It was announced this month that Stevensville publisher and journalist Dale Burk has been inducted into the Montana Outdoor Hall of Fame. Sponsored by the Montana Historical Society and the Montana Outdoor Legacy Foundation, the Hall of Fame was created to honor individuals, both living and posthumously, who have made significant and lasting contributions to the restoration and conservation of Montana’s wildlife and wild places. The first “class” of inductees was honored in 2014 and a second class was inducted in 2016. This, the third class of a dozen new inductees, will be officially honored at a ceremony in Helena on December 1.
“It is a remarkable list of men and women whose accomplishments span a lifetime of keeping watch over Montana’s natural wonders,” said Bruce Whittenberg, director of the Montana Historical Society and member of MOHF. Burk said that he was honored by the award, but especially honored at being the first journalist to be inducted.
“Burk was the right person at the right time in Montana Conservation history,” wrote longtime wilderness advocate Steve Woodruff in his letter of nomination. He praises Burk’s role in “catalyzing unprecedented public engagement” in the role of national forests and their management and writes that he was a critical voice in the establishment of the National Forest Management Act (NFMA).”
“Burk’s groundbreaking, indefatigable reporting of forest management in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought attention – in Montana and throughout America – to misguided, unsustainable activities that included massive clear-cutting, aggressive road-building, terracing, and logging-centric management that undermined the concept of multiple-use,” states Woodruff.
He said that Burk’s work was all the more notable because it came when the Montana press was still shaking off the “Copper Collar” of control by the Anaconda Company. No tradition of environmental reporting existed then, much less investigative reporting by Montana media. Burk broke new ground, he said, to inform and engage Montanans about forest management – catalyzing crucial public support for reforms by the Forest Service and Congress. Burk’s exhaustive work was controversial at the time but has stood the test of time.
Woodruff notes that Burk’s journalistic work, alone, qualifies him for a seat in the Montana Hall of Fame, “but his lifelong contributions as a conservation leader have not only shaped our outdoor heritage but also serve as a model for the leadership that will always be needed to maintain Montana’s outdoor heritage for future generations.”
Thomas Baumeister, who chairs the MOHF, said, “The Hall of Fame inductees cover a range of personalities who worked in the public and private sectors, and more times than not on their own, to advance what could be called Montana’s conservation consciousness.”
Burk, who wrote before the concept of “environmental journalism” was invented and actually helped forge the term, would add the word “conscience” to what is called “conservation consciousness.”
Believe it or not, early in his writing career Burk left his job as a reporter for the Interlake newspaper, where the pay was “beyond pathetic,” to go to work for the Anaconda Company in public relations. He did alright for six years, but then they sent him to Butte to do a brochure, or, as he now puts it, “They sent me to misrepresent the truth on an environmental issue.”
In the spring of 1967, he was assigned to write a story about the water treatment program of the Anaconda Company at the headwaters of the Clark Fork River at the Anaconda settling ponds. With the brochure finished he was standing on the dike where the water from the settling ponds flows back into the river with the President of the Butte Water Company and saw something floating by. He was shocked when he saw that it was human feces. When he pointed them out, he was assured that it had been “neutralized” by a purification process.
“But in my mind, they were still human turds going into a trout stream,” said Burk, “and I made a decision that morning on that dike that I was leaving the Anaconda Company.” And two days later he did just that. He wrote freelance newspaper features, went back to school, and got a job as state editor of the Missoulian newspaper. Then he began to write a few outdoor stories and then was asked to write a column, which he did for ten years.
The first two or three stories he wrote, he said, turned out to be about quite controversial issues. So, he went to his editor and asked, “How far do you want me to go?” The answer was, “Go as far as the truth will take you.” Burk attributes a lot of his success as an investigative/environmental reporter to the kind of support he got from his editors at the Missoulian at the time.
“We were just coming out from under the Copper Collar,” said Burk. “You almost have to have been there to really feel what that was like.”
He remembers the first story he wrote about what he calls the “Alice Creek issue”. The Anaconda Copper Company had asked for a permit to reclassify the Blackfoot River from a Class A river to a BCD, which is the classification of the Clark Fork carrying all that mine waste.
The permit request was being heard before the State Land Board composed of five state officials. When Burk looked into it he discovered that the State Land Board invariably always took the recommendation of the State Water Quality Board. When he looked into that a little further he found that three out of the five members of the State Water Quality Board were Anaconda Company employees. That little fact, once made public, turned out to make a difference.
“It was the first time in history that the State Land Board said no to the Anaconda Copper Company,” said Burk.
From there Burk’s career took him to coverage of the forest issues on the Flathead as he reported on the years of discussion that culminated in the creation of the Great Bear Wilderness. From there he was invited by Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor Guy Brandborg to come to the Bitterroot and talk about forestry in general and in the Bitterroot in particular.
“I came down and I became convinced that their allegations that multiple-use principles were being violated had merit deserved a series of stories,” said Burk. “I went back and talked to my editors and they agreed and the rest is pretty much history as that opened the national debate on forest management.”
Burk bit into that issue like the proverbial bull dog and never let go until the issue was resolved.
“There was only one reporter in the whole nation that covered every congressional hearing on the National Forest Management Act,” said Burk, “and that was me.” It took six years to get through the congressional hearing process and two more years to get the act passed.
Burk said by covering such stories and writing a column at the same time he was sort of “thrust into the controversy.” He said his articles written during this era had been analyzed in a Master’s Thesis by a journalism student at the U of M and found to be fair and accurate with equal or more copy given to agency and company officials compared to their critics.
“I never shirked on being fair and giving fair copy,” said Burk. “It was not my coverage, it was my column that was upsetting people.” And on this side of things, his editor was just as supportive.
“Looking back on things,” said Burk, “I think my detractors, in their vehemence, essentially enhanced my reputation as an investigative journalist.”
Burk had a lot to cover over the years including the passage of Montana’s Water Quality Act, the enactment of the Streambed Preservation Act, and close to 30 other pieces of major legislation. He also covered the “people’s re-writing of the Constitution,” as he calls it.
Throughout his journalism career and afterward, Burk has garnered a lot of awards for both his writing and his conservation efforts. Besides being the first to be inducted into the MOHF for journalism, Burk was also the first Montanan to receive a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard for exhibiting quality journalism. He was the recipient of the 1973 American Motors National Conservation Award. He was also the recipient of the National Conservationist of the Year award by Trout Unlimited; elected to the Montana Hunting Hall of Fame in 1995; founder and Director of The Hunter’s Alliance and in I995 he was named one of “25 Most Outstanding Montana Citizens” for the previous 25 years by Montana Magazine.
In his eighties, Burk still owns and operates Stoneydale Press in Stevensville, is active in community affairs, and finds time to hunt and fish with his grandsons whenever he can.
