If you’ve read anything this week about J. Robb Brady, the former Idaho Falls Post Register publisher, you know he was an environmental journalism pioneer in Idaho.
You also know he was kind, generous and unassuming and had one of Idaho’s most touching love affairs with his wife, Rose, for 69 years. She died earlier this year and he joined her a week ago. Services are Tuesday in Idaho Falls.
I knew Robb as the most decent human being I ever met. I am in Idaho because of his interest in quality journalism and I stayed, in part, because of the wilderness he led me through.
We hiked together to places like the Big Boulders in the White Clouds, Edith and Imogene lakes in the Sawtooths and along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River above Dagger Falls. He ventured into alpine places into his late 80s and encouraged everyone he encountered to call their congressmen to support wilderness protection.
Since he had been making the same call in editorials since the 1960s, he found no conflict with his journalistic ethics. But he didn’t join environmental groups, and he sought to keep his independence even into retirement.
He only stopped writing editorials in his last days and continued to consult with Post Register writers after that. His crusade to reform the 1872 Mining Act, so mining companies would pay royalties and not have the right to mine public lands, lives on without him.
Robb’s love of Idaho wilderness came early in life when he summered at the Diamond D Ranch on Loon Creek with his brother Jim. On the way to the ranch, he could see the destruction left over by miners on the Yankee Fork of the Salmon River.
As an editor, he bought a small ranch in the Sawtooth Valley in the 1960s in the sunrise shadows of Castle Peak and the White Cloud Mountains. This became his place, the White Cloud Ranch, from where his own journeys through nature would start.
From then on he began pushing for protection of the White Clouds, which were threatened by a molybdenum mine. He never pulled his punches: “Miners don’t like the word desecrated, but it’s agonizingly appropriate,” he wrote in a 1968 editorial.
Robb was a new kind of conservationist for Idaho. He didn’t hunt, though he didn’t mind hunting. I never saw him hold a fishing rod. His connection to the land was spiritual.
Robb loved to hike Idaho’s mountains like many of the engineers, chemists and computer programmers who worked at the Idaho National Laboratory and read his editorials. His editorials and their advocacy presented an Idaho face for conservation that was not tied to the sportsman community.
His editorials influenced Cecil Andrus’ decision to oppose the Castle Peak mine, which led to White Clouds protection in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.
Robb supported economic development, too, and he backed the Teton Dam — a position he always regretted.
He had been the first reporter on the scene when the SL-1 reactor blew up in 1961, but he was a supporter of the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
He shared that view with his generation of INL workers, who saw themselves working on peaceful nuclear technology instead of bombs.
But the INL’s uranium recycling and waste storage were directly tied into the bomb-manufacturing network, as Department of Energy officials acknowledged publicly for the first time in 1986.
They were pushing for a new plutonium plant and wanted the same strong local support they had always had.
But Robb courageously wouldn’t join the parade.
He opposed the plant editorially, despite the threat to the paper’s advertising. When Jerry Brady bought the paper from Robb in 1988, younger Brady continued his uncle’s position in the face of an advertising boycott.
Despite his environmentalism, Robb proudly called himself a rancher and owned three ranches.
He saw good stewardship of the range as an honorable profession, but wasn’t above challenging his neighbors in print when they didn’t live up to his ideal.
Robb set the bar high for Idaho and the state is a better place for it.
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
