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W.J. McCabe Chapter Izaak Walton League of America

For awhile Huck had been a believer. After all, he had never engaged a king in conversation, only a duke. "Yes, my friend," the king had said shortly before he and the duke settled into Huck's quarters on the raft, "it is too true--your eyes is lookin' at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette... Trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampled-on and sufferin' rightful King of France."

There is nothing remarkable or even newsworthy about humbugs and frauds. Always, they have crawled upon society's unexposed flesh. Always, they have been plucked and cracked between the teeth of sundry groomers. Always a few persist and even prosper P.T. Barnum-style, though usually at the pleasure of that element of the public which enjoys being fooled and frightened. It takes at least one flea, goes the aphorism, to keep a dog happy.

But how is it that so many humbugs and frauds are proliferating and prospering in America? Hundreds of industry fronts are suddenly coalescing under the Orwellian moniker "Wise Use Movement," and they are doing more than just entertaining and titillating; they are swaying public policy on important environmental issues.

William Burke, writing for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Political Research Associates, defines the Wise Use Movement as "a coalition of self-proclaimed grassroots groups allied to developers and resource-extracting industries [which] seeks to overturn modern society's assumption that there are common public interests, such as health, education, and planning for the future, that bind communities together." That's as good a definition as I've heard.

The principle organizers/promoters of Wise Use are Alan M. Gottlieb and Ron Arnold. Gottlieb, who runs the not-for-profit Center for Defense of Free Enterprise, has done time in the slammer for filing false income tax returns and failing to pay taxes. Arnold has ties to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

The movement's official platform--known as the "Wise Use Agenda"--advocates opening all wilderness and national parks to logging, oil drilling and mining, and lifting Endangered Species Act protection from "non-adaptive species," i.e., everything that can't stand hack-and-gouge development. The one planetary crisis the agenda doesn't kiss off is global warming, for which it prescribes razing all old growth, this on the timber-industry-generated superstition that planted monocultures suck more carbon from the atmosphere.

"Right now the environmental movement is a perfect bogeyman for us," Gottlieb told me. "In order to get people to join and donate money we need opposition."

"Facts don't matter," declares Arnold, "in politics perception is reality."

One has to admire their brass. I do. I met them once in print. On a raft.

There is a river near my home too small for rafts. It is cold and intimate, hurrying down from the village of Becket in Massachusetts' Berkshire Hills, slicing through granite ridges and hardwood groves, pausing here and there in little pools that scarce could bathe a star, gathering other mountain runoff until the flow is fit for unstunted brook trout, planted rainbows and Atlantic salmon parr.

The West Branch of the Farmington wanders off toward every compass point, having been snarled ten millennia ago by the rubble of retreating ice. Where it briefly straightens in Sandisfield, Massachusetts the New York/New Jersey Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club holds an annual white-water canoe-and-kayak race in October. A few miles from the finish line, after the river enters Connecticut, it slows and deepens. Here, under the sweeping shadows of bald eagles and ospreys, the native squaretails and hatchery rainbows give way to wild and holdover brown trout. It joins the East Branch in New Hartford. And in Windsor the main Farmington is collected by the 400-mile-long Connecticut River, once the continent's greatest producer of Atlantic salmon. If self-sustaining runs ever are to be restored--the objective of a cooperative, $725,000-a-year effort by Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and the federal government--the Farmington watershed will provide vital spawning habitat. Unless, of course, the West Branch is dammed, diverted and polluted.

There have been some close calls. In 1981 the State of Connecticut made an unsuccessful bid to pirate part of the flow, the better to "accommodate"--or, more accurately, *encourage*--watershed growth, thereby inciting an interstate, eight-town study to determine suitability for protection under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968. Wild and Scenic status, and even studies for such, block federal permits for projects hurtful to river banks and the fish and wildlife they sustain.

Then, in 1988, Burlington Energy Development Associates of Melrose, Massachusetts hatched a scheme to construct a powerhouse and a 3,500-foot steel penstock at an existing dam on a major tributary. Completion date was to have been 1990. But the National Park Service prevailed on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny the license on grounds that the flow-altering project would fall within a quarter-mile of the potentially Wild and Scenic West Branch of the Farmington.

Wild and Scenic status does more to protect than limit private property rights and values. It gives a river national significance, ensures water quality and protects the people who live near it from government acquisition of their land. Under the customized plan for the West Branch, certain types of riverside vegetation would have been protected, and new septic tanks would have been required to be set back 100 feet unless the landowner obtained a variance from the town. But houses could have been built anywhere. Moreover, Congress--in the persons of Representatives Nancy Johnson and John Olver--provided written assurance that Wild and Scenic status would be granted "only if there is a strong indication of local support." The two legislators further promised that "there will be no land acquisition by the federal government [and] no federal land management," that "the river area will not become a component of the National Park system or be subject to the federal regulations governing lands in the system," and that "control over the use of lands along the Farmington River will remain the responsibility of local government." No sane person with the slightest affection for earth as man did not make it could object to such a contract. In landslide votes all four watershed towns along the 11-mile study area in Massachusetts and all four towns along the 14-mile study area in Connecticut committed themselves to Wild and Scenic designation.

For the past 12 years consulting forester Bob Tarasuk, 38, has lived in the old farmhouse high on a wooded slope in Sandisfield, Massachusetts. He has blue-gray eyes, brown hair, a thick moustache and a manner that projects professionalism and patience. In addition to his forestry credentials he has experience as a wildlife technician. Therefore, when an environmental issue arises the town turns instinctively to him.

So it was that Tarasuk was named to the unpaid study team charged by Congress with determining the potential of the West Branch for Wild and Scenic status. "I quickly found that this was not your typical Wild and Scenic project," he told me. "This was private land up and down the river. The Park Service knew right from the beginning that federal control wasn't going to work here. They were tracking a brand new program that would actually modify the Wild and Scenic Act. All seventeen members of the committee understood this from day one. We worked incredible hours to make the package palatable to private land owners. What we needed to show Congress was that all eight towns would vote in favor of Wild and Scenic designation, and that each town would adopt an overlay district to further protect land along the river bank, showing Congress that we could take care of the river ourselves. All existing development would be grandfathered. If a septic system was only fifty feet from the water, that was the way it was going to stay." When all the towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut voted to support Wild and Scenic, Tarasuk felt that the committee's four years of labor had been worthwhile.

Enter the Wise Use Movement.

Descending on the watershed like a blowfly on a dead sucker was one John Connor, Massachusetts rep for the Alliance for America, a group sired by Alan Gottlieb and funded by industries involved in mining, timbering, oil extraction, power generation, and Off Road Vehicle (ORV) manufacture. According to promo of an ORV-industry front called the Blue Ribbon Coalition, the alliance's first convention two years ago in St. Louis provided victims of environmental extremism an opportunity to get together for a good cry: "It was an emotional scene as speakers recalled personal tragedies inflicted by government edicts forbidding use of private property because it was judged to be wetlands, 'possible' habitat of an endangered species or a 'dangerous' coastal area. Throughout the meeting hall, cheeks were damp as delegates one by one pledged unanimous support for the basic aims of the new alliance."

Also descending on the Farmington was Don Rupp, president of the Upper Delaware Citizen's Alliance, an organization dedicated to repealing the Wild and Scenic status of New York State's upper Delaware River. Rupp has ties to both the Alliance for America and the National Inholders Association, whose video"Big Park"--in which kicking, punching, dancing park rangers sweep through private inholdings like Nazis through Poland--has twice been reviewed in this column. Political Research Associates reports that he claims to be involved in a guerrilla war with the U.S. government and that he once informed members of the Upper Delaware River Management Plan Revision Committee that they would 'probably get shot.'" Rupp is described by his neighbor Glenn Pontier--editor of the Narrowsburg, New York newspaper *The River Reporter*--as follows: "He is a local individual who made something of a career out of scaring people here along the river corridor. While none of his dire predictions ever proved to be true, he caused quite a stink and raised a lot of fear. I've never figured out what his motives were, except perhaps the attention it got him. He didn't manage to convert his notoriety into elected office (although he ran often enough), but he has linked up with a real estate firm. Now he sells the same land he claimed would be condemned by the National Park Service."

Within hours Connor and Rupp had stampeded riverside residents into forming a local group which, in proper Wise-Use doublespeak, called itself "Friends of the Rivers" (FOR). It erected posters reminiscent of the king and duke's billings for their Royal Nonesuch: "YOUR LAND HAS BEEN STOLEN!! Learn how our government has come like a thief in the night."

FOR cranked out disinformational chaff in the form of "newsletters." It accused The Massachusetts Audubon Society of calling in "armed environmental police" after the society had hosted an informational meeting attended by several fully uniformed game wardens. FOR ran a rendering of a wolf, in park ranger attire, huffing and puffing at a young couple's door over a caption advising readers to contact Chuck Cushman of the National Inholders Association. "Becoming designated Wild and Scenic automatically makes us a National Wildlife Refuge," lied FOR. Other typical "news" items included the following:

Writing in The Litchfield County Times, Donald Lundberg of Washington, Connecticut dismissed protection for the Farmington as "just another scheme by the left-wing animal rights and environmental groups to take away your land... If an Indiana bat, five-lined-skink or any poisonous snake shows up in my yard, they're dead meat; to hell with the Department of Environmental Protection and the state. They should be more worried about jobs and the welfare of the people of the state than a bunch of wildlife vermin."

Wise Users excavated Tarasuk's resume from the Sandisfield town offices, thereby discerning that after college he had worked briefly for the BLM and Park Service. The resume was posted at the center of town with "Federal Agent" scrawled over it. This of a public servant donating his time to a town he had lived in a dozen years. "I was almost lynched," Tarasuk recalls. "They were frothing at the mouth. People who didn't even know me were calling me a liar."

Early in 1992, in some of the biggest voter turnouts they'd ever experienced, the Massachusetts towns of Otis, Sandisfield and Tolland rescinded their endorsement of Wild and Scenic designation, thereby convincing the headwater town of Becket that its continued support was pointless. The larger, more sophisticated Connecticut towns, on the other hand, did not allow themselves to be gulled; so their 14-mile stretch remains protected by the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

I departed Tarasuk's farm, clutching to my breast a topo map with a brook-trout pond circled in pencil. But I couldn't dash off to it just yet. First, there was the business of interviewing FOR's grand pooh-bah, Ben Campetti, then lunch with folk singer Bill Crofut. Both Tarasuk and Crofut are scolded by FOR for living high on hills away from the river. Campetti, on the other hand, lives on and even in the river. At his New Boston Fuel and Supply company, wetlands have been filled with waste from road repairs (legally, he claims). Beer cans, tires, fuel tanks, oil barrels and demo debris litter the banks. There is a wooden building plastered with no-trespassing signs, an overflowing dumpster. But Ben Campetti has not completely preserved his freedom to defile, having been called upon last summer by officials of the state Fire Marshall's office who found numerous compliance-standard violations.

Campetti, a slender man of 40 with long black hair, perused the Massachusetts Audubon sticker on my truck. "That's a bad sign to be putting on your vehicle when you're coming into my yard," he declared.

"Have we offended?" I inquired innocently.

Yes; and the offense was rank. In addition to calling in armed environmental police, the society had bought a parcel slated for development, then posted it to hunters. Of the newly formed river-support group called the Sandisfield Citizens Association, Campetti said: "They're all really outsiders. They're all people who have moved here in the last twenty years. They're city people who don't want to see growth. I've lived here my whole life." Because Bill Crofut, like Tarasuk, holds sachem-like sway in the Sandisfield Citizens Association, I asked Campetti what to expect. "He moved here twenty years ago," he revealed. "He's got a house way up on top of the mountain, away from the river. He's a folk singer."

Only Crofut's house, not his heart, is away from the river. Sometimes he sings with Chris Brubeck to call attention to the Farmington and to raise money for such items as elementary-school play equipment. His talent is monumental, appreciated internationally. When the posters advertising the concerts go up, the Wise Users tear them down. "We sponsored a planning lecture which was absolutely non-partisan," he told me as we sipped beer and watched bluebirds flit about his litterless, beautifully manicured backyard--the sort diagnostic of river-hugging folk singers from away. "A woman came in from an architectural firm in Boston to present a slide show, basically saying you have this beautiful, open town, quite undeveloped, and here are the planning options for what you can do. It was a fabulous talk, no political overtones. It wasn't for or against anything--just pure information. Campetti and Connor were there disrupting. They reduced the meeting to an argument." So it goes with Wise Use.

Emboldened by its success on the West Branch of the Farmington, Wise Users have blocked Wild and Scenic designation for New Hampshire's Pemigewasset River which, in addition to trophy brown trout, contains most of the Atlantic salmon spawning habitat in the Merrimack River system. In August 1992 members of the New Hampshire Landowners Alliance--shed by the Alliance for America like a medusoid jellyfish--canvassed local stores, buying up all copies of *The Bristol Enterprise* which had dared to run a one-page questionnaire designed by the Wild and Scenic study committee. The questionnaires, explained alliance president Cheryl Johnson, would more accurately reflect local sentiment if alliance members took charge of getting it to the proper people.

Will the Wise Use Movement continue to flourish in Yankeeland? Probably. Yankees are different now than when they were wrestling stumps and building stone walls. We have been infiltrated and hybridized. These days we are softer, more easily led and, well, dumber.

But I like to fantasize. Sometimes when white moths are on the wing and I wander with Wilton through the milkweed field or with fly rod down granite riverbeds, I see a scene that Huck described after the final performance of the Royal Nonesuch:

"Here comes a raging rush of people, with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go by; and as they went by, I see they had the king and the duke astraddle of a rail--that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn't look like nothing in the world that was human."

© Ted Williams. Reprinted here by permission.

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