Advocate looks back at environmental history

Decades ago a young man named Brock Evans from Ohio spent two summers working at the Many Glacier Hotel. When he wasn’t at work, Evans was out in Glacier National Park hiking trails and climbing mountains.

Evans went on to establish a distinguished career in the conservation movement. He was awarded lifetime achievement awards by the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Council of America and the John Muir Award, the Sierra Club’s highest honor.

Growing up in Ohio, Evans had never seen mountains before coming here.

“Glacier Park is where it all started for me,” he said last week.

Today, Evans, 77, is the president of the Endangered Species Coalition, which he joined in 1997 as the executive director. The coalition is an advocate for endangered species around the world. He returned to Montana last week to speak at the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance’s annual fall gathering.

Evans is not a typical environmentalist. He graduated from Princeton University and has a law degree from the University of Michigan. He also enlisted in the Marines in 1959 and spent half a year in active duty and 5 1/2 years in the reserves.

The Marine experience helped, not hurt, his environmental advocacy over the years, Evans said.

“I loved the Marines,” he said, noting that he wore Marine attire when lobbying conservative lawmakers. “My God, that opens doors with conservatives like you wouldn’t believe.”

The Marines also taught loyalty and discipline, and the experience opened his eyes to what other countries were doing with their natural environments — often to the detriment of many species.

The Endangered Species Act is one of the strongest environmental laws not just in the U.S. but the world, he said. It requires governmental agencies to not only preserve endangered species but also their habitat. When Congress passed the ESA in 1973, it had a super majority in both the House and Senate.

“Deep down, Americans love their Earth,” Evans said.

Evans began his environmental advocacy career with the Sierra Club in Seattle, fighting to preserve old-growth forests before there were any environmental laws, like the ESA, the Wilderness Act or the National Environmental Policy Act.

“We were driven by fear of losing the forests,” he said.

Later in his career, he was an advocate for Montana’s Great Bear and Mission Mountain wilderness areas. He is good friends with Stewart Brandborg, one of the authors of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Evans said the ESA has been a tremendous success, but it still needs work. The law is often under attack by various interests — it’s always been that way, Evans noted. Industry has blamed the ESA for economic woes in the U.S. ever since it was enacted, and they still do today.

But Evans said he remains optimistic about the ESA and the future of the environmental movement, even with a polarized Congress and, at times, a polarized nation. It’s happened before in American political history, he said.

“Even though things seem gloomy and polarized, this is not new,” he said. “There’s always been this threat.”

When the Wilderness Act first passed, it protected 9 million acres, he noted. Today, it protects more than 110 million acres.

Evans recalls a simple saying.

“Endless pressure, endlessly applied,” he said. “That’s how these green areas got on the map.”