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W.J. McCabe Chapter Izaak Walton League of America

November 24, 1999 ©Duluth News Tribune Editorial

Columnist George Will wrote a column that included Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb of the Wise Use Movement among ``quasi-political entrepreneurs who have discovered commercial opportunities in merchandising discontent... ''

Arnold, described as the ``Founding Father of the Wise Use Movement,'' spoke in Duluth this week promoting his latest book. Northeastern Minnesotans should make it known they aren't buying his line that environmentalists ``combine to systematically cripple rural economies by eliminating resource industries.''

It's easy to foment discontent in a climate of rapid change. It's easy to exploit people's feelings of economic insecurity at a time when our natural resource-based industries respond to international market forces and technological advances continue to reduce the number of jobs.

Arnold would have us believe that our economic uncertainties are due to current laws protecting the environment or environmentalists who really aim at authoritarian power -- a bunch of hooey. As Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf once said at a Nature Conservancy press conference, ``These `Wise Use' extremists claim that economically you're going to take their jobs away from them; they're all going to become poor; their children are going to starve; and it's all because you're a bunch of fuzzy-headed tree-huggers... It's blatant lying in many cases is how they present things.''

Ironically, Arnold has taken the name for his movement from Gifford Pinchot, named by President Teddy Roosevelt as the first head of the U.S. Forest Service. Roosevelt created the nation's system of public parks and national forests as a protection against what he called ``land grabbers and special interests.'' Pinchot led the way, saying in 1907 that ``Conservation is the wise use of resources.'' Both men would roll over in their graves to learn the current use of their ``wise use'' message.

Arnold admits, however, ``The modern wise use movement does not hold Pinchot in reverence: he was just another bureaucrat who believed `conservation' had to come by `government control of resources.' ''

Arnold is very effective and should not be underestimated. Author David Helvarg describes him in this way: ``He has taken a personal bitterness against the environmental movement, the organizing theories of Lenin, the collective-behavior analysis of a couple of professors in the social movements field, and a broad reading of Abraham Maslow and other social psychologists, and synthesized them into a new force on the political Right that sees environmental change as an imminent threat to free enterprise, private property and industrial civilization.''

His program includes unrestricted timber cutting on public lands; mining and drilling in national parks and wilderness areas; rollback of clean air, water quality and other landmark environmental legislation.

For those of us who live in communities where economic vitality still depends on natural resources, we need to have discussions about future development and growth. But our discussions ought not be of the politically polarizing, conspiratorial sort that the ``Wise Use Movement'' promotes.

``Wise Users'' are as out of touch with the American mainstream as those at the other extreme who advocate tree spiking.

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