Dear HCN,
Few historians make
Westerners more uncomfortable than Bernard DeVoto. Ed Marston’s
Aug. 25, “Squishy-soft processes – hard results” article brings to
mind one of DeVoto’s stinging bromides: “The West does not really
want to be liberated from the system of exploitation that it has
always violently resented. It only wants to buy into it”
(The Easy Chair, 1955).
DeVoto and advocates opposing collaborative negotiations understand
that corporate democracies are designed to offer the public no
agreeable options to protect the environment.-Because government is
generally both unwilling and incapable of defending against
corporate banditry, the task falls to the passions of a few
advocates.-But when activist ardor wanes, extraction corporations
pounce with their best strategy – collaborative negotiations.
Northern Plains Resource Council and its
affiliates willingly took the co-optation bait by assuming the
moral authority to negotiate secretly the future of public lands
and waters near Montana’s Stillwater and East Boulder Rivers.
Stillwater Mining is understandably
delighted.-As an added bonus, the kinds of agreements conceived and
negotiated by NPRC produce newly minted models for mining companies
to seek the most compliant environmental corporations with which to
cut deals.
These nonprofit corporations and
their officers should be legally and financially responsible for
resource degradation arising from their private agreements; their
privileges to accept tax-deductible contributions and foundation
grants should be rescinded; and their revenues should be taxed.
Larry Tuttle
Portland, Oregon
Larry Tuttle is the secretary/treasurer of the Center for Environmental Equity, a nonprofit but not tax-exempt Oregon corporation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Response to ‘squishy-soft’.
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