Alumni Album

Unkind Cuts

U.S. Senator Slade Gorton '49 holds an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth along with his B.A. Thanks to a few Dartmouth students, he also owns a less-coveted prize: a tree stump. The students—who call themselves "Dartmouth is B.R.0.W.N. (Building Options for Wrecking Nature)— awarded Gorton the stump and an "Environmentally Destructive Alum Award" in a ceremony last Mav.

A Republican from Washington Srate, Gorton co-authored a timber salvage rider that passed Congress last year. The law suspends all environmental laws in some areas of national forests in the Northwest. It was promoted by- Gorton and other Republicans as a way to cut fire-scarred or bug-infested salvage timber. A single paragraph in the rider suspended all environmental laws in some areas, allowing for old-growth trees to be cut. The law, which expires at the end of this year, is bitterly opposed by environmentalists.

The Dartmouth is B.R.O.W.N. students generated media coverage in New Hampshire and Vermont for their skit. "All we hear for four years is 'green, green, green,'" said Justin Ruben '96 from New Haven, one of the organizers of the event. "What about brown? What about pavement?"

The sarcasm wasn't lost on Gorton, who shot back with some of his own. "If anything, the students have learned a valuable lesson in media relations the more outlandish and outrageous the act, the more the media will cover it!" he said. "I also hope that the professors and faculty- at Dartmouth are teaching their students to respect that there is more than one side to an issue. The other side of the timber issue is people." He said that timber communities in Washington have been "ravaged" by federal timber policy, with tens of thousands of lost jobs during the last six years. "When the President signed the timber salvage legislation into law, we hoped it would provide a modest amount of timber to put a handful of people back to work," he said.

President Clinton has said he didn't think the law would permit unregulated logging in parts of national forests, but a federal judge last year interpreted the law as doing just that.

Jim Hourdequin '97 gives Senator Gorton '49 a hand.