It's Your Oregon: Maradel Gale

The most striking thing about talking with Maradel Gale is the strong sense of shared experience that pervades the conversation. She emanates a deep sense of knowing what’s important, and that, together with her plain-spoken way of communicating, gives you the friendly, familiar feeling that she knows you share these values, too. Maradel Gale is, in her own quiet way, a powerhouse.

The first President of the Oregon Environmental Council, Gale was also the organization’s first lobbyist in 1968. “We picked a couple of bills to follow,” she says of that session, but it was “mostly an effort to keep bad things from happening,” because OEC had neither the funding nor the lead time to write bills or be proactive.

When asked how she became involved with environmental work, she immediately hearkens back to her childhood. Growing up in San Francisco and later in the Seattle area, she recalls frequently loading into the car with her mother and siblings late on Friday afternoons. They would meet her father at the train station—he commuted into San Francisco by train—and “head up to Sequoia or Yosemite.” Camping was not a widely popular pastime for Americans then. “This was before people did that,” says Gale, “Now you have to make reservations a year in advance.”

Later she married a man from Portland who was also outdoorsy, and they spent their first summer as lookouts at Flattop in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. She witnessed the forest “being chewed up” by clear cutting. “That’s when I formed my first environmental organization,” she jokes, “the Washington Anti-Clear-Cutting Association.” Various official visitors and the public often visited the lookout, so the “stamp out forest ringworm” sign Gale posted in the window made their forest service supervisor quite uncomfortable.

While completing graduate studies in Michigan, Gale and her husband had some disconcerting camping experiences that solidified her values around conservation. Within large swaths of what looked on the map like state forests, all the lakeshores were off-limits to campers because they were privately owned—and often developed with homes. That caused her to become a member of the Sierra Club, and to realize that this could happen in Oregon and Washington as well.

Returning to Oregon, Gale became the Lane County coordinator for Beaches Forever, where she worked with other activists like Janet McLennan. “That got me into the political arena,” she says. In 1968 Gale began to drive from Eugene to Salem several days a week – on her own dime – to meet with legislators on behalf of the newly-formed Oregon Environmental Council. “Janet showed me the ropes,” recalls Gale. There were only a few lobbyists working on behalf of the environment at the time, but the number of environmentally-concerned citizens was growing with the budding national environmental movement. By the 1971 session she says, “We were geared up for lots of things.”

Indeed. It is to clear-eyed visionaries like Maradel Gale that Oregonians owe much with regard to our state’s ecological heritage. The 1971 session saw passage of the bottle bill, the beach bill, a billboard removal bill, important motor vehicle pollution controls, landmark legislation highway funds for bike and recreational trails, the creation of the Nuclear and Thermal Energy Council (NETC),* and much more. Gale and other conservationists, along with the large numbers of Oregon citizens who attended hearings and wrote letters, had taken the legislature somewhat by storm. “Business hadn’t organized to fight us yet,” she says.

The successes of that session were due to many factors, including the growing concern many Americans had for the environment. But a great deal of that success can be attributed to the well-researched information provided by Maradel Gale, her clear-headed testimony, and her ability to communicate with legislators across the political spectrum.

While Gale was one of only a few environmental lobbyists in the 1968 session, by 1971 those numbers had grown. “A new chapter in lobbying in 1971 is the arrival of the environmentalists in battalion strength,” said an Oregonian article. “They now outnumber the resident ‘professional’ corps of Associated Oregon Industries who, as one legislator put it, ‘have a man under every rock’ in manpower if not in acumen, knowledge and financial power.”[2]

“One member of the new group whose calm, rational testimony has impressed a number of legislators in hearings this year is the Oregon Environmental Council’s Mrs. Richard (Maridel) (sic) Gale,” the article continues. “Unlike Mrs. Gale, many environmental cause spokesmen harm themselves because there is too much emotion and too little fact in testimony offered legislators.”

Unlike the tactics that were then employed by many paid lobbyists, the article notes that Gale and other unpaid lobbyists had neither the budget nor the interest in “wining and dining” legislators to get their attention. “The Eugene woman does not dispense food and drink to the people she’s trying to reach. First there is no budget and second she and her cohorts are convinced they don’t have to. ‘Our issues are right and the public is with us,’ is the general attitude.”

The experience of “writing all those bills,” prompted her  to attend law school, says Gale. She completed her law degree at the University of Oregon in 1974 and subsequently taught land use law at U of O for several years. Then, taking a sabbatical to backpack extensively in New Zealand and Australia, Gale was inspired to translate her experience in the emerging concept of sustainability and her lifelong fascination with the Pacific Islands into the next phase of her career. She began writing her doctoral thesis to test the notion that communities and cultures. If they are aware of the finite nature of available resources might be better stewards of those resources. In particular, she thought that coastal and island communities might be the best stewards of their environments. For 12 years Gale and her University of Oregon students in the Micronesia and Pacific Island program researched and supported sustainable development and women’s issues.

Today Gale is retired from her work at University of Oregon, but she remains active in the areas she is passionate about. From her Bainbridge Island home, she currently works with the City of Bainbridge Island on the “Winslow Tomorrow” planning and design process for the city’s main street. Last year she was appointed to a three year term on the Planning Commission for the Island. Through these projects she remains very active in promoting sustainable development, this time on an island much closer to home.

When asked about her greatest concerns and hopes for our environment, she cites concern over global warming, including the prospect of sea level rise and what it will mean for Oregon and Washington. Also of concern are issues such as population growth, and the added pressures on existing resources, like water. In true Maradel Gale fashion, though, she has a way of seeing the big picture and summing it up.

In the end it all comes down to the basic resources: “Clean air and water,” she says. “These are the founding elements of the Oregon Environmental Council – you’ve got to have them, and you can’t replace them.”

The formation of the NETC was seminal because, as Gale says, “this was the first time that our state had any say in the development of nuclear plants.” At the time there were up to 100 nuclear plants slated for development in Oregon. “I saw plans for 20 nuclear facilities around the Coberg area alone,” says Gale. In 1975 the NETC became the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council under the Oregon Department of Energy.

 

Research becomes best way to score points: Salem lobbyists tiptoe to get new image, by Harry Bodine, The Oregonian; March 14, 1971