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January 19th 2006 • Printer version
 In the Thick of It:
My Life in the Sierra Club
by Michael McCloskey
Mike McCloskey. law class of 1961, was the Sierra Clubs first
field organizer and its longtime executive director during the rise of
the environmental movement. His new memoir gives
an insider's take on these transformative years.
In Chapter I, he talks about his childhood and youth in Oregon, and his
experiences at the University of Oregon School of Law 1958-61:
On the forests-
I was born in Oregon: in Eugene, in 1934, at the bottom of the great
Depression. My hometown stood at the head of the Willamette Valley,
where the rivers from the mountains joined on the valley floor to flow
lazily northward to Portland to meet the Columbia River.
Eugene then was a town of only 14,000 people, home to the University
of Oregon and to a large lumbering business. The slow rains of mild
winters nourished great stands of forest on the surrounding hills.
Trees were being cut as fast as conditions permitted, but the federal
forests farther from town had not been much touched. These old-growth
stands of Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar were among the greatest
temperate rain forests that ever existed. More mass of wood was found
in the average acre of these forests than in any other in the
world.
Growing up at the edge of these magnificent forests, I took the lumber
industry for granted, but I also took the old-growth forests as a
given. Only slowly did I come to understand that the one spelled the
end of the other.
On the town and campus, Eugene, Oregon-
"The town of Eugene offered various entertainments to fascinate a child.
The premier event was a pageant that was staged periodically at the
county fairgrounds to celebrate the pioneers who had settled the
country. Old Cal Young, who was born in a pioneers cabin, led a parade
of townspeople dressed in pioneer costumes. And on campus, every fall
for Homecoming, the fraternity and sorority members put colorful
displays on their lawns and lit a huge bonfire. "The campus at the time was a marvelous playground for kids. I watched
WPA workers dig trenches for tunnels to hold steam pipes to heat the
university. I dug fossils out of the shale of excavations for
university building. I spied on ROTC students who were trying to
disguise themselves with camouflage in the nearby woods as World War II
began. My friends and I learned to climb along narrow ledges on the
sides of university buildings and clamber up and over them...
On law school-
(McCloskey graduated in political science from Harvard in 1956 and
signed up for ROTC, where he was appointed to serve as counsel in
Special Courts-Martial)
With this legal experience under my belt, I was looking forward to law school.
Convinced that I was well suited to be a lawyer, I decided to return
to my home state of Oregon, where I was accepted at the University of
Oregons law school.
I felt a bit bewildered returning to Eugene as just a student. I had
been used to running a substantial operation, with men saluting and
opening doors for me . . . Suddenly, I was no one again. What was
worse, I was being hazed as a first-year law student, being shown how
little I understood.
And I didnt like the way the law was being taught at the University
of Oregon. The law school then was in transition. Many of its most
respected faculty had left. The students were now supposed to learn the
law largely through the case method--by analyzing court decisions. Some
of the older professors continued to lecture, which I liked, while some
of the newer ones were still struggling to learn to use the case
method. The method seemed like looking for a needle in a haystack to
me. I didnt yet know enough law to know what I was supposed to be
looking for. And the school was using a lot of local attorneys, with
little or no teaching experience, as adjunct faculty; these folks
struggled even more to find their way in the classroom.
. . . for the first time in my schooling, I was not doing well. I was
tempted a number of times to drop out. But I could never figure out a
better type of graduate training to pursue.
"I finally concluded that I wanted to be an advocate, but not just for
anyone. I wanted to be an advocate for a cause I believed in. I wanted
to shape the law, not just apply and interpret it. While becoming a
politician was one way to do that, I could also work for a cause
organization . . .
I asked myself which causes were relevant to the area where I lived.
The answer was conservation. Oregon was then all about natural
resources and the issues concerning their use and future. Richard L.
Neuberger was elected senator in 1954 by championing conservation, and
it was evident that conservation was a growing issue in the state...
A law degree might help me work for this cause, I concluded, but I didnt need
to practice law . . .
On environmental law-
"Today, the University of Oregon Law School is one of the nations
leaders in teaching environmental law. But at that time, the field of
environmental law did not yet exist. I took all of the public law
courses available, but no course on natural resource law was even
offered then.
"Unguided, I prepared an extended note for the Oregon Law
Review on the origins and meaning of the Forest Services Multiple-Use
Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, which was well received. I argued that the
Forest Services basic law gave the agency the grounds to preserve the
national forests as well as to log them. Oddly enough, the Forest
Service took ten years to prepare an answer to my argument. In that
article, I also predicted that citizen lawsuits would someday be
brought under statues like that. A decade later, I helped make that
prediction come true by initiating pioneering legal cases as a leader
of the Sierra Club.
-E.S.
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