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In the movie Good Will Hunting, both Robin Williams and Matt Damon
make critical decisions in their lives because they’ve “gotta go see about a
girl.” Much the same thing happened to me at the conclusion of my
Harvard neurobiology studies when I gave up science and followed my
wife, Eleanor Bliss, to a wild valley in southeastern Utah. I’d never been
west of Pennsylvania before suddenly finding myself living full time
outside, building our home in a hayfield from which I could see Arches
National Park, the gorge of the Colorado River, three BLM Wilderness
Study Areas, and the Manti LaSal National Forest. For the next half
century, America’s public lands were the setting for our daily lives. We
drew our irrigation water from BLM lands, gathered stone for the house
and firewood for the winter from the national forest, and hiked and
kayaked and fished wherever we wanted. It was a hard place to get rich,
but a very good place to be poor.

I say I gave up science, but it occasionally came in handy or got me in
trouble, depending on your point of view. Soon after we got settled in our
new home, the U.S. Department of Energy came to Moab looking for a site for the nation’s high level nuclear waste repository. They especially liked the salt formations adjacent to Arches and Canyonlands, and the local politicians were excited about the economic development possibilities.
The common refrain was, “We dug it out of the ground here, so we have a
responsibility to take it back.” I began to tell people that high level waste is not the same as uranium ore, and sacrificing a glorious national park for
the repository might be a poor trade. Within no time, I was the face of the
opposition with a prominent seat on the Utah commission formally
consulting with the DOE. I recall testifying at a hearing with David Brower
when we had to run a gauntlet of enraged uranium miners and county
officials. Ultimately, the remoteness of the Utah sites and our opposition
helped result in the so-called Screw Nevada Bill, that let everybody off the
hook as long as they agreed Yucca Mountain had to take the waste. That
unsatisfying compromise was my introduction to environmental politics.

After falling into the deep end of nuclear waste policy, I began remedial
education about the West, serving as Utah’s representative on the board of High Country News with luminaries like Tom Bell and Ed and Betsy
Marston. I worked on national forest management issues for Robert
Redford’s Institute for Resource Management, and on wild and scenic river
designation for The Keystone Center. I was appointed by Governor Leavitt
to the Utah Board of Parks and Recreation and was a member of the
board of the Utah Chapter of The Nature Conservancy and the Southern
Utah Wilderness Alliance. Meanwhile, at home, Eleanor and I were raising
our two girls, I was the perennial president of the local irrigation company,
and I built custom furniture to keep the wolf from the door.

Somehow, that stew of local visibility and westwide involvement helped
get me elected to the Grand County Council in 1992 when the people
threw out the commissioners and changed the form of government. Seven essentially unpaid neophytes took charge of an insolvent 2.4 million acre county with two national parks, the nation’s busiest BLM recreation
district, a national forest, and the largest roadless area in the lower 48
states. Wilderness issues were on fire, we’d just had a recreation-run-
amok riot at the Slickrock bike trail, and the county was spending all its
mineral lease money on a deeply unpopular road across the Bookcliffs at
the same time our hospital was about to close from lack of that same
money. We had a steep learning curve. After I played a leading role in
killing the road and saving the hospital, I went to a meeting of Utah county commissioners and was shunned after being brusquely told, by the leader of a nearby county, “We like roads!”

As much fun as all that volunteer work was, our kids were getting ready to
go to college, so I took a job as the Utah Director of the Grand Canyon
Trust, marking what is still the only time a paid environmentalist has been a county councilperson in Utah. My older daughter, accustomed to my
working in the woodshop or garden, asked Eleanor, “Mom, why did dad
have to take this stupid, invisible job?” It got even worse when I was
promoted to Executive Director a few years later and began spending half
my time in Flagstaff.

A friend at SUWA once remarked that The Grand Canyon Trust is the
Swiss army knife of environmental groups. The Trust works on issues
across the spectrum. During my time, amid much else, we helped clean up
emissions from coal fired power plants and remove radioactive wastes
from the bank of the Colorado River. I negotiated deals to remove grazing
from over a million acres of public lands and bought two ranches covering
850,000 acres on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Ethan Amuck, who took
over when I retired, led the largest forest restoration program in U.S.
history in northern Arizona. Perhaps most significant, we created a
groundbreaking Native America program where my Navajo staff members
and their communities led the way in killing a proposal to build a tramway
into the heart of the Grand Canyon, and ultimately helped win designation
of the Bears Ears National Monument.

We were aided in all the work by a spectacularly accomplished Board of
Trustees, including David Getches and Charles Wilkinson. Both were dear
friends and served terms chairing the board. Thus, it is an honor and a
kind of homecoming for me to become associated with the Getches/
Wilkinson Center. I hope to repay my inestimable debt for all they taught
me by working to protect America’s public lands.