Jim McClure

I didn't start out liking Jim McClure.  He was a senior US Senator, chairman of a key committee, wildly supportive of extractive industry, and I was a volunteer conservationist ready to do battle and doing just that.  I saw him solely as an opponent, not as the thoughtful legislator he was, and that view remained as I became a young staffer digging trenches and lobbing barbs.

Years later my perspective evolved.  First off, I now see how much wilderness we didn't get back then working with him and later in the under-appreciated collaboration he had with then-Gov. Cecil Andrus.  Those bills were far from perfect.  But bills today are also far from perfect, and today's are more limited in scale.  Nothing's perfect you say?  I didn't know that then.  Incidentally, my older mentors didn't know that, either.

Keep in mind that wilderness or river bills passed for Idaho in 1964, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1975, and 1980.  Then Frank Church lost his seat.  McClure's first wilderness bill was in 1984 and failure to pass that meant we failed to keep progress moving in one of the most important transitions in Idaho conservation history: moving into the post-Church era.

I was a volunteer in DC in a room where the decision to stop negotiation with McClure began to take shape in 1984.  I won't tell you how close we were.  Too close to stop talking.

Something else came from our failure to effectively work with Jim McClure: new Idaho leaders didn't see any reason to work with us.  For quite a while wilderness and other conservation issues developed a political toxicity that would take years to overcome.

Fast forward many years.  I had just finished a live discussion on wilderness with McClure on Idaho Public TV's Dialogue program.  We were jointly speaking in favor of Rep. Mike Simpson's White Clouds bill.  Afterward we left together.

As we stepped out into the dark evening he asked me where I was headed.  When I said home he said let's talk.  We sat on the steps for close to an hour.  We talked about those days.  We talked about politics.  We talked about the polarization that is only worse today.  We also talked about being young and what it takes to learn your craft. He told me about some of his missteps. We also talked about Idaho and the importance of conservation to the future of Idaho.

Some leaders are known for what they did.  I will always remember Jim McClure for what I learned and for what we didn't do.