on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Born again

The new NEC fresh-faced and ready to rumble

(May 3, 2007)  On a sunny, nearly hot spring afternoon in early April, Susan Penn was setting up easels inside the Northcoast Environmental Center’s headquarters and placing paintings on them. The office was chaotic - boxes everywhere, some with giant stuffed salmon swimming atop them. How much of this stuff would make it to the new headquarters, up the road, was anyone’s guess. For now, there were more immediate concerns. Soon, the auctioneer and film crew would arrive to record a commercial for the NEC’s annual art auction. Erica Terence, meanwhile, was talking on the phone to Petey Brucker’s mom, who was the first person to mail in a bid for one of the artworks. They’re both mid-Klamath folks, ardent activists.

Through the door came a slender young man with large brown eyes. “Hello, Ryan,” said Penn. “Hi,” he said. A tiny white flower on a long green stem peeked out of his curly brown hair. “I have another one, too,” he said, bending down to show off the little purple bloom on top. “I had a whole crown of them, but took it off.” He’s one of the NEC’s work-study students - although, he admitted, he skipped out on the “student” part today on account of the sudden sunshine, which needed to be loafed in. “My skin still feels charged from it,” he said, rubbing his left arm.

Susan Penn, Greg King, Alisha Clompus and Erica Terence on the porch of the Northcoast Environmental Center’s soon-to-be-digs (once the permitting hurdles are cleared). Photo by Heidi Walters.

GALLERY >

But he did show up for duty at the NEC. And, reeking as he did of sunshine and idealism, he could have been a kid walking in straight from the 1970s. Or from last spring, even. But some might call it remarkable that he, or any of the others, showed up on this day in April 2007.

Last July when Tim McKay died , you could see in many locals’ eyes, behind the shock and sorrow, the unspeakable prediction: “There goes the NEC.” They hated themselves for thinking it, but there it was. How could the NEC go on? McKay had been the executive director of the Northcoast Environmental Center for 35 years, all but a year since he and Wes Chesbro (the first executive director, and recently termed-out state senator) started it in 1971, along with a handful of other environmentally conscious, scrappy college students knocking about a rather conservative Arcata at that time.

“Tim - he was the NEC, and the NEC was him,” said Erica Terence, who joined the NEC staff in January 2006.

Led by McKay, the NEC shed light on numerous issues, starting with recycling but soon moving to the federal landscape: pesticides, timber harvest plans, the plight of the northern spotted owl, ill-conceived roads through pristine forests, off-shore oil drilling, a plan to fill Butler Valley up with water, wilderness preservation and PacifiCorp’s dams on the Klamath River. Certain closer-to-town issues did catch its attention, such as the proposed liquid natural gas plant on Humboldt Bay. But its forte was watchdogging policies on the four national forests in the Klamath-Siskiyou region - a “seed bank” zone of incredible biological diversity, with complicated, remote mountains whose creeks and small rivers form the watersheds of the Klamath and Trinity rivers, stretching from Northern California to southern Oregon.

McKay also was the NEC’s obsessive archivist, storing massive amounts of information on paper and filing equally massive amounts directly into his brain cells. One of his greatest attributes, colleagues and friends say, was his readiness to share this vast knowledge with anyone who walked in the door, and to send them back out the door with the tools to wage their own battle. After the NEC office burned to the ground in 2001, taking with it 30 years of saved news clippings and an impressive, one-of-a-kind environmental and political library collection, McKay’s “institutional memory” became indispensable.

The NEC drew scads of volunteers, a steady feed of work-study students, and grew to 4,000 members. It achieved a $250,000-plus annual budget, 90 percent derived from donations, according to former staffer Connie Stewart (who went on to the Arcata City Council and now works for Assemblymember Patty Berg). Over the years, many people worked just as passionately and tirelessly as McKay at the NEC. But McKay drove the thing. And his staff and board of directors went along for the ride - or got off the bus.

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