What Others Have Said About Andy Kerr

For his participation, by personal invitation of President Clinton, in the Northwest Forest Conference held in Portland in 1993 Willamette Week gave Kerr a "No Surrender Award."

Time reporter David Seideman, in his book Showdown at Opal Creek, described Kerr as the "Ralph Nader of the old-growth-preservation movement."

Jonathan Nicholas of the Oregonian characterized Kerr as one of the "Top 10 people to take to (the) Portland bank" for "his gift of truth."

The Oregonian's Northwest Magazine characterized him as the timber industry's "most hated man in Oregon."

The Lake County Examiner called Kerr "Oregon's version of the Anti-Christ."

In a feature on Mr. Kerr, Time titled him a "White Collar Terrorist," referring to his effectiveness in working within the system and striking fear in the hearts of those who exploit Oregon's natural environment.

Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press called Kerr "the lighting rod for the environmental movement during the battle about the northern spotted owl."

The Christian Science Monitor characterized Kerr as "one of the toughest environmental professionals in the Pacific Northwest."

Willamette Week said Kerr "is entirely unwilling to give an inch when it comes to this state's remaining old-growth timber.

In his book Lasso the Wind, New York Times correspondent Tim Egan said of Kerr, "(h)e has a talent for speaking in such loaded sound bites that it was said by reporters that if Andy Kerr did not exist, someone would have to invent him....(Kerr) forced some of the most powerful timber companies to retreat from a binge of clear-cutting that had left large sections of the Oregon Cascades naked of forest cover."

High Country News noted that Kerr "was a key figure in the struggle to curtail logging in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and 1990s."

From a profile in the Oregonian, "In the 1980s and 1990s he was a much-decorated officer in the conservation movement's war with the timber industry—with the outcome that logging in the past decade declined by more than 80 percent on Oregon and Washington public lands."

The Oregonian named Kerr one of the 150 most interesting Oregonians in the newspapers 150-year history.

The Salt Lake Tribune described Kerr as "part provocateur and part policy wonk . . . Kerr . . . has long been a bur in the side of the cattle industry."

Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman said, "There were a lot of environmentalists working to stop logging on old growth national forests in the 1980s and 1990s. But few were more outspoken and effective than Andy Kerr."

Veteran Pacific Northwest journalist Floyd McKay, writing in Crosscut.com, said Kerr was "once considered [a] wild [man], aggressively challenging federal agencies and corporate land managers" who is now "an elder [statesman] in the region's environmental leaders."

High Country News called Kerr one of "public-lands grazing's greatest enemies."

Sen. Ron Wyden said Kerr "played an absolutely key role in pulling together the eastside [forest] bill in Oregon."