Enterprise, Ore. – The Wallowa Resources Stewardship Center, home to the innovative nonprofit created in 1996 to address the competing needs of the natural resource industry, the local economy, and environmental concerns, has a new name: The Doug McDaniel Stewardship Center.

“Doug McDaniel was an original founding board member of Wallowa Resources,” said Wallowa Resources Executive Director Nils Christoffersen. “He has been instrumental in advancing land stewardship, and has a long history of making a positive impact on forest and range management, as well as animal husbandry,” continued Christoffersen. “We wanted to honor Doug for his many contributions.”

McDaniel was born and raised in Wallowa County, and his family was among the first new settlers in the valley. Growing up, Doug hunted, fished – and worked. “I started working 30 hours a week on a dairy ranch when I was 13 years old,” remembered McDaniel, now in his 80s, who lives in Lostine with his wife, Gail Hammack.

The need to work led to a near full time job during high school working in a garage and delivering fuel to a remote sawmill, and working from age 17-30 as a logger when not earning a degree in Production Technology at Oregon State University. From then on, McDaniel created and then sold various companies engaged in logging, ranching and construction, providing as many as 120 jobs along the way. “I consider my strongest asset my knowledge of what a working man has to go through to get a paycheck,” said McDaniel.

When tensions were at their highest between the natural resource industry and the environmentalists, resulting in the closure of all three mills in Wallowa County in the mid 1990s, McDaniel wanted to get involved in finding solutions. He believed he had a unique background that helped him understand the concerns of both sides of the debate around use of natural resources – both the industry and the environmentalists. “I believed that everyone’s goals were closer than most people believed,” McDaniel said. “I believed if we got the working people – the foresters, loggers, ranchers, recreationalists and environmentalists – together, they would develop a relationship built on trust and get the work done.”

McDaniel brought this philosophy to the back room of Cloud 9 Bakery in Enterprise where a group of people were meeting to try to find solutions to the major economic crisis that resulted from the mill closures. From those meetings of concerned citizens from a variety of backgrounds, Wallowa Resources was born.

One of McDaniel’s most notable accomplishments was the national award-winning Wallowa River Restoration Project he developed with Wallowa Resources to restore over a mile of the Wallowa River near Lostine. The goal was to return the river to its natural state, which had been changed in the 1950s when the common thinking was to save pastureland and promote flood control by placing bulldozers in smaller streams and rivers and straighten out channels. Restoring the river back to its original gentle meander was critical in promoting fish habitat and improving the overall ecosystem of the watershed.

“McDaniel has played such a pivotal role in developing good land stewardship policy and community-based solutions for Wallowa Resources, and Wallowa Resources in turn has become a national model for other rural communities facing similar issues,” said Christoffersen. “We are excited to rename our building, and carry forward his legacy.”