I am growing increasingly ill-humored about chinook salmon. My demeanor has become sullen, my moods are universally black and a dark cloud seems to hang about my person, a cloud of anger, of hatred; a cloud of resentment.
I resent that an army of dull-witted self-satisfiers came to Idaho a few decades ago and, eyes aglow with greed and fogged by visions of numberless electrical appliances, began to build dams. In Hell's Canyon! In Hells Canyon! How can it be? There is just no explaining it. A person could grope about for an answer all his life and not find one, even a puny little unworthy one. A person could devote every minute of every hour of her every day dedicated to the single pursuit of some fragment of understanding, and she would die alone, unhappy, and broke from the unrelenting toil of it.
The thought that someone would willingly trade Hell's Canyon and Snake River chinook salmon for a blow-dryer and a bathroom fan is just too awful to ponder. I urge you, reader, do not begin, for you will end up like me. Your friends will leave you, unable to endure your maddened and solitary foulness.
Nobody knows a god-damned thing about Snake River chinook salmon, which suits me just fine. Nobody knows why it enters their head one day to light out for the ocean, after one or two years spent at their birthplace up in the mountains of Idaho. And, nobody knows why, two or three or four or five years later they decide to come back from their fishy wanderings off the coast of Alaska. And I mean back. Back to the very same spot they were born, and they're serious about it. These fish mean business. These fish don't compromise. These fish are tough . These are wild fish, and they don't pause for any sight-seeing, either. They don't make any wrong turns; they don't mess about with fruitless small-talk, they don't take no for an answer. They aren't like those hatchery fish, those poor little brainless things with big-city angst and a bad sense of direction. No, these are some bad-ass fish, and if you ever saw one clear the waterfall over here on French Creek you'd know what I mean.
But, see, you won't see that. You won't ever see that for as long as you or anybody with even the dimmest memory of your name is alive. Because these bad-ass fish, these fish that have endured dams, Freddies, and bureaucrats for whom an appropriate obscenity has not yet been invented, these fish, these French Creek fish, are now extinct. The fish that lived and spawned and died by the millions in French Creek, the fish that swam a thousand miles only to be confronted with one first-class extra-gnarly waterfall just a few feet from their home, these fish whose ancestors have cleared that waterfall for millennia: they are extinct. Nobody has seen a French Creek Salmon since 1987, when Rich Uberuaga, a Freddy, watched a lone salmon die, the last of his race, the last ever to make that mighty leap home to the gentle headwater riffles of French Creek. There won't be chinook salmon in French Creek ever again. They're gone, compadre.
You can't take a chinook salmon (or salmon egg) from, say, Big Creek and stick her in French Creek and expect her to come back to French Creek when it's time to spawn. She's too smart. She knows. She knows something isn't right from the very instant she hatches, and like I said, this is a no compromise fish we're discussing. She won't want any truck with French Creek. She doesn't belong in French Creek. She doesn't like French Creek. She resents being in French Creek. If she could find out who put her there she'd take that gigantic jaw of hers and crush the bastard.
About eight-hundred or so of these fish made it back to Idaho last year. That's down from a high of countless millions on, say, the year I was born, 1965. There are people around here, lunatics to the very core, who urge me to have hope. They point out that a single chinook salmon lays 4,000 eggs. They remind me that this fish has endured our dams and our wanton forest practices for decades, and is still holding on, albeit barely. They do not let me forget that this fish is tough.. Means business.
I appreciate their optimism, sort of. But a new kind of resolve, a new kind of mean-spirited, focused, creative, and coordinated attack is going to be required if we are to do this fish any justice in its final days. There isn't any time left for cheery optimism, and there isn't anything left to be optimistic about. This animal is going extinct before our eyes, and it isn't happening slowly. Empty, soul-less bureaucrats and hollow Freddies spew their dizzying garbage and continue to level their vacant, brainless glares upon this land, forever impoverishing everything they encounter, and they are not opposed.
There is no 1970's Sierra Club, pounding the streets and proving to our leadership that people care about an animal that holds so much beauty and wisdom and magic. There is no Audubon Society out there, holding high its photos of this creature and demanding its protection. There is not a National Wildlife Federation, or Trout Unlimited even, quietly pleading for a return to the days when it was legal to fish for salmon here. Instead there is a weak and frightened shambles of an environmental movement, ever bickering for more money and ever whining for more attention, all the fight long ago gone from their lifeless features and languid brains.
If this fish is to live, then we are going to have to fight. We cannot save this fish by making friends with our adversaries, because the very people who are running the salmon off the planet are getting rich by doing so. This seems to be something the big groups do not understand. They are afraid. They have lost their way. They equivocate, they waver, they worry and fret. They are not tough and they do not mean business.
The Snake River chinook salmon deserves better. The Snake River chinook salmon is one of the most magical, bewildering, and fierce creatures to bless the planet, and right now it needs our help. If we cannot muster the will to save it, then we are not alive ourselves.
1) Write to your congresspersons, especially the Republicans. Tell
them you hate nothing more than corporate welfare schemes like the
one run for the power companies in the Snake and Columbia Rivers.
Tell them you think the chinook salmon is a mighty important part of
your heritage and you want your grandchildren to be able to watch
salmon leap waterfalls on their way home from the sea, and you don't
care what it costs, because such a thing is priceless. Tell them you just
don't really care much about jobs when it comes to keeping chinook
salmon in Idaho.
2) Write to the Sierra Club et al and chew them out for not making
this a giant, stinking, pain-in-the-ass issue for everybody in
Washington DC. Do not feel an overwhelming need to be polite to
these sell-out Range-Rover driving minions of political expediency.
Tell them to do their jobs and fight for salmon or get the hell out of the
way.
3) Form an army and distribute literature and photos of this fish to
everyone you encounter, particularly children. The chinook salmon is a
haunting, awesome creature, and photos and tales of its life history
alone are compelling enough arguments for its protection. If you're a
schoolteacher, give a lesson on anadromous ichthyology. Remind
children what a precious thing it is to be able to share this planet with
other creatures.
4) Use your head and pay attention. Model your life after the
chinook salmon.
5) Most important of all: rejoice in life, but not just your own.
--The following is a transcription of a speech Jeff St Clair delivered on a lively panel discussion entitled "Foundation/Corporate Control Over Environmental Organizations" at the recent Land Air Water Public Interest Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon. On the panel with St Clair was Michael Donnelly and Wise Use leader Ron Arnold, who shared the results of his investigations into the environmental movement.--
When word leaked out that Donnelly and I had invited Ron Arnold to be on this panel, the mainstream greens that I know went apoplectic. I got 12 or 13 well meaning but frightened folks calling me demanding that he be kicked off. There were nasty faxes, obscene E-mails; they said Donnelly and I would be perceived as traitors. I was thinking well, we've already been called that.
This is, of course absolute hysterical nonsense. If we have any chance of prevailing as a political movement, as a movement for social change, we have got to demystify our so-called opposition. Cut behind the demonizing propaganda, the outlandish rhetoric. Who knows? Perhaps we'll find some common ground. Perhaps we'll even find some common enemies, like transnational corporations, a malevolent central government, even some environmental corporations. You gotta say this for Ron though, because he's been quoted, and I don't know how accurately it is (God knows), as saying he is obsessed with destroying the environmental movement. All I can say is Ron, you might want to get a new obsession, because we've got some national environmental groups like The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club that are doing a damn fine job of that right now.
I just returned from a week in DC, up on the hill (hell) and its a bleak landscape you know. There's a dark cloud spreading out from the capitol across the country. I think, however, our national environmental leaders, though they would sooner perish than admit this, but they see a silver lining to these sable clouds that loom over our capitol. Already their vast direct mail machinery is cranking out a dark litany of threats to the environment and a desperate cry for cash to fight the dreaded Newt.
The precedent is James Watt. The venal but utterly harmless Watt was a bankbook bonanza to these groups, who cast the Reagan's Interior Secretary as Ghengis incarnate. Memberships doubled, budgets tripled, everyone packed up. They hired CEOs for 6 figure salaries. They closed their grassroots office and moved to headquarters. Glossy ones in DC.
But there was a terrible price to pay for this. As Dave Foreman recounts in his book Confessions of an Ecowarrior, the so-called Watt effect quickly neutered the environmental movement as a political force. I don't think there's a better word for it today either because I think they've been re-Newtered.
In the 1980s [the environmental movement] became soft, it became corporate, it became politically ductile. What it gained in techno analysis, and lawyerly clout, and legislative access, it lost in vision, it lost in common sense, it lost in a connection with the people. And it lost in effectiveness.
Meanwhile, the corporate headquarters of America had been economically bruised by the environmental movement, the grassroots environmental movement of the 60's and the 70's. They'd been frustrated by the inability of their Reaganite friends like Watt and Anne Gorsuch-Burford to gut federal regulations. But they found a better path to mastery over these groups. Buy them! Turn them into us! Contributions from corporate foundations to national environmental organizations soared during the 1980s, accounting for a significant, if not controlling, portion of the budgets of groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC], the Environmental Defense Fund, and The Wilderness Society. And the key foundation players here, who are they? Who are these key foundation players? Rockefeller, Pew, W Alton Jones. These are the philanthropic subsidiaries of the major US owned oil companies. And they advocate extremely conservative social agendas.
One of the biggest funders is Pew Charitable Trust. They pack a four-billion dollar endowment. They distribute millions. Across the spectrumQfrom right-wing causes like the Billy Graham crusade, the Christian anti-communist crusade and the wretched Hudson InstituteQto the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund [SCLDF] and the Western Ancient Forest Campaign. Why?
Do you know the first grants Pew gave out were to suppress civil rights demonstrations in the workplace back in the forties and the fifties? These are the kind of foundations that we are taking money from. They have an agenda. The Pew family, by the way, were early and lavish supporters of Bill Clinton's Democratic Leadership Council. There is a connection with Clinton that goes very deep. Now like the old oil monopolies, the big eastern foundations that now run the environmental movement don't act alone. They pool their resources under the auspices of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a powerful conclave of 165 private foundations that provide most of the $350 million dollars issued annually to the big environmental groups. And at the nexus of this operation is Donald Ross, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, and an expert in the devices of what the philosopher Michelle Foucault calls "condescending philanthropy."
In 1992, at a meeting of the grantmakers, Ross boasted that, "The funders now have a major role to play" in dictating the strategy and tactics of major environmental campaigns. "I know there are resentments in the community toward funders doing that, and too bad. We're players, they're players."
Now the eve of our fall election 13 years after James Watt, at least two of the big green organizations, National Audubon Society and The Wilderness Society were low in the water; they were swamped with high overheads, swollen staff, declining budgets. And most of the others weren't any better off. The Sierra Club faces a three million dollar debt.
You know you think back and its been almost 25 years since the tremendous victories of the late sixties and early seventies, when we had the endangered Species Act passed, the Clean Water Act, the [National Environmental Policy Act] were passed. And since then, the principal strategy of these corporate groups has been to stop the weakening of old laws, not to pass new onesQeven as the ancient forests are being cut down. Even as more and more species are going on the endangered species list. They became managers, not organizers.
And the Wise Use movement, headed up by former Sierra Clubber Ron Arnold (and many factions of which, by the way, are staked like the big greens by oil companies), they were able to score a lot of their hits and rally populist opposition precisely because so many of these chargesQthe changing character of the environmental movementQ rang true. It looked elitist, it looked highly paid, it looked detached from the people, indifferent to the working class. It looked like the firm ally of big government.
Once revered and feared as the most effective public interest movement in America, the environmental movement is now accurately perceived as just another well-financedQand cynicalQspecial interest group, its rancid infrastructure supported by Democratic Party operatives, and millions in grants from corporate foundations.
The surest sign of the decadence in a political and social movement is its engagement in the suppression of internal dissent. Such a decadence now erodes the moral core of the environmental movement. Stray beyond the margins of permitted discourse, publicly critique the prevailing strategy, strike out in a new direction, and the overlords of the environmental movement crack down. They inveigh the insurgents with legalistic maledictions, gag orders, accusations of sedition.
Witness the Sierra Club's recent threats to sue renegade chapters that publicly opposed their position on Montana and Idaho Wilderness. Or NRDC's attempt to delay the filing of the petition to list the Queen Charlotte's goshawk as an endangered species. Or SCLDF's arm twisting of the plaintiffs in the spotted owl case. Or the Environmental Defense Fund's betrayal of at-risk communities across America when it signed on to Dow Chemical's proposed revamping of Superfund. Fred Krupp, president of EDF, was overheard telling the EPA's Carol Browner "you are our general. We are your troops. We await your orders." Or the sadomasochistic pleasure that NRDC's president John Adams took when he boasted about "breaking the back of the environmental opposition to NAFTA."
You don't have to be versed in the works of Hannah Arendt or Michelle Foucault to understand the dynamics of power and repression that are at work here. Activists are now aliens on the political landscape. Their relationship to the lawyers, lobbyists and CEOs that manage the movement parallels that of welfare mothers to the welfare bureaucracy: abusive indifference. To quote Joseph Heller, "something happened." Somewhere along the line the environmental movement disconnected with the people. Rejected its political roots, pulled the plug on its vibrant tradition. It packed its bags, it starched its shirts and jetted to DC where it became what it once despised: a risk aversive, depersonalized, overly analytical, humorless, access-driven, intolerant, statistical, centralized, technocratic, deal-making, passionless, sterilized, direct-mailing, jock strapped, lawyer-laden monolith to mediocrity. But you know, there's hope, because its a monolith with feet of clay. It can be toppled. The environmental movement didn't so much go awry as it simply flatlined, cruise- controlled right into an entropic cooldown the ultimate thermodynamic fate of all closed systems. The gang of ten now manifests all the intensity of an insurance cartel. Their executives and administrative underlings are much more likely to own a copy of Donald Trump's Art of the Deal or god forbid Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy than Donald Worster's The Wealth of Nature or Bill Kittridges Hole in the Sky or Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge. You know you can forget the eyes because its a person's bookshelf that is the real window to their soul.
National environmental policies are now engineered by EDF and NRDC and SCLDF. You can call them the Acronym Access. They're groups without voting memberships, they have no responsibility to the subscribers for their magazines or to the movement as a whole. They are the undisputed mandarins of techno-talk and lawyer-logic, who gave us the ecological oxymorons of the 1990s. Pollution Credits. Re- created wetlands. Sustainable development. In their relativistic milieu everything can be traded off or dealt away. For them, the tag end remains of the native ecosystems on our public lands are endlessly divisible. Every loss can be recast as a hard won victory in the advertising copy of their fundraising propaganda. Settle and move on is their unregenerate mantra. And don't expect them to stick around and live with the consequences of their deals.
But there's still a flickering pulse to this battered movement of ours. Hannah Arendt and Thomas Paine sang the same refrain: the more pervasive the repression, the more profound the rebellion to come. Well the rebellion has started. There have been a small range of victories across the landscape.
You've got Jimmy Carter endorsing NREPA when the Sierra Club wouldn't.
You've got Missouri forest activists defeating multi-tentacled ORV trail plans in their forests in the central hardwoods.
You've got Headwaters' renunciation of the Applegate partnership, the archetype of consensus-blessed clearcutting.
You've got the Native Forest Council's brave attemptQand they're still trying to do itQto maintain the Dwyer injunction, to stop the wretched Option 9.
You've got Heartwood and Andy Mahler fighting for the defense of the red-cockaded woodpecker in the federal backwoods of Kentucky.
You've got the Western North Carolina Alliance leading a hillbilly rebellion in a decade-long struggle to transform the Nantahalla-Pisgah forest plan on the most biologically diverse forest in the country in North Carolina.
You've got the Bryant Bill, which I'm not all that thrilled about, but it defies the odds because the Bryant Bill is getting better every year over the opposition of the nationals. And everybody telling them its impossible. This is a bill that doesn't get weaker it gets stronger and it gets more co-sponsors as it gets stronger.
You've got Forest Guardians down in the southwest, doing groundbreaking work in Mexico's Sierra Madres.
You've got the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. Tremendous work on the bull trout and their leadership on NREPA. And they've been fought every step of the way, they've been fought every step of the way by the Pew cartel and by the nationals.
You've got the Greater Gila Biodiversity Project's Rivers Project, and Gila Watch's defense of Aldo Leopold's wilderness.
You've got Pat Wolff's courageous run for New Mexico State Lands Commissioner.
You've got Steve Kelly's challenge of the frigid Pat Williams.
You've got EPIC's slam-dunk injunction over that mad felon Charles Hurwitz!
These are like snow peaks sprouting on the horizon, they're scattered pockets of resistance, and they can help us triangulate our way back home. They can enable us to circle back to the resolute clarity of place. And that move, as Terry Tempest Williams suggests in her shimmering book, The Unspoken Hunger, may be the most radical act of all.
Environmentalism was once a people's cause, unaligned with any political party, independent of the demands of the shadowy syndicate of mega-foundations that now hold the mortgage on the movement. Those high priests of Foucault's condescending philanthropy. Environmentalism was once driven by a desire for social justice, and an unrelenting passion for the wild. We've got to tap back into those progressive tributaries of the populist mainstream. Let the vision attract the money, don't allow the vision to be refracted through the ideological prism of conservative foundations. Remember, the power of the people can still overwhelm the influence of money. Look at Chiapas. Listen to Mandela. Anything is possible; find your place, take a stand. People will join you.
Recently, this paragraph from a December 19, 1994 Nation article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair was reprinted on the Wall Street Journal's front page:
The "Wise Use" movement, led by former Sierra Clubber Ron Arnold (and staked, like the big greens, by oil companies), has been able to score many hits and rally populist opposition to environmentalism precisely because many of the charges ring true. The mainstream brass is elitist, highly paid, detached from the people, indifferent to the working class and a firm ally of big government.
EF! Journal readers are familiar with the sentiments expressed by Cockburn and St Clair. It's nothing new. Now both Arnold's front group, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) and The Wilderness Society (TWS) both have published new reports that play directly on our abilities to save the surviving threatened ecosystems. Here's how they see it:
Virtual History
The Wilderness Society just published a primer for stump monitors. Called a Citizen's Guide to the Northwest Forest Plan, its first chapter is entitled a "Brief History of the Ancient Forest Controversy." It begins with the citation that "some wildlife biologists in the early 1970's expressed concerns about loss of old-growth habitat for the northern spotted owl and other species." It then jumps on to mention how "the federal timber sale program began to fall apart in 1988 and 1989 as the result of three successful lawsuits." A quick mention is made of Section 318 (the Hatfield Rider from Hell) which mandated the cutting of 130,000 acres of prime national forest. (At the time of Section 318, then TWS head and current Babbitt underling George Frampton called it a "compromise victory.")
The history then leaps forward to the 1990's and spends four of its six pages on the era of the policy wonk's dreamQhearings, science teams, congressional impasse, the Forest Conference, FEMAT and (co)- Option 9.
What Really Happened
The sanitized TWS history conveniently leaves out RARE II, the national groups' compromise on roadless areas. The Carter-era RARE II (to which the nationals acquiesced) proposed that the line between (big-W) designated Wilderness and "released" de facto wilderness be forever set. This would have, if carried out, rendered the ancient forest issue moot long ago, as the "released" areas (read: native forest habitat) are the very same areas we have been fighting for ever since.
However, brave souls refused to go along with the mainstream greens and opposed the sell-out. Doug Norlen and other activists literally stood their ground at the Bald Mountain Road site and were partially buried by a bulldozer. The attempts to build a resistance to the Gaston-Orleans (G-O) Road in Northern California and the Bald Mountain Road in the Siskiyous were the real birthplaces of the modern forest movement. For any forest history to ignore these events is like saying Ghandi's "illegal" salt manufacture or the Montgomery Bus Boycott never happened.
Activists from all over came to blockade the roads and, despite pressure from the nationals, the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) and Earth First! filed the RARE II lawsuit and the issue was engaged. The nationals? They sent out threatening letters to their members who had the audacity to support the actions and lawsuit.
The Wilderness Society misses virtually all the other critical junctures in its Orwellian history as well. There is no mention of the early 1987 petition for listing of the spotted owl filed by Green World and roundly condemned by the nationals. Yours truly was in DC at the time and was amazed by the mainstream execs' unanimous whining about the petition. One even said, "Well, there goes any chance we ever had." Chance of what, I never could figure out.
Dinah Ross' 1979 first old growth appeals that saved 9,000 acres around Pahtoo (Mt. Jefferson)? Must not have happened. Millennium Grove/Middle Santiam? Grouse Mountain, British Columbia? No mention. North Roaring Devil '86? Must not have counted. The Easter Massacre in 1989? Ignored by TWS, but cited as the event that finally nationalized the issue by Time editor David Seideman and other writers. The landmark Breitenbush lawsuit? James Montieth and John Talberth's courageous "mass appeal" (done despite heavy admonishment from the nationals) of 238 old growth sales, 40 percent of which (7,600 acres) were never cut and are now in reserves?
The many colorful and informative events staged by Earth First!, Cathedral Forest Action Group, ONRC, Waldo Wilderness Council, and others? The endless hours spent by Mary Beth Nearing, Karen Wood and Freda London training people in the tactics of non-violence? (In my history, these three extraordinary women get credit for the fact that no one was ever seriously hurt during the string of 1980's actions.) Mike Roselle and friends' dependable arrival at site after site of destruction? The massive national education campaign carried out by Lou Gold, Beth Howell, Kelpie Wilson, Steve Marsden and their tireless allies at the Siskiyou Regional Education Project? Cecilia Lanman and EPIC's heroic efforts to save the last functional stands of redwoods? Redwood Summer? Opal Creek?
The founding in direct response to the ineffectiveness of the nationals of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE), the John Muir Society (Sierra Club reformers who are threatened with lawsuits by the Sierra Club over their name) and the Native Forest Council, with its highly-effective national media campaign? The critical early financial support of the McKenzie River Gathering Foundation and the Levinson Foundation? None of this hits the TWS radar screen. Unbelievable.
Same As It Ever Was
Perhaps even more unbelievable than their revisionist history is TWS's solution to the forest crisis: train people to monitor timber sales. The inherent catch is that though you may well stop some egregious sales that are in non-compliance, you undoubtedly will be supporting sales that are consistent with (co)-Option 9. The spotted owl lawsuit plaintiffs have already given the green light to dozens of old growth sales (see Phil Nanas' articles in the Samhain and Yule, 1994, editions of the Journal). Now, people are being primed to go after the two or three trees that might be cut in the (woefully inadequate) buffer area all the while ignoring the thousands of trees being cut on the "legal" side of the same sad buffer. Bottom line is: (co)-Option 9 monitors, funded by corporate America, are out there helping identify billions of dollars worth of public assets for liquidation and private profit.
One has to ask the question: if the plaintiff groups were really serious about stopping (co)-Option 9 in court, why were each and every one of them simultaneously preparing six-figure-plus grants to "monitor the implementation of Option 9?" Doesn't that create an economic incentive to lose? Maybe industry was right after all and it really is a "jobs" issue. If we succeed in stopping the Clinton Plan, a goodly number of stump monitors will be out of work. Hmmm?
Getting Rich: A Wise Abuse Analysis
So is it any wonder that corporate apologist and leader of the astroturf roots Wise Use movement, Ron Arnold, has any number of bloated bureaucrat poster boys to wave before the public? Arnold has just released Getting Rich, an analysis of "the environmental movement's income, salary, contributor and investment patterns." In it he dissects the finances of the top twelve national groupsQfrom the Nature Conservancy to the pollution credit (cancer bond) trading Environmental Defense Fund. We find that the average compensation of the top execs of the twelve groups is an astounding $174,873 per year with Jay Hair of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) hauling in the top salary of $242,060 and additional benefits of $58,000.
The dismal dozen have collective assets of over 1.2 billion dollars. In 1993, they took in $633 million and spent $556 million (averaging $46 million each), of which over $217 million went directly to officer, director and employee compensation. (Think how much threatened habitat could have been bought outright and set aside for that kind of money.)
The report goes on to list the major donors to these groups. The list is studded with Fortune 500 firms. ARCO, Boeing, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, Newmont Gold, Times-Mirror, Amoco, Ford, AT&T, GE, Proctor & Gamble, Shell Oil, Weyerhaeuser, Mobil Oil, Waste Management, Chevron and Pennzoil are just some of the major funders of the modern day mainstream environmental movement.
For their part, the groups return the favor and hold major investment in the afore-mentioned behemoths. TWS, for example, has $385,000 in GMAC and major holding in dozer-builders Deere & Co. and Cummins Engine, JP Morgan, 3M, US Bancorp, Southern Cal Edison, GE, Gannett and IBM. Many others also show up in the TWS multi-million dollar investment portfolio.
TWS also gets over $100,000 per year from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, owners of a large Idaho ranch that's famous for being the welfare ranch most out of compliance on grazing. British Columbia's favorite deforestation company Macmillan-Bloedel recently bought 50 percent of Truss-Joist. Truss-Joist's CEO, Walt Minnick, put up $250,000 for a seat he now occupies on the TWS Board of Directors. Jerry Franklin, one of the architects of (co)-Option 9 is also on the TWS board (no conflict of interests there, I guess.) And, TWS head, G. John Roush, is himself a Montana rancher. Yet, TWS Washington state staffer Bob Freimark states, in a recent Oregonian article, that "funding doesn't influence our policy."
TWS, SCLDF and Cove/Mallard
Elsewhere in this issue there is plenty of analysis and reporting on the (ig)-Noble Timber Sale sell-out. Briefly, I'd like to note that the sale and all habitat disturbing activities on six Idaho national forests were effectively stopped by an injunction that the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF) obtained by telling the Court that an emergency situation existed, then quickly went back to court and asked for a "stay" of the injunction. Sound familiar? Despite the fact that SCLDF plans to go to the Supreme Court to defend an identical injunction in Oregon, SCLDF illogic deemed it OK to give up the Idaho version. Why?
Well, it seems that some of the Idaho ranchers that pay the salary of Idaho TWS staffer Craig Gerkhe called in their (cow) chips. Best I can figure is that rancher, TWS fund-raiser, and former Governor Cecil D. Andrus put in a call to Bruce Babbitt. Babbitt then leaned on his flunky, former TWS-head George Frampton. Who then leaned on Gerkhe. Who, in turn, called off SCLDF.
Amazingly, Gerkhe claimed that they had to give up the injunction as environmentalists would get hurt otherwise. Ironically, the actual risks to real conservationists increased dramatically as a direct result of TWS's action, as dozens of conscientious folks headed to the area to begin CD in a climate where the Wide Abusers have been emboldened by the nationals' lack of backbone.
Now it seems that SCLDF will be faced with sanctions (judicial reprimands and possible fines) from the court that granted, then stayed the injunction, as it violates the duties of SCLDF attorneys as officers of the court to cry "emergency" then give up a court injunction for political reasons.
Vic Sher, head of SCLDF, writes in a recent article in SCLDF's in- house journal, In Brief, how "despite our victories in court, the political landscape for the environment is more bleak than at any time in the past quarter century. Environmental disputes have become increasingly complex, contentious, and expensive. Sadly, with mounting frequency, we see our courtroom victories threatenedQand even, sometimes, lost in the court of public opinion."
Leaving aside the glaring question of what victories, one can easily make the case that our losses in the court of public opinion are directly related to SCLDF and the nationals' knee-jerk capitulation every time there is even a glimmer of holding the line and gaining the backing of the general public. Environmentalists are seen, much like the spineless Clinton, as standing for nothing every time an injunction or timber sale is given up.
The Deal of Shame End Game
On February 9, the Oregonian reported that Senator Slade Gorton, R-Timber, was preparing to introduce yet another "sufficiency" rider. This, Gorton assures us, would not be resisted by Clinton. According to Gorton, he has "private assurance" from the White House (read: Babbitt) that Bubba won't veto such legislation.
On March 2, 1995, the House Appropriation Committee got the jump on Gorton and his extractionist senate buddies when they passed a "salvage" rider proposed by Reps. Charles Taylor (R-NC) and Norm Dicks (D-WA). The Taylor/Dicks Amendment calls for the cutting of six-billion board feet (disturbing 150,000 acres) of public forest over the next two years. Like past riders, Taylor/Dicks suspends the relevant environmental laws. Such so-called sufficiency riders, like the infamous Idaho Earth First! law, show how desperate the plunderers are to hide what they are doing to America's public lands from the owners of these lands. The polemic of weakness, as preached and practiced by the nationals, has emboldened the beast once again.
When the plaintiffs gave up their offering of sacrificial old growth in late 1993, in justification they trotted out a letter from the White House promising that Clinton would resist any future sufficiency riders. This letter, obviously not worth the tree flesh it was written on, was the sole worthless trade-off resulting from the plaintiffs' surrender.
When Will They Ever Learn?
The scariest part of the nationals' and big regionals' capitulation/denial is that now they are proposing more of the same for the upcoming Endangered Species Act (ESA) reauthorization fight. On a continuum from "Zero Tolence for Species Loss" on one end and the "Developer's Dream" on the other, the nationals propose a starting position somewhere to the developer's side of the middle. They actually propose that we engage industry in Habitat Conservation Plans (HCP) which would absolve large landowners from responsibility for any protection of species' habitat on their lands, despite any new scientific knowledge that might come along in the future. Kind of reminds one of how they went to the Forest Conference with pleas for Adaptive Management Areas.
Weyerhaeuser just gained federal approval of a spotted owl HCP for their Millicoma Tree Farm (209,000 acres of purloined public land) in Coos and Douglas counties, Oregon. This Babbitt-signed plan calls for leaving a mammoth 1,592 acres of old growth standing (for 35 known nesting pairs and resident singles) and is unlitigable for 50 years. Amazingly, all 1,592 acres are legally harvestable after 20 years, meaning a full 100 percent of the old growth will be destroyed. Not surprisingly, this travesty sailed through without a word of protest from the national groups.
The result on the ground has been horrid. We know the disgraceful litany of failure of the national groups' "Lobby and Litigate" strategy. Have they learned anything from their failures? Not a chance. When pinned down at the recent Western Ancient Forest Activists Conference in Ashland, Oregon, Mike Axline, one of the legal minds behind the litigation strategy, in direct contradiction to the stumps on the ground, claimed that the plaintiff groups hadn't given any green light for a single tree to be cut. Axline refused to say whether the plaintiffs would appeal Judge Dwyer's decision. They eventually decided not to appeal, thus securing their "monitoring" jobs. Axline ended his hubris-ridden analysis by defending the failed litigation as "still the best strategy."
Sorry, Mike, but we're not that defeatist. Your "best strategy" is a proven loser. We believe that with acknowledgment of the true history and a better analysis of what went wrong, we can get it right. It is time to shed any illusions of help coming from the national groups and get on with it. Fighting off Arnold with the Babbittry of Clinton and the baggage of the nationals strapped to our backs won't be easy, but is there any other choice?
When asked by the Journal to do a story about the situation in Idaho and The Wilderness Society's mind boggling withdrawal of a federal injunction on six national forests that, among many other things, has left endangered salmon, wildlife habitat, and forest activists in a bad way, I hesitated. Not only am I not from Idaho, but both Wild Forest Review (WFR) and High Country News (HCN) have recently done stories on the subject. However, since I've never shied from a chance to stick my foot in my mouth, I said "Sure!" The two papers' treatment of the story couldn't have been more different. Like the divergent opinions surrounding the fall-out in Idaho, this is worth looking at.
On January 12, Federal Judge Dan Ezra granted an injunction closing six national forests in Idaho at the request of The Wilderness Society (TWS), the Pacific Rivers Council (PRC) and Sierra Club Legal Defense (SCLDF). It was the result of a suit they'd brought against the Forest Service for failing to consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service for failing to amend their forest plans to accommodate the endangered salmon runs. The injunction precluded all logging, mining and grazing activity on the Challis, Clearwater, Nez Pierce, Payette, Salmon and Sawtooth National Forests.
For a minute it looked like a badly needed victory for the otherwise endangered salmon. But twelve days later, after a series of well orchestrated public Wise Use rallies against the injunction, and the day before the injunction was to be put in place, TWS pulled out. The judge reluctantly put a hold on the injunction until March 16, and it has since been permanently lifted with TWS' blessing. "The Society" did not want to take the blame for closing down the forests.
Jeffrey St. Clair published a blistering account of the fiasco and The Wilderness Society's sad capitulation in the latest Wild Forest Review (see "Whither the Wilderness Society?" and "Ignominy and Resistance in Idaho", WFR, vol. 2, no. 3). His story emphasizes the impacts the withdrawal has had on the situation in Cove/Mallard roadless area on the Nez Pierce National Forest where two Massive White Dudes (MWDs) with the support of dozens of other activists attempted to block the logging activity which started back up when the injunction was lifted. The MWDs were arrested and charged with felonies under a bogus Idaho law which makes opposition to logging a felony (the charges have since been dropped). St. Clair went on, ripping into TWS and condemning it for the worst kind of chicken-shit, political flip- flopping cowardice that not only hurts the real work of grassroots activists, but more importantly, the wild lands and creatures The Society is supposedly committed to protect.
The High Country News story, written by free lance journalist Steve Stuevner (see Salmon Campaign Fractures Over How to Include People, HCN, vol. 27 no. 3), at first glance was all but an outright apology for the Wilderness Society's lame behavior. They published a big picture of an anti-environmental rally in Salmon to emphasize the effect the rally had, and it read like HCN thought the reversal of the injunction was a good thing. Wouldn't want to upset the locals now, would we? It did raise the question of why TWS filed for the injunction without talking to local activists in the first place (folks who knew the politics were against such an injunction), but not once did it mention the Cove/Mallard activists in Dixie, Idaho, nor the campaign to save roadless habitat. But this is no surprise. HCN and it's editor Betsy Marston have long been detractors of Earth First!, direct action campaigns, and civil disobedience. Why change now?
The difference between the stories in WFR and HCN highlights the important strategic difference in conservation strategies between grassroots activist styles and large corporate organization styles (in this case it could just as easily have been The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, or National Wildlife Federation). The problem with national organizations, while they whine and cheese their way across the west at spectacularly situated board meetings, is a major problem in America. They want to have their cake and eat it too. Unwilling to face the difficult task of saying enough is enough, they will remain intellectually dishonest as long as they are unwilling to take a hard look at their own rhetoric. Their sentimental love affair with the Wild West belies their unwillingness to let the law work.
I talked to Michael Scott, TWS Regional Director out of Bozeman, and when it came right down to it he said, "We don't want to be the ones to tell those people they're out of a job." This is exactly the problem. I should have asked him, "Is that the same as not wanting to be blamed for protecting salmon habitat?" but I chickened out. On the other hand, Jake Kreilick, long time Cove/Mallard campaigner said, "Sure we sympathize with those workers, but until they find another line of work, there's going to be conflict." At least Kreilick (like WFR) is willing to face the tough facts.
Many have criticized St. Claire work as just so much bashing. They call it childish, shallow and reactionary. It's as if these people would say, so what? The Wilderness Society fucked up again. Old Story. No big deal. But it is a big deal, because they are a large and influential organization who is willing to tell the federal courts and industry they don't care about the lawQinstead they'll pander to the bullying cries of industry shall carry the day. This cannot be the only message big government and big industry hear from the conservation movement, and fortunately it is not.
Here in Missoula, MT, we are lucky to have a wide variety of grassroots organizations that continue to push and say the unpopular things and take the heat for the movement. Their very diversity is their success, as they draw from the eclectic energy and creativity that only comes from people involved because they want to be, not because they get paid to be.
% There is the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (AWR) and its legislative campaign for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA). AWR's strategy hasn't changed with the new Congress. It is the same clear vision for protecting wildland ecosystem it has always been. And while the nationals have been ringing their hands about the new "evil" Congress, AWR with the help of Representative Carolyn Maloney has already introduced NREPA with bi-partisan co- sponsorship.
% There is the Missoula Ecology Center and its hi-tech mapping and appeals onslaught against the Forest Service, invaluable in its efforts to keep the Freddies in line.
% There is also the newly formed Women's Voices for the Earth (WVE) and old stalwarts at Friends of the Bitterroot, both of whom participate in local efforts to meet with regular people in rural communities and empower them through information, education and support. True grassroots.
I mention these organizations (and there are many like them all over the US and the globe) as positive examples of what environmentalism can be. They are diversified, small and intimate with the land and world they strive to protect. Their hard work is what keeps our slim democracy functioning, especially in these urgent times.