Today Morley is in his late 80’s and slowed by age and the effects of dementia.  But he is still fighting the good fight.  This one is perhaps his last, and certainly his most obscure -- the battle against a fast-growing weed known as cheatgrass.

Stemming from imported European brome seeds in the late 19th century and carried west in loads of wheat by settlers, cheatgrass is turning America’s Great Basin into a dry, easily-ignitable prairie.  It invades fertile rangeland areas, “cheats” other grasses out of their nitrogen and other key nutrients by growing earlier and faster than they do, then quickly dies, leaving a brown, barren landscape.  The altered environment is unsuitable for raptors such as golden eagles because their main prey – jack rabbits – have difficultly surviving without the cover of sagebrush and the nutrition of native grasses and perennials. 

Cheatgrass now forms an estimated 100-million-acre dying carpet across the West, a recognized problem in Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Oregon and a growing concern in Wyoming and Colorado.  The drier areas are now seeing major wildfires about every three years instead of every 60.  The estimated cost to taxpayers:  More than $100 billion.

Morley first introduced the cheatgrass issue in his 1992 movie, The Vertical Environment, featuring actress Lynn Redgrave.  He and his 58-year-old son Norman, a Boise-based filmmaker, have presented the issue to politicians, colleagues and university researchers.  The U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture and several universities are now experimenting with potential antidotes including biological alteration, controlled burns, the introduction of competitive native plant species such as wheatgrass and the use of newer herbicides.  None of the proposed solutions, however, is proving to be a panacea, and research in the area still lags.

It’s a warm afternoon, and Morley is in the passenger seat of a truck headed down a straight, abandoned two-lane country road an hour south of Boise.  Except for the endless power lines that divide the landscape, the seemingly lifeless area backlit by the setting red-orange sun could easily be mistaken for the surface of Mars.

Morley sees a clump of cheatgrass and asks to stop the truck.  He steps down to the gravel shoulder, rocks crunching beneath his boots.  He points to a tall, thin, wispy-looking weed.  “Goddamn cheatgrass,” he says.

Morley gets back into the truck and slams the passenger door.  The truck proceeds slowly toward the canyon edge of the 600,000-acre Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, a place Morley first envisioned and later helped establish in 1980 with the assistant of Cecil Andrus, then President Carter’s Secretary of the Interior and former governor of Idaho. 

The area, with jagged, rust-colored walls cut by the silty Snake River, is home to one of the world’s highest concentrations of raptors.  Twenty years ago, Morley and his sons documented more than 50 pairs of eagles and 200 pairs of falcons living there.

At the canyon rim, the river rippling 700 feet below, Morley gets out of the car again and slowly surveys the terrain.  On the prairie behind him, he sees neither jack rabbits nor golden eagles, and only a lone falcon flies in the distance. He looks both angry and sad, as if he were gazing at the ruins of his own house.

Morley doesn’t know who will protect this land for his beloved raptors, who will step up and embrace the fire-and-brimstone environmentalist spirit he shared with his comrade David Brower, founder of the modern environmentalist movement and longtime leader of the Sierra Club.  Brower is dead now, and Morley’s time is almost up too.  The generation that founded the modern environmental movement is passing, and Morley doesn’t know who will take its place. 

He stands by the truck staring at the empty landscape listening for the long cry of the eagle on the wind, the call that’s filled and inspired him for over 70 years. He knows that he’s done what he could.  His films, words and actions have inspired thousands around the world and protected untold numbers of birds of prey.  Now his hope is that he’s passing the torch of advocacy not to one person, but to many.

SETH WALKER is a second-year student in the University of Oregon’s Literary Nonfiction program.  His writing has appeared previously in Etude, National Geographic Traveler (On Campus), The Oregonian and the Eugene Weekly.