Stand for the Land: A Defining Duty of Richard A. Wilson

By Tom Harris

Richard A. Wilson is a remarkable man, grounded in courage and commitment, fighting for what he loves – the land, our water, and our forests. For most of his long life, he has lived near, played and worked in and sought solace from the deep woods in remote Northern California.

Richard’s story, as transcribed in the early years of this century, records how he faced down and defeated powerful interests, including water guzzlers, intent upon developing a massive dam that would have inundated part of his land and much of Round Valley near Covelo, destroying the flows and habitat of the high reaches of the Eel River; recreational development to create a massive subdivision in that same remote area; and timber war lords and road builders determined to cut up and liquidate the natural forested landscape of Northern California. As a bi-partisan Republican conservationist and man for the land, Richard accepted public service leadership, on the initial California Coastal Commission, the State Board of Forestry & Fire Protection, and two terms as Director of the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection. He has helped save wild rivers from dams, the remarkable California coastline from excessive development, productive farmlands from massive subdivisions, and has fought endlessly to protect and preserve the health and vigor of our forests.

As he reflects on his efforts over many decades, he acknowledges the dangerous reality that we as a people face more so than ever, as we lose an understanding of our natural landscapes and yield to increasing influence from power and greed. While this book recounts the history of one man’s remarkable efforts, it gives instruction about what we encounter today, and how we must meet contemporary dynamics, ecological conditions, and community needs.

Richard presents an urgent invitation for all to embrace a new conservation ethic and strategy of the land and conversion to a more natural economy. Based on his experience and commitment, Richard urges us to face head-on the merchants of greed and self-interest and to no longer subjugate our natural resources to those forces. For Richard, we need individual and collective efforts anchored in community to protect our natural heritage. Here is a story of one man, who successfully challenged many powerful forces, and as he looks back and stands in the present, inspires us to change course and embrace, with just and dedicated action, a great cultural, spiritual and education change to care for our common home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781098087838

Tom Harris

Tom Harris has spent two decades in the animal liberation movement and is a former coordinator of SHAC. He received a five-year prison sentence during the attempted 'elimination' of the anti-vivisection movement and is a named victim in the Miscarriages of Justice category of the Government's Undercover Policing Inquiry.

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Stand for the Land

A Defining Duty of Richard A. Wilson

Tom Harris

Copyright © 2022 by Tom Harris, Richard A. Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

In Defense of Home

Dams and Buried Dreams

Omens of Depletion

Madness in Mendocino

The Gap Widens and Mendo Fights Back

The Great Timber Wars

The Fires of Summer

Runaway Fires

Legacies Preserved…and threatened

Treachery Within

Gloom of Night/Hope of Dawn

Prologue

Richard Alexander Wilson’s life, by his own frank admission, has not been so momentous as to merit much biographical note. But what happened to him as life overtook—and often threatened to overwhelm—his plans and dreams certainly does. Life, of course, happens to us all, shouldering its way into and sometimes over our most cherished perceptions and preferences. But in Richard Wilson’s case, events did not merely unfold so much as they cascaded, crashed and collided over, around and upon him.

How anyone responds to such pressures and challenges is the mark by which others judge and assess their values, principles, and, above all, the courage to live by them. On those standards, Richard Wilson would pass anyone’s test of personal courage and commitment. Environmental protection has been a by-word to him, and the imperative to protect and preserve our watersheds and forests, key components of our natural ecology.

Richard Wilson has fought for what he loved—the land, our water and our trees.

He knows the irreplaceable value of our rivers and watersheds, at risk from overuse and great water development projects, for the lanky rancher was nearly swallowed whole by the biggest of them ever proposed in California, defeating the high dam on the Eel River at Dos Rios in the 1960’s, forever changing the face of water development in a state world-renowned for it. After orchestrating the demise of this expansionist dam building history on the Middle Fork of the Eel River, Wilson and a cadre of close colleagues made sure it was not a one-stop, temporary victory, birthing the state’s Wild River System that made permanent the rescue of not only the Eel but such other North Coast rivers as the Smith, Klamath, Salmon, Scott, Trinity, and Van Duzen.

If Wilson’s life has been metaphorical for the much of his native state’s struggle with a wide sweep of environmental and conservation issues, his own preference for metaphors to all that is wrong with modern society’s extractive demands on natural resources are trees. He has lived near, played, and worked in and sought solace from the deep woods for most of his life. Regrettably, those experiences also had a dark side: a protracted view of how California’s vast forests have been gutted by an industry that ravaged not only the environmental values of the resource but its own long-term profitability too, all in an unconscionably greedy race for short-term profits.

How well he succeeded at each task will only be determined by time, and an uncertain future. His once-sprawling cattle ranch has morphed into a more compact and sustained shadow of its former self while the state’s depleted forests still teeter between ravaged past yet promising future.

Environmental concerns are more elevated now than at the century’s turn and their impacts even greater.

Demands on our rivers are far outstripping supply and the pressures just keep building and growing, with less and less fresh water for people, fish and wildlife, and our forests. Our forests are not just tinder dry, but explosively so. We are, it seems increasingly clear, only a spark or a strike away from catastrophe; from seeing our homes go up in flames, families dashing out the door just moments after evacuation orders, creatures of the forests threatened with instantaneous destruction, at worst, and life-threatening relocation, at best.

The vivid word pictures of California’s hectic and rapacious logging past herein contained now seem more prescription than prologue to an ever more combustible future.

Few could imagine our future in 2000. Fewer still could see it. Richard Wilson, then and now, a true man of the land, could…and did, with unblinking clarity. He was brought to that unnerving view first as a rancher in Northern California’s uncluttered and largely unsettled Round Valley, along the isolated eastern fringe of Mendocino County, and, then as a conservationist-cum bureaucrat. His life was virtually catapulted from only having to learn how to peacefully co-exist with the stands of rich timber that bordered his meadows and grasslands to managing the vast sweep of the state’s entire forests, second only in size and productivity to those of far-off Alaska.

The question for all those with a stake in the outcome, whether just Wilson and his cherished Buck Mountain Ranch, or ALL of the state’s residents and California’s nearly incomparable timberland is singularly similar: Will safe, sustainable stewardship win out or profligate pillage prevail?

Introduction

Milk and honey have never been enough for California. Neither streets paved with gold, the world’s tallest trees, the lower 48’s highest mountains, richest soil, greatest climate, nor the planet’s biggest waterworks. The promise and promotion have always come in capital letters and broad, bold strokes. Of course, they always exceeded reality. They still do. It remains a promised land of innovation, where discovery is limited only by imagination. Though .com millionaires no longer mushroom overnight, there still are dreams to be lived and fortunes to be made, waiting just around the corner of the next technological revolution.

If our past is rooted in landed immigrants who worked the soil, rocks and plants for a bounteous supply of goods, the popular view of the future is being guided by a new force of landless explorers. The break has been more than just with the land, itself, but with the processes that regulate and take place upon it, and our understanding of and commitment to them.

What is not beyond calculation—nor agonizing observation—is the increasing pressure put on a static land base and the diminishing resources it can supply each new wave of nearly a million people a year. Farmland is playing out, salting up or being paved over in urban sprawl. Forests have been wantonly over-cut and many of the species they sheltered evicted. Fisheries have been decimated. Water supply reservoirs are being drained, groundwater aquifers over-drafted, and air basins increasingly polluted as huge new tracts of homes, some of them 20,000-strong, creep beyond city lines into the state’s shriveling productive land base. More fires are raging out of control.

The very system of governmental checks and balances designed to guide, direct and attenuate the impact of such growth and exploitation seems badly over-matched. Inadequate or uncaring, unable or unwilling, the result is the same. Rules and regulations are layered atop each other by federal, state and county agencies laboring for survival or supremacy. And what stakeholders—farmers, fishers, ranchers, loggers—are not being driven from the workable land by those pressures are being forced off by merger mania, and the competitive edge it creates for the resulting huge multi-national corporate entities it spawns.

There is a feverish corporate surge to harvest the last of the state’s old-growth forests before bureaucratic arteries harden further and constrict their profit flow. That, in turn, is making a bad situation intolerable. Decades of distrust have so case-hardened many environmentalists that there no longer seems any possible middle ground between the advocates of Clear Cut and No Cut. One seems as intent on ravaging what little is left as the other is on locking it up.

Few Californians are pleased with the prospects of such continuous conflict. Fewer, still, have done as much to avoid or resolve it as Richard Wilson. For a very private man, Richard Alexander Wilson became a very public part of California’s tumultuous environmental history. The evolution was more circumstance than choice. The 3,300-acre family hide-away he inherited and built into a thriving 20,000-acre cattle ranch in mountainous Mendocino County, became more a lightning rod of controversy than the quiet family sanctuary he first envisioned.

First, powerful water interests proposed a massive dam that would inundate part of his holdings in Round Valley. Wilson was David to bureaucracy’s Goliath, one man against the combined force of the California water lobby and the Corps of Engineers and state Department of Water Resources that served it. What started out as a very personal—and often lonely—battle to save his ranch quickly grew into a startling statewide campaign that forever changed the face of water development in a state famous the world over for mighty water works. In the end, it would attract the interest and protection of no less a figure than then-Gov. Ronald Reagan.

The smoke from the heated battle over the high dam at Dos Rios had barely settled when Wilson’s domain was again threatened, this time by a developer more famous for his helicopter and gold-colored Cadillac than blue-suede shoes. The proposed My Ranch recreational subdivision was the largest of its kind in the world. It would have carved up the floor of Round Valley that the Corps could not flood into 8,500 half-acre home sites. Would have is the operative phrase. Wilson’s genius for coalition building energized a county-wide campaign that defeated the proposal and the Board of Supervisors that approved it.

With each triumph, the private rancher became much more public, earning a reputation as a conservationist who was as determined as he was inventive in rallying people to a greater cause than his own self-interest. The mythical rancher, who did his most effective work behind the scenes, suddenly was thrust into the public spotlight. There were overtures to run for high office, and the money to make it happen was proffered by business interests who sought to purchase such allegiance. But Wilson already had eschewed the world of high finance and social connection for a life on the land, to build a place of his own with hard, honest toil.

He was not born into wealth, but he was a close neighbor to it. His parents were well known in Los Angeles, his father a prominent orthopedic physician whose patient list included many of the rich and famous from Hollywood and the biggest corporations. His maternal grandfather, Angus Grant, built the Santa Fe Railroad and was one of the early-day power brokers in Los Angeles. Richard’s familial connections to the social elite would have far less attraction than the love of nature acquired from his father. But they would pay rich dividends in his later life because they gave him entre to the decision makers.

He went to school with the elite at the prestigious Thacher School in Ojai and, later, at Dartmouth College and Cornell University. He could, and did in his earlier life, move with grace and ease in such circles but his love for the land was—and remains—a paramount driving force in his life. He earned his mark, both on and off the land, the old-fashioned way: he worked for it, and worked hard. If his good looks and social contacts were inherited, his own fortunes and love for the land were of his own considerable doing. He made the familial mountain hide-away a bustling 20,000-acre cattle ranch on which he ran upwards of 1,000 head in the Coast Range headwaters of the Eel River’s middle fork, cheek-by-jowl with the Yolla Bolly Wilderness and the Six Rivers National Forest. He loves to say that his beloved Buck Mountain Ranch, is downstream from no one. And he is well right about that. There is nothing above him in that watercourse but the mountain top that births it.

The battles over dam and subdivision were counter-points to more personal and private wars he was forced to wage with timber war lords and road builders, making him personally and painfully familiar with the development pressures that were then straining his native state. He started out to carve a ranch from the mountainous hinterlands but wound up almost being carved up himself.

Wilson is as resolute as he is relentless in living up to principles that are anchored in the bedrock of home and family: living peaceably and productively in a place that rewards hard, honest toil, a credo he hoped the land would teach his own children.

Richard Alexander Wilson’s journey through the resulting bureaucratic, corporate and legal maze of the threats and conflicts he dealt with for so many years is metaphorical for California…and, perhaps, the nation. All his experiences with wild rivers, wilderness, logging, and subdivisions were painful. But he was not defeated by any of them. Helped by many, he fought and won…each time.

Ever true to the creed in which he was schooled, Wilson—like the young men of Athens—always…aim(ed) not only to preserve the things of worth in my native land but to make them of still greater worth. The exercise of that duty took him to and through the halls of government and chambers of court. He spent two terms on the original California Coastal Commission, another on the State Board of Forestry, more than three years heading the Planning and Conservation League, one of the most respected of the state’s environmental groups, and two successive terms as Director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

A bi-partisan man at heart, the rancher-conservationist was appointed by conservative Republican Governors like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson and a very liberal Democratic one, Jerry Brown. His 30+ years of meeting and resolving sometimes bitter conflicts was, at least, an uncommon odyssey. His faith in the desire and ability of people to do the right thing by the land and all it sustained—both domestic and wild—has never wavered.

Though convinced the public still harbors an innate understanding of and appreciation for the land and its ability to succor us all—in perpetuity, if properly cared for—Wilson now fears that the political and economic cards are stacked too high against ordinary citizens. The lines of communication that once allowed him to connect with people all over the union’s most populous state are now so corroded by money and power that they conduct the business of only the very transitory rich and elite, a cadre that seems to shift with every wind of opportunity or exploitation.

Never envious of political office, nor the citizen-legislators that once held them, Wilson now laments that politicians seem interested only in getting—and keeping—a job, with little thought for and less understanding of the land and its resources. To him, they all come too fast and stay too short to know the history of California’s harmonious tapestry of natural environments and working landscapes. Sadly, and worse, they don’t stay in office long enough to learn much about it either. The land, other than as a corridor of commerce, has become an orphan to them.

Wilson helped save wild rivers from dams, the incomparable coastline from wall-to-wall homes, productive farmland from the jaws of massive subdivisions and he fought fiercely to preserve the health and vigor of forests. He did more than his part in helping California survive what he describes as an environmental train wreck in the last half of the 20th century. But he fears that it may not do the same in the 21st century. Caught in the cross hairs of conflict, crises and contention, California is in a dangerous stalemate between power and wealth, on one side, and excessive zeal and intransigence, on the other.

A new ethic for the land and all that it can safely, sustainably produce—for humans and critters—must evolve. Cropping foreign soil for our own benefit not only drives U.S. farmers to their competitive knees but robs host nations of sustenance for their own people while also saddling them with more environmental insult than would ever have been allowed in the U.S. It is one thing, and regrettable enough, to feed an increasing addiction to oil from reserves beneath deserts that support so comparatively few. It is quite another, and immorally so, to now tap the land base of poorer nations to support our increasing societal obesity.

It is far past time for America to come home to, and stand up for its land and both the practical and intrinsic values it represents. It is time for those who still respect the land, and its promise and potential for humans and wild creatures, to stand their ground.

It is in that vein and with that sincere hope, that the following chapters are penned. Over the course of a few years as the new century began, the author recorded Richard Wilson’s oral history and reached back into California’s fascinating past to recover the road signs now lost. The lives and times of many could likely serve as archetypical for all that has gone so terribly wrong yet could go so reassuringly right. But the challenges and triumphs of one such survivor of hectic times provide unusually insightful case histories that can model a wider societal recovery from the fraud, deceit and egregious exploitation that has so clouded America’s moral compass.

Book I

The Land

Chapter 1

In Defense of Home

Buck Mountain is a large protruding shoulder of the Coast Range that flanks the sun-baked southeastern fringe of California’s storied and isolated North Coast. Cattle graze its verdant hillside meadows; summer-run steelhead make their annual mad migration dash up the Middle Fork of the Eel River that is birthed by the tributaries on its west slope. It was an undeniably bucolic setting in the heady days of the early 1960s and an unlikely place—part of the nation’s most populous state—to be opened up by modem pioneers. The dizzying pace and jostle of big metropolitan cities and mushrooming suburbs must have seemed light years out of place and time. But appearances deceive. Bubbling beneath the pastoral facade was a sequence of circumstance that would destroy its tranquility, challenge the integrity of its landscape—and its steward—and thrust the isolated outback of eastern Mendocino County into the heart of environmental conflict birthed by too many years of post-war profligacy. Without warning, the quiescent countryside was about to morph into environmental microcosm, a proving ground for defense of the working and natural landscapes. Its story line would be metaphorical to the wider technological and social revolution shaking and shaping the California experience. Central casting could not have delivered a more unlikely, though artfully effective, setting or cast of leading players.

The news that would begin to turn Richard Wilson’s sweat-stained dream world inside-out and upside-down on Buck Mountain came on an otherwise unremarkable fall day in September of 1966. Only six years back from his stint in the Army, he had already settled in at the ranch and begun shaping his dream. That day, he was in town picking up supplies. Well, town may be stretching credulity a bit. Covelo was really just a wide spot on the road that dead-ends in the pastorally splendid Round Valley, a place so isolated from the rest of California that living there is like being quarantined. It’s probably 10 miles from the ranch up on Buck Mountain, as the crow flies, but 18 torturous, steep, twisting, rutted and dusty ones by road.

The broiling heat of California’s northern interior ridge- and-valley landscape had already baked the green carpet of grass to a light golden-brown. California Gold, the Chamber of Commerce promoters call it, and they are not talking about the kind you smoke, although that is hardly an unknown crop in Mendocino County. By evening, the freshening ocean breezes that seep into the vacuum of the valley’s day-time convection oven had turned the air around the aging but sturdy ranch house balmy. It was redolent with the mixed scent of flowers in Susan Wilson’s garden, and the odd, earthy smell of California Buckeye, mixed with the more pungent aroma of nearby Ponderosa and Sugar pines. It was the smell of money, wafting from hill-top forests that would soon bankroll her husband’s dream of turning the isolated family hide-away he had inherited from his father into a bustling cattle ranch. When Richard returned home from a hard day on the sunbaked hills, they would sit out on the deck and watch the sun go down behind the far-off ridge lines that border the Six Rivers National Forest. They often talked, there, for hours, sharing dreams in the quiet solitude after yet another day of heavy toil. There would be occasional interruptions or shared conversation with their three children—Alex, Marjo and Chris (a fourth, Sarah, would be borne later). But it was mostly private time for the Ivy Leaguer, a graduate of Dartmouth and Cornell, and his attractive, dark-haired, Stanford-schooled bride, an unlikely twosome in that rugged setting.

But the conversation that night was not about anything so pleasant and fulfilling as more land, more cows, more kids and, hopefully more money to finance all of that. They had been uneasy for days, since word had come that the small private plane carrying Frank and Vivian Crawford, and some friends, was missing on a fishing trip to northern British Columbia in Canada. They weren’t missing anymore, Richard told Susan, relaying what he had heard in town that day. The plane had crashed and sunk to the bottom of some far-off lake.

The news carried shock value disproportionate to their relationship. While not personally close, a solid business relationship was flowering into something good for both parties. Frank Crawford and Richard had ridden over what parts of that wild country the meager road system allowed, bouncing along in Frank’s Cadillac or, for the more rugged parts of the ranch, in Wilson’s pickup truck. They were not joy riding. They were eye-balling the majestic, virgin stands of thick pine and fir that covered the upper part of the hills, and the most likely avenue for roads to get at them.

Frank had a small mill down in nearby Longvale and those trees would keep it humming long into the future. Richard, on the other hand, needed money to buy an adjacent 10,000-acre ranch owned by the aging Brown brothers, who had opened up that country decades before. The lush mountain meadows that dominate the lower slopes of the heavily forested Coast Range there were just what Wilson’s growing livestock herd needed. Circumstances dictated a partnership