Gavin Noyes, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Robert DeBirk [June1 and 2, 2008]

Transcript (51, 24 pages) of interviews by Rob DeBirk with Gavin Noyes on June 1 and 2,2008

Noyes (b. 1974) grew up in Salt Lake City, Uah. His family was quite outdoors oriented. His family took many fishing and camping trips, Mirror Lake was a preferred location. He recalls being involved in the Scouting program, and reaching the rank of Eagle Scout. After attending college at the University of Michigan, Anne Arbor, he came back to Utah and got involved with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). He spoke out against the Olympics for Salt Lake and was involved in the production of the "This Is Not the Place: 2002 Olympics" bumper sticker. Noyes also discusses the Save Our Canyon organization in Salt Lake City and explains that the strength of Save Our Canyon comes from the combination of a completely volunteer board, and a very solid grass-roots activist membership. He also discusses his involvement with the Round River Conservancy, and the upcoming Colorado Plateau project for Round River. Utah Environmentalists Project. Interviewer: Rob DeBirk

GAVIN NOYES Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview by Rob DeBirk May 7, 2008 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project u-1936 American West Center, Environmental Humanities Program, And Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah MY NAME IS ROBERT DEBIRK FOR THE AMERICAN WEST CENTER. TODAY’S DATE IS MAY 7,2008. I AM INTERVIEWING GAVIN NOYES. GAVIN WILL YOU SPELL YOU LAST NAME FOR ME PLEASE? N-O-Y-E-S. THANK YOU. RD: So can you tell me when you were, where you grew up, start with some of that information? GN: Start with basics? Yeah, I was born July 15" 1974, Salt Lake City and I was raised here in a family that had just moved here and spent a few years... I actually lived in Houston, Texas for a couple of years when I was four and five, but the rest of the time I’ve been living in Utah with the exception of college and a few years after college. I don’t know where you want to begin? RD: GN: We can go anywhere. What brought your family to Salt Lake? My dad was a doctor and he had finished his medical school in New York state and he thought he was going to be headed back to his hometown of San Francisco where he had been guaranteed the first spot and so he didn’t even pay attention to where his second slot was and both my parents wept when they opened the card and learned that they were going to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, which they didn’t know anything about except that there were a bunch of Mormons there. But after doing his residency and all of that for... I think they were here for four years and ended up really liking it and realizing it was a great place to raise a family and made some good friends, and so my dad went and specialized in cancer down in Houston at one of the big hospitals down there and when he decided to go into practice they were by then excited to move back to Salt Lake. RD: No tears this time. GAVIN NOYES GN: RD: GN: 7 MAY 2008 No tears the second time around. How large is your family—ryour brothers and sisters? Yeah, so I'm the middle of three boys and we’re all spaced... actually my older brother is a year older and my younger brother is three years younger. RD: GN: Where did you grow up in Salt Lake? Well, the first few years we moved around kind of around the University area. But when we moved back we lived in Holladay, so kind of about forty-five hundred south and thirtieth east. Our backyard faced Mt. Olympus, which was kind of cool. So I grew up desiring to always climb up the mountain—walk up the road and get into the mountains. I think it was definitely an influence. RD: GN: Did you do that often growing up? Well, I took my teddy bear under my arm to try, but usually my parents would stop me by the end of the driveway. RD: By the time you got to Wasatch Boulevard? GN: No, we were just above Wasatch Boulevard. RD: Oh, so you were even closer to the mountain. GN: RD: Yeah So what was it like growing up? Did you spend a lot of time out of doors growing up? GN: Yeah, my dad was very active and very outdoorsy and so we were outside a lot. We did a lot of backpacking as little kids and a lot of hiking. We went river running, skiing—grew up skiing a lot, and basically we were out of doors doing all kinds of stuff as kids. GAVIN NOYES RD: 7 MAY 2008 Do you have any early memories of going backpacking or river running or any of those things? GN: RD: GN: RD: Oh yeah. Any that you want to share or that sticks out in particular? Are you looking for influential moments or... Anything that stands out to you. If you can think of something that was influential that yeah, would be good to hear—something that was a guiding experience for you? GN: I think the times out of doors really did lead to a lot of memories and stories and crazy stuff. It seemed like we were always unprepared for whatever we were doing. I remember one trip in particular where my younger brother was probably three or four years old, so I would have been six or seven. My older brother was maybe eight, we were with my dad. My mom didn’t go on that trip. We hiked in to the Uintah Mountains to a place called Duck Lake in the peak of the summer and when we got there and the mosquitoes weré just unbearable. We had our family dog too. So we spent the whole time just hiding from the mosquitoes, sitting in the tent, it was raining all the time. We made the dog stay outside the tent until we felt too bad for him because he was getting eaten alive. It was just comical. It was one of those miserable trips that was funny afterwards. We did a lot of that. And I think I was in a lucky position that I wasn’t the oldest child so I wasn’t traumatized by all the really dumb things that happened like the river trips at one year old and the sun burns... I got a couple of traumas like my parents had some sled that they pulled behind their cross country skis that flipped and scraped us up before my dad realized that we were upside down and turned around I was all bloody... so we had a lot of experiences like that, but for the most part they were good. I think GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 there were definitely a lot of experiences that... we’d do these what I now realize were very short overnight trips like up Neff’s Canyon to that little picnic area, it might have been a campground back then, but we would always camp somewhere and then in the morning my dad would have us all have a competition to see who could pick up the most garbage. So we’d leave the campsite cleaner than when we found it. I realize that that’s... when [ hang out with my grandpa nowadays, he does the same thing. We go to some beach in California and before we know it we’re all picking up trash on the way back to the car. There’s something about that. You start looking at trash differently like: “Oh, I’ve got to get that out of here.” RD: Was that part of a larger environmental ethic that you were being taught at the time either consciously or unconsciously as an environmental ethic? GN: I think so. I don’t know. I haven’t really pieced together that my parents had any... [ don’t think they had any environmental agenda that they were trying to raise us a certain way. I never felt like we got too pressured into that. [ mean garbage is just one example, but a lot of things I don’t think my parents... [ mean people weren’t really aware back in the seventies. I don’t remember any of that being a big issue. My mom was very into good food. My dad cared about other things, like meeting new people and seeing new places. RD: GN: What do you mean by good food? Oh, just... they both cared in different ways. To my dad it was very important that we all sit down as a family and enjoy whatever food we had. My mom, [ think was very intent on making... she always had a garden so we’d have fresh fruits and vegetables and just simple nicely cooked hot meals. No real shortcuts. I don’t think we were raised on a GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 lot of the things that are turning out to be bad for us like margarine and... just good basic food that took a little more time to prepare. RD: GN: RD: How about growing up, were you ever in the Boy Scouts or anything like that? I’m an Eagle Scout. You are an Eagle Scout? I’m just always curious because I’ve been surprised by how many people I’ve spoken to that the most formative experiences they’ve had— environmental experiences were through the Boy Scouts. I’'m always kind of shocked by that because my understanding of Boy Scouts is far from one of a responsible environmental ethic. GN: Well, I think the Boy Scouts are a good example of how I arrived at my environmentalism, which is that you first... I think to truly appreciate something you have to try to destroy it. I think I had a very good troop that actually kept the kids for the most part in line. But even outside of my Boy Scout activities I definitely had a period in high school where I was very destructive while I was out in nature. RD: GN: What do you mean by that? What kind of things were you doing? Oh, we would... teenage boys who are figuring out their strength and they’d say, “Do you think we could shove that boulder off that cliff up there?”” And half the time— no. Ninety percent of the time you’d push on it and go urrrgh and the thing just wouldn’t budge. But every once in a while it would just release and it was pretty awesome. We’d do the same thing with logs. RD: GN: Fires were good too —big bonfires... You’ve really outgrown that haven’t you? Well, it’s funny because I'm also a wood-fired ceramic artist and all wood-fired ceramic artists are pyromaniacs, but I really don’t consider myself one. I have a true GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 respect and appreciation of fire, but it probably goes back to that trying to get out of control with something and then respect and admire it and use it wisely. I do think that there’s something to that. If you don’t know the limits of... really when you’re out of doors you are testing yourself and you’re testing nature. I think there’s some learning process where you can finally revere something enough to show a lot of restraint and maybe look back and say, “That was a pretty dumb idea.” You’re testing nature, but you're really testing yourself and so I think near death experiences bring you to value your life a little more. And the powers of nature—things that almost kill you. You definitely learn where to draw a line and say okay, let’s respect this place. RD: GN: RD: GN: Did you have many of those near death experiences? Oh yeah, yeah. Other than your sled being toppled by your father? Yeah, my parents aren’t to blame for most of them. They didn’t know about most of them. If they had known, I probably would have been indoors a lot more. I had a group of friends in high school that we didn’t ever really get into alcohol or drugs so much. [ mean we might have tried beer a few times, but we never got into trouble with any of that stuff, but yeah our entertainment was just getting up in the mountains, going down to the desert and just getting... we’d try and free-climb everything even though we didn’t consider ourselves climbers. We’d try to hike up everything, we’d try to float down rivers in spring runoff that we should not have been floating down. We were climbing up avalanche fields not knowing anything about avalanches and feeling... hearing thunder in the background and then suddenly realizing at the same time we heard GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 the thunder the whole slope was dropping six inches. And so we were constantly getting back from these trips and just saying, “Well, there goes another one of our lives.” RD: Were you ever involved in anything or did anything dangerous ever occur other than being in that situation itself? GN: Nothing too bad. A friend of mine had to carry me off the mountain once because I cracked both my heels jumping off a cliff and landing on a rock instead of the ten feet of snow I expected. I had a group of friends that would ski off of cliffs and land on their hips and one of my friends did it in the early season and shattered his hip, and was paralyzed from the waist down after that. But we were both really stupid and really lucky—my closest group of friends. RD: That’s a good friend to carry you off the mountain when you have two shattered heels. GN: RD: GN: RD: Not shattered, just cracked. Cracked—nonetheless still a good friend. Doesn’t change. He’s still a good friend. Can you pinpoint a time or is it even possible to really pinpoint a time from when you went from really testing yourself against nature or testing both your limits and the limits of what of nature’s of resilience, I guess and not doing that—enjoying being out in nature without finding it necessary to find those limits or find those limitations? GN: I guess that’s a good question. I still like doing dumb things. [laughs] But I have this sense that I know a little better now. It’s not always the case, but I don’t think that I ever deliberately went out and said, “Okay, I’'m going to do something really dumb.” I think I always had this illusion that I was in control until in hindsight I realized that I GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 really just should have known a lot more. And so I think the question of enjoying nature came long before. I think I always enjoyed being out in nature, learning more things and I think ever since I was a kid, being raised in the family that I was, and having the experiences that I enjoyed somehow... I think just what changed was not having any parental supervision [laughs], and having to figure out your own parental supervision. My wife helps out a lot with that. Ive always been a little optimistic—that the trail is a lot shorter and less steep and has a more beaten path than it actually does. RD: I seem to recall that you have a reputation for saying it’s around the next bend or not really having the best sense of distance. GN: Yeah, maybe I’ve done the hike before but I have no clue how long it is or how hard it is. RD: GN: So you went away to college, is that correct? Yeah, so college was a hugely formative time. I think I was really itching to get out of Utah because I felt like it was this really different place than everywhere else in the world and I wanted to get out and see a normal place. And so I went off to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and one thing I immediately realized was that I really missed home. I really missed the ability to get away from the urban setting and get out doing whatever—mountain biking or hiking or whatever. I definitely missed that right away, but I also really liked the rest of what I found in Ann Arbor and I made a lot of close friends—rowing in college, through the School of Natural Resources there. They have a very liberal School of Natural Resources that is very environmentally oriented. They have pretty strong ties with conservation groups and they’re not such a feeder school for GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 the land management agencies, although they do put out a lot of students for that. But it was a pretty liberal setting and I definitely got shaped by all of that. The other thing that I realized is—so one, I missed home, but two, the issues that we were dealing with in the School of Natural Resources and in the other environmental classes I was taking, I could not stand the east coast issues. There were groups out there suing Yoplait because raccoons, when they were licking the inside of Yoplait containers couldn’t get them off their faces and they were stumbling around blind on the highways and getting run over by cars. [laughs] I couldn’t have cared less about raccoons with Yoplait containers on their faces. And the fact that people were wasting time and money getting a little ridge put around the bottom of your Yoplait container all to save a nuisance species that I had no respect for in the first place. It made me really... I think that was a jelling moment where after looking at a few issues like that, I just realized I had no place in doing environmental work out east in these places that had already been destroyed and that my true passion and opportunity for getting some meaningful work done was in land preservation at home in Utah. And so I think it was pretty late in my junior year that I switched majors and decided that rather than... my major before was called resource ecology management, which was really more of a feeder for land management agencies. So [ shifted to try and get some more information about what I wanted to be doing at home, which was... so I did some independent studies called desert ecology and wrote some papers on the desertification of the southwest grasslands and just tried to get more information on biology and ecology out west, which was really hard to do in Ann Arbor, Michigan. GAVIN NOYES RD: 7 MAY 2008 So what was your involvement with local issues or I guess Utah issues prior to going out to college in Ann Arbor. GN: I was pretty aware of Utah issues going into college because I went to Judge Memorial High School and we had... so I went up to the Teton Science school in high school and had some great experiences up there—tracking animals, and writing and getting exposure to environmental issues then. Then [ had another teacher—actually he was never my teacher, but he was an English teacher, he was the head wrestling coach, and I wrestled. So [ knew him really well and he was a role model of mine even though I never took his classes. But he led all of these outdoor programs, so he took us all to the Teton Science School. He was a huge Ed Abbey fan. So he got us definitely reading Ed Abbey in high school and exposed us to some pretty interesting ideas. He also led what turned out to be a dumb idea. He started the first group... this is how I met all my friends. This is who I got into trouble with subsequently. He organized a group... there was this brand new mountain biking trail that had just been connected or put on a map or something down in Colorado and southern Utah— the Kokopelli trail. It was this five day mountain biking trip. He thought this was just a great idea and wouldn’t it be fun to take a bunch of high school kids on a five day mountain biking adventure. We did it two years. I was on it both years. The first year was a big success. We had the first woman to ever ride all five days—fifteen year-old girl. I think the trail was only a couple of years old so not many people had actually done the whole thing, and we had a support vehicle. So I met a lot of my friends, my current friends who I then went off with and did all these other adventures through that first trip. It was a bonding experience for us all. 10 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 But then year two when we did it, it was the biggest disaster of a trip you can imagine. We had a quarter of the kids almost die. We didn’t know that they had rerouted the trail the next year and so we all just kept going. We were doing Day 2 while we were still on Day 1 because everyone missed the Day 1 turn off, because the signs all pointed the wrong way. So we had all these kids that were dehydrated and out of food and hailing down semi-trucks in the middle of Colorado, drinking out of horse troughs. Oh it was a mess. Steph and I met... well we didn’t meet on that trip, but that was definitely a bonding experience for us. She almost died... RD: It sounds more like a Realms of Inquiry trip than a Judge Memorial High School trip. GN: Yeah, it was bad and then when we were all recovering on Day 2, or maybe it was Day 3, we were camped under Dewey Bridge and a thunderstorm rolled through and blew up the cottonwood tree we were all camped under with a lightning bolt. RD: GN: Oh, no way! And so we all got hit with shrapnel and one kid blacked out. We had burning branches falling all over the tents and it was a disaster. Anyways, Judge Memorial never did that trip again. RD: GN: Wow. Was the English teacher still employed after that trip? He was. I don’t think anybody sued him, but I bet he was scared. He was the only faculty chaperone. There were some parent chaperones as well. RD: Oh my goodness. That’s pretty cool. Were you volunteering with local groups at that time... while you were at that school? 11 GAVIN NOYES GN: 7 MAY 2008 Yeah, actually. Judge had a really good program of... they required every junior to volunteer with a non-profit. I volunteered with SPLORE—Special Populations Learning and Outdoor Recreation, which is a really cool group. It had some really cool ladies running it at the time. RD: Will you talk about your experience with SPLORE? Is there anything in particular you would like to talk about? GN: Well it was... It was one of those things where when you are in high school, it’s actually really hard to carve out time for that. But it’s definitely a valuable experience to see that there’s people like that doing cool things in the community. I did a cross-country ski trip where we did an overnight up at Wasatch Mountain Club Lodge and did a canoe trip where we took another group of mentally handicapped adults down the Jordan River. So it was definitely eye-opening. But I didn’t feel like [ made a big difference or anything. As a volunteer, I felt like it was just really interesting for me to meet these adults that we were helping get these outdoor experiences. [ was aware that the group was doing some really cool stuff. But I didn’t feel like I had any capabilities to make a difference. It wasn’t the most influential experience for me. Stuff that I did on my own in college was a lot more influential. RD: GN: Like what? I spenta year back here at the University of Utah because I ended up... Well at some point I decided to be a double major. I think it was before I decided to do the desert focus thing. So it was before then... I came back to the University of Utah and took some classes because I thought I would be graduating in five years rather than four and so that was really the first opportunity where I... I tried volunteering with SUWA a little bit and 12 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 they were really too disorganized. I had a few experiences like that with SUWA where [ just never really felt like you could... like you could come in and lick envelopes for a few hours but no one would ever remember you or ever really realize that you were there. So I got kind of interested in... [ mean I was already reading about all these issues and had a pretty good understanding by the time I was in college of these big forces at play and [ was very much... I very much liked where I grew up and the opportunities I had and knew that that defined me so much as a person. So some of my friends and [—that same Kokopelli Trail group of friends... we would get around and we’d start complaining about what a dumb idea having the Olympics in Salt Lake was. Not because we didn’t like the Olympics, but because it was going to ruin Salt Lake. Everyone’s running around talking about how much growth and development and money is to be made, which were exactly the kind of things we didn’t want to see happening. We didn’t want... they were talking about hundreds of thousands of new homes being built and millions and millions of dollars flowing into the local economy that just was basically changing the whole face of the city, and we had already had clear examples that we had seen all over. Our favorite camping spots, our favorite boulder rolling places were being eaten up by development. We saw that in high school. We saw that whole cabin area above Guardsmans Pass get shut off to the public. We never knew it was private land. It didn’t matter. We’d just go and camp up there when we wanted a break from... it was Friday night, we’d just go sleep in the mountains and hike and have fun. And so these big changes were underway and it was development. It was this “progress” that we really didn’t want to see. So we just started wondering, why is there no voice. You read the newspaper and it is unanimous that everybody loves the Olympics. Who would dare say anything bad about 13 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 the Olympics? It was this media love fest where, “Oh, we’re going to win this Olympic bid...” So this was in 1994. At the end of the year—at the end of the school year in June was... the International Olympic Committee was going to make their decision on who got the Olympics and Salt Lake had lost year after year after year. I didn’t know any of that at the time, but it all started with the question of why is nobody saying anything bad about the Olympics when it’s clearly going to be an environmental disaster for Salt Lake City. We’re going to get all these people at it’s going to change it from this charming city that it was into some awful Los Angeles, Las Vegas type sprawl filled with traffic and we would talk about these things. 1994 we noted was... it might have been *95 was the first year that there was ever such a thing as a traffic jam in Salt Lake City. And we noticed this. We’d come back from college and we’d say, you know what? I just got stuck in a true traffic jam. This wasn’t just some freak accident. It was just plain old traffic and that was a sign of just the degrading quality of life of Salt Lake. And just some other little instances like you’d remember back when you were in fifth grade or whatever and you got in big trouble for making your friend’s mom late to her doctor’s appointment that was downtown. When she gets back and says, “Oh, it turned out to be okay. I made every light all the way downtown from Holladay.” [laughs] It’s impossible nowadays. It took ten or fifteen minutes. So we realized that there was no voice speaking out against the Olympics. We also realized that we had no voice. Or we had no ability to speak out against the Olympics. We couldn’t change the media and what they were saying. We didn’t know any of those people. We didn’t know how it worked. So we looked to tools that college students could use and we said, “Okay, we’ll make a bumper sticker.” It took one night of 14 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 brainstorming, several sheets of paper—oh, we had lots of bad ideas. But one of the things we wanted to do was we wanted to question on whether the Olympics was a good thing. And we wanted it to reach across all spectrums of the public and so the slogan we came up with was “This Is Not the Place, 2002 Olympics™. It was taken from Brigham Young standing up in Emigration Canyon saying, “This is the place.” So we knew that this would probably have more of a liberal appeal, but we wanted it to have a real... this is our place kind of appeal—that everyone could resonate with. So if it’s coming from Brigham Young’s mouth we thought it would sound a little bit better. So we ended up printing up these little tiny bumper-stickers that said, “This Is Not the Place” because they were cheaper. When you print them small, I think they were ten cents a piece, and we made like four hundred of them. Then we thought, how are we going to get these out? Are we going to charge for them? So we came up with this really good strategy. We were going to give them away, because... and I was working like three jobs at the time. I was working at the bagel shop—this was Bachman Bros. Bagels, back when we had good bagels. Oh where else was I working? Anyways, it doesn’t matter. They were three crappy part-time jobs. And all of our free time... we printed these four hundred bumper stickers and it took us about a week to hand out every single one of them. People were so excited. Some people were so excited to see them. What we would do is we would go to any place that a lot of people gathered. Jazz games, if there was some ski race going on up at Snowbird, if there was a concert happening, we would go before or after the event or if it was the arts festival, we would just try to get around people. We’d show people the sticker and say, “Do you want one?” A lot of kids especially would say, “Oh, yeah.” And as they’d reach 15 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 for it, their fingers are already pressed onto it, you’d say, “Well, we’re collecting donations for these, but you can have it for free if you promise to put it on your car or your bike or whatever visible place you’re going to stick it.” A lot of people would say, “Oh no, it’s okay.” Because people just collect stickers. They want like in their bedroom. Because it shows their values but only to the people who they want to see it. So we required that they show it publicly. And some people would take them. out for free if agreed. We’d give them We’d say, “This costs ten cents a piece to make.” And they’d give us ten cents and then they could have one anyway. Usually they’d give us whatever change they had in their pocket. If it was three cents, it was fine. And some people... we had some... we went to the symphony too and people didn’t really like them there. But there was one woman there who took one and then she chased us like two blocks away... no I think her friend got one. Her friend paid a dollar for one and then she chased us down all the way across that open area in front of Symphony Hall and stuffed ten dollars in our hands. We said, “You’re crazy. This is only worth ten cents.” “I don’t care. I like what you’re doing. Go print more. You guys are great.” That led to getting rid of the stickers super fast and we ended up having enough money to print twice as many and we realized... we started seeing them around town, but you couldn’t read them. So we made them like four times as big so they were really huge and you could see them from... You know, they were normal bumper-sticker size. But we also got put in touch with Steven Pace, who was kind of casually fighting the Olympics, but just didn’t have any time or enthusiasm to go and talk to people of the street about it. But he and his friends who were kind of a grumpy group, they invited us to one of their meetings. They were attorneys and all these professionals and they said, 16 GAVIN NOYES 7MAY 2008 “Well, okay, we made up this petition that we don’t want the Olympics because it’s going to be a financial disaster for Salt Lake City. We were like, “Okay, well that’s cool.” It didn’t say anything about the environment which was all we really cared about, but it was a petition and it was a tool that we could start talking to people about—all the reasons why people should be against the Olympics. [ was doing this with Andrew Moeller primarily who was a friend of mine who was on the Kokopelli trip and he was actually on the ground a lot more than I was because he wasn’t working three jobs. But we would get together and do this whenever we could. So we ended up taking this petition out and at their meeting two weeks later we had like fifteen hundred signatures. RD: GN: Wow, that’s impressive. And we had given away hundreds of more stickers and had enough money to make tee shirts and print more stickers. So we had a few cycles of these. I don’t know how many stickers we ended up printing. Probably eight thousand. .. RD: GN: I still see some around now and then. It’s rare nowadays, but back then there was a very noticeable difference four months into it. You just saw these stickers everywhere. We got a lot of petition signatures and we started. .. as we talked to people, kind of in the grass roots level, we’d get interested in more and more aspects of the Olympics and were educating ourselves and learning all these little tips from other people and so we really built this grass roots powerhouse that ended up... I really think it was one of the things that brought the Salt Lake Olympics to their knees years later when they had all the scandal troubles because we exposed it all back then. We heard it happening. Behind the scenes people knew what was happening, but the corruption that you could start talking about really pissed 17 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 everyone off. Like these [OC members we realized that... we didn’t know they were getting bribed, but we knew that they were getting... well we heard from people that they were getting gold bars—untraceable gold bars, but we’d stick to what we could prove and so we’d try and pick on some of these really sleazy [OC members and just talk about their limos. We’d stick stickers on their limos when they weren’t looking. We’d follow them around town and try to talk to them. Oh, my other job was I was a bus boy at Kyoto Restaurant, no I think by then I was a host at Kyoto Restaurant. And one of the Japanese IOC members came in there and my boss Tada—san gave me permission to say something to him in Japanese, because I was majoring in Japanese as well. So at the end of the night I very nervously went up to him and in Japanese said, “Excuse my rudeness, but if you have any questions about not having the Olympics here, please ask me.” He didn’t ask me. [laughs]. RD: GN: What was his response to you? Nothing. He buried his nose in the table and what was that sleazy guy’s name? They were all at the table. Name the Olympic sleaze-balls and they were there. It will come to me, but anyways, it was very... Basically we had this big effort that was kind of rolling at a grass roots level and it gained a lot of momentum. We were very proud that by the time that the bid was two weeks away, we had... I think they did a poll where something like 30% of the locals were against having the Olympics here. It was like 25% to 35%. Nine months earlier you couldn’t find anyone speaking out against it. We later found out that there was opposition to it. Save Our Canyons had spent fifteen years fighting it, but they struck a deal in the eighties that if the Olympics were kept out of Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, they wouldn’t say a thing. So they recused themselves 18 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 from being involved because they got what they wanted out of it and that’s one of the reasons that there was no discussion at that point. But Alexis Kelner... Save Our Canyons was actually founded in 1973, their first bumper-sticker said, “Utah Yes, Olympics No.” In 1973... it might have even been 1972 when we lost the U.S. bid to Denver. And then the Denver citizens had a referendum that they voted not to host the Olympics and Innsbruck took it for the *76 games. So Denver was always who we were most proud of when we were going around talking about the Olympics. RD: What kind of... As you were out on the streets having people sign petitions or when you were giving them stickers, what kind of responses were you getting from the people signing the petitions or taking the stickers? What kind of reasons did they have against signing the petition? Did they also have environmental concerns as you did or were they economic concerns, or what were they? Do you remember? GN: Oh, everything, everything. Our goal was to get them to sign the petition. We had just a sales job, basically. We did whatever it would take to get them to sign the petition and to get them to have some ownership against not wanting the Olympics here. And so we would kind of size them up as we saw them—profile them and then try and pick an issue that would win them over. I remember we got one of the Salt Lake bid committee members wives’ to sign our petition. [laughs] We didn’t think she was very smart! But some people just wanted us out of their hair. Here was a college kid, he wants me to do something. I’ll just sign it, I don’t care what it is, just get out of my hair. And then there were other people... Some people would sit there and really want to hear why you were against it. And I would always either use the economic argument—that every winter Olympics for I don’t know... at the time it was like thirty years had lost money hosting 19 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 the winter Olympics because it was so expensive to build all the infrastructure and then mothball it, and then you had these ghost towns of Olympic villages. So that was a strong argument was that you as taxpayers were going to foot the bill for this and it’s going to hurt, which didn’t end up happening. I actually... I think Mitt Romney is... I respect the guy for that alone. But then the other piece that we would talk about was just the environmental impacts and what kind of city do we want to live in? At the time everyone was all excited because... it’s the same thing we see today—Ikea opens up in Draper and everyone goes crazy. Back then it was Red Lobster opening up in Sugarhouse. People went crazy! We would make fun of the mainstream. Why do people get excited? I don’t think I’ve still ever been to a Red Lobster, but why do people want these things? And why do they not value what they have? I think a big reason is is that you don’t realize what you have till it’s gone. When you move to a place like Michigan, you realize that Salt Lake and Utah are both pretty special. We don’t have a New York City, Manhattanlike retail environment which would be great, but we’ve got a lot of things that wouldn’t survive in Manhattan. [ think that was a lot of our discussion. What do we want Salt Lake to look like? Will the Olympics contribute to that? In hindsight I think the Olympics were not as bad as [ had feared, but certainly all the ski resorts went absolutely bonkers over developing and I think they invested over a hundred million cumulatively into improvements and expansions and lodges and all that even at the resorts that weren’t hosting the games. So I think that is still the question we need to ask. One of the selling points of the Olympics was Utah has one of the youngest populations in the country and we’re the kind of people that like living in Utah, but we travel to New York City for vacation. Well, 20 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 Utahns all know that’s a bunch of crap. We have the youngest population because there are so many babies here. We don’t travel to New York City as a general population. If we did we’d be a lot more worldly and we’d realize how great of a place it is to live here. And we wouldn’t get excited about Red Lobster or Ikea. [laughs] We’d go down and tell R.C. Willey what we really like—tell them to expand their services a bit. RD: GN: RD: Warren Buffet’s not going to listen to that. Well, that’s true. So what happened once the Olympics were announced or once it was announced that we had received the bid or that our bid had been successful? GN: The town went crazy. Everybody celebrated. Thankfully I was off in Japan when the... I left three days before. My friend Andrew was here kind of monitoring everything and I was taking summer school in Japan. We were under no illusion that Salt Lake was going to not get the bid. They had lost so many times in a row and it was just... Salt Lake was the only city who took the philosophy that if we build it, we’ll get it. They had already built a lot of the infrastructure after they lost to Nagano, they just said screw it. We’re going to build it all and they’ll have to give it to us next time. And then it all came out... It must have been... I don’t think it was until 99 or 2000 that the whole bid scandal broke and it all came out that Nagano got it because they bribed all the IOC members and those were beautiful days. Reading the newspaper as the bid scandal unfurled—oh, it was a wonderful time to live in Salt Lake. It was great. I kept up my activism around it then, and then Deedee Corradini moved in next door to my dad... [laughs] Right after she had lost all her money. My dad had gone out to meet the new owner before she moved in and she said, “Oh, I'm Pam.” My dad’s like, “Pam who? 21 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 What’s your last name?” She said “Joklik” My dad said, “Oh, are you related to Frank Joklik?” And Frank was the number two guy back then, and so he basically funneled Deedee a house when she got into financial trouble—when her husband got thrown in jail. RD: Did you just go and leave an empty brief case in front of her house every now and then to remind her of when she used to have old brief cases to give people? GN: That would have been funny. No I just called the Tribune and told them to look into it. [laughs] RD: GN: Oh, really? What came of that? Nothing conclusive. She claimed she was paying rent and Frank Joklik was very embarrassed that he was having to explain why Deedee was living in a house that he owned and was it not just a coincidence. RD: GN: RD: GN: That’s very funny. It was very funny, yeah. So how did your activism continue after that? Well, I think that made me realize the power of a grass-roots movement—an effective grass-roots movement. But we might have done all of that in like five or six months right before the June deadline and if we had started—someone had started earlier it could have actually really been effective. It was effective, I won’t say it wasn’t because I do think that the scandal... it all prepped everyone for questioning things enough where you could really challenge what was going on and that the way it broke, it was one of those exciting things where one little release led to all these other explosions and the whole thing got exposed. Prostitutes coming out this week and new bribes and all this 22 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 disgusting stuff and it just made me realize that... I think that was actually the shifting point for me where I... I think it actually led to my deciding I’'m not going to be one of these Forest Service schleps that I had met who had just graduated from the School of Natural Resources and is openly telling everyone that he’s in a job that he hates that doesn’t respect his values because none of his superiors do the right thing. They are just following whatever the current administration is guiding and at some level they are feeling powerless and ineffective and so I think that’s what made me see the potential for just being an activist. I never thought I’d get paid for it. I still don’t think that [laughs] even though I’ve been paid for it for a number of years. I actually do think that it’s a legitimate career now and it’s one that’s needed. But at the time I never dreamed of doing it professionally. I thought logically that I would become a potter and make my money off of art. [laughs] And then I would get to do my activism on the side as a volunteer. And sadly, sadly that plan didn’t quite pan out that way either. RD: GN: Yet. Yet! [laughs] At the moment, activism pays a lot better than art. But at the time, I thought this is what I care about, and because I care about it, I'm going to do it no matter what and I’ll just work it into whatever career I choose. I went back to college feeling suddenly like I had a purpose. Suddenly like I could actually develop some skills in real meaningful ways—skills I didn’t have when I was fighting the Olympics— communication skills. I think biology, just a scientific understanding of how the natural world works is what I really thought would help a lot and so that triggered me into kind of start focusing my energy on getting a good education and developing skills that would help me do some of those things. So I went back to Michigan. I wasn’t really involved. I 23 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 Just had way too much going on to really do any activism there, but I was fully preparing to come back to Utah and do something really meaningful. So I applied for one job when I graduated and that was with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. It was to open up a St. George field office. I thought about it for a while, and I thought St. George would be a little bit weird of a place to live, especially all by myself, not knowing anyone down there, and not picturing any other environmentalists down there, but I thought, you know, I’ll give it a shot and kind of thought I"d be good at it. I didn’t know if they’d give me the job because I was fresh out of college and naive and all that. But I figured I’d take that or I’d go to Japan and study pottery, because I had been working to go to Japan to study pottery for three years. But that was the only thing that excited me just a hair more than doing that. So I had this interview the day after I got back from Michigan and it was a disaster of an interview. [ got like three questions into it and one of the people that I was interviewing—I looked at him and as [ was giving my answer, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling, like “Oh god, I'm so bored and this kid would just be terrible.” I stopped in mid-sentence when I saw him do this and my brain just went blank. I couldn’t go on. I stuttered my way through the rest of the twenty minute interview. I knew I wasn’t getting the job and I was really disappointed. So I ended up not getting the job surprisingly and went off to Japan instead. But in the meantime, I ended up volunteering for SUWA and did some wilderness surveys and compiled a list of all the threatened and endangered species in Washington County for them. I don’t know if they ever did anything with it. RD: Did they ever open up a field office down there? GN: Yeah, and they closed it about six months later. 24 GAVIN NOYES RD: 7 MAY 2008 You were incredibly brave to even consider going down and being the lone environmentalist in Washington County. GN: Yeah, it probably wasn’t a good idea and I think they eventually moved it to... [ think Liz Thomas did several years later ended up starting one down there—that is in Cedar City or somewhere else. So I ended up spending part of the summer studying as a biology assistant at the New Mexico Sevietta Field Station. Then I came back and was the sole volunteer for a group called the Wild Utah Forest Campaign and they sent me off to Boulder Mountain to survey for wilderness potential all of Boulder top, which was really an amazing place. And I spent about two and a half weeks up there. I actually brought a lot of new high tech skills from my natural resources classes. You know they had this brand new thing called GPS units. And so I talked the group into buying one of those and I wore this big antenna under my baseball cap—it was a flat antenna. I got one of the board members—I didn’t have a car, so I got one of the board members to drop me off on my mountain bike on Boulder top by myself with a bunch of food. And I spent the next two and a half weeks surveying every road and trail and logging impact riding around with this GPS unit that I downloaded when I got back, and taking dozens of rolls of pictures of all the roads. When I was done, I pushed my bike to the edge of the mountain and rode trails all the way down till I got to Boulder, Utah where I called one of my friends and I couldn’t get a hold of him, but I left him a message saying I'm going to... he was living in Springdale outside of Zion—same friend, Andrew Moeller who was doing the Olympic stuff. I said, “If you get this message, come pick me up. I’'m biking toward you.” Sure enough just before I had to climb the hill into Bryce, my friend came 25 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 driving down the road like clockwork after a very... I put in a lot of miles that day. [ was pretty tired. RD: How far did you go? Well, I started on Boulder top and I probably put in twenty miles before breakfast. GN: And then rode all the way from Boulder to Cannonville or whatever those towns are. It was probably a good eighty mile day or something. RD: Wow, that’s pretty good. It was the best bike ride I've ever done. GN: RD: All in one day? Yeah. GN: Wow, that’s cool. So what did you do after that volunteer job? Then you went to RD: Japan? GN: I continued working with the Utah Wild Forest Campaign that fall, volunteering for SUWA that fall and working for a guy named Dr. Lennox Tierney and Greg Thompson at the University of Utah. We were doing an art history archiving project of his—decades of slides of art history, which he had an Asian focus. He had some... most of them were dead, but he had some key contacts to Japanese pottery people, so I was kind of brushing up on my art history of Asia. RD: GN: RD: GN: What was your interest in pottery? When did that start? That started in high school. How? [ just started taking pottery classes and I really liked it. I don’t know if this is that relevant to the project you’re doing, but basically... I realized a few years ago I had the 26 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 really depressing realization that both of the things that I’'m really passionate about came at... were the result of when I was in high school, my parents were going through a divorce and so I think it was my coping mechanism. This is the depressing part. When I was going through that period, my coping mechanism for dealing with my parents’ divorce, which I didn’t really talk about with friends or anyone was either spending a lot of time immersing myself in pottery—in the pottery studio, or getting together with friends and going up into the mountains or down in the desert. Those were periods I could totally be myself and forget about what my parents were going through and the impact it was having on my life, which was a negative impact. It really sucked. Those were my escape mechanisms which became kind of a crutch for... [end of file one] Let me just rephrase what I just said, which was that I think sometimes when we’re struggling with things in our lives we have a tendency to change our patterns and habits in ways that are... and when they’re good and healthy for us they are things that... well, like with nature, it is definitely a way that I recharge. With ceramics it was the same thing. And so I think it’s also conscious but subconsciously we elevate that thing in our mind higher than it might be because it’s something that’s so beneficial to us as people. I say that, but I don’t want to devalue those things by saying that they are coping mechanisms because the opposite can be said too that we all go through times in our lives where we need things that help us recharge. I think that we all recharge in different ways. As a species, nature is a really big part of that—of our ability to recharge and to discover more about ourselves and be able to escape whatever stresses of our lives. So I think on a psychological level it has a value that goes beyond all the other services and really just 21! GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 inherent value that it has as a whole. That’s one of the ways that helps me understand things that other people value. I can put my values in perspective because when I went through those hard times, it seems kind of random that I chose nature and ceramics and those are now two things that make up a really big part of my life. But I could have chosen something different. Other people certainly chose different things. And so I think it just makes me really cautious to judge people on the things that they value and find worth in. I think religion is a big one. I think that that’s something that people often... I grew up in a not religious family. I’ve never really understood religion. But I think it’s obviously a powerful tool for a whole lot of people. RD: What do you think it is about you going out into this nature you find recharges you? What is it about going out there? GN: [ think it’s forgetting who I am. People call it a lot of different things. You can call it your natural self—being yourself. Just taking away any pressures... I think it’s... I really don’t know how to explain it, but it’s... It’s like forgetting. .. shutting down that little voice in your head which is always telling you that you need to work harder or be better or criticizing decisions that you make—just the constant churning of things in your daily life. For me and I know this doesn’t work with everyone, but I get out in nature and I observe. For me it has always been about beauty. I observe beautiful things around me. That’s where I get into trouble getting people lost on trails and things is that I really don’t pay attention to a lot of the negative things like the challenge of the trail... But it’s all about processing the world that you see in front of you and I stop thinking about whatever personal issues I might have going on in my life. I think it’s switching off the conscious mind is actually what it is. When that happens I think we forget that... I don’t 28 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 think we necessarily... switching off the conscious mind shuts down our storytelling process, which is our memory process, so I think when we get in those states because there’s no monologue going on while we’re out of that state, we don’t remember it but we somehow feel better coming out of it, which kind of explains these gaps in time like when “time flies when you’re having fun.” You get these gaps in time where you forget yourself, you forget your ego and this inner monologue shuts down and I think that that monologue is somehow tied to our memories, or at least the verbal aspect of our memory. There’s something very inherently good and natural and I think it’s what we all strive for in life—is shutting that down. We don’t realize it, but we look for mechanisms that help us do it, whether it be drugs or alcohol or religion or nature or... I think there’s a million ways to do it. RD: Is that a realization that you’re... you’ve always been coming to or... I don’t even know the best way to phrase this but I’'m just wondering if coming to that understanding has been a gradual process for you to develop that understanding about what’s important about nature. In a way it forces you outside of yourself... GN: No I definitely wasn’t... I don’t think there’s any way to know if that’s what’s actually going on. It’s a hard thing to understand, but it’s just kind of my way of understanding it. I’d say that understanding for me only developed just a few years ago. It’s evolving too. Like I said, I was really embarrassed when I realized that that’s why I like nature. Or that it’s probably not a coincidence that my passion around nature came at that time in my life. But I could also trace it back and look at all of my other interests, which I have a lot of interests in life. But all of those interests are related to things that I can totally lose my self in. 29 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 I was obsessed with math as a kid. I just loved it. For me math is another... I don’t do math anymore. I should. I love it. But as a kid I would just totally lose myself in math equations and it was all in my head—whether it be counting or doing big addition or multiplication problems or whatever the latest math problem in class, I loved it. That was my favorite homework to do. I would jump right into it and I was good at it. But think I was good at it because there was this reward mechanism that I could just lose myself in it and then pop out at the end even if it was a long complex thing, I would stay totally focused, pop out at the end with the right answer that I had no idea how I... I probably couldn’t retrace how I came up with it. But it is that forgetting yourself state of mind. I think that’s why I love math. It’s weird to like math! RD: GN: It’s not weird. It’s peculiar. [laughs] [ think it’s the same with sports. When you get really into sports you do the same thing. Your physical body takes over and you’re responding to the real situation that’s in front of you. And televised sports, I think it’s the same thing. Your brain is witnessing the sport happening. I think it’s relaxing. You’re not fretting over anything else in your life. Your mind is occupied with the good activity that’s happening in front of you. RD: Yeah. Would you then though draw a distinction between... or even make a value judgment on the kind of experience you’re having when you’re in nature—when you’re outdoors and you’re able to forget yourself or when you are doing a math problem and you are able to forget yourself vs. the forgetting of yourself that may occur when you’re watching television—something which could be interpreted as something more passive or something which could be seen as escapist. 30 GAVIN NOYES GN: 7 MAY 2008 Yeah there’s definitely a big difference. But at one level—at the level in your mind there might not be a big difference, but I think there’s a good deal more happy chemicals being released in your body when your body’s moving as well. I think it is... I’m sure it’s much more complex than that. But at a basic level, I’d say no. They are the same. In terms of just forgetting yourself, I think that’s healthy in itself, even if you’re just watching television. RD: So then you wouldn’t really... so on one level you don’t really draw a distinction. It would be accurate to say that they are all just escapisms or means of escaping. GN: Well, I think you’re trying to make a distinction between escapism and productive escapism. [ always think it’s better to have productive escapism. RD: How would you define productive escapism? How do you know when you’re actually being escapist and it’s productive and when it’s not productive? GN: Well, I think you don’t learn that till you’re done. American Idol might have been really good that night. RD: GN: It’s productive for someone. I think for me developing... refining physical skills—that’s a very productive thing. If you’re out moving and using your body and playing sports, you’re refining physical skills that’s a good thing. I think if you’re watching good television and getting good information, which is really hard to do, then yeah, it can be productive. I don’t know if I can answer... RD: Okay. I don’t mean to pursue it too far. I was just curious. There’s a whole line of thinking where people are thinking now if wilderness is just the experience of being in wilderness, then it’s something that can be re-created anywhere. So wilderness really 31 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 isn’t out there, it’s what makes you feel in here. So therefore, wilderness could be something that’s simulated by the construction of specific scenarios. Therefore there’s kind of a leveling occurring between like the wilderness we may think of as environmentalists which is out there in a totally different ecosystem than we’re accustomed to vs. the wilderness of a virtual experience. We don’t have to talk about it further. GN: No, no. I was just contemplating that a bit. Obviously I’'m going to defend the real experience and the value of that, but I’ll also admit that my attitudes have changed over time to some degree. [ think [ was very obsessed with the idea of wilderness, which sometimes blinded me to a lot of other kinds of beauty in the world and ways of seeing systems working. If you separate man from nature I think it’s a problem. I’d say I definitely did that for a while. I think it’s... the virtual wilderness experience... there’s just so many reasons to have wilderness and natural systems and very healthy natural systems to exist in the world that we can’t look at it from this self-serving perspective that all you need is to play this video game where you’re actually going to be hiking through the most pristine wilderness in the world and we’re going to squirt odors going through the cubicle while you’re playing it giving you the scent of fresh pine and bear scat when you walk by the bear scat and... that’s not the point. I don’t believe nature’s here to serve us. I don’t think that we’re very different from other species in... I just think that we have to all learn to... we just need to get along. [laughs] I don’t know. RD: What are your thoughts on wilderness now? You said they’ve changed over time so... I know you just were, but can you talk about what your thoughts are on it now? 32 GAVIN NOYES GN: 7 MAY 2008 [I'm definitely still... it’s still an area of great interest to me. I don’t know ifI can speak very clearly on it at the moment, just because I think I’m of two minds. One, we need wilderness and we need a lot more of it. Other species need a lot more of it. So we’ve encroached too far into the natural world where we’re not only endangering other species, but we’re reaching... we’re at a point where we’re in real trouble ourselves. I think that our encroachment on natural systems is at a point that it’s harmful to us as individuals. So I’m worried in that sense just about the state of wilderness. That said, I think that we can... I don’t even know how to talk about it in terms of wilderness, because—this other aspect—because you can also break down the whole system and say that there are all these natural systems in place which we don’t understand fully. We probably will never understand fully but we’re continuing to gain a better and better understanding of it. These are systems which serve human needs really well. They always have. We’re taking over more and more of them and I don’t think we need to... I think we’re at a point where it’s useless to cast judgment on some of these processes that we’re taking over, but we do need to have a little humility and say that we don’t understand what’s going on here. We need to do things better and smarter if we want to sustain the population levels that we have. I think we just need to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty and figure out how we’re going to hold on to what we have and basically give people on this earth the quality of life that we each deserve. At the same time we try and restore places that have been badly damaged, protect species that need protecting and... I don’t know. It gets depressing when I start getting in... I don’t know. It is depressing. I think the hard part for me comes that it does seem like we get to a point where the discussion starts to look like humans vs. nature again, 33 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 which is exactly the wrong way to lead the discussion, and I think we just need to be talking about balance and quality of life and somehow break ourselves of this growth for growth’s sake cycle and it’s really hard. I don’t know. We’ve got to have a new level of consciousness where we’re... it’s the old clichés of think globally and act locally or look at the big picture but focus on... make sure that you can trace individual actions and small systems and see how they tie into the bigger systems. It’s a real mental challenge to get to that point. And then it’s even a bigger jump to politically get to that point or even as a small community to get to that point. That’s what ’'m really interested in focusing energy on. How can we break this down to a community scale and not get all frantic that the earth’s coming to an end now. We should have done something yesterday and we’ve got to recognize problems, offer solutions, offer hope and find new ways of doing things that work and spread them around. Yeah, we might not have enough time, but we do have some time. RD: Do you see instances of that kind of work occurring now in Utah or nationally or globally you see as models? GN: There are lots of little examples. But I just think there’s so many better ways to do things than we’re currently doing them and that we need to... We just need to reincentivize things. We need to take the broken systems and change them around. I think some things need to happen at the local level and some things like global warming just absolutely have to happen at the international level. The things I’m interested in working on are at the community level where you can... There’s a good example of... these are small things but like Bellingham, Washington is a place where a couple of years ago they decided to... One of the non-profits up there started a program. What do they call it? It 34 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 think it’s “Think Local First” or something where they started a program to basically just get a marketing incentive for alternative energy. They got the city and a bunch of businesses and individuals to all pledge a little bit extra to their utilities kind of like the one Rocky Mountain Power does here but somehow carried it out at a bigger scale and in a single year I think they went from less than 1% of their energy coming from renewable energy sources and alternative energy sources to 11% of the whole city’s electricity coming from these methane... basically retrofitting pig farms and things like that. It’s something that everybody feels good about—starting new businesses, building their economy, building jobs. Van Jones is another guy doing that kind of work in Oakland where he’s tying together social justice—tying jobs to good environmental movements. He’s just an inspiring guy besides that—talking about building tomorrow’s engineers by getting excons installing solar panels on people’s roofs—so basically teaching people skills. I think that’s what it all comes down to is we’ve not only got to rebuild the ways that we’re damaging the environment and causing all these pollution problems, but we’ve got to rebuild ourselves as people. We can’t tolerate people being misused or used, abused, developing psychological problems that they can’t break out of. I think that’s why again the community piece... if we are really being good community citizens, we’re taking care of each other and we’re not letting people drop off the edge. I don’t think you need social services to fix it. Social services can help a lot. But we really need good people and we really need people who feel secure in who they are and the future of their community and it seems like with the trajectory that we’re on that we’ve got all these pressures that are making people feel less secure—jobs that are 35 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 paying less, lacking health insurance, just forcing people into a lot of bad situations where they have to decide whether they are going to participate as good members of a community or whether they are going to retaliate and fight and look out for their own life which is being threatened. I think that we can do that, but it happens at the very small scale and so basically I'm saying that’s where I’m putting my energy, but we kind of need energy at every level. We need it from the grass-roots up, we need it from the top down and everywhere in between. RD: I want to come back to maybe some of the social justice stuff in a minute, but before that I’d like to go back to some of your activism. We still haven’t quite gotten up to the point where you start working for Save Our Canyons, so can you... what was that process? GN: [ went to Japan and I studied ceramics—I was over there for a year and a half. When [ was coming back, I realized it would take me a while to get my ceramics up and going and [ started putting out some feelers for potential activist type jobs and basically when [ got back I didn’t have anything lined up and the Wild Utah Forest campaign, which was then up and going a year and a half after I had been volunteering for them, they were hiring summer field workers to go out and do more wilderness survey work. I already had been volunteering... I knew how to do it. I liked it and I actually saw it as a good opportunity to... it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing activist-wise because it was basically out in the middle of nowhere looking at... you think wilderness survey work, the problem with it is you never get into the wilderness. You’re looking at all the damages on the side and you’re stopping at those damages because you’ve got to record them and get off to the next damaged place. It was actually a good opportunity for... I 36 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 wanted to find a good piece of land that I could build a kiln on to keep pursuing my ceramics and I also was picking up local clays and figure out how I could incorporate all these local materials into... I basically wanted to make Utah-style ceramics, but high fire rather than the Native American northernware vessels. So I was doing that job realizing that I didn’t totally... it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing more activist type stuff and writing and engaging with people and so in that job as the snow started falling everywhere, I started working toward that and proposed a job at Wild Utah Forest campaign for myself doing issues work. It was actually really awful how it turned out because I proposed this new job, and my boss at Wild Utah Forest campaign, she had a boss in Washington D.C.—Jim Jontz I think was his name. Susan Ash was the head here. I don’t know whose fault it was, but there was some horrible miscommunication where Susan thought she had permission from Jim Jontz to hire me and so basically what I was doing is [ was doing forest issues work and part of it was helping out with Save Our Canyons fighting Snowbird and looking at other forest issues and starting to work on them. I had been doing this for two months when Susan got a call from Jim Jontz saying, “All your field workers are done for the season except Gavin. Why is he still getting paid?” This was three days before Christmas. She said, “Oh, well you gave permission to keep paying him.” He said, “No I didn’t actually give permission. I said I’d try and raise money for it and I never raised the money. His salary has been coming out of the field work salary, which is not allowable. That’s money earmarked for field work. So tell Gavin he has to pay back the last two months of salary and he doesn’t have a job.” [laughs] I had spent all the money. It was three days before Christmas. It 8y GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 wasn’t much to begin with. They were paying us crap. I was really upset, and I think Susan got in big trouble for it. But anyways, I didn’t have a job, and ended up going to this conference down at the Boulder Mountain Lodge working on forest issues, again as a volunteer, just because I wanted to be doing it. I had gotten involved in some really cool volunteer projects on the side as well. So I got to know some of the other players and anyways I rode home from Boulder Mountain Lodge with Gale Dick who—he and I had been working on the same subcommittee fighting the Hidden Peaks structure on this new Snowbird proposal which had just come down the pipes. I had been working hard on it as a volunteer now and I did end up paying back like half the money. I don’t know how I did it but I borrowed money or something and [ was like, “This is what I can give you now and if you are really a bunch of jerks you will keep looking for more.” They kind of wrote it off and said, “Okay, we’ll share the cost of Susan’s mistake.” [ still thought it was so sleazy. So Gale, on the way home basically said, “Well, you know the board... Save Our Canyons has been doing this for twenty-five years and we’ve been talking for the last year and a half or two that we really want to hire a staff person. We don’t have much money, but we just found out that we got this little grant from Patagonia and the board all decided we would love to make you a job offer if you’re willing.” We had one of the WUFC board members in the car and so I forget how it happened, but... oh he was asking what I was doing... I don’t know—what my job status was. I think we were still trying to work out funding issues like oh, you have no job now, but we’re going to try... maybe in two weeks after you pay back all this money, we can hire you. RD: We get the money you give us. 38 GAVIN NOYES GN: 7 MAY 2008 [don’t know. No, I think all of that was just water under the bridge, but they were going to try and hire me to keep working on the project I had already been working on. I did not want to keep working for them. So anyways, I ended up telling Gale this whole... and the other board member—the other board member didn’t really know about it either. By the end of the car ride I was hired by Save Our Canyons on a part time basis. That same week, [ had just bought a chunk of land to build my kiln on, so timing was... I was all geared up to move down there and find a job and build the kiln and then Gale offered me this job. I was like, “well, I’ll do that half time and build my kiln the other half time.” That never panned out either. I worked double time for Save Our Canyons for the next five years. But it was great. I loved the work and I loved the people and it was fun. Save Our Canyons is just a great grass-roots group. No money, but tons of enthusiasm and creativity and just making the most of really the power of people to do stuff and grass-roots organizing. Alexis Kelner is kind of the grass-roots genius of Utah who is just... basically it was his one-man band of a non-profit running this pretty effective organization for so long with no money. The way they operated for twenty-five years was they would put out a newsletter and go for two or three years and write all these letters and get engaged in all these processes and then every couple of years they’d say, “Okay, we’re out of money. Send us what you can.” People would write checks for five bucks or seven-fifty. They have this little tiny three thousand dollar a year budget or whatever just to produce the newsletter—pay for the ink and the paper and the postage stamps and volunteers did everything else. They had a lot of volunteers. They were basically a volunteer system. When they hired me, it was the opposite of every other group that I’ve seen that does this, which you have a board that’s burned out and you hire 39 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 anew person at twenty hours a week and then you’ve got eight board members that say “Oh, thank God you showed up!” Dump. Here’s what I was doing and here’s... I spent about twenty-five hours a week doing this and this is now your new job and you have eight board members doing that. Suddenly you’ve got this kid making no money trying to figure out how to do all this with no volunteer force anymore. Save Our Canyons did the opposite where they very strategically said, “The whole reason we are doing this is because the Olympics are coming down the pipes and we’ve got every single ski resort that’s trying to put in a ten year master development plan and we’ve really got to build our capacity. We can’t have a single person stepping back from any of this. In fact we’ve got to bring on someone and we’ve got to get that person trained. We’ve got to get them up to speed and basically teach them how to use this good system that we have and make it that much better. And so they had some really good strategic thinkers—Gale Dick being right up there... really the head of the organization in terms of great minds and being a great people person. Tom Berggren, who is an incredibly smart guy was one of the key strategic thinkers in all that. Wes Odell, he’s actually the only one that was kind of stepping out. He worked for IBM and was just a total business man. Sharp as... very sharp but just down to business and he was mean if you weren’t on his side. But he could... he was one of the more efficient people that I’ve worked with and he basically sized me up in about... just from one meeting. He knew exactly what my strengths and my weaknesses were and addressed... basically said, “Here’s where you need to develop...” He was so talented at sizing anyone up and he basically went through the whole organization and summarized every single person in the group in two sentences. 40 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 He’d say what they were excellent at and he’d say their biggest weakness. Each of those phrases seared into my mind and really guided me for the rest of the time I was at Save Our Canyons for using people at a level where they could be really effective. I think Wes was really amazing at that. He was also just kind of terrible to have involved in some situations because he would get all involved and would make things roll so well and then at critical point he would blow up and storm out and just end everything. He never did that with Save Our Canyons, but he was involved in a lot of the Olympic committees and different groups where he would storm out and the groups would either fizzle and not be as effective or he would just piss everyone off. He wouldn’t give in either. He just thought environmentalists just really needed to hold their ground. He was the opposite personality of Gale. He always had more patience and sympathy for views other than your own. You could always kind of work things out. Well, Gale cpould certainly hold his ground too on important issues. But he was always nice about it. No one hated him when he held his ground. RD: GN: RD: Is Wes still around? No, he moved. Last I heard he was in Texas. Oh, really? Okay. They hold the ground well down there. [laughs] So the first issues you were working on then with Save Our Canyons were the Olympics and Snowbird? GN: Actually no. The Olympics really didn’t get heated up until the scandal broke. Even then we didn’t do too much with the Olympics. The Olympics we were really just fighting ski resorts related to the Olympics because... Actually Save Our Canyons did... 41 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 they were already involved in the Snowbasin lawsuit I think that had just finished and the big land swap fiasco out there—some endangered species that got exempted from NEPA. RD: GN: Do you want to talk about that more for a minute? That’s a pretty big deal. Yeah, it was just this boondoggle that our congressional delegates from Utah pulled off to basically privatize Snowbasin ski resort so that Earl Holding could first and foremost develop this huge resort out of nothing—building condos and a huge lodge and gave him big swaths of public land to build more gondolas and lifts going up to the top. The other piece of it was they bought him a new highway up to Snowbasin, which would cut a lot of time off the commute for skiers to get out there. So the federal government paid for that new highway that went out, which also got exempted from NEPA and basically Snowbasin just put in their master development plan and it all got approved through that process. None of their development had to got through NEPA, but they set up another process where the Forest Service and Save Our Canyons and other interested groups were still involved, but it was just on a weekly basis. Here’s what we’re doing this week and here’s the environmental precautions we’re taking. The implementation of that happened while I was there and so we had board members that were out doing that, but the law suit was finished and we ended up winning that lawsuit. I don’t really know the details of it. I know there were some things that... Snowbasin—that was the biggest environmental scandal that happened as a result of the Olympics coming—that huge land swap where Earl Holding after the bill passed spent several years trying to buy up enough private land to... Oh, that’s what the lawsuit was over. They devalued all the public lands at Snowbasin and we challenged it saying, “You’re giving this land to Earl Holding for nothing.” It was a land swap, but he didn’t 42 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 own the land yet. He just had to come up with a similar value of land to give to the Forest Service. So they devalued it and we challenged it in court and got it revalued so that he had to buy a lot more land to give to them. The other details were... I think it was all unchallengeable because it was law passed by congress that endangered species they later found on the slope they developed didn’t have to go through any of the environmental process they discovered it after they started building. So that was kind of mess. The issues I first got involved with were Snowbird’s master development plan, which I coordinated all of the different... it was a huge... there were a lot of different aspects to it. We had about thirty or forty activists working broken down into subgroups. Each was in charge of responding to different elements of the master development plan— the Hidden Peaks structure—putting a sixty-eight thousand square-foot conference center/multiuse building on top of Hidden Peak; Mineral Basin expansion—dropping two new lifts into Mineral Basin; connecting up with Alta; the White Pine expansion. They were trying to put a lift up to the White Pine ridge line, so that skiers could ski down through White Pine. Those were the main elements we were fighting. There were tons of other things, but most of them we didn’t oppose. So that was one thing and then the current Wasatch wilderness bill—that was actually the very first thing. I think that we finished up the Snowbird comments before I got hired and so my first issue was putting together the wilderness proposal. We had Merrill Cook who had gotten elected into Congress and we started meeting with him about expanding the wilderness areas in the Wasatch. That’s current right now. We’ve been talking with. .. I started talking when Jim Matheson got elected. Every term he was saying, “Oh yeah, I'm going to do it. We’ve just got to wait for these rural Utah folks to 43 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 calm down a little bit. Supposedly he’s talking again like he’s going to introduce this bill in congress last month was what I heard. But expanding Lone Peak, Twin Peaks, Mt. Olympus and then creating a new area called Grandeur Peak. I mapped, with the help of the Wild Utah Project, [ was in charge of creating that map of what the bill would look like. We had a guy named Michael Garrety. That was his pet project under Merrill Cook. I think Michael Garrety was pretty involved with Wild Utah Forest Campaign as well somehow. But I put that together—those were the main two issues and then eventually... Alta’s ten year master development plan had already gone through. We had sued over that—Save Our Canyons had sued over that. That was actually pending while I was there, but I never got too involved in it. Brighton was the next one, Solitude was the next one and then Wasatch Powderbirds heli-ski permit—those were all huge issues that we took pretty strong stances on. The heli-birds—we tried to shut them down, and got some pretty good concessions in that go-around. We got involved in a lot of good issues. The Olympics came up again. We felt like someone needed to put together an environmental assessment of what having the Olympics means. So we wrote a really great broadside of... it was maybe a sixteen page document—big, two-tone that just went through and laid out all the environmental problems with having the Olympics in Salt Lake—everything that we dealt with. Then we mailed it to every media outlet around the world. [laughs] And that was fun. The Salt Lake Olympic Committee really didn’t like it when that came out. RD: Did you get much coverage out of that? 44 GAVIN NOYES GN: 7 MAY 2008 Oh, my gosh. We got tons of coverage. Yeah we were on NPR, we were on... I think I was quoted in the Guardian. We were just doing interviews for the three weeks leading up to the Olympics. Most of them were a little alternative. Everyone was looking for a hook to tie other stories into the Olympics and so it was big. And then we also had one little devious idea that got us more coverage—probably too much coverage... it went everywhere. The Salt Lake Olympic Committee kept doing this thing where they would rather than telling anyone what they were doing up front, they would wait till the very last minute and go to whoever they needed final approval from for these things with really big environmental impacts. They would say, here’s what we’re proposing to do. We’re going to donate money on the side. It was just the bribe system. They would donate money to some environmental cause that the politician liked and then they would get rubber stamped for whatever terribly destructive thing they were doing. So we had watched this happen for the two years leading up to the Olympics. They just kept doing this over and over. So le I plotted one night. Actually Rocky Anderson called us in that morning and he said we’re going to put the logo of the Olympics on the Avenues Twins—on this peak, and it’s going to be the size of three football fields or something. It’s going to be lighted up. We’re going to haul all these generators up there and it’s going to be... the Olympic committee guy had some term for it. Oh, he said we’re doing this for the “beauty cam”, which is the camera set up at the KSL station so that we’re going to balance out the nothing that’s happening over here on the left of downtown and the Avenues. It’s going to balance out the majesty of the Wasatch with this lighted up Olympic logo. Rocky basically called us in to tell us that he was going to support it in front of the city council that night and he knew that we 45 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 would be opposed to it, but he just wanted to see if there was something that we could work out. We discussed it briefly and said no, we have to oppose this. This is terrible. This is disgracing one of our beautiful mountain peaks with lights and generators and you’re going to punch a road up there? That’s not the message that we want to send the world— that this is how we treat our mountains. It’s like putting the U up on the mountain or the big T above Tooele. It’s horrible. It’s just a bad message in itself. We really should be sending the message that we value these mountains and everything that they offer our community. Rocky said, “well, okay, but would it make you guys feel better if the Olympic committee said that they’ll give some money towards open space? And it’s quite a bit of money.” It’s always quite a bit of money! [laughs] And no, it’s not okay. So Gale and I left that meeting and we came up with this devious little plan that at the city council meeting that night after the... when they had the open discussion on the proposal to allow these rings up on the hillside, which is protected watershed, it’s all these things, that Gale would get up and he would... the big thing was that they were giving twenty-five thousand dollars toward open space, right? The Olympics had millions and millions of dollars that they were tossing around like flowers or something. So Gale Dick got up and he explained all the reasons why this is just a bad message and is unnecessary and that we don’t need another road up to that peak. We don’t need generators going—we don’t need all these things, and in fact we will raise the money to give... [ forget. Oh, we were going to buy—I think we put it in those terms the rights to not have the rings put up on the hillside for thirty-thousand dollars, [laughs] or some ridiculous thing like that. We’ll offer the city thirty-thousand dollars for open space— 46 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 basically to just embarrass the Olympic committee. They’re the only bidder in town. Why not turn this into... go the full length that the fools that they’re making out of themselves that they can outbid everyone and just toss a little money here and there and get what they want. So we offered thirty-thousand dollars to the city, which was a little over the top, admittedly. RD: GN: So what happened with that? The media went crazy with it. “Environmental group offers thirty-thousand dollars to not destroy hillside.” RD: GN: It sounds like an Onion headline almost. Yeah, it was ridiculous, and we didn’t have the money and no one would give it to us. But it did make international news everywhere. RD: GN: So did the Olympic committee have to up their bid? No, what it caused was it humiliated them. They were embarrassed that they were seen as the environmental bad guys—that an environmental group wants to come in and disallow them from hosting... from their beauty-cam shot. They had to defend their plan in front of everyone to destroy this hillside. So the immediate result was that they were very responsive on that issue and they met all of our concerns. They did not punch a road up there. They got Hill Air Force Base to helicopter in all of their generators and fuel. This was all two weeks before the Olympics. This was when they announced it. They had their guard walk in rather than driving their Bronco up the road every night and every morning. They just took care to make sure... and they agreed to do a longer term replanting and just make sure that the seeds that they planted up there took. And they did have to do a little bit of road work and 47 GAVIN NOYES 7MAY 2008 so they reseeded all of that. So it ended up... and we had to sign off on it when it was all done and they did a very good job. So that was one result. But the second result was that they just didn’t get permission any more for anything. They punched roads into three areas for the finale of the Olympics so that they could set off fireworks in all of these key beauty-cam locations and they just didn’t get permits for it and didn’t do restoration on it. And weren’t around long enough to really be held accountable for it. The games were a success and no one wanted to criticize them afterwards, and we decided not to criticize them after it. It would just look bad. RD: Yeah. I realize you’ve been talking for a long time, and I know this isn’t in like your top ten of experiences with Save Our Canyons, but one of my favorite stories of yours that I think is definitely worth retelling for this project is... I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but it involves the rerouting of a marathon in the foothills behind Salt Lake City. Would you care to share? GN: Yeah, I mean some of these issues... it’s hard to be proud about some of them because they’re not really big deals. But, that one, it is a bit... it is a big deal. This was the eco-challenge race, and I think it is just good to have groups like Save Our Canyons paying attention at this level, which we were doing. So eco-challenges, I think, are totally silly and this one was no exception. Basically you have a TV crew that is all for television and advertising dollars and so you’ve got all this money that shows up to film a bunch of people doing dumb things to try and get from point A to point B however they can, right? So these guys show up and it was... they were slammed to get the permits, so they called the Forest Service offices and they said, “Look, you guys should have come to us years ago to start the environmental process for what you are proposing—to run all 48 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 these TV crews and more than a hundred racers through watersheds, through forest lands all around Salt Lake City and you guys are trying to do this in six weeks. The only way we are going to let you do it is if we write you what is called a categorical exclusion, which basically is just blanket approval and you don’t really have to do any environmental impact. We’re only going to give you a categorical exclusion if you get Save Our Canyons to agree with you and any other stake holder who cares. So they had them contact us and the Utah Environmental Congress also got a little bit involved. But I really love City Creek. They planned their great event, which was timed at the Outdoor Retailers Show, and that’s important because the Outdoor Retailers Show happens—it was like August 19" or something that they had this. It was kind of the kickoff or finale for the Retailers Show. They were going to start on roller blades and they had to do... I forget how many laps around the Salt Palace. Then they were going to roller blade up City Creek and kick off their roller blades and start running. They were going to run through an area that clearly the organizers had never been because there’s no trail up it. They were going to go through wetlands in upper City Creek, which is totally overgrown and very wild. It’s probably the wildest canyon of the bunch that we are most interested in. I think it’s the only one that has bear. It definitely has a lot of moose and there’s definitely no trail. It’s this marshy area that is Salt Lake City watershed and sending TV crews and a hundred people up through it, and there’s no rule on how or where or anything that... they just get from point A to point B as fast as they can. And so I studied their maps and I had issues with a couple of areas. One was rappelling down a waterfall above Provo, but the Uintah National Forest didn’t care. They were going to give them the permit regardless of what we said. This was the other 49 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 one that I just said, “You know, this is a problem area.” He said, “Okay, well help us out with this, help us get around it.” So I called a few people and we had a meeting with the organizer who flew in a couple of weeks in advance of the race. And I called a trail runner who knew that whole area above City Creek really well and we basically came up with a plan to send them up the old whiskey smuggling route that was used during Prohibition to bring whiskey into Salt Lake City, which goes along the upper ridge—the northern ridge of City Creek. They wanted to get all the way to Big Mountain Pass, which it does. Again there’s no trail. But there’s a faint trail and so they were very amenable to that and said, “okay, yeah it’s no problem. We didn’t realize there wasn’t a trail up in the wetland area and we don’t want to cause any damage there, so we’ll just move it up to the ridge, and you guys are okay with the ridgeline getting trampled?” We’re like, well, it’s a concession. If you’re going to do it anyway, yes. This is a lot better that you are on a dry ridgeline. So we worked that out and told them we wouldn’t protest it and they got their categorical exclusion just in time. So August 19™ happened to be the hottest day of the entire year and so they worked up a sweat rollerblading around the Salt Palace and then rather than going up the nice shady City Creek and tromping through the mud and wetlands where they could cool off under the shoulder-high moosewood and everything else that’s growing up there, they got put on the most exposed, driest, steepest ridge in the middle of the day. [laughs] So they had... the adventure racers were totally unprepared, or some of them were. They ended up five or seven people get helicoptered off the ridge because the people filming it from the helicopters were watching them drop like flies and getting waved off. They just all overheated and didn’t have enough water and got dehydrated and so a bunch of them 50 GAVIN NOYES 7 MAY 2008 were hospitalized. [laughs] The race went on, but the race organizer ended up coming out in the paper the next day. He’s like “Yeah, we just named that stretch the Gavin’s Trek because he’s the jerk that sent us up there.” He didn’t say I was a jerk. He just said we worked out this agreement and... but you could tell that they were a little upset that half their racers didn’t make it. I thought it was funny. RD: GN: It’s supposed to be an eco-challenge. Yeah. [end of u-1936] 51 GAVIN NOYES Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview by Rob DeBirk 2 June 2008 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION Utah Environmentalist Oral History Project u--1937 American West Center, Environmental Humanities Program, and Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah TODAY IS JUNE 2, 2008. I AM ROB DEBIRK FOR THE AMERICAN WEST CENTER AND I AM, AGAIN, INTERVIEWING GAVIN NOYES. RD: All right, Gavin. So last we spoke we were talking about Save Our Canyons and some of your work there and then we were going to transition to your leaving Save Our Canyons and going to Round River. Before we go to Round River is there anything from Save Our Canyons that you think we left off from last time or anything you would like to discuss from the work that you were doing with Save Our Canyons? GN: We spent quite a bit of time talking about Save Our Canyons, so... RD: Yeah. Is there anything you feel like... last call? Last call for Gavin’s stories regarding Save Our Canyons. GN: I don’t know if we kind of did a snapshot summary of it, but I’ve always thought of Save Our Canyons as a really effective grass-roots organization that manages to get a lot done. They have an all volunteer board that really drives the organization so they’re kind of the key. There’s both expert—experts doing stuff on the ground, but then because they have that such unique volunteer structure and they’re not really a fund raising board, but they can tap into a much deeper level of grass-roots organizing than I’ve seen other groups able to do. RD: Why do you think that is? Why are they so successful with being volunteer or focusing on volunteerism—the abilities of the volunteers? GN: Well, I think part of it is just a willingness to let volunteers step in with their own interests and take on certain levels of projects and let actually just the structure of it where you actually see volunteers getting heavily involved and learning skills and getting nurtured as they learn things about how to do organizing work. And then the best ones GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 get invited on to the board. So it is entirely an activist board. I think being able to see that people are able to move through and be effective as just a basic volunteer but move into higher roles—I think that’s one of the reasons. It’s got a supportive structure for that. And the staff has typically not been... they’re not... in other organizations there’s kind of a staff hierarchy where you kind of move up and take on different responsibilities. But I think Save Our Canyons was founded on good solid grass-roots activism. RD: Are most of the board members—were they living in the Wasatch area when you were with Save Our Canyons? GN: Uh, yeah. Everyone of them lives somewhere along the Wasatch Front. They still have one board member in Ogden. But almost everyone else lives in Salt Lake City, maybe one in Park City. RD: Yeah, okay. After Save Our Canyons you worked for a little while at Local First Utah? GN: Yeah, the buy local campaign. RD: So [ wonder if you could talk about your work at buy local Utah and how that plays into environmentalism or the kind of organizing you did in Salt Lake with Save Our Canyons? GN: Yeah, I think the main thing that [ was interested in doing... the reason I wanted to do the buy local campaign was to get a better understanding of the economic side of... it was always just such a big piece of working at Save Our Canyons is we were always fighting big economic interests, so I was really interested in seeing what are the economic assumptions that we’re making when we’re talking about environmental issues, and what are some models for how you can create different economic incentives for doing different GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 things. The buy local movement nationally is all about sustainable communities and sustainable economies and really shrinking things down to a level where you’ve actually got money recirculating in communities which is kind of the ideal way to do things. It’s the ideal for sustainability. You’re growing crops in a certain area. You give the farmers that money. It’s just that whole economic cycle that creates jobs and basically community members are providing services for each other. They’re not as prone to being taken advantage of by outside forces where you have a real need for jobs and you have some big corporation that says, “I’ll come in and create a thousand new jobs if your work force is willing to work for minimum wage.” You are basically just creating a supportive dynamic where you’re giving workers fair wages and understanding how... I’'m not really describing this very well, but local economies I think are in many ways the ideal way to have a community set up because everything is interdependent on each other. People support the things in the community that they want to see. Ideally you don’t have big corporations coming in and taking advantage of workers and so I don’t think there’s a good example out there of this functioning—especially in western societies, but I think if you look at very strong tight-knit communities, they often have this local economy built into it as well, which can be a very powerful thing just on a personal level. You know everyone in the community. You’re dependent on everyone in the community, but everyone’s also feeling good because they’re making their own contributions, which people can see. RD: Who was your audience when you were working for this organization? Was your audience of people you were mostly speaking with, were they business owners, or were you trying to speak to consumers, or both or how was that weighted? GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 GN: Well, that was one of the internal dialogues. I felt very strongly that it should have been consumer driven. That to be powerful you have to get consumers really buying into the idea that locally owned shops are the best for their community, because the people who have the highest stakes in the long term in creating the kind of community that they want to live in and that consumers are really the way excitement gets spread around new stores, new restaurants, new ideas, and I think without that... and ultimately the board decided to have it be really a business serving and business driven organization. [ think it loses a little bit of trustworthiness because you’ve got the businesses who are the most interested in making money also being the same ones saying, “Oh shop here because I’'m local.” Obviously it would be good to have both, but I think it would be more effective just to have it coming from the consumer level, which was never really that encouraged. RD: Okay. How heavily did you emphasize—when you were speaking either to consumers or to Utah businesses, how heavily did you emphasize the environmental argument for buying locally? Did that come into play? GN: That was another one of those internal arguments that the board and I didn’t totally see eye to eye on. Actually the board internally didn’t see eye to eye on, and there was... A lot of nonprofits don’t have ideal group dynamics going on. I don’t think there are any individuals to blame for that, but it happens. It was one of those organizations where I think I was optimistic that it would be a little more cohesive than it was and that people could get over it and make decisions and move on and actually build the organization. But there’s a big internal dilemma around how much that piece of it... even sustainability. Some people on the board did not want to mention the word sustainability, GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 which upset the whole national movement because they felt like it couldn’t be separated from the word sustainability. RD: Yeah, that’s surprising. GN: So that was one of the odd dynamics of what was going on there. That’s why I was only there a year. RD: All right. Fair enough. I just wanted to ask. GN: But it was a very educational year. I got out of it the pieces I was interested in learning about economics—looking at economics as a real positive force that can be harnessed rather than economics being used for other purposes that aren’t supportive of community... strengthening community and improving the environment. So I definitely got a lot out of that. [end of file one] RD: So you were talking about how one of your goals in going to Buy Local was trying to gain a greater understanding of economics, because so many economic issues came into play when you were working for Save Our Canyons. You mentioned that economics was... you realized from working at Buy Local that economics was a powerful force that could be harnessed as opposed to just opposed I guess? GN: Yeah, right. I always thought money was evil before. RD: Can you explain to me how you came to this realization and how it’s now affecting you? Because some of us still feel that money is evil and so... GN: I think I first realized it in talking with a friend of mine—Jason Cowan, who runs a local business. He was actually on the board of Vest Pocket, which was a precursor to GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 Buy Local First. I was really struck by him because he made me realize that he loved the process of business. And as I questioned him on that, it came down to really his love of personal relationships that happened to hover around money. RD: Okay. So he’s not fetishizing money itself. GN: I don’t think so, no. For him money was usually part of it, but it’s not the part that he enjoyed so much. It seemed to be all about enjoying people and the different relationships and really understanding himself through these business relationships and business decisions and management decisions and all the challenges that really are human relationship challenges. He, I think, just opened my eyes to the possibility that there’s other... I mean for me having other relationships with money that I don’t dislike—just automatically rule them out, but also realizing that there’s actually probably really good people and ideas and that there’s value in all these business relationships that I was discounting—assuming that people were just after the dollars, and selling themselves out in exchange for those dollars. So I started reading and I think I also realized that I wasn’t a very good manager at Save Our Canyons. So this goes back to the period of when I left Save Our Canyons, but certainly before Local First. I had gotten into reading all these business books and management books and money books and just trying to get my head around all these different ideas that I knew were important, but I found them so distasteful before I could bring myself to reading it, but gave it a chance and tried to find some good principles that I could get out of it, and I did. I actually got a lot out of it. [laughs] RD: Okay. Such as? GN: Well, which piece of it? The economics piece? GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 RD: Yeah, what did you learn? GN: Well, one economic thing that I found really interesting was... there’s so many fascinating things about it. It actually makes sense economically if you look at... if you compare the growth rate of the stock market to the growth rate of trees, it actually makes financial sense to chop down the trees and put it in the stock market and let it grow in the stock market rather than in the ground. RD: Yeah, I’'m glad you came to that realization! GN: So the second piece of that realization is that the interest rates that we assign to money is an artificial construct. You do not have to have inflation. You can actually... you’d get a whole different set of behaviors if you had built in deflation. Then it would be much more valuable to keep everything in hard goods—trees, bags of beans—in any other form than money. That is a human construct. We apply an artificial inflation to things, and you can have neutral inflation—stag... RD: Stagflation? GN: No it’s not stagflation! [laughs] RD: It’s fun to say. GN: Anyways, there’s ways that we can change these things so that we can actually get the kind of behaviors that we want to see. No one’s going to do it in your future, but it’s possible. RD: It’s good to know that it’s possible. I'm glad that you continued that because I was getting a little worried when you left off... well, you cut down the trees and invested them in the stock market and it grows there... GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 GN: Well, from before then I was just... you would think about it. Why are people chopping down trees just for money? You can leave them in the ground... I'll discontinue that thought but... Anyways, I thought people were just a bunch of jerks before that, but you can try and say, oh well, they need to feed themselves and they’ve got kids and so maybe it’s essential that they chop down that tree and put the money in the stock market. I don’t know. RD: I think I’1l title this interview: Gavin Noyes, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Buck! That’s the subtitle. [laughs] No that’s interesting. I appreciate you going into it. Well, do you want to start talking about Round River and your work at Round River? GN: Yeah, I can. [ don’t want to leave any loose ends on the economic thing. I still have an uncomfortable relationship with money. RD: Okay, good. Final word. Round River? GN: So, yeah, Round River is a really interesting organization that’s been around for about eighteen years. It was founded by a guy named Dennis Sizemore who you should interview at some point. RD: I would like to. He’s on my list. Terry gave me his name with no contact information, so... GN: I can give it to you. RD: [ would love that. GN: He’s got a biology background, and was really fascinated with grizzly bears. He was running student programs and doing environmental education. I think he was doing wilderness survival courses—teaching them for BYU down in the Escalante area. [ don’t GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 totally know the story of how it all came together, but basically Dennis started branching out and started trying to do conservation projects and I think tried to start down in southern Utah and didn’t get any money and didn’t totally know what to do because it was so complicated. I guessing he started following grizzly bears up north into Canada and got wrapped up in what turned into a pretty huge project in British Columbia. According to him I don’t think it was totally intentional that he started doing a lot of community engagement work. I think it came through a concern for wildlife, and conservation, but realized eventually that the indigenous first nation tribes up there had such a strong voice and were willing to talk about conservation. But they also had a lot of social issues that needed addressing and I think through Dennis and other people that got involved, they just started working with people and as some of the social issues came up they were more than willing to step in and help out with those that range from a lot of problems that you see in any low-income communities from drug and alcohol abuse and physical abuse. RD: In what ways does Round River step in with these issues and assist? GN: I don’t think it really falls into Round River’s mission that they do any of that, but I think when some of the community leaders would step forward and say, “Look, we’re interested in conservation, but we’ve got bigger issues that we can’t even think about that.” When they’d hear about these bigger issues, I think there were some pretty simple solutions like getting an abuse hotline into the little town where they were working. If a wife was getting abused by her husband, she could make a call and get some outside assistance for dealing with the situations. So little things like that went a long way toward building trust between Round River and community leaders. So I think those small trust- GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 building things really led toward being able to engage at a much deeper level and make the communities realize that Round River wasn’t just interested in conservation alone, but really was looking to the community to be functional enough that they were going to be the ones that ultimately will care for the land. It’s their land and I think helping them realize just how valuable that land is with all the amazing wildlife and the huge tracts of wilderness that support grizzly and big salmon populations and moose and mountain goats and thin horned sheep and everything else. So they started working to addressing some of the threats. The British Columbian government was trying to let a mine company come in and punch a road through the heart of their territory. Things were different up there in that a lot of the treaties hadn’t been settled. So there were different opportunities for getting... Basically it’s built into over the last eighteen years that right now they’ve... a judge ordered that the British Columbian government could not give a permit to a mining company when the tribe wasn’t involved in the discussions. The tribe didn’t want to be involved in the discussions because they were being called stake-holders and they don’t view themselves as stake- holders. They view themselves as... that it’s their land. So the courts finally came back and said the courts finally came back and said that the British Columbian government has to have government to government negotiations with these tribes to work out the treaty process to come to an understanding on who has rights and what kind of rights to the large tracts of land—tens of millions of acres in northern British Columbia. So that’s where that’s at up there. But I think what’s worked for Round River is they’ve always stuck to the science. Conservation science—looking at conservation biology principles and doing good GIS work where you can take what in the past has 10 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 been pretty complicated ideas and condensed them down into simplified maps that show where important wildlife habitat is, where important fisheries are—represent these values in the landscape in a way that is easily understood by everybody, no matter what your background. Then having those tools available so that locals can start to effectively engage in land-use decisions and make decisions around development too. If they have more information around where the critical wildlife habitat is, it’s easier to say well, we need this kind of development but it makes more sense to do it over here where we it won’t harm the wildlife as much. It helps them say, well we used to hunt moose and now we have to hop on our snowmobiles and drive twenty miles before we can find any moose. Being able to look at that problem and say well, if we create a no snowmobiling boundary, which comes in close to our city and create a core moose habitat, then the moose will spread out from there and maybe we can have areas that it’s okay to hunt moose on snowmobiles, but also have this core area that people can walk into and get their food that they need to live on. So there’s a lot of powerful things that you can do with modern mapping tools and just helping people understand the importance of carnivores in an ecosystem and what role they play and how important they are. So I think that work up there has been really key in identifying ways that Round River can engage in other areas, so other project areas include Namibia where again we have people working on the ground with communities learning from them where all the water holes are, where they graze cattle, where the elephants are, where the rhinoceroses are and created maps that the locals see that they have contributed to—their water holes show up on the map and they can visually understand what their little communal area 11 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 looks like, but then you can back out and they can see how big the landscape is and see areas that they’ve never been and get a sense of how they fit into the big picture. RD: It seems to be a different style of grass-roots organizing than is common. It seems to be way of... I don’t know a lot about these things and maybe you can tell me if 'm being totally wrong, but it seems like when you think of most environmental organizations, they're thought of as coming in and a lot of people think of them as coming in and telling the locals what to do. And it seems to me that what Round River is doing is completely opposite. I mean you are very grass-roots. It’s very... Round River goes into areas and sees what they can do to help with that community. Is that accurate? Is that an accurate assessment? Do you see them as being much different from other organizations? GN: Yeah, [ see it being a partnership, and I see it as being an open ended partnership, which is really key. We come in as a conservation organization. We are interested in protecting the wildlife and landscapes. But you don’t have to go in and say, “We’re going to designate wilderness for everything around here.” You can go in and say, “We’re interested in protecting wildlife. You’re probably also interested in protecting wildlife, but you have other interests as well. Let’s look at ways that we can achieve both.” Round River is not afraid to have discussions around what kind of economic development is needed in the area. There’s a project in Ecuador... I think right from the beginning there’s been the idea that there will be payment for environmental services, which is a bit of a newer concept, where you actually are raising money. You basically write a contract with the community that so long as they fulfill the conservation agreements, then they will get a certain amount of money to do... it doesn’t have to be money. It can be medical aid, it 12 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 can be any kind of things that have direct benefit to the community that changes the trajectory they were on from chopping down forests and creating pastures where they can graze cattle, but shifting it around so that they are able to meet their own needs while achieving conservation goals that protect the wildlife and habitat around the areas where they live. So I think it is pretty different. They have a role in defining what that is. They are involved in the discussions. Another piece of it is that we have students that go in. We run student programs simultaneously that are going in and helping with the science and learning about applied conservation biology and field methods and land management policy and things like that. But the students have a presence and they build relationships with the locals. They are doing traditional knowledge interviews with people to find out what the local cultures and customs are and so there is a real give and take. People are asked their opinions. I think they are listened to and they see the results of their knowledge and their opinions coming back in the kinds of things that are proposed to do in terms of conservation. I think that’s really key right there. RD: So what projects are you working on now with Round River or is Round River engaged in? GN: Well, I've described the project in British Columbia and there’s several pieces of that up there. It’s turned into a pretty large project. There’s one in Namibia that’s working on... it’s assisting the Namibian government in planning and carrying out a national park that will link their two existing national parks. It will be a people’s park where the people get to stay and they’re not going to do what South Africa has done where they fence in the whole park. They’re trying to get the locals on the ground to shift 13 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 their land use patterns to support this as a wildlife migration corridor—a huge one. So that’s a really interesting project. We’ve got partners in almost all these areas, like there it’s Save the Rhino Trust. Ecuador is another project where we’re working in a national park with locals and another non-profit partner organization. Peru is another project where we’ve got one biologist down there getting a similar program started in the heart of the Amazon. It’s one of these... it takes him three days just to get into the area, and it sounds... it’s one of the wilder places you can imagine where you’ve got indigenous Peruvians—Peruvian Indians that are living way deep in this Amazonian national park, but then there’s all these tribes of... or at least one tribe of uncontacted people that have no communication with the outside world. The Indians down there call them the “naked people” and they shoot each other. There’s no contact between them. The naked people are shooting bows and arrows and killing them with poison darts and the locals are shooting with guns and then you’ve got a Catholic priest that’s trying to punch a road through the area to convert all the natives. You’ve got the indigenous people eating anything out of the forest that they can catch, so they’re trying to develop some incentives to get them to stop shooting some of the endangered species. It’s a challenging project. I can’t imagine how we’ll get students in there. I don’t know if it would be safe, but it’s an interesting one. RD: I'll volunteer. I have an anthropologist wife I can take with me so that may help. GN: Oh yeah, that sounds good. RD: So, what project are you working on now? GN: I’m leading up our new Colorado Plateau program, which we’re just defining right now. What that’s going to look like is basically we’re going to do a similar kind of 14 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 regional scale mapping where we’re going to look at... we haven’t defined exactly the boundaries of the Colorado Plateau, but it’s going to be maybe a larger than usual area, just so that we have a big picture to look at. And then go in at a local level with the students and we’re going to try a couple of new things here. The biggest new thing is we’re going to see how we can engage rural communities, which the challenge with that is that in Utah and elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau, environmentalists have come in and tried to do things over the top. Federal agencies have come in and basically said, here’s what we’re doing. Give us your input. The federal agencies don’t listen. They just do what they were planning from the start. The environmental groups haven’t really done much of anything to engage the locals. So it’s doing the same kinds of things where it’s assuming that the locals want intact ecological systems and the beautiful landscapes that surround them there as much as everyone else, but really going in and listening to how they want to achieve that and finding ways that we can achieve conservation with their ideals in mind as well. So we’re going to start with a student program and hopefully get locals from rural communities involved and also get locals from Native American communities involved and start working in communities where environmental groups probably haven’t dared to work much before. I don’t know if they’ve not dared to, but where they haven’t had a lot of success, and get the students in there who are a less threatening audience. You can have a rancher who won’t mind coming in and telling college students all about ranching in southern Utah. Then you can have environmentalists come in and tell them the problems with ranching in southern Utah. Students will be pretty receptive to hearing both sides, and I think over time we can start to identify some rather than just looking at the 15 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 differences between the environmentalists and the locals, we can look at what values we all share in common and meet locals’ needs while meeting conservation needs and hopefully make some gains. RD: How do you even begin a project of that scope though? When you are looking at the area of the Colorado Plateau, how many miles are you talking about there to begin with even? GN: How many acres or how many miles? RD: I guess how many acres is the area you have identified that you want to go in and work or begin facilitating conversations, and this covers how many square miles? I'm sure it’s enormous. GN: Oh, square miles. Yeah, it’s enormous. It’s maybe like a hundred and something million acres. It covers most of Utah, half of Arizona, half of Colorado, a little chunk of Nevada and we might try and squeeze some of Wyoming in there too. RD: So when you’re talking about going into rural communities in these areas, how many can you realistically get to? GN: Well, we’ll start small. We’re going to probably start in San Juan, Wayne and Garfield counties in Utah and run our first student groups through there and just kind of feel it out—see what kind of opportunities there might be and start looking at ways that we can get locals interested in planning and looking at other communities that haven’t planned and what’s gone wrong and what their ideal for the future looks like. But it’s hard to say. The other big piece of it is how do you get... Federal land and state land is such a big part of the picture that whatever we do we’ve got to do in such a way that is going to 16 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 be receptive—the agencies are going to be receptive to the information rather than threatened by it. That’s the key. We don’t want to take an antagonistic approach to either the communities or the agencies. That’s the whole challenge. How do we create the process that isn’t going to be threatening where we can get people actually doing... It’s a fine line. We’re not going to go in and tell people, “This is what you need to do to have this community thrive for the long term.” But we need to create an opportunity for dialogue and planning that may get to some of those ideas. RD: It just seems so... it’s just incredibly daunting. For me to think about you could begin organizing this... [’m just trying to imagine how. I don’t know. GN: Yeah, if I think about it too much I get overwhelmed. So I’ve got to... especially if T think about both things at the same time—creating this huge regional-scale tool that can be used, I have trouble figuring out how the local piece of it... how that’s going to be relevant to the local piece and vice versa. But I just have to keep reminding myself that conservation is something that benefits everybody. There is a pretty hostile environment towards it in these rural communities. The Native American communities are similar but totally different as well. There are things we can all agree on that will help everybody. We can create more jobs in some cases. We can incentivize conservation to some degree, but yeah, it’s going to take resources and that’s our first job is fund raising so that we can have a reasonable sized program to attempt to carry this out. RD: How large is Round River as an organization? How many people are employed in the organization or working with the organization either as students out in the field or... I’m trying to get an idea of the size of it. L7 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 GN: I think we have about twelve full-time employees and we probably have about another twelve part-time employees. We run about forty students through our student programs every year. We have about six student programs—they’re all pretty small—six to ten students each. There are several organizations that we partner with... that we somehow collaborate with that contribute a lot to the efforts too. RD: What kind of organizations do you collaborate with? Are you talking... GN: Some are big—the Nature Conservancy... RD: Okay, so other conservation organizations. Sorry I cut you off. Who else other than the Nature Conservancy? GN: In Namibia it’s the Nature Conservancy and the Save the Rhino Trust that are the two main ones. Usually there’s a local scale conservation group that we partner with and some of the bigger organizations are mainly just providing money so that we can carry out the work on the ground. British Columbia is a whole different thing because there’s always been a group of non... it’s more similar to here where there’s a non-profit under every rock. And everyone trying to achieve similar goals, but there’s been a series of ways of trying to figure out how to work with each other and in some cases they’ve gotten themselves. .. found some funding opportunities that don’t fit Round River so they’ve created other non-profits that can help support different kinds of activities. A lot of it is figuring out a structure that’s going to support the kinds of activities that they’re trying to do, so creating a tribal non-profit that can run the new hunting lodge that they just acquired up in British Columbia is a really tricky thing to set up, because they have to fulfill the agreements of the Canadian government which requires a certain number of hunting 18 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 licenses to be sold because the government is making money off of that. And then you’ve got all these foundations that have helped acquire this land that want to help make sure this is run... it’s going to be run by the tribe but they’ll need some capacity building support to figure out how to set up the models and just the whole economics of how it’s all going to work. And the rules around... the rules that they want to change like the tribe doesn’t want to hunt grizzly bears anymore. So there’s a lot of really technical things that are way beyond my understanding. But there’s a lot of... especially in British Columbia there’s a lot of people with some really good expertise that... Round River staff is really pretty high caliber—aside from me. RD: Including you, I’m sure. GN: No, there’s a lot of... there’s several PhD biologists, there’s a PhD anthropologist, there’s people that know all about government, all about land planning, so there’s some pretty technically skilled people on staff. No attorneys. RD: None at all? GN: No. RD: That’s kind of surprising. GN: But there’s a GIS specialist and all that, so... RD: How does this work... I mean it sounds like a lot of this work... inasmuch as it’s going out and meeting with communities and facilitating conversations between communities, it’s also based quite heavily on technology—when you’re talking about GIS and some of the mapping that has to be done. Maybe you haven’t been there long enough to see, but I’'m just kind of curious how in the past eighteen years how changes in 19 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 technology have affected Round River’s mission or the way in which Round River works. So how have mapping technologies made a difference? GN: [ think I’'m probably not the best person to ask about it, but it certainly has made so much more possible. A lot of the land management agencies nowadays are doing everything in GIS. It’s also a really powerful tool just visually to help people understand what can be really complex ideas. How do grizzly bears move in the landscape? Before you’d have to study a map and know a territory completely well before you could say, “Oh the understory of whatever fern over in this region is really important.” What you can do is you can build all these complex habitat descriptions into your mapping models so you don’t have to... you’ve got all the information in the underlying layers that you can explain to anyone who knows any of the... or who knows the landscape well or knows the animal behaviors well. So they can all get an understanding of what’s into it, but you can build it all into the model so that I can look at the map and say, “Oh, for whatever reason that is good moose habitat.” If we want to support moose, let’s stay out of it. It totally simplifies it and if [ were a decision maker I could trust those maps or trust the people who made the maps and make better land use decisions from them. So that alone is a tool that’s relatively new and really powerful that I think has totally changed land management and is going to continue to change it. Yeah, the world’s changing fast! I haven’t kept up with it well enough. RD: Okay. Well, is there anything else that you want to go over or anything that you feel we haven’t discussed that you would like to talk about? GN: No, I think... In terms of Round River, I think the adventure is just beginning for me on that. 20 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 RD: Yeah. How long have you been there now? GN: Four months. So it’s brand new. But there’s definitely a lot of interesting ideas and it’s exactly the kind of thing that I think is going to make conservation exciting. So... RD: How far off are you from having your project to the point where you are actually out on the ground in these rural areas? GN: Well, we have to get funding first. But assuming that happens—February *09. RD: Okay, wow. And then you just go in and it’s totally open-ended? GN: We’ll start before then. We’ll start doing the regional mapping by August and start putting the base layers and everything together and start building partnerships with some key players—academic institutions or other people that have similar overlap with what we are doing that we can help them and they can help us. RD: Yeah. [ was wondering what kind of partnerships you would be building in these areas because... I mean obviously you can’t go to some of the... It seems to me like you wouldn’t want to go to other well-known conservation organizations or other environmental organizations necessarily asking for their help all the time or to partner with them that are already in there because... Like you wouldn’t want to go to SUWA, for instance, it seems to me and try to partner with them in some of these areas, because SUWA is such a lightning rod and so contentious that a lot of people in the rural areas would have a knee-jerk response to anything SUWA is involved with. GN: Right. It’s a fine line. We share two board members with SUWA. But SUWA has really taken the approach that the locals don’t matter to some degree. I think that has changed a lot, but they’ve been trying to push things at a national level without really bothering to convince locals that it’s a good idea. I think in the long term, and this is... I 21 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 think Round River’s philosophy is definitely... I’ve hear this from Dennis that you’ve got to think in the long term. If you really piss all the local people off, if something substantial changed in our society and the locals don’t like the idea of wilderness and don’t understand the important role that wildlife and water systems are playing in their communities, you really don’t have any kind of protection without local support. I think that’s a foundational principle that you’ve got to get locals on your side and make them realize that conservation is a good thing and understanding natural systems is a powerful tool in itself. They might still not want to do the kinds of conservation that I would want to see, but... RD: Yeah, so what do you do at that point? I mean what do you do if you come in and find that you’re not really welcome or that their idea of conservation is so radically different from your own or from the groups’ goals that you’re incompatible. GN: I'm sure we will find that out. RD: I’'m sure you will. GN: I think it’s about partnering with the right people. Some people are going to be close-minded to it. But we’re not going to go in and do things over the top of them. We’re going to hopefully get people who are on our side because they want to strengthen their communities and hopefully we can create incentive that can get people on our side. But I don’t know. There’s a very good chance that... it’s certain that we’re going to run into opposition in what we’re doing. It’s happened up in British Columbia. But I don’t know how that will play out. RD: Yeah, I was just curious. [ guess it was more rhetorical. 22 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 GN: No, it’s a good question. I’'m talking like everything is going to be all rosy and hunky-dory and everyone’s going to say, “Oh, conservation...” But no, the reality is... RD: Of course. They’re going to welcome you as liberators. GN: I don’t think sarcasm comes across well in written text. [laughs] RD: Well, if there’s not anything else you want to go over, or you want to discuss, we’ll call it good. GN: We can talk about the evils of money again. RD: Oh, I’'m always open to discussing that. Apparently you have a lot to teach me about how it’s not really that evil. All right. END OF INTERVIEW 23 GAVIN NOYES 2 JUNE 2008 24