown one night. It occurred after either an all day and night or an all two day and night negotiating session. It was later in the evening. Things were tense and raw. Some language had been drafted up based on the total number of available roads and trails on the Shawnee that could potentially support off road vehicles - at least according to the Forest Service. I remember Mike Spanel, long time Shawnee wildlife biologist (at that time a wildlife biologist mostly managed white tailed deer) sitting by us on a table in the back of a large room, having retreated, while others worked to agree on language that would sooth Mr. Englehardt and his folks and maybe Sierra Club. It wasn't going to sooth us.

The language, which ended up in the agreement, and which a little research could find the exact language, but I'm telling this story off the top of my head, was basically that there were 286 miles of travelways that could be eligible for off road vehicle use, and that the Forest Service would do a study to see if they might want to "designate" any. A "designation" would require another process - a "site specific" environmental study and public review.

Sierra Club thought that language would protect our interests, because we could fight any eventual designations through that process. We told Sierra Club that we believed that if a number like that got into an agreement, that it would be almost impossible to beat back every attempt at designation. We weren't going to agree. By this time, the groundrule to have to take tenative agreements back to your organizations had been lost in the fog of war, so to speak. Things were being said and written down as if it were gospel. As the evening ticked on, nerves frayed, visions of slimy salamanders were being had, and pressure mounted, the working agreement ended up having the language of the study of 286 miles of off road vehicle trails.

As we more regularly reported back to people that had become very interested in this, as I mentioned before, the calls for us to not agree became fervent. We told everyone that the agreement was going through, regardless of what we thought or said. We agreed with those calls not to agree, and we never did sign anything saying that we agreed to anything. (what a sentence!) Near the end, we asked for advice from Craig and Charlene, Jan Wilder, Joe Glisson and Jackie Turner, Bill Cronin and Mindy Harmon, Dick and Jean Graber, Corinne and Pete Whitehead, and others. We were all very upset that this was going through, and no one seemed to know if there was a way to stop it.

I thought of Ned Fritz. Ned had come to our area, and Kristi and I had been his host, in his tour of national forests in the midwest as he was writing his second book. We spent a wonderful day with Ned, and we established a friendship that would last until he died. I did have his phone number, and knew that he was an attorney. I knew that he had a lot of experience with national forest things. So, I phoned him, and got to talk to him.

He remembered me, and was very warm and friendly. I explained to him that we were in an administrative appeal of the Shawnee forest plan with Sierra Club and some other appellants, and that we had entered into settlement negotiations which had been ongoing for months. Basically, I said that Sierra Club wanted to settle and we didn't, and Sierra Club was going to sign a settlement and we weren't, and was there anything we could do. He didn't hestitate. he said, "oh sure, just file a 'notice of formal separation' of your appeal from Sierra Club and the other appellants with the Chief - do it immediately. That's exactly what I did. That document exists today. I actually got a letter from the Chief's office acknowledging it later, after the settlement had been signed.

In the meantime, Sierra Club agreed to the terms of the settlement agreement, as did the other parties. The Forest Service planned a huge event - a signing ceremony that would serve as a public relations booster as they launched their campaign for a new forest plan. It was held in late summer at John A. Logan community college, in Carterville, Illinois.

The settlement agreement contained the 5 "interim timber sales," plus the study of 286 miles of off road vehicle trails. By this time, the opposition to this settlement had grown. Meetings of local residents concerned about the clearcutting on the Shawnee, which we were involved in, were getting bigger and more frequent. At one of those meetings, after the signing ceremony was scheduled but before it had taken place, Joe Glisson proposed that a new organization be formed that was a combination of the work that we had done with ACE, on taking it regional. That, he proposed, would make it RACE, and RACE would be very appropriate name because were in a race against time to save the areas that were going to be logged on the Shawnee.

Dozens of people present at this meeting were excited, and approving. Joe proposed that I be elected president, and there was approval of that. Our first order of business was to deal with the settlement signing ceremony.