An occasional essay on issues pertaining to the Western landscape
A Fire Within: Stewart Brandborg's Passion for
Wilderness--And For People
Frederick H. Swanson
April 16, 2018
Wilderness--And For People
Frederick H. Swanson
April 16, 2018
There aren’t many individuals whose death truly marks the passing of an era, but when word came today from a Montana friend that Stewart Brandborg had died at his Bitterroot Valley home, it struck me that an epoch in American conservation has come to a close. Brandy, as everyone knew him, may not have gained the notoriety of Ed Abbey (whose book Desert Solitaire I'm examining this year in my blog), but I would argue that his influence was just as great.
The reason that many wilderness lovers may not have heard of this outsized man with the booming voice is that he devoted himself to the unglamorous work of grassroots organizing. From 1960, when he began working as Howard Zahniser’s understudy at the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C., to his last years in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Brandy never let go of the idea that an aroused citizenry could make a difference in the affairs of a nation.
It was an viewpoint he gained from his father, Guy M. Brandborg, whose similarly outsized influence in Montana is memorialized in a rugged granite crag that scrapes the skyline of the Bitterroot Range. Big Brandy was a forester, while Stewart left a promising career in wildlife biology for the political life in the nation’s capital, but father and son shared belief that individual citizens could (and ought to) wield power in a democracy, not the corporate interests that have come to dominate our lives here in the West.
Stewart came back home to western Montana to preach this same gospel in an increasingly conservative Bitterroot Valley--a place that his dad might not recognize, what with all the subdivisions and anti-government rhetoric found there today. The Anaconda Company no longer has the Montana worker in a headlock, but corporate America has merely become more crafty, able to exert great influence in our governance even though it is not overtly buying off senators and congressmen.
I got to know Stewart long after I left Montana, when I began researching the book I would write about his father. He gave unstintingly of his time in many long interviews over the phone and in his home. At first, Anna Vee was there to welcome me, but she died after the book came out, and I’d find Brandy alone or with a caretaker (whose name I wish I remembered, for she had quite a task in seeing after this grizzly and sometimes ornery giant of a man, who refused to give in to the ailments that faced him).
After that book appeared, I had further conversations with Brandy about wilderness issues in Idaho and Montana, which immeasurably helped me in writing my next book, Where Roads Will Never Reach. He had been closely involved in the early campaigns against hydropower dams on the Clearwater and Selway Rivers and could relate instances where he convinced reluctant sportsmen and wildlife biologists to stand up at a meeting or public hearing and say their piece against building these fish-killing monstrosities.
I could tell that Brandy was reaching deep back in his memory for these stories. I especially appreciated his accounts of meeting Olaus and Mardie Murie, the stalwarts of a still-earlier generation of conservationists. I recall him recounting a visit to the Murie home not long before Olaus died--this was 1963--and Brandy wistfully recalling how Olaus asked Mardie to stoke up the fire in their log home’s fireplace. Fire represented life to an old woodsman, Brandy pointed out to me, and Olaus especially wanted that warmth right then.
In 1965, shortly after Congress passed the Wilderness Act, Brandy bought an opened-ended ticket on Frontier Airlines and jetted around to a dozen or more towns and small cities in the West, stoking fires of his own. He met with every member of the Wilderness Society or some other conservation or sportsmen's group he could get to listen to him, usually in meetings held in some conservationist’s home. He told them about the Wilderness Act that Zahnie had worked so hard to enact and how it now needed a groundswell of citizen action to implement. The law specified that the Forest Service, Park Service, and Fish & Wildlife Service had ten years to review all the roadless lands on their respective domains, and recommend to Congress which areas should be designated as wilderness. Brandy foresaw this as the first big test of the Wilderness Act--one that would make or break it as a useful implement of land conservation.
He followed this barnstorming tour by unfolding a plan of action based on hiring low-paid grassroots organizers in each of the western states and building a network of committed activists who knew how to lobby their legislators to protect key roadless areas. Brandy knew that the enemies of wilderness wanted to restrict the law’s scope to the original nine million acres it designated as wilderness in 1964, while there was so much more worthy land out there that needed protection.
One of those organizers helped bring me into the movement in the early 1970s, along with many others who became the core of the wilderness movement in Oregon back then. Brandy oversaw this whole effort, although he soon redirected the Wilderness Society’s resources to the campaign to save Alaska’s wildlands--an effort that drained the group’s coffers and ultimately led to his dismissal. Brandy took some time to regain his feet after this blow, but he continued to preach his homilies about grassroots organizing, even taking it to the streets of inner-city Washington, D.C. for a time.
Eventually he “retired” to the Bitterroot, and even then he was constantly on the telephone, organizing meetings, cajoling people to do some necessary task, hectoring politicians, giving interviews, making speeches. Many people found his efforts overbearing at times, and he could be maddeningly persistent in asking you to help. Just like his father.
In his last years, when we talked mostly by phone, he was increasingly upset about the direction that wilderness conservation was taking in this country. He still wanted to see no-holds-barred activism, not the more collaborative style that has taken hold among many conservation groups. I had no words to offer him -- here in Utah there are plenty of organizations that refuse to give an inch in the struggle to protect wild lands, but having left Montana thirty years earlier, I felt I could not speak with any real knowledge of the efforts many are making there to reach out to long-time opponents and try to find areas of agreement. It remains a real conundrum for me.
So Brandy is gone. We may have to find some feature up in the Bitterroot Range to name after him, although Bill LaCroix, who has been researching Brandy’s papers, tells me there is a small creek in that same range that bears his first name--a tale that I hope he’ll circulate some day. Perhaps Stewart, like Olaus Murie before him, didn’t see much point in bestowing people’s names on geographic features. Brandy’s real legacy lies in the countless people he mentored, inspired and energized. I hope that in his last weeks, he was able to gaze up at the Bitterroot skyline and pick out Ward Mountain, where he once worked as a young fire lookout, and take heart from the fires he lit in us, and the many wild places that our nation, and our laws, have protected.
The reason that many wilderness lovers may not have heard of this outsized man with the booming voice is that he devoted himself to the unglamorous work of grassroots organizing. From 1960, when he began working as Howard Zahniser’s understudy at the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C., to his last years in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Brandy never let go of the idea that an aroused citizenry could make a difference in the affairs of a nation.
It was an viewpoint he gained from his father, Guy M. Brandborg, whose similarly outsized influence in Montana is memorialized in a rugged granite crag that scrapes the skyline of the Bitterroot Range. Big Brandy was a forester, while Stewart left a promising career in wildlife biology for the political life in the nation’s capital, but father and son shared belief that individual citizens could (and ought to) wield power in a democracy, not the corporate interests that have come to dominate our lives here in the West.
Stewart came back home to western Montana to preach this same gospel in an increasingly conservative Bitterroot Valley--a place that his dad might not recognize, what with all the subdivisions and anti-government rhetoric found there today. The Anaconda Company no longer has the Montana worker in a headlock, but corporate America has merely become more crafty, able to exert great influence in our governance even though it is not overtly buying off senators and congressmen.
I got to know Stewart long after I left Montana, when I began researching the book I would write about his father. He gave unstintingly of his time in many long interviews over the phone and in his home. At first, Anna Vee was there to welcome me, but she died after the book came out, and I’d find Brandy alone or with a caretaker (whose name I wish I remembered, for she had quite a task in seeing after this grizzly and sometimes ornery giant of a man, who refused to give in to the ailments that faced him).
After that book appeared, I had further conversations with Brandy about wilderness issues in Idaho and Montana, which immeasurably helped me in writing my next book, Where Roads Will Never Reach. He had been closely involved in the early campaigns against hydropower dams on the Clearwater and Selway Rivers and could relate instances where he convinced reluctant sportsmen and wildlife biologists to stand up at a meeting or public hearing and say their piece against building these fish-killing monstrosities.
I could tell that Brandy was reaching deep back in his memory for these stories. I especially appreciated his accounts of meeting Olaus and Mardie Murie, the stalwarts of a still-earlier generation of conservationists. I recall him recounting a visit to the Murie home not long before Olaus died--this was 1963--and Brandy wistfully recalling how Olaus asked Mardie to stoke up the fire in their log home’s fireplace. Fire represented life to an old woodsman, Brandy pointed out to me, and Olaus especially wanted that warmth right then.
In 1965, shortly after Congress passed the Wilderness Act, Brandy bought an opened-ended ticket on Frontier Airlines and jetted around to a dozen or more towns and small cities in the West, stoking fires of his own. He met with every member of the Wilderness Society or some other conservation or sportsmen's group he could get to listen to him, usually in meetings held in some conservationist’s home. He told them about the Wilderness Act that Zahnie had worked so hard to enact and how it now needed a groundswell of citizen action to implement. The law specified that the Forest Service, Park Service, and Fish & Wildlife Service had ten years to review all the roadless lands on their respective domains, and recommend to Congress which areas should be designated as wilderness. Brandy foresaw this as the first big test of the Wilderness Act--one that would make or break it as a useful implement of land conservation.
He followed this barnstorming tour by unfolding a plan of action based on hiring low-paid grassroots organizers in each of the western states and building a network of committed activists who knew how to lobby their legislators to protect key roadless areas. Brandy knew that the enemies of wilderness wanted to restrict the law’s scope to the original nine million acres it designated as wilderness in 1964, while there was so much more worthy land out there that needed protection.
One of those organizers helped bring me into the movement in the early 1970s, along with many others who became the core of the wilderness movement in Oregon back then. Brandy oversaw this whole effort, although he soon redirected the Wilderness Society’s resources to the campaign to save Alaska’s wildlands--an effort that drained the group’s coffers and ultimately led to his dismissal. Brandy took some time to regain his feet after this blow, but he continued to preach his homilies about grassroots organizing, even taking it to the streets of inner-city Washington, D.C. for a time.
Eventually he “retired” to the Bitterroot, and even then he was constantly on the telephone, organizing meetings, cajoling people to do some necessary task, hectoring politicians, giving interviews, making speeches. Many people found his efforts overbearing at times, and he could be maddeningly persistent in asking you to help. Just like his father.
In his last years, when we talked mostly by phone, he was increasingly upset about the direction that wilderness conservation was taking in this country. He still wanted to see no-holds-barred activism, not the more collaborative style that has taken hold among many conservation groups. I had no words to offer him -- here in Utah there are plenty of organizations that refuse to give an inch in the struggle to protect wild lands, but having left Montana thirty years earlier, I felt I could not speak with any real knowledge of the efforts many are making there to reach out to long-time opponents and try to find areas of agreement. It remains a real conundrum for me.
So Brandy is gone. We may have to find some feature up in the Bitterroot Range to name after him, although Bill LaCroix, who has been researching Brandy’s papers, tells me there is a small creek in that same range that bears his first name--a tale that I hope he’ll circulate some day. Perhaps Stewart, like Olaus Murie before him, didn’t see much point in bestowing people’s names on geographic features. Brandy’s real legacy lies in the countless people he mentored, inspired and energized. I hope that in his last weeks, he was able to gaze up at the Bitterroot skyline and pick out Ward Mountain, where he once worked as a young fire lookout, and take heart from the fires he lit in us, and the many wild places that our nation, and our laws, have protected.
Photo by Bessann Swanson