Comb Wash 2010, photo by Reid Lustig Yesterday Joe Feller’s family hosted a wonderful memorial service for him in Berkeley. Joe’s brother Fred read an inspiring passage by naturalist David Peters about Joe’s work to restore and to preserve Comb Wash. I thought it was worth reprinting here:
“In March 1988, just after the winter grazing season, Joseph Feller, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, took a hike in Arch Canyon. What Feller saw there, he’ll tell you, was ‘appalling … cow pies everywhere. The vegetation had all been grazed down to root-stubble. The stream banks and cryptobiotic crust were trampled and destroyed. It looked like a war zone.’ Feller headed home determined to do something.
“What he did was appeal BLM’s Comb Wash grazing practices to BLM’s mother agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior. As a result, DoI administrative law judge John R. Rampton, Jr., directed the area BLM boss to explain and reconsider his Comb Wash grazing strategy…. [T]he BLM manager ignored the court’s mandate and issued another grazing permit, without modifications….
“No quitter, this tenacious feller Joe recruited the National Wildlife Federation and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance … to join in filing a second, much broader appeal…. The upshot of it all was a rare sweet victory in the ongoing battle for public control of public lands….
“If [Edward Abbey] were here today, I know absolutely that he’d be shouting praises from every canyon rim for Fightin’ Joe Feller and his allies at the National Wildlife Federation. And rightly so, for these brave few, with help from several unnamed but significant others, have returned this desert Eden to the American public.”
For more, see David Peters, The Nearby Faraway: A Personal Journal Through the Heart of the West 142-44 (1997). Joe's co-counsel at the National Wildlife Federation, Tom Lustig, passed away in 2008. Two years after that, Tom's sons Brooks and Reid returned to Comb Wash with Joe and scattered their father's ashes; Reid Lustig's account of that trip is worth reading in full. Joe's own discussion of the Comb Wash litigation and its legal significance can be found here.
David Sklansky
“In March 1988, just after the winter grazing season, Joseph Feller, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, took a hike in Arch Canyon. What Feller saw there, he’ll tell you, was ‘appalling … cow pies everywhere. The vegetation had all been grazed down to root-stubble. The stream banks and cryptobiotic crust were trampled and destroyed. It looked like a war zone.’ Feller headed home determined to do something.
“What he did was appeal BLM’s Comb Wash grazing practices to BLM’s mother agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior. As a result, DoI administrative law judge John R. Rampton, Jr., directed the area BLM boss to explain and reconsider his Comb Wash grazing strategy…. [T]he BLM manager ignored the court’s mandate and issued another grazing permit, without modifications….
“No quitter, this tenacious feller Joe recruited the National Wildlife Federation and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance … to join in filing a second, much broader appeal…. The upshot of it all was a rare sweet victory in the ongoing battle for public control of public lands….
“If [Edward Abbey] were here today, I know absolutely that he’d be shouting praises from every canyon rim for Fightin’ Joe Feller and his allies at the National Wildlife Federation. And rightly so, for these brave few, with help from several unnamed but significant others, have returned this desert Eden to the American public.”
For more, see David Peters, The Nearby Faraway: A Personal Journal Through the Heart of the West 142-44 (1997). Joe's co-counsel at the National Wildlife Federation, Tom Lustig, passed away in 2008. Two years after that, Tom's sons Brooks and Reid returned to Comb Wash with Joe and scattered their father's ashes; Reid Lustig's account of that trip is worth reading in full. Joe's own discussion of the Comb Wash litigation and its legal significance can be found here.
David Sklansky
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