Word: stewartt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hawk's-eye view makes the case unforgettable. Stewartt finds a break in the clouds, and we circle over logging operations in high, steep valleys. A huge Sikorsky helicopter is pulling logs out of a narrow canyon. What is going on is not just clear-cutting, which a widely ignored provision of the National Forest Management Act of 1976 permits on national forest land only when it is the optimum cutting method. This, says Stewartt, is really "a mining operation, a one-time extraction of resources." Valley walls too steep to walk on have been scraped to bare earth. Acreage...
...Michael Stewartt began his flying career 2,000 ft. underground, in a copper mine near Tucson. That was in 1969. He was 19, short on cash and certainties, too restless for college, already back from a year of wandering that had taken him as far as Australia. The mine taught him what he wanted: out. He spent his wages on flying lessons and became a bush pilot in Alaska, the state with the bushiest piloting...
...conversation goes on one of Project Lighthawk's flights this summer. The nine-year-old, nonprofit flying service, which operates on a budget of about $200,000 a year, has tracked radio-collared wolves in Montana and rare porpoises in the Sea of Cortes. Last winter Stewartt and Volunteer Pilot Jerry Hoogerwerf flew for several weeks over the Costa Rican rain forest and discovered and helped stop illegal gold mining and logging near a park on the Osa Peninsula...
...first Stewartt had a tough job explaining to earthbound environmentalists how Lighthawk might be useful. That changed after a successful four-year fight that led to the shutdown of the smoke-belching Phelps Dodge copper smelter at Douglas, Ariz., a notorious contributor to the West's airborne sulphur-dioxide levels. Now Stewartt, with five salaries to guarantee, two planes to maintain and the costly prospect of buying three more, spends half his time raising money. He has no house, no wife and lives out of a flight...
Sometimes he broods about these lacks, but as we approach Boeing Field, he is fizzing with good spirits. "Awright, awright!" he yells. The control tower is holding up the takeoff of Boeing's newest 747, a monstrous silver machine with upturned wing tips, to let us land. This amuses Stewartt, who looks astonished when asked whether he ever thought of piloting such an ark. "Nah," he says, "those guys are bus drivers...