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We often mourn when a family farmer or rancher is replaced by corporate agribusiness. But there is another occupation in the rural West that’s also endangered and worth honoring: the community-based wilderness organizer.
One of the finest wildland organizers in the past 50 years is my dear friend Bart Koehler, who is now struggling with Parkinson’s disease. Millions of acres throughout the West enjoy protection and broad local support because of Bart’s decades of on-the-ground advocacy.
Bart started his career as the Wyoming representative of The Wilderness Society. In the 1970s, the Wyoming Legislature passed resolutions opposing any new wilderness designations, and it remains the only state where federal law prohibits the president from establishing new national monuments.
But Bart was undaunted: He organized the people of Wyoming, not just to demand more wilderness areas but to more fully protect existing ones from the resource extraction allowed by the 1964 Wilderness Act. And he did it the old-fashioned way, face-to-face.
As the Wyoming-based field editor of High Country News in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and later working for the Sierra Club, I quickly bonded with Bart. I was amazed at his knowledge of the land and the laws and his ability to win people over to the wilderness cause.
Many ranchers and outfitters believed that wilderness designations meant an end to grazing and hunting. Bart explained that, in fact, the Wilderness Act guaranteed that these activities could continue. The real threat to their livelihoods and ways of life, he warned, were the mines, oil and gas fields and clear-cut logging operations.
During his travels, Bart often stopped by my log cabin home. He’d help the kids build their treehouse, and we’d spend the evenings singing while he strummed his guitar. We traveled to public-lands hearings where I met many of the unlikely new wilderness supporters he had found, inspired and trained.
Bart always kept things light and fun. To assist in our anti-coal campaigns, he created a band called The Strip Mine Patriots. He organized a boat race on the Snake River through Grand Teton National Park. The winner was whoever came in last. At the finish line, Mardy Murie, the octogenarian grande dame of wilderness protection, fed us cookies and read aloud from the Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax.
In 1978, The Wilderness Society shuttered its Western organizing operations and focused on lobbyists and policy analysts in Washington, D.C. Bart and other laid-off Wilderness Society staff banded together to keep grassroots wilderness advocacy alive, building up state-level groups like the Wyoming Wilderness Association, the Nevada Wilderness Association, the Utah Wilderness Association and the California Wilderness Coalition.
Then, Bart and a band of brothers established Earth First! as a counter to the established D.C.-based groups that they thought were making too many concessions for minimal wilderness protection. Their motto: “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth!”
Dave Foreman (another ex- Wilderness Society organizer) was the primary public speaker and rabble-rouser. Bart took on the role of movement troubadour, calling himself Johnny Sagebrush and leading the crowds and campfire circles in original songs about wilderness destruction, wilderness protection and the joys of wild country.
Bart later led the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, organizing Native and rural Alaskans and salmon fishermen to halt overcutting on the Tongass National Forest. In later years, he served as a director of the Wilderness Support Center, helping locals in hostile rural areas throughout the West to enact wildland protections.
Over time, Bart’s physical condition made it difficult to travel, hike, canoe and organize. He ended his full-time work but never retired from the cause.
Now, Bart is in a care facility in Arizona. His fingers can no longer strum a guitar, so he joins other musicians and beats on a drum to keep the music alive. His wife, Julie, is by his side, and a stream of well-wishers visit and send him notes of appreciation.
He has left in place a powerful community that will carry on his work. For a wilderness organizer, that’s the finest legacy of all.
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This article appeared in the March 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “An ode to Johnny Sagebrush.”
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