Mitch Friedman founded Conservation Northwest in Bellingham in 1989 and serves today [2024] as its executive director. With a stated mission to "protect, connect and restore wildlands and wildlife from the Washington Coast to the British Columbia Rockies," Conservation Northwest has helped protect hundreds of thousands of acres in Washington, including vast swaths of the state's forests. In this 2024 interview with HistoryLink's Jill Freidberg, Friedman details his early experiences in environment studies at the University of Washington, gettting arrested "about a dozen times" at anti-logging protests, brainstorming the Ancient Forest Rescue Expedition tour across the U.S, collaborating with the Paul G. Allen Forest Protection Foundation to protect Washington's Loomis Forest, and the reason he started Conservation Northwest in the first place.
Origins
Mitch Friedman: When I was 12 and 13, I went on YMCA canoe trips in the Boundary Waters. Those had a huge impact on me. It was sort of like my template for wilderness and this encounter with a moose in the early morning when I was the only one up. Bull moose standing knee-deep in a misty lake. And well … my older brother when I was a kid, maybe sometime in middle school, gave me a subscription to Jacques Cousteau and Cousteau Society. And so my wall was Calypso Log centerfolds. And then later, I think he gave me a membership in National Wildlife Federation. And so I remember having a daydream as a kid that someday I would win the lottery and give a million dollars and get to meet Jay Hare, who was the head of Wildlife Federation, you know, I … since I didn't believe in God, but I kind of had attitude about people, being part of something bigger meant nature.
Finding Earth First!
MF: I went to college to keep pole vaulting. I was a state medalist pole vaulter and not a very engaged student in high school. I took all the science, natural science classes I could. At Montana State I was enrolled in wildlife management, and I didn't know what that meant. The computer spit it out because of the science stuff, my nature interest. But I had attitude about that. I didn't want to manage nature. And so that didn't last. I was two years there. So, I went to UW. Enrolled in philosophy. My first day in the dorm I'm looking through the curriculum book and I see environmental studies. I had never heard of that. So I immediately change to that and you can't get a degree in that. You can only double major. So I ended up getting my degree in zoology and environmental studies. The spring of my junior year there, there were flyers for an Earth First! meeting, and a guy I had just met in a class and we're looking at that talking about it so we go to that. And many of my best friends to this day, several of them I met that night.
I had already read Ed Abbey, right, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and you know I was into nature in a big way. And so while I didn't know what Earth First! was, as I'm at the meeting and hearing this stuff, I’m like this is, you know, this is me. So that must have been March or early April and Earth Day was coming up and I took the lead to organize an Earth Day thing. And so I just pulled together some couple professors. I remember Al Runte, who was a environmental historian. He agreed to speak and somebody else, I can't remember who else, it was an outside in front of the Hub and it was raining and people were walking by not paying attention. And that pissed me off and I got determined.
The next year I was, I had a big opportunity. I got to go out and study at Friday Harbor, marine larval ecology. I was the only undergrad with a bunch of postdocs and stuff like that from all over the country. And I was organizing a three-day Earth Day while I was sequestered at Friday Harbor, right. There were no cellphones or email or any of that, so I don't know how I did this. And I remember the ferry leaving Friday Harbor as I was going to orchestrate the Earth Day. And this was, you know, 17 graduate credits or whatever and all my classmates were lined up on the beach, and my professors, who were luminaries, chanting "no credit, no credit" as I'm sailing off. But I pulled off this big Earth Day. It was well attended, all the things. David Brower, Dave Foreman, Randy Hayes from Rainforest Action Network, an economist from OSU, Ed Whitelaw, who became a big deal. And no one had organized an Earth Day at UW for a decade prior to these ones. I don't know what happened since, but I left behind how to organize an Earth Day at the Environmental Studies Institute.
Getting Arrested
MF: My role was to organize protests. I mean, I did some nefarious things, pulling survey stakes. I spiked trees a time or two. But that wasn't my thing and shouldn't have been my thing, right, I was the visible person. After that original Earth Day, the one in the rain, I organized a gathering, which probably was in June of 1985. Mike Roselle, who's one of the founders of Earth First!, had come up with a couple of folks who had been, who had just done the first tree sit in the oldest trees in Oregon, the Millennium Grove. But sometime thereafter I was in Corvallis, at a house that Earth First! was renting, preparing for an escalation of that tactic, and we built platforms out of wood, and six of us went up and we each had a tree, and we each had a different way to get up the tree. You know, that was heady, I was 80 feet up a tree with a giant banner, "Give A Hoot Save The Spotted Owl" or something. I had to come down out on my tree to go to Alaska. I was doing a fisheries job, I was a foreign fisheries observer, but when I came back in the fall and went back down there, and the trees had been cut. So it was a three-year period so like from '85 till December of '88, and I got arrested probably a dozen times in that period
We locked ourselves in the entrance to the Siskiyou National Forest in Southern Oregon. Spent a week in jail down there. The first forest protest in Washington was summer of '86. There was a timber sale by Cle Elum. We went and did a protest at the Ranger station. We had costumes, Smokey Bear and Spotted Owl and all the things, and we had song sheets. I would write songs. "Oh Smokey the Ursus Ranger. You'll never see him in the woods.Cause Smokey lives in an office where he's never up to any good." And we would sing these. This particular timber sale had been appealed and the Forest Service had said, "Okay, we'll voluntarily stay the operations. We won't log until this is worked out." My experience in Millennium Grove, the tree-sit, where we were told by the Forest Service that they wouldn't cut, but then they cut, so there wasn't a lot of trust. And so we spent that night, the night before the protest, out by Blewett Pass, Swauk Meadow, and we fell asleep to a spotted owl hooting and woke up to chainsaws.
Ancient Forest Rescue Expedition
MF: You know, I can remember the community elders, right? So the people of Sierra Club and Wilderness Society. My friend Alan Durning, who runs Sightline. His mom, Jean Durning, I knew all the way back then she was running the Wilderness Society office in Seattle. Melanie Rowland, who's now on the State Fish and Wildlife Commission. And Charlie Rains, they were Sierra Club leaders. Bill Arthur was a Sierra Club leader. And then Earth Justice opened an office in Seattle. All of this was going on in the late '80s, and there was litigation.
And the Dwyer injunction, Judge [William] Dwyer here in Seattle, ruled on, you know, spotted owl-based litigation that the Forest Service was under obligation to protect owls. And it occurred to me, the way I like to say it, as I was getting arrested with the same six hippies. That's not a movement. A movement moves, builds. It was in the winter solstice gathering of '88 up in Ferndale, where I told everyone that I had this idea for a giant log on a semi-truck as a national outreach tour, and that I was leaving Earth First! to do that, and who would like to help. I went and told my friend Ric Bailey, who was a truck driver and an Earth Firster, and he's like, "I want to drive that truck." And we needed a log, so (we) sent Jack Sprout and Abe Ringel out to the peninsula, pretending to be looking for a log for native carvers. And they come back and say, "We found a log. And there's this guy, I think he's on our side, this mill owner, Stan Schauffler. But let's not tell him what we're doing until we got the log out of state." And sure enough, this guy, Stan, who had been logging out of Forks, so he had a small, small mill he called "Owl Lumber."
And sure enough, after we got out of state and sent him a postcard with a picture of his log on a truck with a banner and everything, he became a friend. He even went to D.C. once with me, lobbying for value-added processing and export restrictions.
And we left on Earth Day the next year, so it was four months to get all that together. Twenty-eight states in 29 days, and every stop was a press conference in the afternoon and a show at night, and back on the road in the wee hours. Hugely successful and very empowering. Truckers in truck stops, people who were having religious experiences running after us as we're leaving, "Wait, wait." The butt end of the log, we had laminated little cards, 814 years old, I think, with the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence. There were people who quit their lives. These guys, Carl Ross and Mark Weinstein, moved to D.C. from New York and started Save America's Forest. They weren't terribly good at it, but they ... There were more than a few people who we met along the way who were like, "I've got to do something."
Loomis Forest
MF: Washington's constitution says that the granted lands are to be managed for all the people. That language doesn't occur in the constitutions of the other states that were given land grants.
In the '70s, right before the recession, wood was valuable. Timber companies bid up state timber sales, and then the bottom fell out on the housing market and they were stuck with these timber sales. And the (Department of Natural Resources), who was in bed with the timber companies, let them off the hook. Skamania County and others sued the state saying that you didn't have the right to make that decision. That was our money. And they won a state Supreme Court ruling. The state interpreted that undivided loyalty to mean the only thing that matters is cutting down trees to provide money for common school construction and other fiduciary trusts.
All right, so Okanogan County sued Jennifer Belcher, who was a progressive commissioner of public lands. It had the intended effect of putting political pressure on Jennifer. So she directed her staff to come up with a logging plan and it was going to cut the last of the state's roadless acres of 2 million acres of forest. And their plan was going to build a hundred miles more, a hundred miles of logging road, and log what was left.
I had written a proposal to Paul Allen's nascent foundation, which was headed by a guy named Bill Pope, Microsoft's first lawyer, proposing that either the Paul G. Allen Forest Protection Foundation set up an escrow for us to bid on federal timber sales or help us buy this Loomis Forest thing. Bill gave me a meeting and I'm in there with the head of Nature Conservancy, Elliot Marks, the three of us pitching Bill and he's looking through the proposals and he says, "This is the one that I think is the home run, the Loomis Forest."
We had to raise a hundred grand in the first three months for earnest money. That turned out to be pretty easy, just direct mail. We got a settlement agreement that gave us 15 months to raise what ended up being about 18 million bucks to ransom this public land. I'm literally in the Board of Natural Resources building in Olympia, standing by the payphone, waiting to hear that Paul Allen has called. And he hasn't called, so I call up Bruce, guy who had already donated a couple million bucks, had given a couple gifts. And he says, "All right, I'll do the last million." I hang up, I walk down the hall to where the Board of Natural Resources were meeting and I said, "We've got the money." They said, "That's nice. We've decided to raise the price three and a half million." Because there was a kerfuffle with the timber industry and alleging the appraisal wasn't good enough.
Sitting there the next day with Fred, my number two, who'd run the campaign, we get this call. I put Sue on speakerphone. "Paul will do the three and a half million." And our jaws just dropped. We're staring at each other and she's like, "Hello." Meanwhile, some other folks had given a quarter million. I remember a call at home, "Can we put a quarter million on our credit card?"
So we ended up that campaign with $350,000 extra. It allowed us to give the Department of Fish and Wildlife 60 grand to study the feasibility of reintroducing fishers, which led to this 15-year successful collaboration that got fishers back in the Cascades and Olympics. And a quarter million to a First Nation in British Columbia, just north of the Loomis Forest, where there was consideration of a 70,000-acre provincial park. And the band had sovereignty concerns, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band is their name. And I made a deal with their band manager and council that we would invest in them trying to diversify their economy and protect their natural and cultural resources. And because of that, this 70,000 acres, three times the size of Loomis, was protected with the leftovers from Loomis. And I still work with that band today. We've done all sorts of great things together.
Oh, oh, oh, one more thing. So that Supreme Court, the Skamania precedent, we hired Dan Chasen, under the oversight of (Hugh) Spitzer, the state's foremost constitutional lawyer, to, you know, look at that issue. He wrote a law review article making the case that the state has a discretion to balance public benefits with the fiduciary returns. And we finally got a Supreme Court ruling on that in 2022, CNW v. Franz. We won. If Loomis were to happen today, we wouldn't have to pay for it.
Conservation Northwest
MF: I incorporated what's now Conservation Northwest in '88. The reason I started this organization was I saw a need for the conservation movement to be more aware of conservation biology, the science of biodiversity protection. A lot of conservation was based on, you know, scenery or spiritual values or recreational. You know, the big trees, even there, a lot of our arguments were, "Think of how old this goes back to Jesus," you know. And I wanted to save wild nature, core reserves and corridors protecting whole ecosystems to sustain all their species.
Well, historically, right, Congress needed a railroad to the coast. So they gave away alternate square miles for 20 miles north and south of the surveyed right-of-way. And so this checkerboard pattern, that with the highway and the railroad going over Stampede Pass, you turn one ecosystem into two, you divide it in half.
Plum Creek Timber Company, which was the land-owning descendant of the railroad, they were logging these square-mile clear cuts in the '80s. The Northwest Forest Plan that Jerry Franklin and others created as a result of the litigation, designated that area around Snoqualmie Pass as an adaptive management area with the objective of maintaining or restoring north-south habitat connectivity to hold the ecosystem together through that land-ownership pattern. And the Forest Service went to implement, through a land exchange, to consolidate land in the checkerboard. They were going to trade away land in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest, in Southwest Washington, where there were fewer activists, in the black hole between Seattle and Portland. But there were enough activists to see that they were trading away nice old growth. And so there was litigation and pushback that shrunk the size of the land exchange. And being shrunk, it didn't accomplish the ecological objectives.
So we raised, again, about $18 million, leveraged $60 million federal. Maria Cantwell was challenging Slade Gorton, and Slade was helping us. He was chair of the appropriations committee, and I got a call a week before the election from his chief of staff, Tony Williams. "Mitch, Slade wants to give you guys $17 million more, but you're going to have to publicly thank him" [laughs]. So we did. Charlie Raines and I did a press conference thanking Slade while Bill Arthur and other Sierra Clubbers were protesting outside. Maria understood, or said she understood. She won that election by, I think it was 500-some votes.
The adaptive management area, the Forest Service had already done research. Biologists out of Wenatchee had already mapped where the tracks were of wildlife and where we knew which were the highest-value parcels to prioritize for north-south connectivity. And that all inspired Doug McDonald, who was secretary of transportation for the state, who at that point was planning to widen and straighten I-90. And he's like, "Oh, this makes sense. We'll make habitat connectivity and wildlife crossings an objective of all major transportation projects." So that's how we got the overpass and the underpasses, and there's more going in.
Throughlines
MF: When I was 80 feet up a tree at 24, 25 years old, I didn't have a perspective on how it would get to the goal line. We were just acting out. So that was '85. Clinton was elected in '92. And in the spring of '93, he held his Forest Summit that he had promised in his campaign. It was in Portland. And we had two weeks' notice, and the Bullitt Foundation said, "We're going to put on a big event, a big concert in the park." And so two weeks later, we're there in Waterfront Park with 70,000 people in the rain, in a bandstand. I'm backstage with Carole King, and we're watching Neil Young play, "After the Gold Rush" might be. And Air Force One is flying overhead, not just with Clinton, but his whole cabinet. And I started to cry, and I said, "Carole, we did it. We've saved the ancient forest."
And it chokes me up every time I think about it. There were a lot of my colleagues, a lot of activists, who were critical of Clinton and of the Northwest Forest Plan. I'm amazed with what we got done, and a whole bunch of decisions flowing from there. I hired good people that have worked with me to this day to get the most out of the Northwest Forest Plan. We went from there to saving the rest of the old growth in Washington to restoration-only forestry on the Wenatchee and Okanagan. We're reintroducing lynx. We capture them in a partnership with the Colville tribes and the Okanagan Nation Alliance. We release them on the Colville Reservation, because there haven't been lynx for the last 50 years in Northeast Washington, because they were trapped out.
And these through lines, for me, it all connects. But maybe the thing that I think of as a singularity that brings it all together, when we funded the Fish and Wildlife Department to look at the feasibility of fisher re-introduction, I figured that report would recommend releasing in the North Cascades first, because there's all this wild public land. But it was too fragmented. Could you sustain a viable population? So the decision was to start in the Olympics. Winter of '08, up the Elwha, released the first fishers. Did that for three years, 100 fishers or so. The next three or so years, fishers in the South Cascades, and then finally in the North Cascades.
Meanwhile, we had stitched the I-90 fracture zone back together with the land and then the structures. And a few years ago, a WSDOT remote-triggered camera captures an image of a fisher running underneath the Gold Creek underpass.
Talk about a singularity that pulls together everything.
