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Tim Lillebo, an environmental advocate for Oregon Wild, talking about a restoration project amid ponderosa pines near Sisters in 2007. The longtime forest advocate died Sunday at age 61.

(File/The Oregonian)

In 1983, when the environmental group now known as Oregon Wild was a fledgling operation, it sent a young man named Tim Lillebo to lobby for key legislation in Washington, D.C.

Congress was considering a bill to designate nearly 1 million acres of wilderness in Oregon. The group gave Lillebo all it could afford to cover his meals and lodging: $10 a day.

“We said: ‘You can’t come back until it passes the House of Representatives,’ ” remembered Andy Kerr, a longtime friend and environmental advocate.

For more than two months, Lillebo bounced from home to home, staying with friends, housesitting, whatever he could find, never staying anywhere more than a few days. All the while, Lillebo lobbied anyone who would listen about the Umatilla River, Mill Creek, Black Canyon and more. It worked: The bill passed and was eventually signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

Lillebo was an environmental advocate known for his quiet persistence and trademark brown crushed felt hat. The Lewis and Clark College graduate's career focused on protecting Ponderosa forests in Eastern Oregon, where he was born and raised.

Lillebo died Sunday after leaving to shovel snow outside his home in Tumalo, near Bend. He was 61.

“No one disliked Tim even if they disagreed strongly with what he advocated for,” said Sean Stevens, Oregon Wild's executive director. “And those who agreed with what he advocated for loved him dearly.”

Lillebo, a lifelong Oregonian, grew up in Grant County, in Oregon’s timber country, and spent summers as a timber faller, cutting trees, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a man he called Blondie.

His grandfather, from Maine, had crossed the United States cutting trees, winding up in Oregon. But as Lillebo testified before the U.S. Senate in 2010: “I still remember the day when my grandfather said: ‘Tim, as we cut, we thought the old growth would never end. Well, it’s mostly gone, and you should cherish what little is left of the big trees.’ I decided Blondie was right.”

Lillebo became an advocate for Oregon’s forests and was hired in 1976 as one of the first employees at the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, which became Oregon Wild, where he worked continuously until his death.

His work started out taking a hard line. "We said, 'Stop, don't cut one more tree, not one more stick,' " he told The Oregonian in 2007.

As the timber wars of the late 1980s and 1990s cooled, Lillebo and other advocates became convinced there was a benefit to some logging. They turned their attention to thinning Oregon’s eastside forests to counteract fire prevention and logging efforts that had left them unnaturally dense, full of smaller, second-growth trees but few old, large ones.

“The scientific facts called for a different response and Tim was able to adapt to the new necessities,” said Kerr, his longtime friend. “It’s counterintuitive that you address the abuses of logging by doing more logging. Tim was able to work through it.”

In 2010, as Lillebo testified before the U.S. Senate in support of legislation to increase thinning, he found himself on the same side as those he’d long fought.

“Believe me,” he told legislators, “I never thought I would be sitting here with some timber industry folks supporting the same piece of legislation. Miracles still happen.”

He also launched a 1,200-acre model old-growth restoration project in the Deschutes National Forest northwest of Sisters, patiently leading hundreds of field trips to explain the benefits of logging some second-growth trees and clearing brush.

Lillebo took Kerr – a believer in the project’s benefits – to see it five times.

“He’d just keep pushing. He’d push you in the most gentle manner. You didn’t even know you were being pushed,” Kerr said. “He could relate to you, he could relate to about anybody.

“It was a great loss. There’s a big hole today.”

-- Rob Davis