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W.J. McCabe Chapter Izaak Walton League of America

To understand where the Wise-Use movement is going, you need to know what it is. And that's a tall order. The people who are part of it aren't sure themselves. One broad but helpful definition has been offered by William Burke, writing for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Political Research Associates: "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."

The name "Wise Use"--brilliant in its duplicity and appeal to America's core values--was conceived in 1988 by Seattle-area writer Ron Arnold. Then, with help from convicted tax-fraud felon Alan M. Gottlieb, Arnold hatched the "Wise-Use Agenda," an official platform advocating one big development orgy for all public lands (including wilderness, national parks and national wildlife refuges) and suspension of statutory protection for "non-adaptive species" (including trout, salmon and any species of fish that can't get used to heat, silt, cows, dams and lack of water). "Facts don't matter; in politics perception is reality," says Arnold. "The environmental movement is a perfect bogeyman for us; in order to get people to join and donate money we need opposition," says Gottlieb.

Few, if any, Wise Users are rich, but they would like to be. They tend to live in rural areas--especially the West. They are dissatisfied with their lives and angry at people whose lives they perceive to be better. They are angry at society at large--i.e., people who make, enforce or support rules that limit what one can do on and to private and public land. They are angry at advocates of fish and wildlife, especially those who live in eastern cities. They yell and lie and play dirty tricks. And, while they may or may not be in the process of self destructing, they have just had a stunningly disastrous year.

"Wise Users had every hope and every right to believe that they could get a lot of their political agenda passed in the 104th congress," declare's Dan Barry, director of Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) which keeps careful tabs on the Wise-Use movement, attending meetings and rallies and collecting propaganda. "Well, they didn't, and that has to be disappointing. They failed to score on a power play. That's partly because environmentalists are good organizers and good at politics, but I also think it points to a fundamental weakness in the Wise-Use movement. It's young and politically immature."

I agree. If one bellows every sentence and confuses exclamation points with periods, even sympathetic audiences start to tune out. That's certainly immature behavior. But I see another, even more fundamental weakness responsible for the Wise-Use movement's crash landing--its monumental dishonesty. This is indicative not of age but of basic nature.

Even dull-witted audiences can be lied to just so many times before they catch on. What sane or sober person could possibly be won over by Ron Arnold's ironically titled "Truth in the Media" lecture at the Western States Coalition VI conference last June in which he spent 25 of 30 minutes juxtaposing passages from the Unabomber's manifesto and Al Gore's Earth in the Balance? At the same conference Bob Quick, chairman of People for the West! (you get the exclamation point with the title) rose to piss and moan about lack of funds. Two million dollars a year for all Wise-Use groups combined, compared with $50 million for the Sierra Club, he asserted. But material he distributed to his fellow conferees revealed that People for the West! has an annual budget of $1.7 million (75 percent provided by the oil-and-gas industry), leaving just $300,000 to be split between the other 2,100 Wise-Use groups. The 2,100 figure comes from Quick, by the way.

Then there is the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute which retains "an environmental policy analyst" named Jonathan Tolman to write long, rambling screeds for anti-green publications like The Wall Street Journal. His latest kick is that the Clean Water Act needs to be stripped of economically disruptive Section 404 wetlands-protection provisions (administered by the Corps of Engineers) because "many environmentalists detest [them] almost as much as landowners." As proof he quotes an article about Corps' dereliction in enforcing Section 404 in which the author (me) describes the current program as "a hoax perpetrated and perpetuated by a wasteful, bloated bureaucracy that is efficient only at finding ways to shirk its obligations and that when beaten on by developers spews wetland-destruction permits as if it were a pinata." Tolman's anti-wetlands harangue is typical of how the Wise-Use movement bends the truth to fit its own cynical purposes. As he knows perfectly well, the only thing I and my fellow environmentalists "detest" about the Clean Water Act is its lack of enforcement. Citing this lack as a reason to "eliminate" wetlands regulations is as logical as arguing that because the vast majority of wildlife crime goes unpunished, spring waterfowling and interstate commerce in black bass should be decriminalized.

No single Wise-Use defeat in 1996 was a Waterloo, but collectively they were devastating. Consider the following:

• In January 1996 former Interior Secretary James Watt--fairy godfather of Wise Use, and under federal indictment for perjury, unlawful concealment and obstruction of justice--was publicly exposed when he cut a deal with federal prosecutors who dropped 25 felony counts in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor involving illegal lobbying.

• House Resources chairman Rep. Don Young (R-AK) began the year boasting about his omnipotence, vowing to grant the Wise-Use movement every item on its wish list, especially emasculation of the Endangered Species Act. But with a series of brilliant and resourceful initiatives Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt showed America and Congress that the Endangered Species Act has enough built-in flexibility to work in any situation, and without damaging local economies. Over the course of the year it was Young who was emasculated. Now he says he regrets not having acted on the advice of fellow congressman and Wise User Doc Hastings (R-WA) to ram the Wise-Use agenda down America's throat: "What I should have done is repealed the whole [Endangered Species] act. If I had done what Doc told me, I would have repealed the whole thing. Right quick. Before anybody realized what had happened."

• "I challenge any congressman to vote against private property," Chairman Young had crowed. "I'll run him right up the flagpole." But Congress ran the flagpole up Young when it rejected all his promised "takings" legislation--the so-called "property-rights bills" that actually revoke property rights by forcing the public to pay off polluters and developers for not laying waste to public and private land and water. For almost two years Young and his Wise-Use cronies pushed such radical takings bills as "The Private Property Protection Act" which would have provided public ransom to habitat wreckers inconvenienced by laws protecting endangered species and clean water. The bills, written by and for Wise Users, never made it past the House.

• Companion takings legislation failed to make it to the Senate floor, soundly rejected by Americans along with its main sponsor, Bob Dole. Then Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and John Warner (R-VA) introduced a bill designed to counter any future takings legislation. It would allow homeowners to sue for compensation if violations of federal environmental laws devalue their property in excess of $10,000.

• The County Supremacy movement (pretty much indistinguishable from Wise Use and, in any case, metastasizing from it) took it hard on the chin in Nye County, Nevada which had ordained that it owned "all ways, pathways, trails, roads, county highways, and similar public travel corridors...on public lands in Nye County" and where on July 4, 1994 County Commissioner Dick Carver nearly fomented a bloody clash between federal law-enforcement officials and a rabble of armed locals by bulldozing an illegal road in the Toiyabe National Forest. On March 14, 1996 U.S. District Judge Lloyd George struck down the Nye, County ordinance, reaffirming federal authority over public lands in the West.

• Then on August 28 Judge George ruled as unconstitutional a 17-year-old Nevada law claiming title to federal lands. "I'll see them in hell before I give up," ranted Carver. But the author of the unconstitutional law-State Senator Dean Rhodes, a founder of "the Sagebrush Rebellion" (which fermented into Wise Use)--proclaimed that he was "disgusted by Carver's actions [because] the original sagebrush rebels never wanted a violent confrontation with federal officials."

• Meanwhile, Jim Nelson, the brave, embattled supervisor of the Toiyabe and Humboldt National Forests has dealt Wise Use/County Supremacy the unkindest cut of all by forging an almost cordial working relationship with rational elements in Carver's stomping grounds: "We're making good progress with Nye County," Nelson told me in mid-November. "We've got a Memorandum of Understanding on how we're going to operate with each other. Meanwhile the U.S. Justice Department is ignoring Carver-maybe even more of a slam-dunk than criminal prosecution.

• The Wise-Use movement has never required help from environmentalists in discrediting itself, least of all in 1996. On March 15, the day after Judge George struck down the Nye County ordinance, Arizona and New Mexico ranchers allegedly assaulted Charles Oliver, range and wildlife specialist for the Reserve Ranger District of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Oliver had been attending an open meeting--just over the state line in Edgar, Arizona--which featured Wise-Use attorney Karen Budd-Falen, author of countless outrageous, patently unconstitutional County-Supremacy ordinances. "Oliver was attacked, hit on the back of the head and neck, kicked, pulled by the ear, wrenched by the shoulder, and finally, picked up and thrown out into the parking lot," says Jeff Ruch, an attorney for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility which is suing the ranchers. Ruch calls the incident and the other 24 threats and attacks, including bombings, against resource managers within the last three years "a slow motion riot."

• Over the course of the year House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) came to recognize the Wise-Use movement as a Jonah for the GOP. As early as June he had chided Wise Users for their negative platform and for failing to reach suburban members of Congress. "There are not enough ranchers and miners and foresters in the Congress... to move a bill," he told the Alliance for America. "We've got to find a way to build a bigger coalition... If 'property rights' becomes in the popular media a synonym for 'anti-environment,' we can't win the fight." Even before this admonition, the National Center for Public Policy Research had accused him of being part of the "environmental establishment."

• As the Wise-Use movement fizzled, President Clinton took the high ground, boldly defending the environment. Some analysts have dismissed this as opportunism and election-eve politicking. But actions, not motives, are what matters; and I think the president deserves a good deal of credit. In October Mr. Clinton vetoed an unnecessary Wise-Use "notice-me" bill that would have prevented the Fish and Wildlife Service from using eminent domain to purchase land for the Silvio Conte National Wildlife Refuge along the Connecticut River. Only a month earlier he had sent Wise-Use pooh-bahs into apoplexy by using the1906 Antiquities Act to designate 1.7 million acres of southern Utah as a national monument. Quoting Theodore Roosevelt, who designated the Grand Canyon a national monument in 1908, Mr. Clinton declared: "'You cannot improve upon it. What you can do is keep it for your children, your children's children, all who come after you.'

• Designating the national monument in Utah--the crowning environmental achievement of the Clinton presidency to date--would have been politically impossible without the discredit the Wise-Use movement has heaped upon itself. All year Republicans were distancing themselves from Wise Use, leaping like sowbugs from a burning log. Even the conservative Salt Lake Tribune attacked presidential candidate Bob Dole for using the Wise-Use shibboleth "war on the West" to describe Bruce Babbitt's efforts to reform grazing and mining on public land. "Dole's campaign has embraced the Whine of the West," it charged.

Do all these defeats and humiliations mean the Wise-Use movement is dead? I put the question to Dan Barry--the professional Wise-Use watcher from CLEAR. "To conclude that the Wise-Use movement is going away because its agenda failed this time is a huge leap of logic," he said. "Wise Use is down but not out. There are a lot of signs that it is getting serious about developing political maturity--media outreach, funding, real grass-roots activism."

If that's true, maybe it's not so bad. In fact, maybe it's good. The Wise-Use movement hasn't succeeded in doing a whole lot more than scaring the bejesus out of the environmental community which had grown fat, lazy and contented because it fantasized that "an environmental president" was in the White House.

Now, thanks largely to Wise Use, Americans who care about wild things and wild place are on their feet, swinging. And, lo, a person who is looking more and more like "an environmental president" really is in the White House.

As the old saw goes, "Every dog needs at least one flea."

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