Andy Kerr - The Larch Company, biography

March 27, 2006

Andy Kerr is the Czar of The Larch Company and consults on environmental and conservation issues. The Larch Company is a for-profit non-membership conservation organization that represents the interests of humans yet born and species that cannot talk.

He is best known for his two decades with the Oregon Natural Resources Council, the organization best known for having brought you the northern spotted owl. He's also Director of the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, an effort to end abusive livestock grazing on public lands by providing fair compensation to affected ranchers and reallocating the forage to wildlife and watershed protection.

He has lectured at all of Oregon's leading universities and colleges, as well at Harvard and Yale. Kerr has appeared numerous times on national television news and feature programs and has published numerous articles on environmental matters. He is a dropout of Oregon State University.

He participated, by personal invitation of President Clinton, in the Northwest Forest Conference held in Portland in 1993 for which 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 Kerr, Time magazine 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.

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 ranks Kerr "among the fiercest and most successful environmentalists."

Kerr is Treasurer and a founding board member of the North American Industrial Hemp Council, an organization dedicated to the re-commercialization of industrial hemp in the United States.
The Oregonian named Kerr one of the 150 most interesting Oregonians in the newspaper's 150-year history.

Kerr authored Oregon Desert Guide: 70 Hikes (published by The Mountaineers Books) and Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness (published by Oregon Natural Resources Council and distributed by Timber Press).

Projects have included consulting for The Wilderness Society to achieve national protection for the 1.2 million-acre Steens-Alvord area in southeast Oregon and advising the Sagebrush Sea Campaign sage grouse ("the spotted owl of the desert") and sagebrush country conservation.

His next book is Beyond Wood: The Case For Forests and Against Logging, which will argue that trees grow slower than money, forests are more important for any other use than fiber production, America can get nearly all of its fiber products from agricultural waste and other crops with less environmental impact, and that most private timberland in this nation should be reconverted to public forestlands.

A fifth-generation Oregonian, Kerr was born and raised in Creswell (a recovered timber town in the upper Willamette Valley). He lives in Ashland (a recovered timber town in the Rogue Valley). He live with one wife, one dog, one cat, one horse, and no vacancies. In his free time, Kerr likes to canoe, hike, raft, read, and work on projects that move their home and business toward energy self-sufficiency and atmospheric carbon neutrality.

The Larch Company; 7128 Highway 66; Ashland, OR 97520 USA; 541/201-0053 voice; 541/201-0065 fax; andykerr@andykerr.net