"Keith knows better science, better law and is more competent than 95% of activists working today....The agents of death to wilderness travel on roads and Keith has used the Forest Service's own regulations to close more roads in US National Forests than any activist in the entire country."
Jasper Carlton, of the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, a long-time, effective litigator on behalf of endangered species. "We've been effective because we focus on a few issues, a defined geographic area that I know and hike and love, and because we've studied how the science and the law works. We've carefully chosen our shots. Then, when we decide to move on an issue, we've been relentless. Just relentless. Also, I work only a few hours a day. That contributes a lot to my effectiveness. A lot of our problems stem from our obsession with what we do rather than who we are."
Keith Hammer
After finishing school,
Keith Hammer worked for the National Forest Service on a trail maintenance crew and then as a small-scale logger. Now, at the age of 43, he directs the Swanview Coalition -- a grassroots group focused on closing roads in the Flathead National Forest. Swanview's membership fluctuates between 75 and 100 members, mostly in Northwest Montana. "There have been times when we had an international membership," he says, "but the guy moved back from Japan..." On the back of their newsletter is an appeal asking supporters to select from one of three contribution categories: "A token", "A chunk" or "All you've got". At one point in the interview, Keith said, "Activism has to be fun on some level. To a certain degree it has to be hell-raising -- well-intended and directed hell-raising, but it has to be hell-raising. You have to enjoy stirring up the pot a little. Rocking the boat. Getting people to think."
Keith lives north of Big Fork, Montana and east of Kalispell on Foothill Road -- the country road furthest up into the Swan Mountain foothills. Many of his neighbors are artisans, crafts people, carpenters, and people doing "informational work like me -- people with their offices at home who use fax machines and email." I asked Keith if his activist work paid enough to support him. "It's enough to live simply, which is all I ask for."
His house is a small cabin built on the bed of an old semi-trailer. "Now I've added on to it isn't mobile anymore. But it's still relatively small. And I have a smattering of other small buildings, mostly made out of re-cycled wood from places that were being torn down. They are about eight by sixteen, or sixteen by sixteen -- easy to heat with wood.
Over the years, I've selectively logged the seven acres of land I own here. I've tried to take personal responsibility for the wood I've used. I don't want some timber corporation creaming a mountainside and saying that they did it for me. So I decided to do it in my own backyard....Instead of oil wells in National Forests, maybe they should be in suburban backyards.
"I once got an invitation in the mail from a realty company for a free appraisal. I thought, 'Why not?'" Two women came out and as they stepped out of their car, they seemed in kind of a state of shock. They tried to be polite, but you could tell it was difficult. All of my places are on makeshift foundations. They are so small that they don't need real foundations -- they just kind of float on the surface. To sum it all up, none of my buildings would qualify for a FHA loan or anything like that. And yet I'm content. We use one building as a creative space, for meditation, an art studio and as a guest house....Some of my friends like to come up and hang out for a couple or three weeks in the summer....
"One of the primary things that I am up against personally is distinguishing between quality and quantity. It's also a major impediment to the social changes that we need -- to consume less, to be content with less, and yet still have a high quality of life. Yes, we all need shelter. But there are some ways to provide ourselves with inexpensive, easy-to-heat shelter....It's a challenge living what we espouse, but if you can do it, you find an inner peace. Being true to ourselves is the most valuable teaching we can offer, to ourselves or anybody.
Effectiveness
"We decided to concentrate on roads for a bunch of reasons.
First, almost anything that adversely affects wilderness requires a road: logging, mining, hunting, ATVs, snowmobiles, mineral and oil and gas extraction. Second, the regulations governing roads are clear and easy to understand; roads that adversely affect threatened or endangered species can't be built. If they already have been built, they must be removed. Also, roads are something that an ordinary person can easily understand and challenge the Agency on, based on some time out on a weekend. It's not like trying to understand wildlife biology, or count grizzly bears or woodpeckers. Roads sit there. You can go out and photograph 'em or measure them with the odometer on your car or your bicycle.
"The Forest Service does it's own research into roads and how they affect threatened species like grizzly bears and bull trout. Grizzly bears require big chunks of undeveloped land. Unlike wolves and other species that may be in trouble, grizzly bears have a slow reproductive rate. They are down to less than one percent of their original numbers, and less than one percent of their range in the lower 48. They are an excellent indication of true wilderness. The results of these studies often conflict with what the Forest Service wants to do, so they can be difficult to get a hold of. It may even require suing them under The Freedom of Information Act -- but eventually you can get access to them.
"The Forest Service recently acknowledged that there are at least sixty thousand miles of roads in our National Forests that aren't accounted for. They even admit that their estimate is conservative. The only reason that there is an estimate at all is that activist groups have been hammering on them, literally, forest by forest, road by road. There could easily be two or three times that number. To close roads, we've sometimes had to resort to lawsuits....Well, actually, we've had to resort to about twenty-five or thirty lawsuits. We've learned to file them not only against the Forest Service, but also against the Fish & Wildlife Service, who are supposed to enforce road issues on behalf threatened and endangered species. Often, though, it's politically inconvenient so the laws aren't enforced without court orders."
War Stories
"We try to keep three lawsuits going at a time going on the Flathead National Forest. The favorite tactic of the Federal Bureaucracy is the shell game. You file a lawsuit against the forest plan, and they tell the judge that if a citizen group wants to stop a particular timber sale, they have to sue against that sale. If you do that, the Agency responds tells the judge that you are in the wrong place, that you should be suing over the Forest Plan. So our strategy is to sue at both those levels, and perhaps a third level of planning and put them all in front of the same judge. That seems to slow down the bull****.
"Of the cases that the Forest Service doesn't settle, we have won the great majority. Our victories though usually only come on appeal. We have a pro-development district court out here and an old judge that has been around forever. We lose everything in his courtroom....But we're on a first name basis.
"On the Flathead we shut the logging program almost completely down one year -- they cut less than six million board feet, when they were planning on a hundred. We did it by using their own science to prove that they already had too many roads. We won that with a young attorney just out of law school who wanted to help grizzly bears. We were joined in the suit by the Sierra Club Legal Fund, but ultimately we disagreed with Sierra over a major issue and parted company. The young attorney stuck with us and in the end, out of twelve claims, the one he stuck with us on was the only one we won. It was a major, major victory. Precedent-setting. Sometimes it's like watching the numbers line up on the jackpot machine. It is impossible to figure out, but it's humbling to sit back and realize that there is something larger at work. We stumbled across paperwork that proved our case. We were up against all odds and had to even fight other environmentalists to persevere."
