 My name is Christopher Brat. I was born in San Francisco and raised there and actually went to school there through San Francisco State University now, but college. And then through that whole time I was an apprentice carpenter as well. And finished that up and then went to work as a carpenter and spent most of my life carpendering, either there in the Bay area or in the Applegate. Did you specialize in fine woods? Not necessarily, no. I was mostly house building, some high-rise, but mostly house building. In fact, Vicky likes to remember that I right now only carpendered on the little houses on the hillside but sang the song about them too. So that was an old Malvina Reynolds song. Pete Seeger made the song famous, but I was really good at that part. And those houses, those two by fours were prime wood, right? Yeah, most of the housing, especially in the northwest, but even they like it in the east coast too. The studs made out of Douglas fir because the Douglas fir is such beautiful wood, stable as well. So it was good house building wood. I mean, no warpage, stuff like that. And so that's one of the impetus of getting here. So when did you come up here? 1976. But then it gets to the extension of what Paul was saying about the BLM. We have 160 acres here and we just put everything we had into that to buy it. It was very cheap in actuality. $125,000 with a house and it was in pretty good shape, I would say. And continued working on that when I first came here and brought my parents here for four years as well. So a place for them to live in their old age. But what amazed me was they sent out a flyer. The BLM said they were going to herbicide spray right around us. And I couldn't understand the reason why they were spraying anything in the forest. I had had enough experience. Now I was a Sierra Club member, I have to say, because we went on a lot of hikes with them, with kids and family, into the mountains many times. So I couldn't understand what the herbicides were about. So I contacted them and they said, oh, don't worry about it. This is what we're doing, it's called intensive forest management. And it means that what we do is sometimes before, but most of the time after we cut clear cut, we spray the ground and put seedlings in and that kills all the unwanted vegetation. And I said, well, you mean you kill all the other trees, the deciduous trees? And he said, yeah, that's what we do. And I said, well, that's kind of crazy. But so we got involved there and one night the young woman knocked on our door. She traveled up to our place and said, I introduced yourself and said, did you know that the BLM was going to be spraying right close by you here? And we're forming a little group to maybe protest this sale because we don't think there's a good. And my mother was sitting at the, we were just finished dinner sitting at the table. And she said, oh, Christopher, you better do something about that. I said, okay, mama. I did. Yeah. And so they. What was that? It was his mom. Who was the young woman who came to the door? Oh, I don't remember her name now, but she. She was local. She was local. And she died in an automobile accident about two months after that. You know, it's strange right on 238. Didn't make the turn, one of those turns and went into a cedar tree or something. The Volkswagen bus. Kind of a sad story. But that, she gave me a flyer that had a meeting date on it. And so I went over to the Rouge country store there. It's off highway 238 a little bit. And it was run by a young couple there. And we went upstairs to a meeting room and there were about, I'd say 15, 20 people there. And they started telling about what was happening. And of course they said, well, what are we going to do about it? And a couple of people said, well, we should get organized. And I thought that was a pretty good idea. And they said, well, why don't you be the chairperson? I said, well, I got lots to do. I don't know if I can devote all the time. And I don't know if Paul said, well, I'll help. And they said, well, you're a co-chairman. And there we were, you know. There we were. Was he in the Forest Service at the time? He worked part-time, I think, at the Forest Service during the season as the fire person. So that's a controversial position to have taken. Well, the BLM and Forest Service are not the same. The Forest Service was spraying all right, but not to the degree that the BLM was. And so it was not, and they're two different organizations, so his job wasn't jeopardized at all. And so I think it was wintertime or cold anyway. And I think I was working on that place for my parents this day, you know, continued working on that. And so we had Paul and I had to go to the barn and work. And I kind of closed it all in a part. And we started our first protest of the BLM timber sale. And we realized that once you made a protest of a timber sale, they would not do the sale until they got some. In Washington, D.C., they have an administrative court. And it had to go to that court for the judges, administrative judges, not federal judges. And they would decide whether it was a good protest or not and stop the sale or not. And we finally realized that they took a whole year to get around to all the protests that had been going on around the country. So that sale didn't go through. And so at the same time, they were starting the spraying of this place around us. And so I told a little fib that my mother was really allergic to chemicals. And they said, oh, don't worry. We'll come around and take her to the movies. They were going to bring a van around. They said they would bring a van around and take her to the movies the day they were going to spray. And I said, well, don't worry about that. It's okay. And that's what one of the real impotences of doing the protest of the spraying. But then as soon as Paul and I found about the, and this was over a period of six months now maybe, that the timber sale we protested took so long never to be justified or rectified either way. We decided we'd do the whole program, the whole BLM program, every timber sale they put forward. So we did. And Medford District. It's a huge area. Yeah. You know, huge. Oh, 900,000 acres, I think something like that. You know, I was a carbonary union member, you know, and so I realized what the problem was. What I was hoping, and we wrote, we did a lot of different things in these protests. And one was to write, we wrote to the BLM employees and asking them to, you know, take on some of these issues. You know. To try and change. You know, that they needed a union. And they don't, they still don't have one. I don't know they may have some organization, but they... Why did a union have been the answer? Because the answer would... Well, there are a lot of standard practices that contractors do that the union doesn't like. You know, and so we say, hey, you know, this is dangerous or that's not good or we want a pension, you know, we want all the, you know, and those are the things that we have to work for. With a collective voice. Collect voice, yeah. Otherwise you have no voice. You know. And of course, you know, the protests, we weren't trying to put anybody out of work. As a matter of fact, we wanted them to do it manually. You know, in fact, that's one of the things that the BLM did try, was to come to the community and said, oh, you don't like herbicide spray? Well, you know, why don't you get in there and get rid of these trees for us? You know, free. Yeah, do it, volunteer. Well, we even tried it, but you can understand that it's... That's all I do in my whole life. You know, just take care of that. So it was a very, it's a complicated question, for sure. And that meant that the workers then had to, they weren't, they were getting sprayed on, as a matter of fact, you know, the workers, they weren't doing the spraying. It was done either aerially, or they had a crew come out with a backpack and do it. No one took them to the movies. Took them to the movies, yeah. Well, it took them to the doctor, probably. Yeah. You know, in the long run, at any rate. So this was in the 70s? In the 70s and 80s, yeah. And so then... And they were in a clear-cut mode, see? So then, you know, we realized that the heart of this thing was in their mode. You know, if they didn't spray, they had to cut in a different way. The clear-cutting was not, then they were using the clear-cutting as the method of getting the trees off. And of course, that then brought more community members into opposition, because nobody even wants to see it, let alone get sprayed on. Because there was this drift and everything, you know, when they did spray. So, and then one of... If there's one thing that I'm proud of is that they haven't sprayed in Applegate, or mainly on the federal lands for the last 20 years, for 15 years, at any rate, you know, because of our protest. They just have gone back to different kind of method in the forest. Clear-cutting is not done very much at all. Still done on the private lands. And you can still... You can still hear and see the cases of that happening in various parts of Oregon. We're in a very dry forest here, and the further north you go, you get into much more damp weather and the coast too, the same sort of thing. You know, there's different ecosystems for sure. And we're probably in the driest one in Oregon for sure, you know. And what bothered me the most was because these forests are so beautiful and so botanically, you know, unique. I think we got, you know, like 27 different conifers alone, you know. And so it's amazing that, you know, a forester would even think of, you know, using a forest to strictly get timber out and not the, you know, the entire picture, you know. And so that's what... And they just meant the weed tree. They called them weed trees at that time. And that's madrone. And that's oak, you know. And the most... Yeah, anything that was not Douglas fir or pine, you know, was burned up. You know, they cut it, cut it all down, laid it on the ground and burned it up and then sprayed it. So it would never come back, you know. Well, there's a lot done on the ground here because, you know, these are... Most of their units are not so big and to put a helicopter in there over a certain place where an airplane coming in and swooping down to do it aerially is much more difficult. They did use helicopters a lot. But they would burn it mostly on the ground and there was nothing there because they chopped it all down and just made piles or just burned it in ground-based burning. So what do you... Where are we now? Well, so what happened was in terms of Chris's story, the headwaters was an environmental group that actually started out here. Yeah, we really got organized. I mean, you know, the opposition to clear-cutting and to spraying really got organized. I like to talk about a woman by the name of Phyllis Cribby who was a nurse in Vietnam and so she saw a lot there that she did not only didn't like but she was an amazing woman and we started out in a little place in Grants Pass. The tower, the tallest building in Grants Pass, you know, that one that used to be a hotel and we had a little room up there and there were four or five of us operating out of this little room and she wrote a protest based on that they did not take a long-range view of what these herbicides were going to do. Phyllis wrote a brief, really, for a lawyer to look at and say, was it worthwhile taking this on, spraying on in a legal way that they... And I forgot the terminology they use now for what they were doing. It was a long-term view that they were supposed to be looking at and they weren't doing it what herbicides were doing to the long-term basis and she wrote this thing up and she got a young lawyer and we kind of all interviewed him and he said, yeah, I'll take it on. I'm kind of new, but I don't know much... There weren't many environmental lawyers at that time either that knew the rules and regulations of the BLM. I don't know if you've ever seen any of those. They got a manual that big and then they got the Endangered Species Act, which is that big and they got all these different things that they're supposed to live by. Well, at any rate, they went all the way to the Supreme Court and we won. And so they stopped doing it all right. They couldn't do it so they had to get rid of it so they just wrote it out of all their documents. But what it led to was no more spraying. So you haven't seen any spraying in the last 10 or 15 years for sure on federal lands. Private lands still you can. So it's the checkerboard over here. Well, those are the BLM lands. They're left over from lands that were supposed to go to be sold for homesteads. So they're... And that's why they got that. And they gave every other square, square mile to the railroads to build the railroads to get in here and to go north and south as well. The Applegate Partnership was founded probably now 22 years ago from... It was in 82. Yeah, something like that. And by this time, a number of environmental groups had formed and headwaters was won. And so we just put these kind of small groups like one in Applegate, one in Grants Pass, one in Selma. You know, they were all around and didn't want the spray in their backyard, you know. I think there were like 15 of them. Yeah, we had quite a... They were watershed-based groups most of the time. And so headwaters became the lead group. In fact, that was an interesting... The name was interesting because we got it from a group in Selma who called it the name of their group was Headwaters. And they wrote an original federal suit against the BLM for not writing their overall plan, resource management plan. They were supposed to do it five years before this group was formed and they hadn't done it. And they started to cut near this couple, Art and Paula Downing was their name. And they had to cross over their land, I believe, Art and Paula's to get to this unit, to the units they were going to cut. And well, they asked to see their plan. Well, they didn't have a plan. And so they filed suit and they won again. They went all the way to the... I don't know whether it went to the Supreme Court, but at least to the appellate court in San Francisco. And they won. And so everything stopped. Everything. Until they wrote their first resource management plan. So we were responsible for that when I say we, Southern Oregon. So that was... So then that was a justification for the herbicide spray, that first book. I mean, they called it the... not the chemical, but the... Yeah, it's basically a chemical approval, you know, to do this kind of clear-cutting use of herbicides in the forest. And so that was the basis for mainly all the protests thereafter. So... I had no idea. Yeah, it's a wonderful story and wonderful happening. And this woman, Phyllis Cribby, this woman, you know, one of my son, one of my son says, Chris, you know, Dan, she's just a bag lady, you know. And that she was. If you saw her walking down the street, she had polio when she was young. So she walked with a, you know, a limp and everything. And she was kind of a hoarder, you know. She salvaged everything and recycled everything, you know. So she was always gathering stuff, you know, to take care of everything. But here she is up in that room, you know, typing away, you know, on her, for one of the first computers, I think. You know, to help this lawyer plead her case. And one, I mean, it's an amazing story in itself. She died very, well, I'd say recently, you know, like three years ago, something like that. Yeah. But I think that the story, but I think that one... What happened to her, you say? She was on her deathbed when she gave me a telephone call. Said, have you, you know, she was always trying, did you get that protest out on such a sale? And I said, well, I think I knew about that there was, and it was about herbicides, of course. They were thinking about using them again or something. And they were trying to, they wrote a special, just a special unit on herbicide use for the BLM. But did you protest that and take care of it? I said, well, I think I did answer it, but I don't know if I took it any further than that. She was, yeah, she was really on her death, but she was living with her sister in Portland. So she took it. Yeah, she was really in bed, you know. She had a fall or something, I think, to get there. I saw her once when she was there. She was in pretty good shape at that time, but she just kind of went downhill, you know, very quickly. Environmental mission, or were there others before that? From my perspective, one of the most amazing, not only women, but people I've ever met in my life. I mean, she's a fan of the blazers, or, you know, is that the blazers of Storgentine? I mean, she knew more. She watched tennis on, you know, she'd go to her sister's house or a friend's house and watch tennis. So, you know, you've got to come prepared to meet her, you know. Whatever you knew about, she knew plenty more. She'd clip out something for me about poetry, you know, and say, hey, you know, have you seen this? I mean, that was very exciting, very exciting for me, you know, because we got to be such good friends, and just amazing. You're one of the first board members of the Applegate Partnership. That's right. So how did you move from that mode of protest? Well, you didn't really move from it. You held on to that, but how did the partnership become important to you? Well, that was interesting too. I was building a house down in, right in Applegate, right in the town of Applegate, and Jack Shipley, who I didn't know at the time, he came by a helicopter guy who was I don't know whether he had a company or he worked for the company. I don't remember exactly his relation, but he seemed to have a power of position in whatever he was doing. And he said, they're getting together a bunch of people, you know, community people and agency people, BLM and Forest Service, and environmental group people, and we heard that you were, I was maybe Vice President of Headwaters at that time or something. Would you be interested in sitting in on these things? Because we're trying to work something out here in the Applegate, working together. This was before the Applegate Adaptive Management Area was ever formed by the Northwest Forest Plan originally. It was formed because of the Applegate Party. That's right, because we were already had taken this step, I have to give Jack Shipley a lot of credit. I don't know if you've ever met Jack or anything, but he's still at it, he's still there. I think he's pretty disappointed that the failure of the agencies to really follow through at this point, and of course I am too, because I thought it was the only way to solve the problem. And that is, for instance, to have the people buying the wood like the timber companies at the table giving an idea of what they needed from, let's say, from the Applegate. Because we have we were special kind of drainage and group and everything, people very interested in their futures and futures for their families and stuff. And the agencies were supposed to be working with the communities and they really weren't at that time. In fact, they were going to alienate it from them because of the spraying and some other things. So we're bringing all these people together and at that time the agencies really went for it. Because they thought it was going to make their road a lot easier. And of course the community said, well, it's going to make the road a lot easier because they have an idea of what they want to do here and we can be involved in that. And then, of course, the people that were cutting the wood, loggers as well as the mill owners were saying they wanted some stability. Well, how do you get stability? You put all these people together to make it work. And it was very exciting to me because in the background of carpentry I started out in San Francisco where they drop a load of wood, a big load of timber and you're building these hundreds of houses and you just never thought about where the wood came from. It's kind of unending when it comes to in that form. And you just don't say, oh yeah, another load of lumber. So we need that. And of course, personally I felt that it was building houses for people that needed living in a house and I was working in the Carpenters Union trying to help get it organized as I should have as a union carpenter and stuff. So it was kind of the second nature then to come into this organization of the partnership. And it was jolly. It was good and it was got jolly. It was jolly because there was a sense of hope. That's right. Not stopping someone like the protest but a sense of a new beginning and a new future that everybody was crafting together. So if it is really sustainability that they want we want sustainability too. And of course, if you're in a timber company that wants to hang around a while you better have some stability as well as sustainability. And so the problem there is as I've envisioned it with people came in, let's say Medco Lumber which owned beautiful part of the Cascades and well in the Applegate they owned land too. And they were cutting it on a sustainable basis basically. And some jokers came in from the east coast bought it, cut all the big trees down and then sold it all off. And they made money at each venture. And they left this high and dry. They're gone. There's not a mill in Medford that really can take raw logs. And what I thought would happen was that we would sustain this so there would be work for everybody and we'd build up the develop sustainably a place like the Applegate. So you didn't have a job now and then the crash would come and there was no need of the wood so you're on relief for some other thing. Some kind. Very strange time not only nationally but internationally. The world is making some realizations about if we're going to live we better start thinking about how we want to live. Can we live with war? Can we live with hating each other? Can we live with nationalism to the degree we have it? I don't know. My experience says no that we have to do it a different way. And you have to do it like the partnership sitting it sitting down at the table getting rid of your animosities what they did in South Africa I think is a good example where the people that were killing people and holding them down got together with the same people and told the stories and got it off their chest and the deaths and everything and start anew. My parents were very strong decent people with very good educations I mean both of them my mother was a college graduate and one of the first women at the school of agriculture architecture actually was one of the first two women graduates from that school and so I came to school with an education really we had everything we were poor we didn't have anything they both were on the WPA works project administration 50 bucks a month that's what we got to live on from the work they were doing and they couldn't both work simultaneously we could only have one person an household working for the WPA at a time so my father who was an actor he came off being an actor in New York and when they landed in San Francisco I was born the day after they arrived there by the way so he would work in a federal theater project he would act or direct or something like that and then that would end my mother would go to work as a nutritionist and going around visiting people that were poorer than us you know showing them how to cook and take care of the kids all this kind of stuff so it was a very varied background and very six we were kicked out on the street one time too couldn't pay the rent the attitude was the other says told them when they wanted to give them one month's rent for one month for the family he said you better make that too because that's not fair to the homeowner not fair to the owner of the property have anything to do with us so was that kind of a background where were you in the family four number four yeah boys don't usually rise don't they well I don't know what where I've risen to I mean I've had a good life you know I mean I was the carpentry I did was at a period of big building throughout after world war 2 you know and then I got pretty good at it and been successful you know there had great partners good women my life mother and sister and two wives so good kids right paradise let me tell you really paradise yeah and it gave me a chance really to experiment was what I besides the partnership which I was very supportive all the way through I was the fact that and the reason we moved here one was not only because the kids were getting our kids were getting bigger and wanted more space and they liked being in all kinds of things that we could do here easily the gave me an opportunity to experiment with the forest you know the other side of carpentry you know what could this wood do for how could we make it because there are some problems here with the wood there's very small diameter very slow growing but very beautiful as far here is probably the most beautiful building wood there is in the world and they were cutting it down and burning it they didn't want anything that small they wanted all the big trees well what do you do when all the big trees are gone you know you got small trees right and then they don't they want them to grow fast too so they gotta get rid of all the unwanted vegetation that means they get rid of all the trees they don't want so I mean it's a big story and it's a big view it's a big view of how you want to live do you want a forest I mean if you look to Europe you'll see that they cut almost all of it down I mean they got little patches here and there you know but it's this we have them magnificent forests in this country in fact we cut two-thirds of them down already you know the Midwest was the best old deciduous forest in the world and it's gone basically you know patches here and there so you know I don't know I did my figuring about it was that we should maintain more of that let's go home to the sea I don't want you to weep after me because when I'm on my journey don't you weep after me when I'm on my journey don't you weep after me when I'm on my journey don't you weep after me I don't want you to weep after me that was a great story