Dear HCN,
Sam Hitt may describe the
Christmas candlelight demonstration as a protest against the
Endangered Species Act (Green Hate in the land of enchantment, HCN,
2/3/97), but we were protesting the abuse of the act. It was not a
wise-use protest. Organizers of the protest were small,
community-based logging and grazing organizations. Indo-Hispano
members of the wise-use movement and People For the West, as well
as environmental activists, were there. There was one mining
executive in attendance. The grassroots action protested the idea
that urban environmentalists are the only environmentalists and
that only they know what is good for the
land.
Hitt describes Moises Morales, a member of
the 1967 Courthouse Raiders, and now a member of the Rio Arriba
County Commission, as a person who whips up crowds with an
anti-environmental message. Moises has a long record of
environmental activism. He has been a member of the board of
directors of La Clinica del Pueblo in Tierra Amarillo for more than
20 years and has been chairperson of that organization for more
than 10 years. He authorized the health screening for more than 100
Navajos who were afflicted with different ailments associated with
uranium mining in the Navajo Nation. He was a very active
participant in halting an effort to mine uranium in Rio Arriba
County. He has frequently protested and halted unsustainable
logging operations in the forests of northern New
Mexico.
Hitt’s statement that “wise users’ were
drawn to the controversy by lazy media that seek to exploit the
racial issue is baseless. The media were drawn by the drama of a
well-financed environmental organization’s efforts to destroy the
ability of impoverished rural people who have lived on the land for
hundreds of years to eke out a subsistence from the lands that were
historically theirs. Sam Hitt himself introduced the race card into
the debate. In an interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican, he was
quoted as saying that I am a “racist” and an “environmental outlaw”
because I did not agree with his position. He insists that a ban on
firewood cutting never existed and that if it did, the Forest
Service is at fault. The truth is that Hitt and his minions brought
the lawsuit that produced the ban, and he refuses to take personal
responsibility for his part in an agreement reached between him and
the Forest Service.
Hitt also misunderstands the
difference between a local community logging enterprise and that of
a large multinational known as Hanson PLC. He does not recognize
our contribution toward getting Hanson PLC not only out of the
Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit but out of New Mexico. He
refuses to comprehend the attachment that the Hispanic and Native
American people in northern New Mexico have for the
land.
Many of our villages are older than the
old-growth trees that stand in our forests. It horrifies him that
we would cut down one old tree to save our even older villages. In
fact, he would gladly sacrifice all of the villages of northern New
Mexico to save one tree, ostensibly to protect the Mexican spotted
owl. The problem he encounters with the locals is that the locals
are fully aware that not only are there no spotted owls in these
forests, but there have never been any.
Sam Hitt
describes a plan developed by Luis Torres. This so-called plan is
really a feasibility study commissioned by Madera Forest Products
under a Forest Service grant. While this project seems feasible,
and he did help raise the money to purchase a fuelwood processor,
the fact that it is idle and rusting is a legacy of Hitt’s
litigation that stopped wood cutting that made the $35,000 machine
worth no more than its weight in scrap metal.
If
this is the kind of help the community is going to receive from the
radical environmentalists, we do not need it. Is it any wonder that
the community has set its sight on reviving the sawmill that he
describes as an old-growth sawmill? This is another misleading
statement, because the sawmill in question is capable of milling
logs as small as six inches in diameter. Could it be that Sam and
company have a different agenda than what they show the
community?
They say that they are willing to
allow small-diameter logging when in fact they want no logging, no
recreation, no hunting or fishing and no grazing on what they refer
to as public land. These so-called public lands are community land
grants stolen by the Forest Service and the BLM in the early part
of the century from the very people who are now losing their jobs
and homes as a direct result of the environmentalists’
ill-conceived assault on local culture, customs and traditions.
While we recognize the Forest Service historically is not a friend
to the locals, they are not currently as bad as the self-proclaimed
forest guardians, whose elitism, egotism and insensitivity to an
ancient way of life has thoroughly alienated these extremists from
the community.
The only accurate statement Hitt
makes in his opinion piece is that there is an unprecedented
alliance between northern New Mexico Hispanics and southern New
Mexico cowboys. Recently, Howard Hutchinson, chairman of the
Coalition of Counties consisting of 22 New Mexico and Arizona
counties, came out in support of Rio Arriba County’s stand against
portions of the New Mexico governor’s welfare plan that would cause
poor people to lose their land and homes to the
state.
So-called right-wing southern New Mexico
ranchers and loggers are taking progressive political stands while
the radical environmental community never mentions homelessness,
hunger, crime, drug abuse, alcoholism and the many other social
ills that affect us all.
I would like to mention
that prior to the community taking demonstrations into the streets,
we had a series of meetings with Hitt and company. Why did an
attempt at coalition fail? It failed because at the very time that
we were commencing a dialogue, unbeknown to us, they were filing
administrative appeals followed by the lawsuits that led to the
logging and firewood ban. Our experience shows that radical
environmentalists have their own agenda and have not yet shown that
they can be trusted.
Antonio
DeVargas
La Madera, New
Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline You can’t trust some greens.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
