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B y the 1970s, the wilderness movement in the Northwest had come a long way from Karl and Ruth Onthank’s living room in Eugene in 1954. The organizational structure and resources available to wilderness advocates and their influence on decisions regarding land use boundaries had expanded greatly over two decades. In addition, wilderness debates in the 1970s began to represent far more than just zoning and land use policies. They occurred within the context of signi ficant cultural and social change, and young people involved in the cultural protests of the 1960s and 1970s latched onto the issue of wilderness as a battle against the status quo in politics and economic power. The growing influence and awareness of ecology beginning in the 1960s and heightening in the 1970s added greater significance and support to the wilderness campaigns. The former emphasis on recreation and aesthetic values became only one of a host of concerns, which now included wildlife and fish habitat , endangered species, biological diversity, and watershed health. The often confusing mix of voices that supported additional protection for de facto wilderness was a direct product of the growing grassroots nature of the wilderness debates. Not only did citizens have greater access to the decision-making process, as seen with the Alpine Lakes debate, but 99 5 returning french pete to the three sisters wilderness area, 1968–1978 map 6. French Pete Creek, Oregon. Map by Peter Morrison and Barry Levely. Project MUSE (2024-04-23 21:05 GMT) more citizens joined the efforts, bringing a more diverse set of interests, concerns, and strategies with them. The extent to which the debate had changed by the 1970s is most apparent when it returns to focus on the forests west of Horse Creek in Oregon that had been the central concern of the Onthanks when they helped to form the Friends of the Three Sisters in 1954. Bob Marshall instigated the addition of this rugged country of the lower “Old Cascades” to the Three Sisters PrimitiveArea in 1938, and the Forest Service removed that protection in 1957. The agency began to build roads into the northern sections of this 53,000-acre parcel in the early 1960s, but by 1968, no roads had yet reached into the drainage of French Pete Creek. The Forest Service intended to log these areas, but greater citizen influence over wilderness decisions through Congress and a growing social movement of environmental concerns supported wilderness advocates in Oregon as they once again challenged the 1957 decision in the Three Sisters. The French Pete debate demonstrates a significant change from earlier conflicts and from the concurrent discussion over the Alpine Lakes. For the first time, the area proposed for wilderness designation consisted solely of low- and mid-elevation areas with significant amounts of commercial timber. As a result, there was no support from the Forest Service or the timber industry for any wilderness designation. Each of the previous debates had established agreement on creating a wilderness area; disagreement focused only on the boundaries. In French Pete, the Forest Service and the timber industry stood firm on their insistence that none of this area should become wilderness, that “multiple-use” forestry should prevail. To the growing environmental movement, French Pete became a battle cry for something greater: to determine whether any part of the timber base of the national forests could be put off limits to logging. Brock Evans, who coordinated the wilderness campaign in French Pete in its early years, wrote, “we would make the battle over this valley the ‘Verdun ’ of our struggle with the industry in Oregon.”1 As a result, this debate was far more combative than earlier conflicts, and it laid the foundation upon which later high-profile disputes over forestry and wilderness in Oregon would be based. French Pete had once been a very typical, anonymous forested valley draining the western slopes of the Cascades. At French Pete Creek’s Returning French Pete 101 confluence with the South Fork of the McKenzie River, just upstream from the Cougar Lake Reservoir, the elevation is 1,900 feet. The highest reaches of the drainage top out at nearly 5,000 feet. The forests at the center of political debate were not unusual either in their size or their commercial value. Large fires had destroyed much of the timber in the 1800s. The trees, mostly Douglas fir, were relatively young, about one hundred years old. Until...

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