Lawson Legate oral history interview

Transcript (49 pages) of interview by Rob DeBirk with Lawson Legate, on July 8, 2008

Legate was born in Sacramento, CA and spent his childhood in the Sierra Nevadas and at Lake Tahoe. He was student body president at Cordova Senior High School in Rancho Cordova, California, during the April 1970 earthquake and he helped organize an Earth Week Conference. Joined the Sierra Club while living in British Columbia and helped start the chapter in Nelson, BC. He went back to school in 1980 to get his masters in Forestry and Range at Washington State University and got involved with the Sierra Club group in Pullman, Washington. He's a firm believer in learning from others and learning by doing. Lawson likes the Sierra Club because it's a large-scale effort and that's beneficial. He moved to Utah in 1987 and started working on desert wilderness. He discusses what it's like to live and raise a family in Utah and not be LDS and the struggles for him and especially his kids. He believes that air quality, water usage, and transportation are very important issues in Utah. He speaks about the idea of "resilient habitat" and how it's more holistic than wilderness. Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project. Interviewer: Rob DeBirk