Archives and Special Collections Mansfield Library, University of Montana Missoula MT 59812-9936 Email: [email protected] Telephone: (406) 243-2053

This transcript represents the nearly verbatim record of an unrehearsed interview. Please bear in mind that you are reading the spoken word rather than the written word.

Oral History Number: 476-005 Interviewee: Ron Erickson Interviewer: Clara McRae Date of Interview: July 25, 2020 Project: G.A.S.P and the History of Missoula’s Environmental Movement Oral History Project

Clara McRae: All right, so can you please state your full name, date of birth, and where you were born.

Ron Erickson: My name is Ron Erickson. I was born on [edited for restriction] 1933 in Peoria, Illinois.

CM: How long have you lived in Missoula, and why did you move here?

RE: We moved here in 1965. I was already teaching. I came as an associate professor of chemistry at that time. The university was about to begin its PhD program in chemistry. The family wanted to move out of Buffalo, New York. I'd been teaching for four years at Canisius College, which is...it was a very nice college. Jesuit. All male. It had a really decent chemistry department. Before that I had done post-doctoral work for three years, so when I came, they knew that I would do research. I'd been doing research and that I would continue to do so.

CM: Can you tell me a bit about your family...both before and after you moved to Missoula?

RE: Sure. My wife Nancy I met while I was a teaching assistant at the University of Iowa. She got an undergraduate degree in zoology and later a master's degree in nutrition. One of the reasons we came here though was that she wanted to leave those fields and go into art. It's not that she had never done any art, but she had no formal training. So, when she came, she was able to get into the graduate program in art...got both an MA and an MFA in art. The great thing is that it's been something she's done her whole life, and I know that you're not particularly going for written materials, but I wanted to give you a thing for her. (Paper rustling)

CM: Yes, thank you so much. That'll be great. I'll be able to upload this to the historical archives too.

RE: That is about her work, written 10 years ago. Since then, she's been given the award at the University of Montana…the Odyssey of the Stars award, and there's a nice write-up here by Beth Lo about her.

CM: Oh, that's great.

RE: So, I'll give you that.

1 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.

CM: Yeah, I'll definitely be interested to check that out.

RE: But her work has always been environmental, animal-centered. She, in fact, has been very active until the last year. In this last year, she fell down, broke her pelvis.

CM: Sorry to hear that.

RE: [She] was really laid up for quite a while and still isn't back to being able to do art, although we have a lovely studio where we live for her. We have two daughters, both of whom used to spend time in this park. We lived for a while on Woodworth and then moved up to Pattee Canyon in 1971. The oldest daughter, Chris, was a so-so student...got an offer to go to Idaho State on a volleyball scholarship...didn't do well there at all. [She] hung around Seattle for a while...finally decided she wanted to go back to school...did so, first at the community college and then here, where she finished a degree in pre-veterinary medicine, but as soon as she finished that, she knew that what she really wanted to do was history. So, she switched and got a master's degree here with Mike Mayer, working on the Ku Klux Klan as her topic. She then went to Santa Barbara and got a PhD...did well there...then got a job at Purdue University at Fort Wayne. It's a lesser Indiana school but still a decent college to teach at, and she's taught history there since. She has one daughter, Avery. Avery's 21. Avery's now a student at the University of Minnesota. She spent months in Africa in the past and is probably going to end up someplace that speaks French, because that`s what she does. The other daughter, Terrell, got a degree in political science at the University of Washington...then got a degree in environmental studies at Evergreen State College, also in Washington...got married and ended up in Hawaii finally...got a job. She had already worked some for the feds in the Corp of Engineers, but she got a good job with the Department of Agriculture. The job was as State Biologist for the State of Hawaii. Then she moved to Washington, D.C., where she became National Biologist. She went into training for Executive Service...ended up as the Director of Ecological Sciences for the National Resource Conservation Service in the Department of Agriculture. She's still back in D.C. So those are my family members. We've been very proud of our daughters.

CM: Yeah, I can imagine why. It sounds like they've both been very successful in their respective subjects. So, I guess, in terms of your career and your life, what first sparked your interest in environmental issues?

RE: You know, it's interesting because I had the PhD in organic chemistry by the time I was 25 and spent three years post-doc'ing, including a nice NATO fellowship in Germany, so we lived a year in Germany. Then I was looking for jobs and got the job at Canisius College. Mostly what I was interested in was chemical research. That's what I was doing, but when we came to Missoula it was 1965. The context, if you will, for all of us in those years, particularly '67, 8, 9, '70 on was war. Missoula was a very anti-war city. Everybody I knew was involved in the anti- war movement. It was the first time it occurred to me to be civic in some way. So, did I do a heck of a lot with that anti-war movement? No, I helped with some of the marches, but that

2 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. wasn't a major effort, I'd say. In '68, '69 I was asked by the Philosophy Department whether I would like to teach in the introductory humanities program here. Have you taken the humanities program...151, 152?

CM: I have not, but I have friends who have.

RE: Take it sometime. It's quite wonderful. What it did when I said yes in '69 was...first of all, I spent a lot of time reading...the Greeks, in particular, others as well...and it gave me some perspective. We've always been readers, both Nancy and I have always been readers. Certainly, our two daughters are too. At the same time, we live in Missoula, Montana. I remember when we had first moved here in '65, and Nancy woke up and said, "Something's dead in the house." So, she ran to the windows and opened them up and it was worse.

CM: Really?

RE: What we had was Hoerner-Waldorf, the pulp mill, and hydrogen sulfide...and some mercaptans as well, other chemicals. So, we had firsthand experience, as did anyone who lived in Missoula, with terrible air pollution. Someplace in there, '68 or so, I think it was Life magazine had a full magazine on pollution, and we were the centerfold...Missoula. So, we were aware of that.

CM: Yeah, it sounds like it would have been hard not to be aware.

RE: Right.

CM: I know you were really instrumental in creating the environmental studies program at the university. Was that part what drove you to help create the program or were there other aspects?

RE: I remember in January of 1970, I gave my first environmental talk, talking about a crisis of crises. The point was that there wasn't just one environmental crisis...there are many, many, and chemistry had a lot to do with a lot of them. That same year, 1970, a group of faculty began to get together to talk about, well, what are we going to do educationally? That wouldn't have happened as easily without a group that was here since 1959 called WMSCPI...Western Montana Scientists' Committee for Public Information. There were, it turns out, lots of SCPIs in the country at that time. It was started by a guy name Barry Commoner in St. Louis. The point was to make science public and to let people know what's going on. That group had already done a lot of work on, for example, nuclear testing and particularly those tests where results came down upon us in Montana. So, you know, the group included Clancy Gordon in botany; Mel Thornton in botany; Bert Pfeiffer in zoology; Mike Chessin, who was probably the very first person, another botanist; Arnold Silverman in geology; a new guy on campus that year, 1970, was Bob Curry in geology. But the group also had other people besides faculty. So, there were

3 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. three different MDs in town: Jim Long, Jim Law, and Bill Norman. So that group already showed that faculty could get together and work together.

CM: Yeah.

RE: In fact, I don't know how it is now, but the academy has always been very tight. Departments have been tight, and the idea of actually working together with other faculty was made so much easier because of SCPI.

CM: Yeah, I can imagine.

RE: We put together a set of courses. We knew we were making up courses. You know, I knew I was going to make up a course in environmental chemistry that didn't exist before. Clancy Gordon had two hugely important classes: Biological Effects of Air Pollution and Biological Effects of Water Pollution. He already had a lab going. He already was well-known. He was so well-known that there were people who didn't like him. Particularly, industry didn't like him.

CM: He had a reputation for himself?

RE: Yeah. Amongst the places he did a great deal of work was out in Garrison, Montana, where there's a phosphorus plant and up in Columbia Falls, where there was an aluminum plant. In both cases, the pollutant was fluoride. In both cases, you wouldn't want to grow lettuce in your yard, and cattle died from their bones jerking up from the fluoride poisoning. So, when we decided to go ahead with the program, Clancy was the obvious person to be the director, but a less obvious person, because he was well-known as being a ruckus-rouser. So, in fact, for the first year we had a fellow named Les Pengelly, who was a wildlife biologist...excellent reputation and he agreed to take it on. What was particularly unusual about us getting going is that we didn't meet until January of 1970, and we began the program in September of '70. So, you don't start new programs like that most of the time, but it was a time of incredible newness at the university. We were starting a program in religious studies, for example, along in that time. That humanities program being taken over from the Philosophy Department was new, and the whole idea of letting somebody who was a chemist in to teaching it was new as well. So those things were working for us...1970, way before your time, but it's the year of Kent State. There were ROTC buildings burning all over the country...not that many but some. We had a wooden ROTC building. I still remember...I happened to have been on the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate at the time, and a group of students took over the ROTC building. The Executive Committee of the Senate marched over there to see what was going on. One of the marchers, if you will, was K. Ross Toole. So, it was a select group of faculty. I would have rather been occupying than visiting, but I was a visitor there. One of the great things that happened that first year was the SCPI idea entered environmental studies. If you'll give it back to me, I'll give you this to look at too. It shows the lectures that were given that first year and talks about the fact that they got a $50,000 grant to go ahead and begin the lecture series, hire a librarian for putting materials together for WMSCPI, and it started a process that lasted for years and

4 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. years and years. You know, now you have in your climate change program, you have lecture series and you have other lecture series around, but we didn't have anything like it then. The very first lecture was given by a historian, Duane Hampton. I haven't seen Duane for a long time. Does he ever show up around the History Department?

CM: You know, I have not heard of him, but I'm sure he does. I mean, I've only been in the department for a year. I'm curious...obviously you had a lot of forces working on your side that, sort of, helped drive this movement, but did you receive any push back from industry folks, or people in the community, or even on campus when you were creating the program?

RE: We were very, very fortunate to have a new dean of the Graduate School. We were a graduate program. The new dean was John Stewart, also a chemist, who had just gotten there that year, I think, and he was for us and that helped. We also had a fairly new dean in the college named Dick Solberg, and he wasn't against it. What was unusual about the program is that it didn't go ahead and fit in the School of Forestry or the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It went under the Graduate School, so it was purely under the Graduate School. Now, of course, environmental studies is under the Liberal Arts School, which it finally deserved to be in. We certainly had people who didn't like what Clancy Gordon was doing or what Clancy was saying, but, for the most part, we came across as, you know, an information-based group in terms of our public outreach. These lectures continued for many, many years. I'm going to show you another one that was about 10 years after that one in a bit. Sometimes that lecture series was...it was always open to the public. Students could go ahead and get one credit for taking it. We also had many years when we had it on the radio…KUFM. So, it was all outreach and that was certainly the early part. That first fall, 1970, we had those seminars going. I didn't teach my environmental chemistry course yet that year, I'm pretty sure, but we were teaching a bunch of new courses. Someplace in the fall of 1970, a group of us were designated, a group of the faculty, were designated to decide on next year's lecture series. So, we got together, and we thought, well, that'd be nice to do a next year lecture series, but let's do an undergraduate program instead. We founded a brand-new program...this one under the College of Arts and Sciences, partially funded by the Dean of Liberal Arts, Richard Solberg. It's called the Round River Experiment...100 students, 10 faculty, five each semester...each quarter. It was a quarter system...100 students, pass-not pass, 16 credits. Everybody passes. We spent a good third of our time outdoors, some of it at the biological station and some up at Lubrecht Forest. We read a bunch of books. Students kept journals, but it was clearly a program that was out there. That program...I taught in it full-time for one year. The reason I was able to do that is I had a grant to hire somebody behind me. That worked out, but in the years following, I didn't do much with Round River. Round River morphed into a program called Wilderness and Civilization, an excellent program that was much more structured than we had been. I taught a bit in that, because I was, by that time, teaching a course called Environmental Science, one of the new environmental studies courses.

CM: What are some of the aspects of the program that you are especially proud of?

5 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. RE: I'm so proud of the group of students who've come into the program. It has been simply amazing. I say that without having met many for the last 20 years, but the first 30 years…the first 28 anyway I was there, many of those years getting to select students. What we got was a group of people who were both competent and caring. They fit exactly into what we wanted. Those meetings when we first start to talk about as a group...well, we want to do something academically. What do we want to do? Well, we decided on a master's degree program, because the problems were great and we needed to get people out there doing stuff. So, the program has been successful because people have gotten out there and done stuff.

CM: Yeah, absolutely. Do any examples come to mind of former students that you've had maybe that have...

RE: You know, I could particularly like the people who went political, one way or another. We had six to eight people who ended up in the Montana Legislature...one of the county commissioners right now, Dave Stohmaier...there's a woman who's in the Senate, and she has an interesting background. She got a degree in environmental studies, and she went to an environmental job of being a lobbyist with Montana Environmental Information Center, but she is also very interested in human rights. She happens to be a lesbian and human rights for gay people was one of her agenda items. She was the first openly-gay person in the legislature. She served...I don't know...four to six years in the House and 10 years in the Senate, while she was working on human rights. That idea that environmental studies branches out to environmental justice and then to all human rights was part of our being from the very first...

CM: Well, that's incredible to hear.

RE: We had at least a half a dozen people who left here and went to the Health Department downtown. Several of them are on the air pollution, water pollution side. I don't know if he still lives there, but in that white house right there, is Peter Nielsen, who was just an incredible person to head up the environmental side of the Health Department downtown.

CM: So, there's graduates that are really spanning all different areas.

RE: All different areas...another one who does all the air pollution monitoring for the city is a guy name Ben Schmidt. We had students who went off and decided, well, they needed to keep going to school, so they got PhDs in forestry. A neat guy who had a degree in English came through and did a writing project for us in environmental studies...decided to go into geography. He teaches geography, and of course, he teaches climate change as a part of that down at a university in Colorado. At least a couple of people went into high school teaching. Then, of course, founding new environmental organizations...Jennifer Ferenstein who became the president of the Sierra Club. Bryony Schwan who started WVE downtown...Women's Voices for the Earth. These are just the people that I knew. You know, it just continues. We get dedicated people, and they learn some stuff, and they go out and do good things.

6 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. CM: Great to hear.

RE: You ask about what I was proud of in terms of my own work in the environmental studies program. There were a couple of things. One, I insisted that the humanities were part of environmental studies. There were some of the people in WMSCPI who didn't see that, but we got it in there, and it continues in there. Nancy and I started a couple of scholarships at the university: one in art and one in environmental studies. The one in environmental studies is for people from the humanities. So that continues. I am often given the thesis of those students who are writers. For some time, a fellow named Phil Condon was the director of the program. He was an MFA...a writing MFA. Neat guy...came and got a degree in environmental studies too. He once took one of my courses, and I thought, well, how can I have this guy in my course, which was a writing course, but you know, he's a billion times better than I at that. I had so much fun teaching those courses...Environmental Utopias; Ethics, Beauty, and the Environment; Environmental Ethics Through Story. So, I got to teach a lot of humanities side while I was there.

CM: So, this is a bit of a shift now.

RE: Ok.

CM: What were some of the most important or most prominent environmental issues, both in Missoula and Montana in the 1960s and '70s? Just as an overview, I guess...

RE: Well, certainly air pollution. The Hoerner-Waldorf mill was on everybody's mind. The GASP group, the Gals Against Smoke and Pollution, were out there picketing against Hoerner-Waldorf in '68. I'll talk about the particular organization that I headed up in a moment, but again, our faculty were involved with issues all over. There's a guy named Bob McKelvey in mathematics. Bob's still living...in his nineties. He took on a seminar in environmental studies on the development of the coal fields in eastern Montana...organized it so that everybody had little tasks to write up, and the write up would go to the legislature. It's where I got interested in converting coal via coal liquefaction or gasification. That particular technology...in fact, I had a grant for three or four years, the last time I did any chemistry, with a good analytical chemist from the university named Wayne Van Meter. So, you know, that seminar was begun with the idea...not that, gee, it's going to be fun to sit around and talk about something, but we want a product. There were various faculty who did things like that over time. There were certainly areas...you know, we already had the Wilderness Act in '64. We didn't have anybody on the faculty who was particularly involved with wilderness other than wanting to get into it once and awhile. I think of a graduate student named Chuck Fisher1 [Hank Fisher]. Chuck [Hank] came to me in probably '76 or so, and he had an undergraduate degree in English. What he was interested in was wildlife. He wanted to preserve wildlife, and so while he was here, he took mostly wildlife courses. He immediately got a job with the organization Defenders of Wildlife. You know, one of the jobs he had there was writing. You know, they have a major magazine

1 Interviewee’s correction: The name is Hank Fisher. 7 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. and he wrote. Then he got very involved in the work of making sure that when you put wolves into a new area, and they kill sheep, that you find a way to give the rancher money for the sheep that were killed.

CM: Oh, absolutely.

RE: So, you know, I mean real activist work that comes out...something like that. I think I've moved around a bit there, so I don't remember where we were with the question.

CM: That's completely fine. Well, I guess we can talk a bit about the Concerned Citizens for a Quality Environment. Let's just start with what was your role and what was the purpose of the group?

RE: In 1973 Hoerner-Waldorf announced and wrote up their own little, small environmental impact statement that they were going to have a major expansion...a 40% expansion. Certainly, they had no idea what an environmental impact statement was, but we did. One of the interesting things about the Nixon administration is that we got the National Environmental Policy Act, which says that, yes, you've got to do environmental impact statements to get better decisions...the Clean Air Act...well, the Clean Water Act...a little later, the Endangered Species Act. So, you know, as bad as Nixon was, a whole lot of good stuff came out of it. One of the things that came out was an expansion like Hoerner-Waldorf wanted to do needed an environmental impact statement. I don't know who called the meeting...probably at the high school...maybe at the Congregational Church...maybe Clancy Gordon...but a meeting was called saying are you interested in this expansion and fighting it? The answer was yes. We probably had 100 people at the meeting. It was interesting. As I was sitting there, looking around the room, I knew that I was the one who had the time right then. I just sort of stopped my Round River Experiment stuff, and I wasn't going to take over the environmental studies program for another year. That happened in '74. Clancy went on a sabbatical, so I was director for a year. He came back from sabbatical. I went on sabbatical, and then I was director from '76 to '84. Anyway, '73 is an interesting time for me to do some other stuff. We met. We decided, amongst other things, to do a petition. (Paper rustling)

CM: Is this the original petition?

RE: This the original petition, and I shouldn't have this copy, because it means that the state didn't get it. It must have come to me after we had given them all to the state. Then people just kept on writing...

CM: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it seems like there was no shortage of support.

RE: Well, we gave 7,300 signatures, not counting those, to the Air Quality Bureau at the State of Montana. What we asked for is, you know, time to actually do a study, so that we can find out how healthy Missoula already is. We were also looking to get best available control technology.

8 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. We had a lot of people wanting to work with us. You don't get 7,300 signatures by yourself. That was a major group...we had over time...several people who wrote for this. I don't know how many we published. We maybe only published those two...The Valley Citizen. The guy who headed that up was an English professor named Dexter Roberts. He had been a journalist before he'd been an English professor. He knew how to put stuff together. We let people know what was going on with Hoerner-Waldorf.

CM: What were some of the specific things that Hoerner-Waldorf was doing at the time that may have been...I don't know if they were illegal at the time or if they were just unethical...?

RE: We argued that there were illegalities. I'm not sure there were. There's always a kind of illegality where...I'll give you the example. I used to take students, all sorts, for tours of the mill, and they would allow that. I remember a day we were walking from one building to the other, and I looked up at a smokestack and green gas was coming out of the top. I said, "What is that?" And they guy said, "Oh, that's not supposed to happen." And "that's not supposed to happen" happened often, if you will...of all kinds. They had the smell problem. There was a standard for hydrogen sulfide, and they would...there are two kinds of standards in air pollution. One is called the ambient air standard, which we would go ahead and get a sample right out here and take the air...find out what's in it. The other is the emissions standard. Go ahead and measure something as it comes out of the stack. They had to meet emission standards. They had not only the hydrogen sulfide problem, but they had a problem where, because they burned fuel oil...they burned fuel oil that had sulfur in it, and we got sulfur dioxide. So, there was an area on the other side the other side of the river from the plant where a whole lot of trees died, and there was an argument that it was because of that sulfur dioxide. We knew nationally that sulfur dioxide was incredibly...I mean, it accounted for air pollution killing forests, whether it was New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, all of those areas which were downwind from coal-fired power plants. So, coal...they didn't burn any coal there. Let me say something about the process of making pulp. Pulp is just a chemical...a carbohydrate, and 50% of a tree or this piece of wood (knocks on table) is that chemical. It's called cellulose. So, we could take this wooden table and break it up and treat it chemically and get the cellulose away, so we could go ahead and make linerboard, which is cardboard. They not only made the cardboard, but some of the cardboard they made something called linerboard out of. Linerboard was simply like a white liner on top of the cardboard, and the way you could get the white liner was to treat it with chlorine. That was the gas that was going out that wasn't supposed to happen. So that particular process was the end of the process. First, they needed, chemically, to get the wood away from the lignin...the other stuff in there that isn't cellulose...you need to get it away. The process they used used sodium sulfate, high, high temperatures, water, steam. Pollutants come out of the stack that turn out to be sodium sulfate. So, you had sodium sulfate. You had this process where you were treating in solution the cellulose so you could make it white. Then you had the water you had to get rid of, and that water they would put in to settling ponds. It was very brown, gunky-looking stuff. Once a year, when the river was flowing high enough, they had permission to dump their settling ponds into the river. We were concerned with that.

9 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.

CM: I can imagine.

RE: There were standards they had to meet. They would set the standard so many hundred yards down from where the pipe was, so you had to have the river flowing really fast and well for them to be able to meet that standard. The other thing is that all that treatment of chlorine with the lignin ends up...lignin is a set of molecules that easily react with chlorine...and the kinds of things they give are chlorinated dioxins, which perhaps you've heard about, because that's what we used in Vietnam to kill things. So, we were worried about the ponds, and we wanted to make sure that things were getting destroyed in the ponds. The great thing about the whole process is that we were able to push them off for more than a year in doing what they needed to do. At that point, they ran into the 1973 rules for water quality, and they had to treat their settling ponds.

CM: Was that from the federal government that did that?

RE: Yes, federal law said you've got to treat your settling ponds. Because I had students out there measuring stuff, we had suspected that the settling ponds were the cause of the hydrogen sulfide. The reason for that is that they have sulfate and the ponds go anaerobic...no oxygen in them. When you have organisms that need oxygen, one of the things they can do is take it away from the sulfate. The byproduct is hydrogen sulfide. So, most of the smell problem in Missoula for all those years did not come out of stacks. It came out of the ponds.

CM: Interesting. Where were those located in relation to...?

RE: You can still go see them. They're mostly on this side of the plant...hundreds of acres.

CM: Hundreds?

RE: Hundreds of acres. It's still a site that needs cleaning up in fact, because some of those chemicals that I'm worried about in terms of chlorinated molecules can still be there, having sunk to the bottom. I think they're doing better at that right now, but you know, I haven't kept up with that well enough. So, what were the problems? The problems were smell. The problems were water. The problems were the sulfur dioxide from the burning of fuel oil. We had...showing up at that very first meeting with CCQE a fellow named Gail Owen. I have a picture of him in here someplace. Anyway, this is the kind of headline you would get. The whole impact statement was just ridiculous, and we needed to get...so we had critics wanting to do that.

CM: I'm curious, were there very specific guidelines around what they environmental impact statement had to be? Or did they sort of just get to invent their own standards for what had to be included in the study?

10 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. RE: You had to make sure that you were comporting with federal and state laws. Those can be very specific about how much pollutant can be out there. You know, I had ready for you all these things that I just sort of cut out of the paper over time...but, oh, here's an asshole. That's the pulp mill director.

CM: Oh, gotcha.

RE: Roy Countryman. He and I would have little bouts once and awhile.

CM: That actually sort of transitions into another question I have, which was did CCQE have any relationship with workers at the mill? Or with people in Frenchtown, and if so, what was that relationship like?

RE: The easy answer is no. Their technical director was a guy named Larry Weeks, whom I really liked. He was a guy who would always help me arrange for tours with students, but I do recall one time where I had a group of...my hair used to be really long, but I had a group of students with longer hair than I, and we were walking again from one building to another. There was a whole group of workers, sort of standing, that we had to go between, and they had scissors, you know, having to do with hair. So, I don't think the workers liked us very much.

CM: Yeah, it doesn't sound like it. Why do you think that was? Do you think they saw you as threatening their livelihoods?

RE: Sure, they were going to get better jobs, in many cases. They were going to be more workers. One of the things that happened right away was a project that was going to cost $40 million suddenly was going to cost $60 million. They had to do a whole lot of work out there. They had to put in a heck of lot more air pollution control equipment and that great water pollution control equipment as well. Gail Owen took on another question, which was…there had been a previous time when the mill had bought air pollution equipment, and if you buy air pollution equipment, according to Montana state law, because it's in the public good, you don't have to pay property tax on it. You know, I think that's fair enough someplace. Gail Owen went back into the details of the stuff that they were buying. What he discovered was that a significant portion of what they were buying and getting a property tax reduction on was in fact for expansion.

CM: Really?

RE: So, he made that argument. We had an attorney, Jim Goetz, out of Bozeman. So, we were looking at various ways to sue them. That was one. Continuing yet on the question of, well, what were the issues? We were interested in total energy use they were using, so we did an analysis on that. When I say we, it was usually Gail. Although I have some record here and there, Gail Owen, before he died, took his entire CCQE material and gave it to the archives. So, if you really want to find more about CCQE, it's Gail Owen. Let me say a couple more things

11 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. about Gail. He was a short man. I suppose he was 5 foot 2. I don't know. He was a feisty man. He knew stuff and showed that he knew it. He had an undergraduate degree in naval engineering. So, he had technical stuff. He then went to graduate school in history. I have a history book that he wrote, and he wrote another piece about how Roman soldiers were paid. So, he would delve into old economics kind of issues. He got his master’s degree at the University of Nebraska in history...was working on his PhD and, almost guessable, he didn't get along with his PhD advisor, so he never went ahead and went back and got a PhD. He probably should have gotten a PhD just for the work he did on this all together. Again, I've drifted off from whatever your original question was.

CM: That's perfect. That's kind of good that it's flowing naturally. Oh gosh, what would be a good one to go off of that? Well, I guess, what were some of the big accomplishments that CCQE had that you're really proud of? What were some of the things that they accomplished?

RE: Well, I think the luck of the draw that made them go ahead and do the water pollution work that made Missoula's air cleaner was the great accomplishment. We did get them to have other new technology stuff put in there. I think it's always good just to get people involved. So, all of the students and people in Missoula who got involved in this process...you know, that was neat to see that happening. I do remember the very last meeting we had, because Gail Owen was the one person left who still wanted to sue. I just couldn't see it, nor could some of the other people like Clancy Gordon, who would reemerge every once in a while. You know, they left a lot of this sort of organizing stuff to me.

CM: What year was that last meeting in?

RE: It was probably in early '75 or late '74.

CM: So, this was over the course of about a year and a half?

RE: Yeah, it was only a year and a half.

CM: So, obviously that's a pretty short movement. How did you see the environmental movement change, I guess, from the '60s, where it was lots of marches and rallies, to CCQE, which was more legal action and sort of tangible change through those means?

RE: I knew enough about environmental organizations at that time to know that you have some that are going to be with us, we hope, forever…you know, the Sierra Club or Earth Justice that's followed the Sierra Club…MEIC in Missoula. You can also have single issue. In this writing here...I was looking through it the other day...we suggested that we would be here for the long run, but that really just didn't make any sense. There were too many other ways to get involved to go ahead and just keep an organization that didn't have any more real focus. So, I was one of the ones who said, "No, let's finish it off here." We kept our standing for a while...you know, you've got to register, et cetera. Let me give you another example of a single issue.

12 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.

CM: Yeah, please do.

RE: There's a neat guy who taught biology at Hellgate High School named Ron Wheeler. I think it's Wheeler not Weaver. Wheeler. He came to me once, and he had a group of students who were with him, and the fight was going to be with the Forest Service over the Rattlesnake. They wanted to move out beaver that wanted to make dams. Ron didn't want that. I didn't want that. So, he says, "Let's form an organization." The organization was called CASTOR, and Castor turns out to be the scientific name for beavers, but it also is Committee Against the Senseless Trapping of Rodents. I would have joined the organization just for its name, but that would be another organization that was just meant for a time and an issue and we did it. They didn't trap the beavers.

CM: Yeah, that's interesting to hear because I think often times in activism there can be sort of this inherent desire to be broad and make things as long-lasting as you can, but I guess there is a need for this very specific...

RE: Yeah, and of course, one of the things you're interested in, climate change, has to be broad and has to be forever and has to involve all sorts of people.

CM: Yeah, absolutely.

RE: By the way is Nicky Phear still heading the department? She's an environmental studies graduate.

CM: She is. That's just kind of another example of how (unintelligible)...

RE: She is...a wonderful person.

CM: So, this is a bit of a shift as well...my next question. Can you give me an overview of your political career and how you sort of shifted from activism and teaching to being directly involved in policy making?

RE: I sort of call the whole thing civic work. I got involved in various planning problems. I remember city-country planning does a comprehensive plan every once in a while, and there was a year when they wanted an energy section. You know, I would go to meetings and said, "Oh, yeah, I'd like to do that." The interesting thing about that one is that I had a co-director with that. It's Gary Marbut. Do you know the name Gary Marbut?

CM: Really? I would love to talk to you about...yeah...

RE: I never have seen him since, if you will, but what was interesting was he was interested in energy policy. Now, he's only interested in guns.

13 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.

CM: He is.

RE: It's been quite a change.

CM: Wow. And you worked together?

RE: We actually did some work together and whatever we put together...I don't know...we did better planning work later on. When I was director of the program from '76 to '84, it really would have been hard for me to also be the chairman of CCQE. We had lots of problems in that time, including Clancy Gordon's death and trying to keep the program alive while he was going.

CM: What year did he die?

RE: I was trying to remember that. We could google it and find out, but I would guess '82, '81...someplace in there. I was able to hire Vicki Watson to take his place. That was a hard decision because we advertised for a full year to get an air pollution person and I didn't like the candidates. The person had to be in botany. We finally threw away that year's search. I had heard of Vicki Watson before...somebody with incredible energy and advocacy interests. So, we got her. Once I had stopped being the director of the environmental studies program, I was asked by the Philosophy Department to teach ethics. I did a sabbatical where I studied ethics at the University of Washington for a while. So those years from '84 on to about '91 or '92 were mainly about teaching. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the CASTOR thing wasn't in the middle of that someplace. If there was an issue that I thought I knew something about, I would testify, but I wasn't leading up the charge. In the '90s I retired quite early and had the chance to do a lot more civic work. I know at one time I was one of the officers for our Pattee Canyon Landowners Association. There was an organization headed up by Mavis McKelvey, wife of Bob McKelvey, called the Friends of Pattee Canyon, which was an overseeing group to the U.S. Forest Service. We got down to the things about don't put your parking lot there because of that tree. Or we worried about folfing and throwing things against trees. We got started because they wanted to put in even more roads up there for skiing. They had plenty of roads for skiing. So, you know, I got involved in that one...got involved with a really fun one that sort of follows up with this...in terms of petitions. That's a group called Save the Fort. The university has land out at the Fort Missoula. They were working with a developer to develop it and put in housing. It was land that had been concentration camps for Japanese in the past and Italians. When we heard that that was happening, I got together with a bunch of other people. We had hundreds of people at the first meeting. We got 10,000 signatures in three days...all over the city of Missoula. You know, it took a while for them to save face and got out of it, but that land never got developed.

CM: It was obviously successful.

14 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. RE: Oh, yeah. That was very successful. I was vice chairman of that or vice president...whatever...of that group. The fun thing was that the guy who was the chairman of the group, a guy named David McEwen, who was the original owner of the Bridge Pizza, but before he was owner of the Bridge Pizza, he was a Round River student. So, it came around full circle so that I was his vice president years after him being a Round River student. At the same time, I applied with the city to get on the Open Space Advisory Committee. The Open Space Advisory Committee had been in existence for...I don't know...six or seven years. There had been an open space bond in which the side of Mount Sentinel had been purchased. We had a wonderful chairman of that committee named Dick Gotshalk. He was responsible a lot for an open space plan that we were all working on, but he left. I was the next person up to go ahead and be chairman for that. Of all the work that I've done, civically, it's the one I like the most, because when you're done, we have Mount Jumbo. We have the North Hills. We have the softball fields at Fort Missoula. It was interesting, because on the one hand, I was fighting the university with Save the Fort, and on the other hand, I was working with them to go ahead and get the soccer fields. You know, thank goodness George Dennison agreed to go that direction, because those soccer fields...it's taken us 20 years to make them into soccer fields, but we needed the land first. There's also...I don't know if you've gone around Missoula on a bike, but there's a bike path next to the railroad...the Rails-to-Trails program. That was part of that open space bond as well. A wonderful woman named Mary Gilman is setting that up. So, I really liked working with the city that way. Then I liked working with groups to get 10,000 signatures at the same time. Let me say how I got to the legislature, because there came a time while I was working with the Open Space Advisory Committee. Dan Kemmis, who was the mayor at the time, called me and said, "You know, we need somebody to run for county commissioner. Would you be interested?" And I said, "Eh. I don't think so." It was partly calculated. Mainly, I just didn't want to work full-time, but it was also having to run against Barbara Evans, who was unbeatable. So, what I told Dan was, you know, I'm much more interested in the legislative process. I had taught courses where I took students over to the legislature. I had testified myself before the legislature. I had a group of students of mine who became legislators. So, you know, I was intrigued with the idea of entering the legislature if the possibility ever showed up. It was several years later where a whole bunch of things happened in Missoula. Fred Van Valkenburg was the senator for this area. He decided to run for county attorney. The reason he was able to run for county attorney was Dusty Deschamps was going to run for Congress. So, we got Dusty...we got Van Valkeburg moving. The representative for the other half of this district was Vicki Cocchiarella and she wanted to go into the Senate. So, Dan Kemmis called me and said, "You know, there's going to be a legislative seat that's going to open up." And I said, "Good. I'll run."

CM: Was this a House seat, first?

RE: This was a House seat. The Senate seat includes the University District here. The House seat was Pattee Canyon, the North Hills, Lewis and Clark School out to Tower Pizza that way...and into Miller Creek. It's a Democratic district. My first and toughest opponent was a Democrat. There was a primary. A guy named Parker...wow, did I just lose his first name? He was the

15 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. president of the Young Democrats on campus. He had incredible support. He had the support of every Missoula legislator on his side. What I had on my side was Dan Kemmis and the next mayor, Mike Kadas. So, I had some Missoula support, but it was different Missoula support. Both of us worked really hard. I was able to hire a guy named Jim Parker to be my campaign manager, run my campaign, and do all the stuff you have to do about yard signs and writing up stuff. What I liked doing was knocking on doors. So, you know, I knocked on every door in that district. It turned out it was an easy race. I didn't know it would be, because the woman we were running against just didn't show up. So, I didn't know what she was doing. I understand that what she did was, when she did go to a door, she would knock on the door and somebody would come, and she would say, "Ron Erickson is a Communist." Oh, ok. (Laughing) That's not the effective way to go ahead and get votes.

CM: No, that doesn't seem like that would be the best method.

RE: Which reminds me...there came a time when I found out that some of my Republican friends in the legislature knew me as Red Ron. I didn't feel that that was the case at all, although, I obviously am to the left.

CM: That's a good transition actually. How did you use your position as a legislator to advance progressive environmental policy?

RE: I didn't. (Laughing)

CM: You didn't? (Laughing)

RE: I certainly tried, and I stopped some bills. I was on the Natural Resources Committee. I always had environmental bills and Republicans always destroyed them. I remember particularly that maybe we'd finally get to them in 2007. Steve Running had just won the Nobel Prize. I got him to come over to...was it the Nobel Prize? Yeah, I think it was. What was the big prize Steve Running won? The guy on climate change...yeah, I think it was. Anyway, I convinced him to come over to the legislature. The bill I had up was simply one that said you can't burn coal unless you collect the carbon dioxide. He gave a wonderful talk to the legislature, but, you know, it was a straight party-line vote and it never got out of committee. I did some good work in the legislature on smaller things. The largest one I ever got done had to do with corporations that cheat by keeping their revenue overseas, so they don't have to pay Montana income tax. It's a fairly complicated bill, but simply put, we were able to say if you have subsidiaries in these foreign countries...and they're all listed, including the Cayman Islands and, you know, the whole Caribbean, Luxembourg, and various places in Europe...if you have subsidiaries there, those must be included in your Montana income tax...Montana corporate income tax. That passed and that law still exists. Republicans over time would like to get rid of it.

CM: That seems like it would be massively important legislation.

16 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. RE: It was great. You know, the state gets money and still gets money out of it and it’s basic fairness. I'm quite sure the reason that I was able to pass the bill was that it was the year where Enron had...you know, when you finally looked at what they were doing they had 650 subsidiaries in the Caribbean.

CM: Yeah, so I would imagine public sentiment for...

RE: So, you know, I had some Republicans who right away said no...and yes.

CM: So, what years did you serve in the legislature?

RE: I ran first in '98, so I served for six years...through 2004. Then there was a census and they changed my district and I didn't like the fact that they changed my district from where I lived in Pattee Canyon, so that Pattee Canyon included the university and it included a good friend of mine who had that seat, Rosie Buzzas. So, I said, "I don't have to run now." Everybody said, "Oh, run in this other district." And I said, "No, I want to run at a place where I live." Well, during that two-year period, I got elected to a commission to study county government, so I stayed involved with that. I got on the planning board. It was a very important time with lots of subdivisions to look at in the planning board, so I was still active, but a few years later, a Senate seat opened up. That had been Jon Ellingson, who just lives a block or so over here. He got term limited. Immediately, my friend Rosie Buzzas put her name in, and I put my name in, so I had to run against Rosie. Rosie had had the advantage over many years. She won seven consecutive elections...four for the House, a couple for the city council and the school board, but she never had to work. She did not know everybody in the district. So, it was the easiest election I ever had, because I had already been to see...80-85% of the district I already knew.

CM: Yeah, I'm sure many of them knew you by name at that point.

RE: When I came to the door, they knew you. So that was fun to go ahead and get into the Senate. Did I get anything done? I almost got a...I needed to get more countries into that list of yeah, you've got to pay your real tax. The two I wanted in were Netherlands and Ireland. Unfortunately, there were some people in the Senate who like Ireland and in the House as well. So, I almost got that through but didn't quite do it.

CM: Did you notice a significant difference between the partisan attitudes towards the environmental issues...maybe from the time when you were working as an activist or professor in Missoula in the '70s to the time that you served in the late '90s and early 2000s? Did you find that it had become more partisan or had it always sort of been a pretty divisive...

RE: It was very interesting when I first went into the legislature in 1999. It was the session before term limits. That is, there were veterans of 30 years or 20 years...you know. If you were in the Senate, you were in the Senate. If you were in the House, you were in the House. Every once in a while, somebody would move but not all that often. So that first time I was with a

17 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. very different kind of legislature. John Mercer was the Republican Speaker of the House. He got up in front of the House the first day and said, "Here's what we're going to get done." I had my pencil out. I looked 90 days later, and he was right. That's what we got done, but that included finally getting a good bill in for education...K-12. The Republicans...it wasn't that they were partisan, it was that they didn't like government. They didn't like spending. There was a whole group of them...maybe 10 or 12...who just...we all had these buttons...green for yes, red for no, and they only had one button: just red. So, the Speaker of the House had to work with the Democrats to get a budget. Well, you know, that started to change the next time, partially because the influx of new people...lots and lots of new people. They tended to follow the leader, and the next leader did a great job for some of those people who were no-sayers. He made them chairmen of this and that and gave them, you know, power.

CM: Would those be the kill committees, then, that they became in charge of?

RE: Yes.

CM: Do you feel like you accomplished more as a legislator or more as a grassroots activist? I know you said that maybe you didn't get too much new legislation passed, but did you feel that your defensive work in the legislature maybe outweighed the other work?

RE: I would have to say that the most important work I did was helping to found and then direct the environmental studies program to get that going. The second most important work is certainly what you can see, which is Mount Jumbo. All of the other civic work was useful. I got enough done in the legislature to be proud of it at the end of any given session. Let me give you just a small example of a bill we got through. Ellie Hill, who is running for the Senate seat right now, was the head of Poverello Center at the time. She came to me with an idea. The folks at the Poverello Center often are unhealthy. They need the help of dentists and doctors, but dentists and doctors are worried about...and particularly retired ones...are worried about liability. A whole lot of people would not go help the people at the Poverello Center. So, she came to me with the idea of a bill that says, basically, you can go to places like the Poverello Center without liability insurance. You can't be sued. That was interesting, because the people I usually like...there's a guy named Al Smith who was one of the lobbyists for attorneys...they think that you shouldn't get rid of liability. You know, he was at the hearings and he finally came up to me and says, "You know my group doesn't like this, but I'm going to stay out of it." We got that little bill through.

CM: Was that just because of his respect for you more than it was...

RE: Oh, no. I think it was respect for the idea.

CM: The idea?

18 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. RE: Oh, yeah. You know, I was always asked to carry other bills...taxi cabs and how they're regulated...or something for the Public Service Commission...that's one that I had now. I didn't pass any bills my first year, but after that I always passed, you know, six or 10 bills...only a few of which I'm incredibly proud of. Not that I'm unproud of any of them, but you wouldn't notice them.

CM: Is there anything else you would like to add before I stop recording?

RE: Yeah, I see that I have not shown you this. I mentioned that environmental studies had a lot of lecture series. There was a year that a fellow named Peter Koehn, a political scientist, came to me and said, "Let's try to get more environmental education throughout the college not just from what EVST is doing and its students." He came up with the idea for a grant, which would pay faculty in the summer for a month's work to change courses. Then to go ahead and give that material you had in your regular courses, or sometimes new courses, and...there was a guy named Dick Barrett...Richard Barrett...who after that was all over...it took at least a couple of years...said, "This is good stuff. Let's try to put it in a book." So, he did that. That must be where all the faculty are. I think only Paul Lauren from the History Department...most of the people who did this were economists, social science people, and that was good because we needed more such environmental work out of the social sciences at that time. I got interested in writing about the Amazon and ended up using materials I had gathered about the Amazon and its destruction for some new courses and putting it into old courses. The single most important piece of writing, perhaps, ever done by one of our faculty was by Bert Pfeiffer on the cover of Science magazine on Vietnam and the destruction by chemicals...the defoliants. He not only wrote a piece that was on the cover of Science magazine, but he made a movie. You have to imagine he was able to convince the fliers to sit in the front cockpit while they were spreading chemicals. I talked once to a major film guy who told me, "You know, it's the best film I've ever seen by somebody who is an amateur." So, you know, that's another memory out there. I bring him up because, although he was a zoology professor then, when he retired, he didn't retire to one-third time in zoology. He retired to one-third time in environmental studies. He said, "You know, I know a lot of the people in embassies from around the country from various countries. Every country has its own environmental policy. Let's go ahead and have a lecture series where we bring in embassy workers." You know, somebody from the Seattle Embassy for Japan we bring to campus. That was a neat idea. You know, that would be much later. That was probably in the late '80s, early '90s. There probably were just hundreds of students who did such great work. Joan Miles came to the environmental studies program with a degree in nursing, but she wanted to switch fields. She ended up working with Clancy on the problem over at Garrison. She got a job with the Health Department in Helena. Then she ran for the legislature and became a legislator. Then she was named by a governor...who I've now lost the name of...to be the head of the whole Department of Public Health and Human Services. People were just talented...one after another.

CM: Well, clearly that entire program has left a very lasting impact on the state and the Missoula community as a whole.

19 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.

RE: Yeah. You know, I don't know what's going to happen right now. Number one, it's a much different department than when I was there. When I was there, I was the only faculty member. You know, now they have 10 or something. The problem is that many of them are older. Are we going to be able to replace them, because it's gone from a program where I used to go knock on the outside door of a faculty office and say, "Look, I've got a graduate student I'd like you to be able to work with here," and give them the applications to a place where it's all by itself. It's a department. So, I don't know what's going to happen.

[End of Interview]

20 Ron Erickson Interview, OH 476-005, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula.