Getting back to nature with Franz

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

By Jake Nichols

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Like a lot of us, Franz Camenzind gets antsy sitting in an office on a nice day. He hears nature calling him; not in a whisper but a roar: “Come, take me in. Walk in my woods, swim in my waters. But please, save me first.”

“You love what you know, you protect what you love,” Camenzind is fond of saying. “You have to know it. You have to have access to it. You have to be comfortable in it to love it. And if you love it, you will protect it.”

And Camenzind does cherish every bird, every beast, and every branch in the wild. He has been known, in his youthful past, to hike in the buff in an attempt to get back to nature. There is nothing the 64-year-old fears more than losing that connection. Now, after 12 years as the executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, where he has rallied for the rights of creatures big and small, he wants to see more of what he was fighting for.

Questions remain. How did the self-professed, original cheese head become the head cheese of one of Jackson Hole’s largest and oldest nonprofits, a job he never wanted? Who will follow in his path? And how does someone who never knows where he is going ever get there?

The Planet spent an hour and a half with this champion of the backcountry, all the while aware that he would rather be beating the bushes and slapping bugs somewhere than sitting in his office talking to us.

Planet Jackson Hole: You were born into a war. 1944.

Franz Camenzind: I was born in southern Wisconsin. My dad was born and raised in Switzerland. My mother was also Swiss so I’m 100 percent Swiss. For the first 14 years of my life I was a cheese maker like my dad.

PJH: What’s the worst part about that job?

FC: It’s every day. It was a small co-op farm and the milk came in every morning, 365 days a year.

PJH: The Swiss are known for their cheese and their watches … (Camenzind proudly displays his.) Could you fend off bullheaded legislators and blood thirsty wolf-haters armed with only a Swiss Army knife?

FC: (Laughs.) No. but I have a cousin in Switzerland who works at the Victorinox plant. So I have a very nice collection of Swiss Army knives. I probably have a couple dozen.

PJH: You are well known for your camera work in the wild. You began making wildlife documentaries shortly after your arrival in Jackson in 1970. How did you get into filmmaking?

FC: By accident. I was here doing my research and National Geographic came in to do part of a special on coyotes and their research people heard of me. Wolfgang Bayer was the cameraman. He was living in LA and wanted to get out of there at that time and he fell in love with Jackson and moved out here. I was the first and only person he knew when he got here and he had a few film jobs and two of them were in Baja. He asked me to help him and why wouldn’t a graduate student not want to go to Baja when he could?

PJH: That paid the bills?

FC: I was also doing environmental consulting work for a number of different companies around here. They would hire me to do wildlife assessments. I did the wildlife assessment on the proposed Cache Creek oil well and the Little Granite Creek oil well. I was the wildlife biologist on the assessment they did for the dam reconstruction.

I eventually gave up the environmental assessment work because I got frustrated with it. I started to realize that I was only there as the token biologist these companies had to hire to jump through the hoop and I didn’t like it.

PJH: The hoop just got bigger with the recent announcement that the Bush administration is proposing what amounts to a pretty severe watering down of the Endangered Species Act.

FC: That hoop is pretty big. You can just about drive any proposal through it now. It’s a chilling proposal. Up until now if [one] agency wanted to do something they had to consult [an outside agency.] It took it out of their hierarchy. [Let’s say] the Department of Defense has their orders to expand their training facilities somewhere. They are now going to go to their own biologists and ask if this is going to work. That’s not checks and balances anymore. It’s putting the drug addict in charge of the pharmacy.

PJH: Probably everyone in the valley sat up and took notice when you announced you would step down from the ED position at the Alliance within a year, mainly because you’ve always been there. You were there when Targhee threatened open space. You drove to Cheyenne to lobby for wolf protection. You were always there whenever a development was proposed to knock down a tree or chase out an animal.

FC: My friends say, “You’re a biologist. You know what evolution is as well as anybody. This is the natural order of things: that we will lose our wilderness and we’re bound to lose species.” I say that may be the case but I have every right to resist that. I have every right to show up … and LOSE. But I have every right to show up.

PJH: You’ve won some, too. But in your game, often you must set out to save five wolves or five trees in order to save one.

FC: I think compromise is the unfortunate pattern in this kind of work. I say ‘unfortunate’ not out of disrespect for the art of compromise but that is truly how we do move forward. In environmental issues, compromise is often measured by how much you’ve lost. When you’re talking about such a measurable entity as wildlands, each time you take an acre off you’ve lost that. Maybe they started out wanting 10 but you’ve got them down to five. Well, you’ve lost that five acres. We are not creating any more of that.

I’ve been fortunate to make films and see some things for the first time, or, in a couple cases, maybe the last time. I don’t want to take my grandchildren by the hand and show them pictures of what was. I want to take their hand and show them what remains, what is.

PJH: Where you haven’t always won one for land conservation, you’ve always won respect. When you speak it’s almost always to stop the bulldozer if only for a while. But they listen to you. Tree-huggers and wolf-lovers get dismissed as emotional. When you speak out it’s passionate, but it’s also educated.

FC: From my end of the conversation it seems like no one ever listens. But since I’ve announced my retirement I’ve had an unbelievable number of people come up to me and say “Thanks for what you are doing” and “What will we do without you?” It is very gratifying and it tells me there are a lot of people who live here who share the values the Alliance embraces.

It’s a tough organization to belong to because we will inevitably be up against our friends. In a small town that’s a very, very difficult situation to be in. I think it has shaped the Alliance somewhat to be more respectful. I was never trained in this kind of work – advocacy. I fell into it as interim.

PJH: And you really don’t like it.

FC: It’s not fun. I would rather be out hiking on a day like today instead of relegating it to weekends. But I feel like it’s important work. The Alliance does important work for this valley. I feel like it does have a voice and does garner respect.

It’s gratifying to the see the results of the polls the county has done. A lot of our sentiments are echoed in the hearts of many of our citizens in this community. It makes going to work easier. But for me it’ll be 13 years next summer. I’ll be 65 and I feel I’m in pretty good health yet, and there are a lot of things I personally would like to do.

PJH: Like what?

FC: I would like to do some writing and some photography. I’ve got twenty or thirty thousand images I have to go through. I have an agent in England but I haven’t given them much lately because I‘ve been so tied up here. I want to spend more time with my grandkids and do some more traveling.

And if I wake up one day and think, “God, this is a great day to go hiking,” I wil,l and not worry about some county commissioner meeting or something. So it’s selfish.

PJH: I hear you like to hike naked sometimes.

FC: I used to but I wore shoes.

PJH: Where are you going this weekend?

FC: I don’t know yet. When I leave the house, I don’t know where I’m going most of the time. I’m 80 percent off-trail. I get into hiking by myself and enjoying the land.

I was talking with a friend of mine and she said, “What happens if you die out there?” I said, “If I fall over and die out there, that’s where I would want to be.”

Photo by JONATHAN ADAMS
On the heels of the announcement of his retirement, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance head speaks.

PERMALINK:
Getting back to nature with Franz | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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