Mark Hatfield: A True Green Republican

Back in the 1980s, the biggest fighting words around environmental policy were not "climate change." They were "wilderness preservation."

Environmentalists wanted more, much more wilderness set aside. Extractive industries wanted little or, preferably, zero new wilderness. The bitterest wilderness battles were in the forests, mountains, and arid lands of Oregon.

One man was indispensable for squeezing Oregon's adversaries into a narrow enough thread that could move through the congressional needle and get an Oregon wilderness bill passed – Mark Hatfield.

Hatfield, an independent Republican who didn't allow mere party leaders to make up his mind for him, passed away Sunday at the age of 89. During five terms representing Oregon in the Senate, the go-along, get-along types in the political class often found Hatfield's contrarian ways exasperating. It's hard to imagine Hatfield lasting long in today's party-first, governance-second environment.

That's a shame. Because reconciling the irreconcilable takes a guy like Hatfield – an independent thinker willing to give a fair hearing to different sides and work issues through to resolution. Standing aside with mouth open and arms folded gets brownie points for purity but gets nothing done.

If there was anyone who could get Oregon's timber beasts and tree-hugging enviros to a place where they could live, grudgingly perhaps, with the end product on wilderness legislation, it was Hatfield. In 1984, the peace-loving Hatfield secured peace in the woods, temporarily to be sure, when the Oregon Wilderness Act was passed and signed into law by President Reagan.

The memory of Hatfield's stewardship legacy is secure – east of Portland, a wilderness area named after him lies on 66,000 acres of forested backcountry between the Columbia River and Mount Hood. The highest point in the Mark O. Hatfield Wilderness is 4,900-foot Mount Defiance – as fitting a monument for the Oregon maverick as there ever could be.