Dear
HCN,
As a forester for 20-odd years and as a
follower of HCN’s coverage of Western resource
issues, I still hold out hope for improvements in the effectiveness
and acceptability of public resource stewardship, despite the
ongoing media and propaganda warfare. Overall, I agree with a
minority of HCN’s slants on things, disagree
with the rest, but try to remain objective by reading all sides of
issues. Your back-page opinion piece on Jan. 15, however, irked me
enough to comment. The column started out fairly for the first
third, then degraded into a form of hero worship dealing with
Clinton and Babbitt for the remainder. I was surprised that Green
Al Gore was overlooked in the accolades.
I don’t
see how you can say that “Babbitt has forged a public-lands policy
for the West” when, in reality, most of the West is wrestling with
the lack of a comprehensive, implementable policy. And I don’t see
how you can claim that Babbitt merged the environmental positions
with the wants and needs of the Interior West. My read is that
nothing is merging toward consensus or
solution.
Then there is the phrase, “Clinton and
Babbitt dramatized their mastery of the public lands …” and
further praise for the Forest Service “protecting” all that
roadless land. Any mastery in D.C. has been of a questionable,
sleazy manipulation of the process, mainly to go out with a
so-called legacy, which down the road will partly be overturned by
subsequent masters of the process.
How can you
say that Babbitt has been “protective of rural economies” and that
he has been a “tough-minded friend to the logging industry” when
both segments of the Interior West are continuing to suffer from
recent presidential proclamations?
Lastly, you
continue to refer to forestry and the timber industry as
“extractive,” which is incorrect. Forest management is the most
renewable practice applicable to natural resources and should be
promoted as a solution to some of the nation’s energy, pollution,
solid waste, and nonrenewable industry problems. Saving forests
from management is actually not saving but is promoting worse
resource consumption and environmental effects in the U.S. and
globally.
Are you proud to be squelching the
Forest Service and necessary forestry? Your drift is that the
public consists of people other than those who do all the resource
production in the country, and that whatever the public wants, they
should get. To hell with those in rural areas devoted to producing
food and fiber for the urban majority.
There is a
community of place, although we’re in the minority, that is just as
important as the community of opinion to which you cater. Some of
us do believe that those of us who live in the rural areas and rely
on natural resources for our communities should count as much as or
more than those distant masters of public lands who depend on our
outputs but fail to acknowledge the connection.
Glenn Koepke
St. Regis,
Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Don’t glorify Babbitt.
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